Author here, happy to answer any questions! I know it’s a complicated topic, and I’m still trying to figure out how best to explain it.<p>Also, we’ve applied to YC for W23 to commercialize and expand this tech; wish us luck!
"A naive solution is to download and store the entirety of Wikipedia; then, all your queries can be local and the server never learns anything. Unfortunately, this takes a lot of bandwidth and storage (~10 GB), so it isn't very practical."<p>We can pretend this is a large amount of data but that notion becomes less believable each year, as bandwidth and storage capacity keep increasing.<p>Many of us now stream (=download and throw away) much more than 10GB on a regular basis.<p>Local databases, where queries never leave the computer or the local network, exclude much of the "tech" industry that survives on monitoring and manipulating computer users through the internet. One would expect strong opposition from "tech" enthusiasts to any suggestion that a computer user can perform work or recreation offline.<p>"Tech" companies may not be the only ones. There is also that pathetic term "go dark" which hints at more surveillance being done through the internet.<p>If the computer user disconnects, it leaves many parties high and dry. Spending more time offline might not be a bad thing.
Is there a library for homomorphic encryption that application devs can use? Is it practical to use this technology yet?<p>Edit: I found this library from Microsoft but it only supports addition and multiplication, not comparisons and sorting so it seems it’s not practical yet: <a href="https://github.com/microsoft/SEAL#microsoft-seal-1" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microsoft/SEAL#microsoft-seal-1</a>