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Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

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Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#31
post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What if I wanted to always link to the latest, like from my normal HTTPS powered web site? Is there a way to link to the head so that it always references the latest version?

The latest would be a link like /ipns/yourcompany.com, and you'd have a TXT record pointing at your node's IPNS hash (or an IPFS content hash directly) and you update it by either updating what your node's IPNS hash points to, or by editing the DNS record to point to the latest IPFS content hash.

Each time the page is updated, the TXT record would need to be modified with the latest IPNS hash?

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#33
post #28

Naive question: if data on IPFS is permanent, meaning it's hard or impossible to remove things from it, what mechanisms, if any, exists to prevent unlawful content from being uploaded to it?

Data on IPFS is not permanent, nodes only host cached or pinned content (the later is explicit).

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#34
post #23

Apologizes for blockchaining every comment, but one of the cryptocurrencies I'm interested in, from a tech perspective, is doing something similar. It lets you host your website on IPFS as well. http://www.shiftnrg.org/

I'd find your post acceptable if the site had any technical content about how it's actually supposed to work. As it stands, it's just marketing fluff.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#35
post #30
post #28

Naive question: if data on IPFS is permanent, meaning it's hard or impossible to remove things from it, what mechanisms, if any, exists to prevent unlawful content from being uploaded to it?

> What mechanisms, if any, exists to prevent unlawful content from being uploaded to it? Probably the same ones used against P2P, lawsuits and pressure on national governments to crack down against the offenders :)

So there is a way to figure out who is downloading what on IPFS? (At least assuming that you have assets comparable to national governments.)

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#36
post #24
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm brand new to the IPFS concept, this looks really cool! I was surprised to see that the page served via IPFS supports HTTPS, do you happen to know how the secret key is securely shared among nodes in the decentralized environment?

The https version is served thru a proxy. This is the way you can get your status page visible to the HTTP world. The gotcha is that anyone on the IPFS network could have a copy of your page and serve them in your behalf.

> anyone on the IPFS network could have a copy of your page

Yes, but critically they can't modify it thanks to content addressing [0].

> and serve them in your behalf.

Yes, over IPFS. So anyone with an IPFS client will have a robust way to view your status page. If people want to view it via HTTPS, they hit ipfs.io, which is an IPFS/HTTP gateway. While it's possible for other people to run gateways, I believe ipfs.io is the main one. It could theoretically be a bottleneck.

[0] https://dweb-primer.ipfs.io/avenues-for-access/lessons/power...

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#37
This is such a natural use case for IPFS that commercial adoption seems inevitable; as first mover you can offer the concierge edition and optionally gain a ton of credibility by open sourcing some of the core bits!

It sounds like your marketing will need to explain:

1. How updates work and how you guarantee staying universes away from NSFW/illegal content -- answered separately because nobody wants to find out what IPFS is infamous for as a part of discovering your service. (Both explanations need to function at two levels: one for techies and one for their bosses controlling the purse strings.) This may be possible​ to pull in quickly from existing CC-licensed documentation.

2. How users can link to content through multiple redundant WWW gateways/other services, and how to pay (you and others) for more reliability. Reliable reachability is absolutely key here, and should be built on multiple existing 3rd parties that are already used as status pages. For example: pay extra to whitelabel an auto-Twitter retweet bot.

Opportunity to be the "enterprise IPFS contact" here - explain from soup to nuts how to push status updates from anywhere (setup and simplified through your service but without requiring it be reachable) with any of multiple Yubikey/hardware auth tokens.

--

Consider a completely separate marketing push/landing page that doesn't even mention IPFS until potential customers ask how it works. IPFS is a buzzword here but commercial customers probably count it as a negative (analogy: ICO on HN). Focus on the unique features IPFS offers and write up how those features solve the status page problem!

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#38
post #35
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> What mechanisms, if any, exists to prevent unlawful content from being uploaded to it? Probably the same ones used against P2P, lawsuits and pressure on national governments to crack down against the offenders :)

So there is a way to figure out who is downloading what on IPFS? (At least assuming that you have assets comparable to national governments.)

Yeah, the nodes connect via IP addresses. You could proxy it through Tor or something though.

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#39

I mean, your status page itself may be on ipfs but since ipfs isn’t natively supported as a browser protocol, your “decentralization” fails since you’ll likely need to host the http ipfs gateway somewhere. Might as well stick your status page on a couple of vps (literally just two on two different continents) and round robin them.

Firefox has already whitelisted the IPFS protocol so that extensions can provide implementations. It won't be long before this can be decentralized.

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/01/26/extensions-firefo...

Re: Show HN: A Decentralized StatusPage on IPFS

#40
I'm not sure this is actually Decentralized. I have been playing with IPFS quite a bit recently, and this looks to host the content on one node. That node goes away, your content goes away. You need more than one nodes 'pinning' the same content in order to actually be decentralized, and as far as I can tell this project doesn't provide that functionality.

That has been my biggest drawback so far with IPFS, there isn't really an easy way to get other nodes to pin the correct content, without passing around big nasty hashes (e.g., QmYwAPJzv5CZsnA625s3Xf2nemtYgPpHdWEz79ojWnPbdG) by hand.

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