How did this thread about a decentralised serverless I internet protocol end up in a debate about US gun policy?
As the saying goes - ‘The road to hell is paved with good intensions’.
Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
151–160 of 190 posts
Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
#152Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just to add to this. Back in 2012 I started coding something that I considered a necessary libertarian corrective to the centralized social networking world. I'm not going to post the idea here because I still consider it too explosive. Thankfully no one has done it yet. There came a point deep into the development when I realized that all my arguments to the contrary - arguments which sounded exactly like yours - we…
> a space they couldn't have conceived of themselves. It is hubris to think that only you could've conceived this idea. Eventually someone else would. If you released, and controlled it, at least you have a way to control the spread of misinformation on it.
Fascists aren't exactly known for thinking outside of the box, but rather for throwing their very large resources [0] at established methods (eg. militias and propaganda).
Three examples from the tech world of the last two decades:
- indymedia.org has arguably been a serious inspiration for the fachosphere (although they dropped the bottom-up part) in gathering information from many places/topics
- raddle.me newsboard was developed by anarchists but the codebase ended up used by fascists
- Trump's TruthSocial is just a rebranded Mastodon, although they tried to conceal that fact in the initial stages
[0] Fascists of all stripes are famously very well-funded and supported by the industry. This is the case today (Trump, Bolsonaro, Zemmour, Le Pen..) and was the case historically, as portrayed in the "Fascism Inc" documentary: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-L5Xlgc8S2Q
Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
#153Earlier quoted context omitted.
So far I'm the only one that has conceived of it, but even if it was conceived of by the leaders of the KKK, they wouldn't have as good a chance of building it successfully and making it work to their benefit as if a self-interested techie liberal libertarian did all the hard stuff for them. Pretty much none of the people dumb enough to spend their lives spreading online hate would be capable of building the platform…
well put. The things you forgot: 1) trolling is also a type of moderation. It will unmake whatever serious effort if 1-2 persons disagree hard enough. 2) sure, there will be facists but those technically seek is the opposite of the platform. 3) however weird or undesirabe some ideologie is we can give it time to come to its senses before we go full retard enforcing our own. if we cant the other idea deserves to win.…
I mean, on the scale of weirdness is it weird that we sell guns you can't shoot at people, and cars that go faster than the speed limit, while locking people up for inhaling burning weeds? Uh, yeah. The thing is, we did arrive at this set of compromises by something slightly more logical, flexible, and iterable than one group of fanbois just forcibly outnumbering another group of idiots. What millions did die for, in the west, was not a cult leader or a weird set of ideas, but a legal framework. Which, creaky as it is, privileges the right of individuals to be treated as individuals and be innocent until proven guilty. Not perfectly at all. But more individual rights than have ever existed in history, and more than could ever exist under the rule of one depraved ideology or another. What we have, at the moment, is a system that appears to make no sense precisely because it has measures in place to prefer individual rights over ideology. To the extent we have any freedom or happiness at all, it's in contradiction to the ideologies being pushed by people who want to have their turn to rule and rewrite the social contract. A cursory glance at the history of ideological movements shows that western democracy is a total aberration in its ability to hold murderous ideologues slightly at bay.
So. A battle royale of weird ideas is great, but only if it's in a ring where everyone leaves their guns outside, and no one's life hangs in the balance. Otherwise it's a bunch of trolls playing dress up with someone else's clothes, burning someone else's stuff, killing someone else's kids; see Stalinism and Nazism. The current generation is lost for knowledge of history, so they don't understand the fire they're playing with every time they think imposing their correct point of view by force is the only way. It's not their fault; their parents were mostly idiots. But they only exist because some people held the fort for an arena where you could debate without existential peril to yourself or the opposite party. The framework is all. The ideas can come and go within it, and lots of seemingly stupid contradictions or compromises will arise, as you pointed out. But if any side is able to overturn the framework, then there will not be a fair battle of ideas ever again.
Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
#154This looks like a great project, thank you. One aspect of censorship resistance is the ability for people to publish and read content anonymously (or pseudonymously). Could you add something to the README about that threat model? Also, I see that your IRC channel is hosted on Freenode. That seems an odd choice for a project that is opposed to censorship. Please consider a network with a better track record in that re…
Thank you! It doesn't actually allow you to publish and read anonymously without Tor or a VPN, but I will definitely recommend using both of those on the README. I do want to be careful about what is and isn't claimed, as I believe the world has become a bit dissatisfied with overclaims from decentralization projects lately. I don't think I've come to the same conclusion about freenode ( https://news.itsfoss.com/free…
> I don't think I've come to the same conclusion about freenode (https://news.itsfoss.com/freenode-controversy/)
This article really obscures some facts. For example, it implies that Lee was the person providing for freenode, when in fact he was just one of many donors: most servers in the network were donated by non-profits. Likewise, the article says Freenode operators were not staff because they were not paid: they still donated their time and resources to keeping the network alive. Also, it says Freenode was "taken over" by Christel, which to my knowledge is not exactly correct: from my understanding, she was indeed granted responsibilities, but was not supposed to govern (as in, give orders) to the network.
