241–250 of 383 posts
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And then your laptop gets stolen and everything's gone.
Make backups. How is this any different than saving photos just in case you spill water on your laptop keyboard?
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how do you read 500 million tweets per day? the idea is to only replicate who you care about+a couple of their friends.
Except for pubs, which are helpful broadcasters of both private and public stuff, but it makes sense to host them on an infrastructure that can ingest 70 GB a day and have a couple days of retention
> However, to get access to the DHT in the first place, you need to connect to a bootstrapping server, such as router.bittorrent.com:6881 or router.utorrent.com:6881 This is a common misunderstanding. You do not need to use those nodes to bootstrap. Most clients simply choose to because it is the most convenient way to do so on the given substrate (the internet). DHTs are in no way limited to specific bootstrap nodes…
to me it always sounds like approaches like dht are the solution but i'm having difficulties diving into it for the purpose of implementing it for my own apps. are there any noteworthy resources for non-academics to get started?
The last two are particularly devastating. Even if the peers had a key/value whitelist and hashes (e.g. like a .torrent file), an adversary can still insert itself into the routing tables of honest nodes and prevent peers from ever discovering your key/value pairs. Moreover, they can easily spy on everyone who tries to access them. It is estimated [1] that 300,000 of the BitTorrent DHT's nodes are Sybils, for example.
[1] https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~lw525/publications/security.pdf
Since the author didnt mention it, the original creator of the patchwork project is https://github.com/pfrazee When I used it, which admitedly was a long time ago now, the biggest setback was lack of cross device identities. So I ended up having two accounts with two feeds, `wesAtWork` and `wes`. Maybe they have solved this by now. ps. Does patchwork still have the little gif maker? Because that was a super fun featu…
A hipster living on a self-steering sailing boat has 600 modules published on NPM. I can't even. Seriously how could this be even more funny?!
But seriously, this is a very very interesting project.
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You don't need to trust the security of pubs. Validation of messages happens through cryptographic signing and public messages are public anyways. You also don't need to trust that pubs will be online much because your followers will also help host your content.
So, if I post a GB worth of diary entries, who ends up caching it by default? Just my followers? People I follow? Pubs I connect to?
your followers, their followers, and their followers (assuming everyone is using the default replication settings). These may include pubs or people you follow. If you are able to connect to a pub then most likely it is willing to replicate your feed.
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to me it always sounds like approaches like dht are the solution but i'm having difficulties diving into it for the purpose of implementing it for my own apps. are there any noteworthy resources for non-academics to get started?
Speaking as an academic who studies distributed systems, my advise is to stay away from anything that relies on a public DHT to work correctly. They're vulnerable to node churn, Sybil attacks, and routing attacks. The last two are particularly devastating. Even if the peers had a key/value whitelist and hashes (e.g. like a .torrent file), an adversary can still insert itself into the routing tables of honest nodes an…
BEP42[0] has been implemented by many clients and yet nobody has felt the need to actually switching to enforcement mode.
All that is the result of the bittorrent DHT being a low-value target. It does not contain any juicy information and is just one of multiple peer discovery mechanisms, so there's some redundancy too.
Also wondering, can this be a replacement for Slack? Can I set up a private group chat room? Or can I only use the private @ feature to send private messages to multiple people?
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If you make a decentralized, encrypted, potentially anonymous network some users will use it for bootlegs and probably worse. That doesn't preclude or outweigh all the legitimate uses.
History says otherwise. Usenet shows, in the ever growing ratio of binaries to non-binaries traffic from (roughly) the 1990s onwards, that in terms of the literal weight (i.e. the traffic volume) the uses that you talk about very much did outweigh the "legitimate" uses, by an order of magnitude at least. And the history of Usenet also shows that people do think that the fact that something is mis-used should preclude…
Do you mean to say that there are more binary messages than text messages by an order of magnitude before chunking and that none of those binaries were permitted copies under the law? Because I'm going to need to see evidence to be convinced of that.
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but hacker news isn't really about social content. Some of that might creep in for some users, and yes the karma thing does pollute motivations for some, but I've never thought of it as a social network. Some networking is done here, but only indirectly I think. Maybe I'm not thinking about it right or use it differently than most :P
You have a point there. "Social content". What is "social content"? Is it people talking about themselves and what they think and showing pictures of themselves? Is that what you do with your best friends? You arrive at their houses and start talking about yourself without being asked?
But yes, for the majority of people, talking about themselves is exactly what they do. They talk about their vacation to the beach. They talk about the drama going on at work. They talk about their sister's date. They don't talk about advances in database design.
I was at a live event (a play) recently and was fascinated by a small group of women in their late 20s / early 30s. They spent a good 10-15 minutes before the play started just taking pictures of themselves being at the play and posting it to their social networks. They talked about the pictures, asked others to send them their copy of the picture. They took pictures from one angle and then another. They talked about who "liked" the picture they just uploaded. It went on and on and on. Not once did I overhear them talking about the play they were about to see. It seemed to be not the point at all. The play was just a hashtag for their social media posts.