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

hashify.me

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

#71

Post by mhitza »

rsaarelm wrote: post #23
mhitza wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_name

Right. Turns out my use of 'URL' everywhere in grandparent comment is a misnomer then. Should've used URN or URI. I'm not quite sure if URN is exactly right for the hash thing either, given that it both fails to unify things which humans would probably assign the same URN to, such as two image files of the same picture using different encodings, and it has the theoretical chance of assigning the same hash to two enti…

I think these issues are clearly answered by the rfc http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1737.

* Global uniqueness: The same URN will never be assigned to two different resources. ((the encoding would be part of the URN))

* Independence: It is solely the responsibility of a name issuing authority to determine the conditions under which it will issue a name. ((a URN wouldn't necessarily be a hash of the resource in question))

The second point makes it pretty clear that the assignment of URN's would be done by some authoritative parties, which makes sense if you think that in their initial view URN's would have been useful in linking citations, references; for research papers. Just that the Internet has far time ago branched from that scope.

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

#73

Post by antimatter15 »

rsaarelm wrote: post #21

I've sometimes wondered about a system where the URL of a document is an actual hash, like SHA-1, of the document. That'd chance the semantics of hyperlinks from "link to document at this internet address" to "link to document with these contents", just like Hashify does, but it could do arbitrarily large documents. The tricky part with that system would be that you'd also need some new mechanism to retrieve the file…

The creator of Freenet made something called dijjer, which mirrors http files in a p2p network accessible by prepending http://dijjer.org/get/ to it. But it looks like he's no longer maintaining it.

http://code.google.com/p/dijjer/

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

#75

Post by nerfhammer »

gresrun wrote: post #58
nerfhammer wrote: post #55

ought to gzip the string before it goes to base64 while you're at it

We actually do this exact thing to send dynamic parameters to a chart-generating backend server. It works great; you get a surprising amount of compression using gzip (2-4x space savings) and the URLs are naturally cached by proxies without any magic!

If it's mostly ascii compression is something you should almost automatically think about.

There's also snappy http://code.google.com/p/snappy/

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

#76

Post by nerfhammer »

aurelianito wrote: post #45
sp332 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Some limitations. You can't redirect to a data:// url, e.g. http://tinyurl.com/44c8ctt > or http://tinyurl.com/44c8ctt >link gets stopped by Chrome as an injection attack. So you can't use data:// to (ab)use a link shortener as a CDN.

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

#77

Post by seanp2k2 »

rapala wrote: post #32
juanre wrote: post #9

Very neat idea, but I think the reliance in bit.ly is self-defeating. This kind of approach would allow people to distribute documents using the web without having to trust them to a particular server, which can be very convenient if your target audience is in a country where access to the server storing your documents can be closed. For this to work you need to be able to recover the document from the URL locally. S…

Very neat idea, but I think the reliance in bit.ly is self-defeating. This kind of approach would allow people to distribute documents using the web without having to trust them to a particular server, which can be very convenient if your target audience is in a country where access to the server storing your documents can be closed. I just can't see the gain here. You need a server to distribute the URLs in any case…

Right, exactly. It's only really cool for magnet links because the law is different for "linking to content" vs "hosting content" right now.

One step further in this direction would just mean "including all the data for one or more documents on one page". You've just invented...a document, possibly with more than one media type.

Think about it this way: You have a 10K document which contains 200 bytes of link data; a URI to another hypertext document that is 5K in size...vs...you have a 15K document which contains 5K of "link data"; the other document.

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

#78

Post by seanp2k2 »

cobychapple wrote: post #2

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.

in essence, this would be moving away from a model of "large networks of connected pages/sites" to "a large amount of single documents with no meaningful mechanism of inter-connectedness".

Think about this like a PDF where stuff is embedded instead of in separate files.

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

#79

Post by seanp2k2 »

orclev wrote: post #51

This is an ancient idea. I read a 2600 article back in the early 2000s or possibly late 1990s that did essentially this same thing using a bash script and one of the first URL shortening services available at the time.

...and the general concept of "embedding one type of data inside another" predates computers and modern civilization.

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

#80

Post by seanp2k2 »

tkellogg wrote: post #25
mattvot wrote: 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

How is this substantially better than just sending someone a file?

Plaintext, the past, present and future.

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