Also, most of the drama took place after this article was published. Many chans which remained on Freenode were pushed out by the new management who seemingly ran regexes on all incoming messages, automatically taking over or banning any chan which had mentions of libera.chat. That is, until new management actually dropped the entire database (a huge "fuck you" to the faithful who remained) and started again from scratch.
All in all, Freenode's story is one of a collective project run by volunteers on their donated time/hardware turned into a top-down startup. It also seems the freenode.net homepage has been turned into some kind of newsboard without a lot of people but where lots of content appears to be "deleted". Strange new world: https://freenode.net/n/freenode/57/there-are-literally-78-us...
> IRC is only decentralized if there isn't just one network anyway.
Not exactly, as there is server-to-server federation to distribute the load (but it's not exactly decentralized in this case). But yes, decentralizing is better. But there's plenty of IRC servers where to host your chans: OFTC, tilde.chat, indymedia, hackint...
Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
#155This looks like a great project, thank you. One aspect of censorship resistance is the ability for people to publish and read content anonymously (or pseudonymously). Could you add something to the README about that threat model? Also, I see that your IRC channel is hosted on Freenode. That seems an odd choice for a project that is opposed to censorship. Please consider a network with a better track record in that re…
Thank you! It doesn't actually allow you to publish and read anonymously without Tor or a VPN, but I will definitely recommend using both of those on the README. I do want to be careful about what is and isn't claimed, as I believe the world has become a bit dissatisfied with overclaims from decentralization projects lately. I don't think I've come to the same conclusion about freenode ( https://news.itsfoss.com/free…
Be careful about the integration with Tor, they explicitly discourage the use of torrents (since they're so heavy they make the whole network slower)
Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
#156Instead of blockchain/web3, I wish these type of projects would pop up more. They are drowned (in my circles) out by 'decentralized everything blockchain' hype... we need this indeed.
Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
#157Very nice work ! I wanted to do something similar a long time ago but never took the time. Congratulations !
A few points:
- is this using webtorrent-the-library or webtorrent-the-protocol ? If it's the latter it's a bit useless. The only reason the protocol exists is to make web browsers speak a similar language as bittorrent, but both protocols are strictly different. Which means if you want to talk both you need to implement both (and fortunately webtorrent-the-library does so)
- The Readme says this is good for whistleblowing. Actually this is one of the worst ways of doing it. When using DHT you tell the whole world your IP is interested in a specific content. When using bittorrent your IP connects with other peers interested in a specific content. There is nothing easier for LE than watching a specific content of interest and see who is interested in it: journalists, sources, ... An anonymisation layer is mandatory for this use case
Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
#158Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a dilemma as the magnet links/hashes aren't easily shareable. One option is to create a DMT directory, but this would be centralized. Handshake is the most mature decentralized domain name project, and I opted for it. It uses coins to limit abuse, since anyone can flood a decentralized system. You don't need coins to browse and use federalist. That said, if there are any other immutable DNS systems that aren'…
ENS (Ethereum Naming Service) is built on immutable smart contracts on Ethereum. Domain names (ie example.eth) are permissionlessly registered for up to hundreds of years at a time for ~$5 a year. ENS domains can be resolved to Ethereum wallet addresses, IPFS, Bitcoin addresses or any other public key or string.
ENS seems to be centralized on to one smart contract holding all the domains under the .eth TLD (which already conflicts with the reserved 3 letter TLD for Ethiopia) under the control of a typical 'multisig' and 'DAO' which is based on 'trusting' the keyholders.
Basically ENS boils down to being a subdomain provider with ICANN-like governance, an illusion to 'decentralization'.
Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
#159Earlier quoted context omitted.
There's a big difference here: paper is typically traceable to the source without much hassle. This tech is partially traceable to redistributors only.
That's a weak reason. I could make my own paper.
I think you missed the point. It's not about literally tracing the physical source of the paper. I mean the network of printing, distribution, any feedback, etc. leave traces where there's a fairly short chain of people to follow before you find the initial source. This is completely different from online distribution. No agency will complain if you distribute information on paper - they're more likely to say "thank you, please continue, we'd like to learn about your whole network of collaborators".
Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
#160Earlier quoted context omitted.
this literally uses a cryptocurrency (handshake) for domains
There's a dilemma as the magnet links/hashes aren't easily shareable. One option is to create a DMT directory, but this would be centralized. Handshake is the most mature decentralized domain name project, and I opted for it. It uses coins to limit abuse, since anyone can flood a decentralized system. You don't need coins to browse and use federalist. That said, if there are any other immutable DNS systems that aren'…
FWIW, Unstoppable Domains is already supported by both Brave and Opera (which I found interesting), and, from my determination, has a much greater chance of even more widespread adoption (due to it not being such a conflict with ICANN). (It has its own issues, but I frankly feel like all of these projects are still a bit "sketch". That said, I am not really pro- the premise of websites relying on permanent human-mappable identifiers in the first place, as I feel there are a ton of philosophical failings that people mostly just try to pretend don't exist down that road. I would much prefer projects like this just use EVM addresses as their underlying address and then users could potentially allow ENS names to map to those if they absolutely must have names locally, but then the names aren't really the canonical bits: permanent unique names just have too many moral landmines to be acceptable.)