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HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

ipfs.io

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–240 of 337 posts

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#231

Post by mftb »

echelon wrote: post #93
BiteCode_dev wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The Web needs to decide what it want to be? A plaftorm to sell stuff? Contact people? Write? Listen to music?

> Imagine if we said that about web sites at the begining. The web was fast (for documents on 56k) and extremely useful almost immediately. It was obvious to everyone watching that the technology was going to change everything.

Yea, I'm afraid that's not so. In 1993, I was running a WildCat BBS and I was way more hyped about that and it's RIP graphics, lol. The only way I could get on the internet at all was through other peoples university accounts, which required dial-up, Trumpet Winsock, and PPP. It was a chore to get running and was very slow on the 14.4k (and slower) modems of the day. 56k modems weren't introduced until the late 90s. So yea, between 90 and 95 other technologies seemed more appealing like BBSs, Gopher and places like "The Well", at least to me.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#232

Post by drdeca »

zozbot234 wrote: post #202
drdeca wrote: post #197

What I would like, I think, is the ability to specify both the multihash and a place to request the data from. Like, if I’m talking to someone over some chat setup which doesn’t have a built in “send this file directly to this person” feature, it would be nice to be able to say, give them a multihash of the file and my external ipv6 address (+ port? I’m not quite sure how routing works), and have them request the fil…

If you have a hash of the underlying resource (note that this is different from how IPFS works) then http[s]:// /.well-known/ni/sha-256/ is supposed to enable this. The ni: URI scheme also allows for an authority field, which is used as a hint on how to locate the resource.

That does sound very much like what I want!

I’m somewhat surprised that I hadn’t heard of the ni scheme before tonight.

Is there some nice software (can be cmd only, but ideally multi-platform) to do that where both parties are on separate residential connections, and where the receiving party side software automatically checks that the received data matches the hash?

Because if so, that seems to serve exactly the purpose I’m thinking of!

Thank you for the direction

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#233

Post by mftb »

perl4ever wrote: post #211
lovemenot wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wasn't a down-voter, but I didn't have 56k in 1994. 14.4 baud iirc. You wouldn't call it fast.

I think something regulatory changed about 1995, such that there were instantly tons of ISP startups, and I think that 33.6k modems were available about then. I had a 14.4K Zoom modem, but I'm pretty sure the ISP I worked for around '95-'96 was buying lots of US Robotics 33.6 modems. I agree that 56k came a bit later, and didn't necessarily work on any particular phone line.

IMHO what changed in 1995, was MS adding TCP/IP to Windows 95. Prior to that you had fight with dial-up, Trumpet Winsock, PPP and PPTP to get on the internet at all. Most normal people still couldn't do it without help, but it moved into the realm of possible.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#234

Post by a1369209993 »

acdha wrote: post #152
vmception wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with a [previously] dead/deleted commented at this level: "Doesn't matter. the point of ipfs is that when cloudflare and google shut down their gateway, the ipfs content is still available at the same address."

… if someone else paid to host a copy. Major companies hosting it makes that less likely and if their backing increases usage that also increases the cost of hosting everything, making it more likely that the content you want will be available. When Google shuts down their mirror, suddenly all of that traffic is hitting nodes with far fewer resources. The underlying problem is that storage and bandwidth cost money an…

> suddenly all of that traffic is hitting nodes with far fewer resources.

One of the points of IPFS (and bittorrent before it) is that this is not a problem; each node that downloads the data also uploads it to other nodes, so having lots of traffic actually makes it easier to serve something (indeed, if it was already widely seeded by Google's mirror, there wouldn't be any sudden traffic).

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#235

Post by Taek »

sam345 wrote: post #213
Taek wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Have you had a chance to try Skynet? It provides all of the same features as IPFS, but it's also a lot more performant and higher uptime. You wouldn't need a centralized node that you run yourself.

Do you have any good links to Skynet? I could just find an old GitHub repo. Is it in active use ?

Check out the pinned repos: https://github.com/SkynetLabs

Also https://docs.siasky.net/

Very much an actively developed project, with over 100,000 monthly active users.

