Spiral Wiki
Security and privacy
private information retrieval
SHOW HN2022
How HN took it
11 positive, 40 neutral or asking, 2 mixed, 8 critical, out of 61 comments about the project. Thread score +0.08.
Idea: 5 for, 1 againstPrivacy: 3 for, 2 againstPerformance: 1 for, 3 againstExecution: 0 for, 1 againstDocs: 1 for, 0 against
The thread, comment by comment
Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.
positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker
What HN said
What people liked
Impressive privacy technique, practical demo of homomorphic encryption
From 3 comments
Extremely cool. Now we can serve content without any ability to observe what people are being served exactly. I was hoping that someday soon such technology could be used to…
f38zf5vdt on HNThis is wonderful! I've never seen anything like this in practical form. I hope it doesn't become standard practice for general websites(As I imagine some would like to see), but…
eternityforest on HNThis kind of stuff gives some of the best arguments for open source software (OSS) to date. Otherwise, it has to be taken completely on faith, which then defeats nearly the…
nixpulvis on HN
Objections
Server is slow at about 0.33 queries per second
From 1 comment
The $35/month server uses 6 cores to answer a single query in ~2.5-3 seconds. So it’s 0.33 QPS :-) Not high, which is why it might not be working well for folks right now… Time…
blintz on HN
Full database scan per query is costly for large datasets
From 1 comment
In another comment you’ve said: > With a proper implementation of PIR, the server still needs to scan through the entire encrypted dataset (this is unavoidable, otherwise its I/O…
jl6 on HN
Requests
Private DNS application
From 1 comment
Could this be used for DNS?
0cVlTeIATBs on HN
Private search engine
From 1 comment
Extremely cool. Now we can serve content without any ability to observe what people are being served exactly. I was hoping that someday soon such technology could be used to…
f38zf5vdt on HN
Questions
Does the scheme stay private if the server issues its own queries?
From 1 comment
Interesting! But, it'd be helpful to clarify further the strength of the following claim: > This demo allows private access to 6 GB (~30%) of English Wikipedia. In theory, even…
gojomo on HN
Can this work on SQLite or support updates to the data?
From 2 comments
I wonder if this can be done on sqlite? http://static.wiki/ See the previous news article. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28012829
iFire on HNTheoretically, can this scheme be turned into a generic O(N) key-value retrieval for non-static content (in this example — supporting adding, removing and replacing articles…
ajconway on HN
Alternatives named
Onion services over Tor
From 1 comment
This is very cool OP! I interviewed to be a privacy engineer with Wikimedia a while back. I suggested that my goal would be to add a v3 onion service. They actually had listed…
dontbenebby on HN