Will there be a Distributed HTTP? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#21

Post by tcdent » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 7:28 PM UTC

traverseda wrote: post #9

gress wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you foresee the decentralized production of CPUs being achieved?

A bit of a non-sequiter, but I'll bite. Replicating toolboxes. Or self-replicating benchtop factories. Microcontrollers could be produced using dip-pen nanolithigraohy, or a few other techniques. Of course we need decent open source atomic force microscopes first. There will always be components that can't be produced on that kind of scale. In reprap parlance we call the "vitamins". An apt metaphor.

> benchtop factories

This is feasible even using current production techniques. Just make smaller tools.

Open hardware designs are a bigger part of the problem, IMO.

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#22

Post by zokier » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 7:44 PM UTC

alexchamberlain wrote: post #20

A little bit confused here. HTTP is already distributed, right? It's an open protocol with a very large number of servers serving a variety of content with little to no coordination.

HTTP is federated more than distributed.

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#23

Post by LukeB42 » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 7:59 PM UTC

Yes. It's a "steam engine time" thing where the invention manifests in regionally disparate places in roughly the same period due to evolutionary necessity.

Even I have an instance(!): https://github.com/LukeB42/Uroko/tree/development

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#24

Post by wang_li » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 8:00 PM UTC

How is this distributed model going to deal with the fact that a lot of (all of?) the websites we visit have dynamic content?

I feel like I'd be much better off, privacy-wise, if I could get a browser that had a user manageable list of locations to pre-cache with some kind of daily/weekly offline cache refresh. So when I go to a web page that fetches jquery from google's hosted libraries service, it instead pulls it from a locally cached copy and never ever fetches from google as a result of visiting a web page.

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#25

Post by corobo » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 8:06 PM UTC

It's only vaguely related... do any of these new HTTPs (HTTP 2, SPDY, etc) support DNS SRV records for load balancing and failover at the DNS level?

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#26

Post by mindslight » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 8:18 PM UTC

kragen wrote: post #6

This is one of the most crucial things we need to make free software viable again. In 2006, I wrote that the only solution to the problem of proprietary services was to "build these services as decentralized free-software peer-to-peer applications, pieces of which run on the computers of each user": https://www.mail-archive.com/kragen-tol@canonical.org/msg001... And, in particular, I wrote a few months later that rep…

> replacing HTTP URLs for naming content is necessary and nearly sufficient

It depends what you replace them with. I quickly skimmed your essays looking for any proposals, but didn't quite see anything.

The obvious thing is Freenet-style public signing keys, but while this helps decentralize distribution (a boon to a person who wishes to publish anonymously - upload and run), the standard centralized naming hierarchy will form, at least for introduction.

The well-known "HNS" /com/ will just be 8b844459891e8f1840bfc4200e758483 instead of the DNS 192.5.6.30 (a.gtld-servers.net). Likewise, after introduction a discussion board would be known as 659f177ebea794e4e74f0708d832f65e (even if it is Petnamed) instead of news.ycombinator.com.

Public signatures are simply one layer and not the full solution, in the same sense that hash trees of immutable content are only one part.

What is important is forking, which relies on the ability for differing forks to be intelligently reconciled in an automated fashion. I should be able to use a version of "HN" where a specific user is/isn't banned, and still communicate with you (presuming that you want to, rather than whoever is running the popular "HN" aggregation node), even if you yourself are using a third version.

I think it ultimately comes down to the data model supporting some concept of "merge points" rather than strict top-down immutability/persistence. With these merge points and rules specified by the endpoints' schemas according to the users' desires. But it's awfully hard thinking about this stuff since I also keep seeing how any specific approach can calcify and turn into similar prescriptive monoliths as we have today.

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#27

Post by toomuchtodo » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 8:22 PM UTC

sktrdie wrote: post #8

There's already a quite large distributed "HTTP" being used everyday: BitTorrent's DHT network. URIs are just the keys of the distributed hash table. Keys are also mutable so one can change the content stored at specific keys. Right now it's being used to serve very large files and not HTML/CSS/JS files. Things like Project Maelstrom are a step in the right direction. Problem is that it's hard to find things, just li…

I'm curious if Cloudflare takes the torch on this, considering their acumen at running a CDN.

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#28

Post by Zash » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 8:27 PM UTC

zokier wrote: post #22

alexchamberlain wrote: post #20

A little bit confused here. HTTP is already distributed, right? It's an open protocol with a very large number of servers serving a variety of content with little to no coordination.

HTTP is federated more than distributed.

Email is federated. Not sure I'd call HTTP federated in itself, but protocols like StatusNet that build on HTTP are federated.

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#29

Post by onion2k » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 8:29 PM UTC

wang_li wrote: post #24

How is this distributed model going to deal with the fact that a lot of (all of?) the websites we visit have dynamic content? I feel like I'd be much better off, privacy-wise, if I could get a browser that had a user manageable list of locations to pre-cache with some kind of daily/weekly offline cache refresh. So when I go to a web page that fetches jquery from google's hosted libraries service, it instead pulls it…

How is this distributed model going to deal with the fact that a lot of (all of?) the websites we visit have dynamic content?

Web content is rarely very dynamic. With the exception of social networks and news sites, most websites would be largely indistinguishable from what they look like now if they were serving the same page as yesterday or a week ago. Technologically we could trade the 'rendered on request' model with the very latest data for a 'rendered and then cached across the internet for a day' distributed model very easily.

Psychologically however, no one would agree to it. People believe their content has to be available to everyone the instant they press Publish.

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#30

Post by Animats » Wed, Sep 02, 2015, 8:31 PM UTC

I'd settle for distributed IP, where everyone who wants one has a fixed IPv6 address visible to others. This allows straightforward VoIP and video chat without a server or gimmicks to get through dynamic DNS.