Will there be a Distributed HTTP? • Hacker News Board

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#51

Post by tracker1 » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 3:14 AM UTC

mnot wrote: post #47

tracker1 wrote: post #45

One of the things I wish browsers supported would be signed content... IE your CDN/distributed content doesn't need to be on HTTPS, just have a header with a payload signature against the HTTPS cert that the application host uses... I don't know why such a beast was never introduced into the browsers. I also feel that it would be nice to see more p2p protocols especially regarding live chat, and other systems. I thin…

That's actually been discussed quite a lot. However, it shares the "request privacy problem" that I talked about in the blog entry; the mere fact that you're requesting information -- even if it's public -- is sometimes sensitive information. Keep in mind that the determination of its sensitivity is often highly contextual; e.g., something that's not a problem in your country may be illegal elsewhere, or someone in a…

Fair enough... my main point was pragmatic... It would be nice to be able to serve certain assets more decentralized and widely distributed than even, for example cdnjs.

jQuery, React, shims for browserify, etc, would all be nice to haves outside of the main payload, and loadable/cacheable on a widely distributed signed system from the browser directly.

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#52

Post by archimedespi » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 3:40 AM 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.

An open-source, cheap AFM: http://hackaday.com/2015/01/13/cheap-diy-microscope-sees-ind...

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#53

Post by david_ar » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 3:45 AM UTC

Animats wrote: post #30

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.

Hyperboria/cjdns gives you that

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#54

Post by lewisl9029 » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 4:01 AM UTC

kordless wrote: post #14

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…

> 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.…

> 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. A solution that takes the best of both on-prem software and cloud based SaaS services may be that middle ground, but it's going to require a globally federated cloud.

I think something like remoteStorage can address this need.

https://remotestorage.io/

It's a federated, open storage protocol that has multiple server implementations that anyone can host. I think it has the potential to enable a new model for SaaS software where users, rather than service providers, own the data.

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#55

Post by pkinsky » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 4:48 AM UTC

jgrowl wrote: post #44

pkinsky wrote: post #5

This is actually a pretty cool idea (although perhaps badly explained, given the other comments here). Here's how it could work: IPFS ("In some ways, IPFS is similar to the Web, but IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository") is a globally distributed hash-addressed versioned filesystem. (see: http://ipfs.io/ ) They have a mirror of their homepage hosted on IPFS, he…

Sorry to be pedantic... I thought their main website actually just proxies to the actual ipfs gateway. Is it technically a mirror?

I actually don't know. Since it's static HTML and assets and IPFS is still in beta they might host their webpage the old-fashioned way.

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#56

Post by mrsharpoblunto » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 5:33 AM UTC

onion2k wrote: post #29

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…

I disagree - aside from blog sites or marketing/portfolio type sites basically every web application on the modern internet requires per-user dynamic content to function - e-commerce, banking, productivity apps, social networks, messaging etc. the modern web is all about displaying and processing users data.

Really any distributed cache is only going to be useful as a replacement for existing CDN's serving static assets (and thats totally fine - it would be great to see the democratization of the performance & scalability of a global CDN)

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#57

Post by comboy » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 7:01 AM UTC

pkinsky wrote: post #5

This is actually a pretty cool idea (although perhaps badly explained, given the other comments here). Here's how it could work: IPFS ("In some ways, IPFS is similar to the Web, but IPFS could be seen as a single BitTorrent swarm, exchanging objects within one Git repository") is a globally distributed hash-addressed versioned filesystem. (see: http://ipfs.io/ ) They have a mirror of their homepage hosted on IPFS, he…

Isn't that more or less how Freenet works?

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#58

Post by nemoniac » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 7:39 AM 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…

Sandstorm is an interesting step in this direction. Not peer-to-peer but decentralized free-software.

https://sandstorm.io/

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#59

Post by insanity54 » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 8:25 AM UTC

pkinsky wrote: post #55

jgrowl wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry to be pedantic... I thought their main website actually just proxies to the actual ipfs gateway. Is it technically a mirror?

I actually don't know. Since it's static HTML and assets and IPFS is still in beta they might host their webpage the old-fashioned way.

In May I contributed an example to the IPFS documentation. (https://github.com/insanity54/website/commit/64db436e33662f2..., https://github.com/ipfs/examples/pull/5/commits) At that time, the site was served by github pages, but parts of the site, including the examples, were served by IPFS. On IRC, I had heard of plans to migrate the entire site to IPFS once IPNS was ready.

EDIT: seems like it's all IPFS now https://botbot.me/freenode/ipfs/search/?q=github+pages

EDIT2: Better link. https://botbot.me/freenode/ipfs/2015-08-22/?msg=47828655&pag... (The way the IPFS gateways work is you run them on a machine and bind to port 80 or whatever. Then in your DNS TXT records, you put the hash of the content you want to serve, and the gateway picks up on this and fetches the hash from the network.)

Re: Will there be a Distributed HTTP?

#60

Post by jacquesm » Thu, Sep 03, 2015, 8:31 AM 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.

The production of integrated circuits is very much dictated by economies of scale. The capital require is simply too large to justify the creation of a production line for a small run. If you crack that particular nut then you're going to be the next Bill Gates.