Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

blog.neocities.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 227 posts

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#51

Post by hueving »

rictic wrote: post #30
simplyluke wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I can purchase a droplet on digital ocean than has gigabit and a terabyte of transfer every month for $5 >I am sure most people could afford that to manage their interneting And before the spec has even seen real adoption, we've already seen it centralize into a few major providers. A bit tongue-in-cheek, but it's a real issue. HTTP isn't the reason things are centralizing so much as economies of scale and convenien…

Distributed technology keeps centralized providers honest. If github got complacent their customers could migrate their most important data in a very short time.

Github is complacent but people haven't moved because it's difficult. The issue tracker is proprietary and losing all of that and the account references for the comments makes moving non trivial.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#52

Post by hueving »

mikekchar wrote: post #25
cocktailpeanuts wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> who's going to pay for servers to retain random peoples' and companies' web detritus? You mean Filecoin? Anyway, I'm also a skeptic about this model but I do think there is a sliver of chance that it may work. There ALWAYS is a sliver of chance that something crazy may work. That's how it's always been. IBM laughed when personal computer vendors and OS creators thought that they will put computers on everyone's des…

First, let me say that I think that IPFS is a good idea and that it has applications that are useful now. However, if I interpret the parent's "thoughtless hype" as "hopelessly naive", I'm pretty much in agreement. Checkout Freenet[0]. And while trying to maintain anonymity makes the problem even more difficult, there are fundamental problems in Freenet that make it basically unusable (mostly around cache coherency a…

Http doesn't solve cache coherency so it's not naive for ipfs to claim to solve HTTP's issues while having orthogonal issues on the TODO list.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#53

Post by adrianN »

Asdfbla wrote: post #49

Why are distributed filesystems like IPFS so popular again these days ? Freenet has been around (and super niche) for close to 20 years soon. Is it because the Bitcoin hype has reinvigorated crypto-anarchists?

I'd run a freenet node if it wouldn't expose me to the risk of getting all my gear confiscated by some LEA.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#54

Post by neutronbits »

IncRnd wrote: post #35
__s wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IPNS isn’t done yet, so if that link doesn’t work, don’t fret. Just know that I will be able to change what that pubkeyhash points to, but the pubkeyhash will always remain the same. When it’s done, it will solve the site updating problem.

That's how these things always work, by saying "it will work one day." If it would work, and the cost benefit ratio were there, people would adopt it quickly. That's what happens with just about everything else.

Wow! What an ignorant view of technology adoption! Almost, every revolutionary technology you see today (right from radio and A/C current to personal computers and deep learning) did not work fine once upon a time. It is because people kept saying, "it will work one day", and continued working on them that we have these technologies making our life simpler these days.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#55

Post by caymanbruce »

alexasmyths wrote: post #15

Wonderful articulation. But I suggest that internet is 'centralized' not due to any technological function, but due to the nature of information, particularly the economics and business of information. The 'protocol' used to pass information from A-B, were it changed to something better, would not yield what the author is suggesting. Google 'would still have all our stuff' - I believe. When 'individuals' can 'run ser…

No. The Chinese government will fancy a 'centralized' internet that the government has total control. It will try as hard as it could to make sure the internet is 'centralized' and dismantle anything that is distributed or P2P. Some ISP in China doesn't even allow you to use a public IP. So I think this IPFS thing is most likely a huge threat to the GFW(Great Firewall) system of China. I hope this thing can eventually tear down the entire effort of the Internet censorship in China.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#56

Post by tscs37 »

yeukhon wrote: post #46

So a couple questions even reading this... 1. The availability depends on the number of peers like BitTorrent? If so, and if no seed is available, how does one access the content, esp in the context of an intranet? 2. Any change to how we run infrastructure except not serving HTTP?

The usual solutions proposed to fix number 1 is to pay someone to host your content. So basically as before but with the added chattyness and overhead of a p2p protocol.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#57

Post by chii »

neutronbits wrote: post #54
IncRnd wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's how these things always work, by saying "it will work one day." If it would work, and the cost benefit ratio were there, people would adopt it quickly. That's what happens with just about everything else.

Wow! What an ignorant view of technology adoption! Almost, every revolutionary technology you see today (right from radio and A/C current to personal computers and deep learning) did not work fine once upon a time. It is because people kept saying, "it will work one day", and continued working on them that we have these technologies making our life simpler these days.

true for revolutionary new technology. Not true for incremental technology that aims to replace an existing similar technology. Especially if the incremental tech is something that most "normal" people don't really care about (such as hosting content on the internet).

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#58

Post by tscs37 »

noam87 wrote: post #24
Semiapies wrote: post #11

Ugh, servers! Except, you're gonna have to have servers unless you've got the entire web backed up on everyone's computer. Otherwise, you don't and can't know how many copies of a page or other file are out there. But who's going to pay for servers to retain random peoples' and companies' web detritus? This whole project exists because that's not feasible in the long term... It's not "crazy", it's pure, thoughtless h…

- Even assuming all this, a hybrid approach of HTTP + IPFS (or DAT) is still better than what we have now, since IPFS is essentially a worldwide CDN for static files.(Sorry: an inter-planetary one.) - The content-addressing aspect makes it perfect for distributing commonly used libraries. - We already cache all this content locally. What a waste! Why do I have to fetch jQuery from fricking California when it's sittin…

>since IPFS is essentially a worldwide CDN for static files.(Sorry: an inter-planetary one.)

Sorry but IPFS is interplanetary in the same way a Boeing 747 is capable of orbital flight.

Last I checked IPFS will not tolerate minute long latencies and requires a bandwidth above several kilobits per second which would immediately disqualify it for anything farther than the moon.

And I'm not sure it would work on the moon since that is a 2 second latency and I had issues with it when I used it on a mobile phone network with 800ms latency.

>I recently did this. It really is one-click hosting!

Except it isn't hosted unless atleast one person keeps a copy online, otherwise it goes offline or you pay money to some hoster or filecoin (not that I think that filecoin isn't a huge scam at this point)

>- Didn't you just read the web is about to go permanent? Do you really want to be archived for all history as one more nay-sayer? ;)

Since the number of people interested in the content of this page is declining with every decade passing, I think I'll make a bet it'll be no longer available on an IPFS after a mere two decades.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#60

Post by jwfxpr »

IncRnd wrote: post #35
__s wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> IPNS isn’t done yet, so if that link doesn’t work, don’t fret. Just know that I will be able to change what that pubkeyhash points to, but the pubkeyhash will always remain the same. When it’s done, it will solve the site updating problem.

That's how these things always work, by saying "it will work one day." If it would work, and the cost benefit ratio were there, people would adopt it quickly. That's what happens with just about everything else.

> If it would work, and the cost benefit ratio were there, people would adopt it quickly. That's what happens with just about everything else.

Great point! Just like:

* Betamax * HD DVD * Minidisc * Hoverboards * IPV6 * DNSSEC * PGP & PKI * Linux desktops * Dvorak keyboards * The metric system * Decimal time * [flavour-of-the-month programming language] * [flavour-of-the-month database] * [flavour-of-the-month cypher] * ...

The factors that influence the proliferation of a technology are wildly divergent from the criteria 'works well, cost/benefit'. I'm not even sure those are weakly correlated proxy indicators of technology uptake.

Post reply on HN