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Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites

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Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites

#121

Post by dave_sullivan »

throaway46546 wrote: post #119
schleck8 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check I don't think this is a good comparison. The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken, i. e. shortly after the war for independence on american soil against an empire, which was fought with militias (hence the third ammendement). That's a totally different scenario than the 21st…

Assault rifles were banned in 1986. The only assault rifles available on the civilian market are registered pre-ban ones. Due to limited supply they tend to be quite expensive ($10,000+). You have to register with the ATF and pay a special tax to purchase one.

Huh? Pretty sure you can still buy an AR-15 in a lot of states, am I missing something?

Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites

#122

Post by sterlind »

publiush wrote: post #89
schleck8 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> censorship resistance Can someone tell me what is going to happen if let's say a terror group decides to use this for propaganda purposes, along the lines of religious fundamentalism/executions as we've witnessed before? Who is going to take the blame for providing them with what is advertised as an unblockable platform? Has abuse even been factored in?

This is an important debate that comes up all too often. I do think this is the proper forum for this, so I'm glad you brought this up and I would be happy to share my thoughts. The more information people have had in the history of humanity, the more freedoms and liberties we have also had. We would likely still be living in monarchies if not for the spread of information -- North Korea is a prime example. If inform…

Personally, I think the right state answer isn't censorship, it's infiltration. Find and bust the people creating the illegal content. That's what the Feds have done with unsavory hidden services.

Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites

#123

Post by publiush »

Aeolun wrote: post #107
everfree wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you solve the problem of spam and squatting without the network requiring payment for domains? Subsequently, how else besides using a crypto coin would it be feasible for a decentralized network to take payment?

Good question, I’m just not satisfied with this answer. Requiring some form of payment is fine, but I’d like the ‘currency’ to be locked into the network so it doesn’t become something you can trade. Maybe contribute to the network in exchange for a balance, that you can then exchange for domains after which it’s gone. Ideally also figure out a way to limit people simply creating many accounts and using that, guess y…

> Maybe contribute to the network in exchange for a balance, that you can then exchange for domains after which it’s gone.

You've just described handshake - when you purchase a domain, the coins are burned in exchange for the domain.

Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites

#124

Post by throaway46546 »

dave_sullivan wrote: post #121
throaway46546 wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Assault rifles were banned in 1986. The only assault rifles available on the civilian market are registered pre-ban ones. Due to limited supply they tend to be quite expensive ($10,000+). You have to register with the ATF and pay a special tax to purchase one.

Huh? Pretty sure you can still buy an AR-15 in a lot of states, am I missing something?

An AR-15 style rifle is not an assault rifle. The definition of an assault rifle is "a selective fire rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine". Selective fire means "the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, burst mode, and/or fully automatic firing mode". These were banned by the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act.

There are "assault weapon" bans like that in my home state of California that ban certain cosmetic features on guns. These are completely pointless as an AR-15 is functionally no different from any other semi-automatic firearm.

Examples:

Assault Rifle

https://i.imgur.com/pGnxHRD.jpg

"Assault Weapon"

https://i.imgur.com/xhsZ2dK.jpg

Not an "Assault Weapon"

https://i.imgur.com/VKtpdSy.jpg

Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites

#125

Post by yesbut »

schleck8 wrote: post #94
publiush wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important debate that comes up all too often. I do think this is the proper forum for this, so I'm glad you brought this up and I would be happy to share my thoughts. The more information people have had in the history of humanity, the more freedoms and liberties we have also had. We would likely still be living in monarchies if not for the spread of information -- North Korea is a prime example. If inform…

> Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check I don't think this is a good comparison. The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken, i. e. shortly after the war for independence on american soil against an empire, which was fought with militias (hence the third ammendement). That's a totally different scenario than the 21st…

> It is very difficult for either of these organs to abuse power without being met with a restriction.

I think, as we have seen over the past ~40 years, it is very easy for either of them to abuse power. On the other hand, it is very difficult for voters to implement legislation that improves the lives of everyday people in any meaningful way. That is really what the Constitution did. It created a complex system of government with veto points around every corner to, in the words of James Madison, "protect the minority of the opulent (wealthy property owners) against the majority (the plebs)". And this is certainly how it is currently functioning. I stopped romanticizing the constitution years ago.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10#Background

Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites

#126

Post by skinkestek »

afavour wrote: post #114
publiush wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government, but after hundreds of years, friendships, camaraderies, it's not difficult to have loosely coupled groups infiltrating all branches. Things eventually crumble as perfect systems are hard. This is akin to the monarchies, where a king may have risen to power as a g…

> When we have a government without corruption, we probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks and balances work in a young government, I’d argue the opposite: it’s the threat of armed resistance that only works with a young government. The idea that an armed group could overthrow the government in the US today has always struck me as fanciful. The army would shut down such an attempt very, ver…

You forget the ties between the army and the 2nd amendment people, don't you?

