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HTTP is obsolete.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Re: HTTP is obsolete.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)

#191

Post by Houshalter »

vog wrote: post #104
Houshalter wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's still a good example because the government in your country probably mandated it. People didn't just switch on their own accord.

IBTD. This is mostly an educational issue. Here in Germany the metric system was introduced in 1872 [1], and compared to other European countries we were already late to the party. That's plenty of time for transition. The last generation who didn't work with the metric system is dead for a very, very long time. [1] The history is actually more complicated, but let's not get into that.

The metric system has been taught in US schools for decades. Still no one uses it, because no one else uses it. Breaking out of network effect traps requires coordination only a government can provide.

Re: HTTP is obsolete.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

#192

Post by tmerr »

clarry wrote: post #181
tmerr wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 [..] on Freenet particular files are immutable, but that's as much as they guarantee. Actually there isn't…

Thanks for the correction! I don't think manifests were mentioned in the whitepaper but I found some info on the wiki: https://github.com/freenet/wiki/wiki/Simple-Manifest.

It looks like I will also have to learn more about IPFS's routing. Clearly Freenet's has some merits, and I would hope that IPFS is strictly faster since it sacrifices privacy, but I don't understand it well enough to make sense of how it scales.

Re: HTTP is obsolete.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

#193

Post by TheRealPomax »

So, we're not commenting on "That hash is guaranteed by cryptography to always only represent the contents of that file"? Because we should be. The fundamental rule of hashing is that you are guaranteed to have collisions. The challenge is to find a good hashing function for the kind of file you're hashing, but on the internet you get EVERY TYPE OF FILE, so at the scale we're talking about for IPFS, we're dealing with a large enough number of files of every conceivable type that collisions are guaranteed.

Re: HTTP is obsolete.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

#194

Post by dane-pgp »

iamnotlarry wrote: post #179
apatters wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Setup, updates, maintenance, tech support, and uptime guarantees, just to name a few reasons that "the cloud" is better. A service like Wordpress.com or Wix beats the self-hosted Pi on all of these…

I have thought about this a bit lately. Social media can be a very convenient way to keep up to date with people, and to allow people to keep up to date with you. But it has real costs. I abandoned my Facebook account many years ago and refuse to set up a new one. As a result, it is difficult for my children to interact with me. They post their lives on Facebook, but they don't open that up to the public. So only spe…

This is why to solve the Facebook / social media silo problem, we really need to solve the web identity problem.

The solution needs to allow identities which are "register once, use anywhere" across the web, and portable so that you can migrate to a different identity host/provider/implementation without losing all your accounts. Ideally these identities would also allow you to reveal as much or as little information about yourself as you want, and not force you to reveal some unique property which is correlatable between colluding sites.

Obviously that's not an easy thing to create, and may actually be harder than creating a viable rival to Facebook, but if we don't solve the web ID problem, then governments and corporations are going to "solve" it force us, and we'll all be the worse as a result.

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

#195

Post by nearbuy »

TheRealPomax wrote: post #193

So, we're not commenting on "That hash is guaranteed by cryptography to always only represent the contents of that file"? Because we should be. The fundamental rule of hashing is that you are guaranteed to have collisions. The challenge is to find a good hashing function for the kind of file you're hashing, but on the internet you get EVERY TYPE OF FILE, so at the scale we're talking about for IPFS, we're dealing wit…

You're thinking of non-cryptographic hashes. A cryptographic hash that could generate collisions in any practical situation would be considered broken. You'd need more files than there are atoms in the galaxy to have even a 1 in a billion chance of collision with a secure 512 bit hash.

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

#196

Post by zeta0134 »

outoftacos wrote: post #134
apatters wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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? Setup, updates, maintenance, tech support, and uptime guarantees, just to name a few reasons that "the cloud" is better. A service like Wordpress.com or Wix beats the self-hosted Pi on all of these…

You can abstract away the Pi and updates as easily as the cloud abstracts away everything. 90% of AWS users can't even figure or don't care about out how to distribute across multiple availability zones, much less data centers. Two Pis would be fine for 99% of this 90%. Seems like the future to me, it's just not in any big tech company's best interest right now as they fight over data centers.

I don't know why we keep gravitating to Raspberry Pi's for this. IPFS works just fine on Windows clients. (By which I mean, it's no less stable than on Linux, neither of which runs particularly well at this early stage.)

What if publishing to your blog was as easy as installing a Chrome web extension that now travels with you? Suddenly every computer you have that runs the extension can pin a local copy of the site, and your visitors help out by virtue of the protocol. This doesn't exist of course, but thanks to ipfs-js, it could, very easily. There are obvious drawbacks to this approach of course, but my point is that the "Hello World" of this kind of app could easily be much lower bar than setting up a Raspberry Pi.

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

#197

Post by krick »

adrianN wrote: post #53
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.

Probably I don't know something: why should it?

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

#198

Post by gear54rus »

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…

It was a good list until...

> The metric system

Really? You know that the whole world is on it, right? And that it makes far more sense than whatever nonsense someone came up with before.

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

#200

Post by belorn »

apatters wrote: post #96
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…

> 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? Setup, updates, maintenance, tech support, and uptime guarantees, just to name a few reasons that "the cloud" is better. A service like Wordpress.com or Wix beats the self-hosted Pi on all of these…

Uptime guarantees? Would that be those 25% rebate for a single month if your business is down for 7hrs or more? I have never seen people talk about it other than as a joke.

Setup, updates, maintenance, and tech support is however a thing, but there is always the fine print. The cloud generally do not maintain and update a website, and attacks generally succeed today by targeting poorly updated websites rather than servers. That leaves setup and teach support, two things which the website developer will often provide while they create and maintain the website.

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