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Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

ipfs.io

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Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#21

Post by jeswin »

radlad wrote: post #16
jeswin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So is this primarily for static websites? More work would be needed here perhaps. But decentralized apps should happen one day. As someone without real technical knowledge in security and decentralized platforms, I'd love to hear from some on HN where we really stand on decentralized apps and security. - Public data. Distributing, searching and querying is not a problem. - Restricted data. You'd be distributing enc…

> Now, if we have a way to send an encrypted query to the peer and have it run on encrypted data without the peer being able to understand the query or the data, we'd be set perhaps. Is that possible? It doesn't seem to be "N versus NP" but it seems similar. How can a computer find a correct answer to a question it doesn't know? I suppose you could send off small units of processing across many nodes, such that none…

Since the private data and the query are from the same user, they could share some mathematical connection perhaps, which would allow a query to be done and the results sent back (results which only the user can decrypt).

Google shows up plenty of articles on the subject, but I am not an expert to know where we stand on this.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#22

Post by radlad »

jeswin wrote: post #21
radlad wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Now, if we have a way to send an encrypted query to the peer and have it run on encrypted data without the peer being able to understand the query or the data, we'd be set perhaps. Is that possible? It doesn't seem to be "N versus NP" but it seems similar. How can a computer find a correct answer to a question it doesn't know? I suppose you could send off small units of processing across many nodes, such that none…

Since the private data and the query are from the same user, they could share some mathematical connection perhaps, which would allow a query to be done and the results sent back (results which only the user can decrypt). Google shows up plenty of articles on the subject, but I am not an expert to know where we stand on this.

Interesting. So you'd perform operations on encrypted data, and send back an encrypted result that's useful yet different from the original encrypted data, all without ever performing decryption?

It seems possible but extremely tricky.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#25

Post by logn »

radlad wrote: post #14

I'm very excited to see what happens with IPFS. The article talks about replacing HTTP however, and this is definitely a tricky task. Someone in this thread already asked one of my questions (So is this primarily for static websites?) but my second question is: So is this primarily for personal websites? I'm having a hard time finding a good way for Facebook, for example, to monetize their website. Targeting ads go o…

One monetization strategy in general for distributed networks is that users pay for bandwidth. They're rewarded for the bandwidth they provide. They profit if they provide more bandwidth than they use. And app developers are rewarded when their apps cause bandwidth to be used. I don't know if IPFS works this way.

As far as paying a premium over raw bandwidth to access premium content (Netflix), you could pay them to unencrypt it for you to download. DRM though isn't secure in the first place and decentralization won't make it better.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#26

Post by typish »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #6

So is this primarily for static websites? I don't see dynamic websites going too well with this system. Edit: If someone like GitHub supported this for GitHub pages it would be a great step forward for this as well.

They could take an approach similar to how Freenet does dynamic things. See here for details: http://draketo.de/light/english/freenet/communication-primit...

Freenet has a similar immutable datastore but chat, microblogging, etc have been built on it.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#27

Post by aftbit »

radlad wrote: post #16
jeswin wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> So is this primarily for static websites? More work would be needed here perhaps. But decentralized apps should happen one day. As someone without real technical knowledge in security and decentralized platforms, I'd love to hear from some on HN where we really stand on decentralized apps and security. - Public data. Distributing, searching and querying is not a problem. - Restricted data. You'd be distributing enc…

> Now, if we have a way to send an encrypted query to the peer and have it run on encrypted data without the peer being able to understand the query or the data, we'd be set perhaps. Is that possible? It doesn't seem to be "N versus NP" but it seems similar. How can a computer find a correct answer to a question it doesn't know? I suppose you could send off small units of processing across many nodes, such that none…

This is called "homomorphic encryption". There's a lot of research in this area, but we're far from being able to efficiently perform all computations.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#28

Post by radlad »

logn wrote: post #25
radlad wrote: post #14

I'm very excited to see what happens with IPFS. The article talks about replacing HTTP however, and this is definitely a tricky task. Someone in this thread already asked one of my questions (So is this primarily for static websites?) but my second question is: So is this primarily for personal websites? I'm having a hard time finding a good way for Facebook, for example, to monetize their website. Targeting ads go o…

One monetization strategy in general for distributed networks is that users pay for bandwidth. They're rewarded for the bandwidth they provide. They profit if they provide more bandwidth than they use. And app developers are rewarded when their apps cause bandwidth to be used. I don't know if IPFS works this way. As far as paying a premium over raw bandwidth to access premium content (Netflix), you could pay them to…

Oh, of course, I'm not trying to argue that DRM is good or that decentralization would make it better or even work as well. The problem of course is that without it working as well as it currently does, premium content providers have no incentive (and in fact, are decentivized) from making the switch.

The general idea of decrypting premium content at a cost would work fairly well, however I'm wondering if it's something that can be done easily and dynamically via IPFS. For example, can I, without burdening the network with a billion copies, encrypted with each the client's key, hand that data off to them? If I simply decrypt it and hand it over, it's on a distributed network and anyone can grab it.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#29

Post by hardwaresofton »

gtrubetskoy wrote: post #23

My first thought is how does it handle SHA hash collisions? Googling for it took me back to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9322489 AFAICT it's not yet resolved.

In the (relatively rare) case of a SHA hash collision, couldn't you try and resolve a collision by using (the results) of other hashing functions?

While two things may produce the same SHA hash, they may differ with other hashing functions.

Re: Neocities is implementing IPFS – distributed, permanent web

#30

Post by adrusi »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #6

So is this primarily for static websites? I don't see dynamic websites going too well with this system. Edit: If someone like GitHub supported this for GitHub pages it would be a great step forward for this as well.

With IPNS, which allows the creation of links whose destination can be mutated by whoever has the private key, you can implement quite a lot of interactivity. You won't ever be able to implement facebook over this platform, but you can replicate all of its functionality by using a tumblog-like architecture. Facebook's design is inherently centralized, and therefore doesn't really fit into the world of IPFS.

The idea is that every user owns their own content, not some central organization. Every user maintains a log of all of their actions, like an RSS feed. Every time they make a status update, that's an item. When they comment on someone else's status update, that's an item. Even when they just like something, it's an item. Each update of the action log would also have send ping to all friends, over some kind of distributed IM like tox. They already need an IM connection like that for messenger.

Given that information alone, anyone can reconstruct the activity of all their friends into a news feed, and post new content. You'd need a lot of client-side leverage, and the ability to upload to the IPFS network from the client, but all the dynamic information is there.

And there you have a fully distributed facebook clone. More resilient and privacy-sensitive and monopoly-averse than even tools like diaspora and statusnet.

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