I'm no American but I can't really see most soldiers starting to shoot their own?

Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites

#127

Post by dave_sullivan »

throaway46546 wrote: post #124
dave_sullivan wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Huh? Pretty sure you can still buy an AR-15 in a lot of states, am I missing something?

An AR-15 style rifle is not an assault rifle. The definition of an assault rifle is "a selective fire rifle that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable magazine". Selective fire means "the capability of a weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, burst mode, and/or fully automatic firing mode". These were banned by the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act. There are "assault weapon" bans like that in my…

This is the kind of autistic pedantry I come to HN for. I don't know what I was thinking.

Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites

#128

Post by AnthonyMouse »

schleck8 wrote: post #94
publiush wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an important debate that comes up all too often. I do think this is the proper forum for this, so I'm glad you brought this up and I would be happy to share my thoughts. The more information people have had in the history of humanity, the more freedoms and liberties we have also had. We would likely still be living in monarchies if not for the spread of information -- North Korea is a prime example. If inform…

> Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check I don't think this is a good comparison. The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken, i. e. shortly after the war for independence on american soil against an empire, which was fought with militias (hence the third ammendement). That's a totally different scenario than the 21st…

> Or you end up with the highest rate of school amok per capita globally

The US has a high rate of firearms fatalities. Around two thirds of these are suicides. Around zero thirds of them are school shootings.

School shootings are sufficiently rare that when they happen, they make national news. Which is catastrophic, because studies have shown that media coverage of school shootings induces school shootings. It's attention-seeking behavior by the criminally insane, so if you show them that it generates attention, it increases their attraction to the act. Most US media outlets know this and do it anyway, because it generates a lot of hits. This is the primary reason why the US has relatively more than other countries, including other countries with a high rate of firearms ownership.

> Licenses make just as much sense as they do for cars.

It doesn't work for this. If you have a driver's license and know it will be taken away if you drive drunk, that's an effective deterrent. School shooters tend to be young people with no prior criminal history. They would pass a background check. Having a license to take away after the fact is meaningless when after they fact they're going to prison forever.

In theory where this does something is for criminal gangs, where you say you want to deny people with a criminal history a firearm. Criminal gangs actually are a significant fraction of firearms fatalities. But here's how that works out: People with a criminal history who go back to a life of crime just get a gun through their criminal organization the same way they get the illegal drugs they're dealing.

Meanwhile, people with a criminal history who reform themselves will commonly also carry a gun, for self-defense against criminals from their past life. Laws against this don't deter it when the alternative is getting murdered. Then this otherwise reformed criminal gets caught in possession of a firearm yet not committing any other crime, so they go back to prison and get another chance to get caught up with criminals. A large number of black people are currently in prison for no other crime than "felon in possession of a firearm," and were in possession of it for no other reason than self-defense. Or weren't in possession of it at all but were near enough to one owned by someone else for a bad cop to opportunistically file the charge.

Banning possession of a technology is weak. If you wrongfully shoot someone, you should go to prison. If you have a gun and don't harm anyone with it, no one should have a problem with that.

Re: Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites

#129

Post by neiman »

This is a fantastic work!

The best part of Federalist is reading and displaying the websites from BitTorrent using BEP-46. The Handshake part is less impressive for me personally, since it basically reads Handshake values from a service (query.hdns.io/dns-query).

If Federalist adds a Handshake daemon, it will be much more decentralized, but at the same time much heavier on resources.

For historical perspective, decentralized websites (or p2p websites) are here since like 20 years. Here's a super concise list of what I recall off the top of my head.

- Freenet is the first project I'm aware of doing that

- ENS+IPFS websites is a strong movement now (see esteroids.eth.limo, I'm a co-creator of this)

- ZeroNet was going strong like 5 years ago, and even though it's less popular now it's still functional and a nice project.

- Agregor browser brings decentralized website the Hypercore (a successor of DAT protocol)

- BitTorrent was supposed to have a project especially for decentralized websites (Maelstrom web browser), but it didn't took off eventually

- Magnetico is a search engine built on top of BitTorrent, very similar to Federalists, but without the Handshake part.

- Skynet is a project meant almost only for decentralized websites, based on Sia. They have integration with ENS, and afaik, also with Handshake (check it out!)

- Swarm, Namecoin etc. could also be used for decentralized websites. I saw some people doing demos with it, but can't recall any links/names atm.

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