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#236

Post by tauwauwau »

thomashop wrote: post #178
sebastos wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS's design makes it so that it's all of those things, or none of them. Picking one of them doesn't fit the shape of the technology. IPFS is basically the answer to the question "what is the RIGHT way to decentralize the web?". If you think about that question hard enough, then anyone can see that their way of doing it is the "right" way. It's just obvious. The problem is that all of these mutually supporting compo…

I would have preferred IPFS to do the storage and propagation of data really well and not implemented stuff like IPNS in the core. To me this should be a separate codebase. And I see this in other features they have been including too. I'm using IPFS quite heavily to store content generated on https://pollinations.ai but there is no way I could run it without a centralized node that I have control over at the moment…

I haven't used IPFS so I was trying to see what the IPFS image URL would look like but when I tried to inspect the images using (right click -> inspect element), Chrome selects the whole division tab (class=MuiCardContent-root) in the Elements tab in web console. I found that it's happening because of (style="pointer-events: none;"). When this style attribute is removed from web console, I'm able to inspect individual elements like image, paragraph correctly. Just out of curiosity, do you know why (style="pointer-events: none;") is used here?

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#237

Post by shp0ngle »

Anyone has any experience with the FileCoin thing?

If I want to “save” some data in FileCoin/IPFS/whatever, and I want it there forever, is it cheap? Expensive? Can I be reasonably sure it stays there?

I want some actual current results, not “one day in the future”, heard that too much from *Coin proponents

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#238

Post by shp0ngle »

shp0ngle wrote: post #237

Anyone has any experience with the FileCoin thing? If I want to “save” some data in FileCoin/IPFS/whatever, and I want it there forever, is it cheap? Expensive? Can I be reasonably sure it stays there? I want some actual current results, not “one day in the future”, heard that too much from *Coin proponents

> Estuary is currently in its alpha testing phase. Because of this, there are some restrictions to the service:

> The service is temporarily limited to users wanting to store meaningful public data. You can apply for an invite →

so… no?

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#239

Post by perl4ever »

mftb wrote: post #233
perl4ever wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think something regulatory changed about 1995, such that there were instantly tons of ISP startups, and I think that 33.6k modems were available about then. I had a 14.4K Zoom modem, but I'm pretty sure the ISP I worked for around '95-'96 was buying lots of US Robotics 33.6 modems. I agree that 56k came a bit later, and didn't necessarily work on any particular phone line.

IMHO what changed in 1995, was MS adding TCP/IP to Windows 95. Prior to that you had fight with dial-up, Trumpet Winsock, PPP and PPTP to get on the internet at all. Most normal people still couldn't do it without help, but it moved into the realm of possible.

During 95 or 96, I was explaining to customers over the phone how to set up Trumpet Winsock and MacTCP/PPP. Most people didn't instantly get Windows 95, so it wasn't the reason that the ISP existed. And it was already possible to access the internet to some extent through an established online service, I think I'd used Delphi, AOL, maybe others during high school.

Something made it feasible right then for anybody to set up a bank of modems in their apartment, to provide direct internet, and there was an explosive growth in small ISPs before they consolidated. At the time, I was kind of oblivious to the historic moment, but the one I worked for was literally a few modems in the closet of a crummy apartment downtown when I started and within months we'd moved to an office a few blocks away and were installing modems like mad.

I found this, not necessarily authoritative:

"In 1994 the National Science Foundation commissioned four private companies to build four public Internet access points to replace the government-run Internet backbone: WorldCom in Washington, Pacific Bell in San Francisco, Sprint in New Jersey, and Ameritech in Chicago. Then other telecom giants entered the market with their own Internet services, which they often subcontracted to smaller companies. By 1995 there were more than 100 commercial ISPs in the USA."

I think that was probably it - right then and there anyone could buy a pipe to the internet and connect some modems. It was around then that I heard the term "T1" which was a lot back then.

Maybe there was some connection to:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_Performance_Computing_Act...

Re: HTTP is obsolete – it's time for the distributed, permanent web (2015)

#240

Post by Falkon1313 »

Datsundere wrote: post #184

This has been bothering for the longest time. I would love to learn more about efforts that are being taken to avoid these workarounds we have for certs expiring, dns issues and such. A lot of website hacking could've been avoided with a better design like even having encryption as standard.

Well a lot of hacking could also be avoided if everything were just plain publicly-accessible static files. Which is what they're talking about with IPFS.

But that would be a very different web from today's, where most content comes from dynamic CMS/CMF, blog software, forum software, or other web apps. It addresses things like the old personal homepage of the mid-90s, but not much at all about the modern web.

It also doesn't address the major outages (like we've seen with cert revocations or DNS outages, etc.)

Post reply on HN