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HTTP is obsolete.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

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Re: HTTP is obsolete.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

#81

Post by Too »

While this might solve distributing content serving, i'm still stuck with transporting all my data through my single point of failure + spying ISP, when all of my neighbors live within wifi-range.

For a truly distributed network we should look into ways to make internet work more like a mesh.

Back in university, all the student dorms were connected to the same internal campus network, back then internet was slow but you could still share files blazingly fast with all the other students on the network (using DC++ at that time). While this wasn't exactly a pure mesh either it shows that local data works and beats internet many times, even with just a few thousand clients. Then DC++ was mostly focused on pirated content but with a more human friendly solution, like IPNS, it's not unimaginable that average Joe neighbor with one click can create a local mirror of the whole Wikipedia for you.

Re: HTTP is obsolete.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

#82

Post by DaiPlusPlus »

blurbleblurble wrote: post #74

I need to comment because people are missing the point... there's nothing in this text that says the web won't need servers. Imagine that you and some friends want to launch a small local business and need to host a website. Instead of paying to host it "up in the cloud", why not plug a few raspberry pi's into the walls at each of your houses? Between that and also seeding it from your laptops, the site should have d…

Distributed systems are suited to static content or "append-only" mutable data - canonical examples include Magnet links, distributed hashtables, git, and the Bitcoin blockchain - they're all reliant on content-addressable storage. Not all web-applications can support this model, for example a banking app or online shopping cart site, which depend, respectively, on secrecy instead of complete transparency and mutable ephemeral state. What is the "Raspberry Pis in the walls" solution to those problems?

Re: HTTP is obsolete.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

#83

Post by Asdfbla »

tmerr wrote: post #77
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?

Hmm they are sort of different things. Freenet basically has hash-addressed content plus some relationship between human-readable strings and the hashes, so you/can/refer/to/stuff/like/this making it easy to use HTTP on top of Freenet for navigation. In contrast IPFS makes the hashed content itself in charge of navigation by using git-like objects -- if you understand the way git objects work https://git-scm.com/book…

Very interesting, thanks for the answer. I'll read the papers you linked.

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

#85

Post by vog »

jwfxpr wrote: post #60
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.

> 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 metric system

While I agree with your sentiment, this one is a bad example.

I grew up with the metric system, as did the vast majority of the world. I have an intuition for "meter", "kilograms", "seconds", and so on.

I need to convert to cumbersome stuff like "miles", "inches" or "pounds" only when reading articles written by, you know, inhabitants of that strange, large country over there.

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

#86

Post by lgierth »

Too wrote: post #81

While this might solve distributing content serving, i'm still stuck with transporting all my data through my single point of failure + spying ISP, when all of my neighbors live within wifi-range. For a truly distributed network we should look into ways to make internet work more like a mesh. Back in university, all the student dorms were connected to the same internal campus network, back then internet was slow but…

IPFS can discover other nodes in the same local network via mDNS -- you don't need to have an internet connection at all to share data locally.

Combine this with the recent work on PubSub [1] and CRDTs [2] and you can make many applications work locally, that are otherwise annoyingly strongly coupled to internet services (thing Etherpad, Google Docs, Skype, Github, etc.)

> For a truly distributed network we should look into ways to make internet work more like a mesh.

Yes! We'll be putting more work into the network stack (libp2p) in the coming months. IPFS itself has done a ton to rework how content is defined and moved around, and libp2p will do the same for the network connections underneath. Think overlay networks, cryptokey routing, packet switching.

[1] https://ipfs.io/blog/29-js-ipfs-pubsub/

[2] https://ipfs.io/blog/30-js-ipfs-crdts.md

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

#87

Post by lgierth »

katastic wrote: post #62
jwfxpr wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

Actually, it's pretty simple. "Better" has to actually "be better ENOUGH" to warrant all of the retooling of existing systems. I've got plenty of clients who would happily run Windows 2003 ("it's paid for") if it weren't for changing standards that aren't compatible (newer TLS, Exchange, etc) and security breaches. They only upgrade because they have to. "E-mail is e-mail" to them. But if you sell them some magical n…

Another important factor for adoption/adoptability is how well the new system integrates with existing deployments of older systems. Ideally it completely interoperates with the older systems, while providing you with additional value right from the start.

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

#88

Post by WhiteOwlLion »

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?

This guy combined IPFS and Steem. He uses the Steem reward system to split payment between the content uploader and storage host 75/25. There is a cost, but this guy figured out a way to sustainably host videos in a p2p environment.

https://steemit.com/video/@heimindanger/introducing-dtube-a-...

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

#89

Post by lgierth »

chii wrote: post #57
neutronbits wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

Ask any non-technical person whether they've ever been bitten by link-rot! :)

Content-addressing doesn't alleviate the problem 100%, since content can still fall off the network - but it improves the structure of the network in a way that makes it tremendously easier to keep content around. It's not up the original source of the content (owner of the domain name) to keep the content around - anyone can help out by keeping a copy.

My colleague Matt addressed this beautifully in a recent talk at the NSDR Symposium: https://archive.org/download/ndsr-dc-2017/04_Speaker_3_Matt_...

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

#90

Post by mbrock »

simplyluke wrote: post #23
setra wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can purchase a droplet on digital ocean than has gigabit and a terabyte of transfer every month for $5. A terabyte is more than enough content for me. I am sure most people could afford that to manage their interneting.

>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…

> Git, one of the inspirational technologies, is in theory distributed as well and in practice hyper-centralized to only a few major providers.

Git repositories are replicated all over.

My laptop has mirrors of all my work's projects and many open source projects.

Imagine how many secure mirrors of, say, the React repository is out there. GitHub is basically just a conveniently located copy.

That's real and tangible decentralization. It's a magical property of the DVCS architecture that it's decentralized even when it's centralized, so to speak.

I agree that there are issues with central hubs though. Maybe the most significant one is that organizational structures and rules are defined in a centralized way on GitHub.

If you look at blockchains as another kind of DVCS that's totally focused on authority, legitimacy, and security, then it seems pretty likely that we'll end up using those to control commits and releases.

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