It's not clear to me what's novel about this proposal, compared to existing distributed stores like the Freenet Project (https://freenetproject.org/).
Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
31–40 of 72 posts
Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
#32I'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.
oy, the routing tables!
Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
#33It's not clear to me what's novel about this proposal, compared to existing distributed stores like the Freenet Project ( https://freenetproject.org/ ).
1. This isn't a single proposal
2. It is not trying to be novel relative to existing distributed stores. It is trying to get the features in HTTP that have been used in lots of other custom applications.
Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
#34There'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…
Is there a description of how maelstrom holds references in the DHT? I can think of half a dozen ways to bolt HTTP hosting on bittorrent, but the scale of "people using http" is orders of magnitude larger than "people who use bittorrent".
Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
#35Why is distributed HTTP needed when you could just run a local (web)server that would act as a translator to the peer-based web which you could implement with other protocols? That way, you can continue to use existing browsers. Now you'd just need to implement that server...
Heck if you did it this way, you could just have remote servers actually pull content from the regular web and serve it up through the peer web. It could be similar to a proxy.
Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
#36i do think there is a lot to be had from p2p technologies. the centralised server is just the obvious and easy solution in most cases...
its a shame webrtc is such a disaster of a project though. it could be truly reusable and powerful... instead its a nightmare of obsolete things, difficult configuration and fictitious problems imposed by bad developers. a lot of this is a legacy of being meant for all kinds of things... but we seem to be lacking a clean and simple p2p library today.
i don't want to depend on systemd or obsolete headers MS deprecated in VC 6.
Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
#37 I think he is talking about some semantic routing layer above http where you ask for content without querying a specific source/endpoint in the same way that dhcp looks for an ip address. I call it the neuroweb and I have made some satisfying experiments in this field; the only barrier I can see has to do with performance/scalability since we have schemaless data structures + realtime queries, which can easily bottleneck without some kind of efficient specialized index.
Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
#38No.
Why not?
Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
#39Fundamental problem: either the distributed thing will be an extremely easy target for DoS attacks -- just because the service is distributed doesn't mean the attacker need be; the attacker can be as monolithic as he wants to be -- or, it will be only superficially distributed, and actually hosted on some honking big central infrastructure.
Things that are smaller than Google, Amazon, or Facebook can be DoSed into total oblivion. Abuse is the greatest unsolved problem of distributed systems.
Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?
#40This 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…
> Ultimately, it was a losing game, because of the inherent conflict of interest between software author and software user. This is exactly what is broken with our current software business models. On-prem software is expensive to deploy and manage but gives users control of their data. SaaS software is cheap to deploy and manage but takes control of the user's data. We must find middle ground between the two models.…
I'm working on an interesting project right now where the web application behaves like a typical SaaS solution, except that all of the customer's data is hosted on premises.
After the initial install, their local servers (and data) don't have to be touched, but the SaaS portion can be continuously improved. So far it's worked really well.
Your MSaaS idea sounds really interesting, especially the multiple trusted deploys. That's the crux of trusting deployed open source software.