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Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

hearth.eternum.io

71–80 of 106 posts

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#71
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's published on Hashbase, you can access it with any HTTP client (though this of course somewhat defies the point of it being p2p). Otherwise, you will need a dat:// client - Beaker is the main web browser with dat:// support, other clients sofar have more specialised uses, e.g. https://github.com/codeforscience/sciencefair

Would it be possible to incorporate dat:// support into existing browsers as a plugin?

Yes. Look for "Support for Decentralization Protocols":

https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/01/26/extensions-firefo...

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#72
post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Would it be possible to incorporate dat:// support into existing browsers as a plugin?

Yes. Look for "Support for Decentralization Protocols": https://blog.mozilla.org/addons/2018/01/26/extensions-firefo...

Cool. I wonder when we'll see an uprise in internet websites that reference dat://

Is there a first HN reference to a valid dat:// website already?

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#73
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The content becomes a part of the problem when it is liable to spread the "disease" (to continue the allegory). I get the feeling we're discussing this on differing levels of severity, here. I'm not talking about dissenting political opinions or pseudoscience or conspiracy theories or counter-culture or drugs or anything silly like that, but things more impactful and corrosive to humanity. The persistence of certain…

Comparing wrongthink to disease has a sorry history. If you don't want to see bad things on IPFS, don't access them. If you wish to force other people to not see them either, the process is similar to anything else on the Internet. There's no need for moral panic.

Exactly, and this applies for all "levels of severity". There is no content so "bad" that censorship becomes an appropriate solution.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#74

Never having used or looked into Beaker, dat, ipfs, etc, some immediate questions about security implications come to mind: 1) Someone accesses your "site" directly on your computer via ipfs/dat whatever it is. This is static content I guess? And it's like your computer is just running a static webserver (kinda/sorta? if not, or something more dynamic please advise). So, are there security implications here? Is there…

1) Yep, exactly. There shouldn't be security implications, as long as the IPFS daemon is secure.

2) Again, as long as the IPFS daemon is secure, standard security practices apply. It's just static files.

3) It's all just static files. You get linked to from other files. Same as you navigate the rest of the web. It's not hard to wrap your head around it, really, just imagine that the web was all static files. That's it.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#75

Never having used or looked into Beaker, dat, ipfs, etc, some immediate questions about security implications come to mind: 1) Someone accesses your "site" directly on your computer via ipfs/dat whatever it is. This is static content I guess? And it's like your computer is just running a static webserver (kinda/sorta? if not, or something more dynamic please advise). So, are there security implications here? Is there…

Ipfs is awesome. It's more like bit torrent. You have hashes generated based on files. Same hash always points to same file, provided at least one ipfs node is mirroring it. You don't automatically mirror content with ipfs unless you elect to.

When you update your site, the hash must change, and thus the link changes as well.

Security stuff... Yeah it can be used maliciously just like bit torrent can, but ipfs hashes can be accessed also by ipfs.io/hash and I haven't heard of any problems with malware or anything of the sort, things get filtered out pretty quickly it seems.

Ipfs is awesome. Read the white paper ... It's such a nice middle layer for projects wanting to use a distributed file network without building out their own torrent network.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#76
post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> we personally liked the "drag some files to a folder and that's it" UX. How much extra work would it have been to add a "drag some files to a folder and run publish_website" interface, for Linux and Windows users? Hardly any, given that the functionality is already there. Not only that, it would make the system more easily scriptable. For example, it is probably easier on MacOS to get a Makefile to run an executabl…

> For example, it is probably easier on MacOS to get a Makefile to run an executable than to drag files to a folder. Easier for whom?

The person writing the makefile. Make can easily run executables. Getting it to simulate GUI movements is, I expect, possible, but harder to do.

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#77

Never having used or looked into Beaker, dat, ipfs, etc, some immediate questions about security implications come to mind: 1) Someone accesses your "site" directly on your computer via ipfs/dat whatever it is. This is static content I guess? And it's like your computer is just running a static webserver (kinda/sorta? if not, or something more dynamic please advise). So, are there security implications here? Is there…

> 1) Someone accesses your "site" directly on your computer via ipfs/dat whatever it is. This is static content I guess? And it's like your computer is just running a static webserver (kinda/sorta?

It's like static content served by bittorrent. The content might be served directly by your computer, or by other nodes in the ipfs/dat network which are caching your content.

> So, are there security implications here? Is there an attack surface that a client/viewer of your content could leverage?

An attacker could try to exploit vulnerabilities in the IPFS/DAT network. This would be similar to exploiting vulnerabilities in bittorrent.

Or they could try to steal the private key used to publish your content, and publish malicious updates.

If access to your content is restricted (ie with a secret hash or url), an attacker might try to get access to it.

Overall the security model is quite straightforward, with a smaller attack surface than typical dynamic web stacks.

> 2) Sort of opposite question as in 1. You are the client/viewer of the "site," directly connected to some dude's computer via ipfs/dat or whatever. Obviously I should use standard security measures and not just go clickity on anything/everything I see, but beyond that, are there any other security implications for the client? I could download a virus I'm sure by clicking or downloading a malicious file, but beyond that, could I get hacked by the target in a more dynamic way than that?

It's pretty much the same security model as regular web content, as you mention. The only exception might be a vulnerability in the ipfs/dat code, since your computer might be running a local node.

> 3) How do I "navigate" in ipfs/dat-land? How do I know what URL to go to, and if this "URL" might be a safe site, or like what the hell is this URL if it's just some kind of hash? Is there a "google" of ipfs/dat sites/content?

IPFS has a naming system called IPNS, where addresses are based on a unique crypto keypair. Addresses look like `/ipns/`. You can use specialized ipfs software, like the `ipfs` cli, or navigate your regular browser to an http gateway. For example, with the official gateway you can navigate to ``" rel="nofollow">https://ipfs.io/ipns/`. Ipfs also has a facility to easily alias a DNS domain to an ipns key, so you can navigate to `/ipns/`

Dat I believe has a similar system. The main difference is that, thanks to Beaker, you can bypass the gateway system - just navigate to `mydomain.com` and, if it's dat-enabled, the browser will lookup the corresponding key and fetch the content via dat instead of http.

There's no reason IPFS couldn't work the same way - you just need a browser to implement iofs support directly in the same way. Personally I hope Beaker will find the time to support both!

> Is there a "google" of ipfs/dat sites/content?

Not that I know of. But I think it's inevitable!

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#78
post #4

Fantastic. The web falling into the AmaGooBookSoft silos has been convenient, but it hasn't been good for censorship or personal sovereignty. Making it push-button easy to publish to IPFS a great way to return editorial control and ownership to individuals, without the downsides of needing to run and maintain servers. I hope Hearth or someone like them expands beyond websites to self-publishing of store front ends, c…

How is this not another silo? A big one called "IPFS"

Re: Show HN: Hearth – A Dropbox-like, IPFS-powered personal website publisher

#80
post #4

Fantastic. The web falling into the AmaGooBookSoft silos has been convenient, but it hasn't been good for censorship or personal sovereignty. Making it push-button easy to publish to IPFS a great way to return editorial control and ownership to individuals, without the downsides of needing to run and maintain servers. I hope Hearth or someone like them expands beyond websites to self-publishing of store front ends, c…

How is this not another silo? A big one called "IPFS"

You're making a category error. IPFS (and friends—like Dat) are analogous to HTTP. Would you call HTTP a silo? No; services like Facebook and Google Drive are silo-y, but HTTP is not. The people working on the P2P web are just trying to make some design choices at the protocol level that facilitates its use in a more decentralized way than the services that HTTP has encouraged to flourish.
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