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Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

hashify.me

41–50 of 84 posts

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#41
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

These messages are SOPA proof. They can never be "taken down" since they don't actually reside on the server

They do however reside on server hosting the link

No, that's not entirely true. I don't have to use a service like bit.ly to send one of these messages. And further, I could just as easily use _any_ or _many_ services. Since the technology is fundamentally browser-to-browser kind of distributed concept, it's just the URL shortening that's not SOPA compliant.

There's also several ways to obscure the impact of SOPA on the URL shortening anyway. For instance, if several services use the same hash algorithm for representing URLs, they can be used interchangeably (if you post the URL to all of them). Further, you can always set up your own temporary shortening service as well.

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really a good reply, but I think that hashify.me's potential for an IE audience was probably small to start with. But consider this: if this idea took off, wouldn't this press MS into keeping IE more modern?

My mobile browser of choice does not support cross browser resource sharing, according to the article...or rather the error message I get in lieu of the article.

Same with Opera and Chrome on my desktop. Firefox works at least.

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#43
post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My mobile browser of choice does not support cross browser resource sharing, according to the article...or rather the error message I get in lieu of the article.

Same with Opera and Chrome on my desktop. Firefox works at least.

Yeah, his message was 5548 characters (so the URL is at least 7380) which is way too long for the generally accepted 2000 character limit. So this particular protocol could use some enhancements - maybe a feature to break up messages into several parts represented by other bit.ly addresses. This would keep URL length under control

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#44
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They do however reside on server hosting the link

No, that's not entirely true. I don't have to use a service like bit.ly to send one of these messages. And further, I could just as easily use _any_ or _many_ services. Since the technology is fundamentally browser-to-browser kind of distributed concept, it's just the URL shortening that's not SOPA compliant. There's also several ways to obscure the impact of SOPA on the URL shortening anyway. For instance, if severa…

* No, that's not entirely true. I don't have to use a service like thepiratebay.org to send one of these files. And further, I could just as easily use _any_ or _many_ trackers inside my torrent. *

Altered to convey another point. Naturally, it would be quite difficult to "embed" a feature length movie into a single url, but if one was to split the file into chunks like torrent transferring does, or simply a multi-part rar like newsgroups still do, it enables each chunk to be more manageable.

I do agree with you though, but I think the reason that a service like this if changed in such a way to be user-friendly for file sharing, not just document sharing, would be able to get around a lot of the pitfalls a torrent tracker (for example) would have if it's DNS lookup was blocked (which aren't many) is due to the simple fact that SOPA is written in a way that assumes all IP addresses and DNS names are statically tied together and slow to alter, not that I can have a new domain name in a matter of minutes that resolves to my existing server. Even more so if the final URL hash was nothing more than a common and known algorithm, like base64, that one could easily plug into a basic desktop app and get the same result.

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#45
post #37

I don't get it. Why do they claim that this is in any way better than a data:// url? ( http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data:_URL )

This lets you use the data as a piece of a URL, so you can pass it as a CGI query string to another web page.

I still don't get it. Passing data as pieces of URLs is what normal parameters are for and data URLs are for generating a "virtual file", id est a link that contains all the information of the file linked.

With those 2 things, everything should be covered.

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#46
post #29

Maybe this would work well in an email? Especially if you want to get content past filtering.

Yes, but so would any pastebin website. You could say the advantage is that the content is not available to the server (since its transferred in the URL itself), but then it is when you actually read it, so it's not any more private.

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#48
post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Solutions like pastebin.com provide the same, with a small url.

These messages are SOPA proof. They can never be "taken down" since they don't actually reside on the server

Considering that SOPA considers linking to copyright infringing content to be as bad as publishing it yourself, this project unifies those two actions nicely!

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#50

What becomes possible? The entire internet could effectively get rid of hosting account providers, with each page in every site being contained in a hashify URL, and with each page linking to other pages using other hashify URLs. Trouble is, there might be a DNS-like system needed to match hashify URLs to more human-readable strings (or a way for existing DNS to resolve to hashify style URLs). Neat idea.

The real trouble is that when you link to a hashified URL, you are actually embedding in your web page (an encoding of) the content of the page you are linking to. Think matryoshka.

Not to mention that makes link cycles impossible.
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