141–150 of 249 posts
Permanent.... is a great idea and a very conflicting idea.
While the utility of permanent cannot be denied but the implications for privacy, piracy are far reaching.
This looks great, congrats to everyone involved, this is really exciting stuff. I got a couple questions I didn't quite understood. 1 - What prevents someone from altering a JS file and serve it to other peers? 2 - Is it possible to obtain all the version of an object and see it's history of changes (like Git)?
Distribution is a great idea. Decentralizing is a great idea. Open Source is great idea. Permanent.... is a great idea and a very conflicting idea. While the utility of permanent cannot be denied but the implications for privacy, piracy are far reaching.
Just to point out -- hypertext systems prior to the web almost universally expected permanent stable addresses (and this was, for instance, required by the various Xanadu specs). Enquire (Tim Berners-Lee's immediate predecessor to the Web) had permanent stable addresses, too. The web didn't have permanent stable addresses because the web was a hack, intended as a way to explain Enquire to people who didn't have a bac…
> (Let the entire existence of the Web, with its myriad flaws, be a lesson to you: your crappiest demo may well become the thing you're known for twenty-five years later, so make sure your crappiest demo doesn't suck as bad as the Web does.) The web is amazing, and you are using it right now. It has flaws, but so does anything that achieves success at the level the Web has. How many technologies have a direct impact…
This Nautil.us article[1] does a good job of summarizing the relevant research on the issue and references some supporting studies.
> My own research has shown that fame has much less to do with intrinsic quality than we believe it does, and much more to do with the characteristics of the people among whom fame spreads.
Put another way: the web has a direct impact on billions of people less because it's any good and more because popularity is inherently a power law and it happened to come out ahead. This doesn't invalidate any criticisms of quality!
It's perfectly possible if not likely for something popular to be crappy because most things are crappy and that's not enough to stop them from getting popular. Then they require tons of engineering effort and hacks to scale and improve again not because of quality but because of legacy. The web is what's there already, after all!
That's how things are, but that doesn't mean it's inevitable or a good state of affairs.
I really wish people wouldn't conflate popularity, quality and success. The first two operate on different axes and the last, if it doesn't, should.
[1]: http://nautil.us/issue/5/fame/homo-narrativus-and-the-troubl...
While IPFS can certainly complement HTTP (for example in preventing censorship in states such as China), it will not replace HTTP. Decentralization does not work with centralized services (99% of the web) such as Twitter, Google, etc. You'll need HTTP to run server code. I for one will not be hosting a node where arbitrary code can be run. Besides the obvious fact that a centralized service wants to control what serv…
It's better if your application is redesigned to be distributed on a fundamental level, but you can still send custom data through IPFS in a standard client/server relationship if you want to, see http://gateway.ipfs.io/ipfs/QmTkzDwWqPbnAh5YiV5VwcTLnGdwSNsN... for an example.
>I for one will not be hosting a node where arbitrary code can be run
This isn't a distributed computation platform like Ethereum, it's purely for transferring files, and the only files you host are those that you explicitly request. Also, IPFS is not a blockchain with a 51% to take over, it's an entirely different animal, the only way to redirect a site is with the correct associated public/private key (unless SHA-256 gets broken at some point in which case IPFS migrates to a different hashing algorithm).
That's interesting, but I see no reference in the website or the paper to GNUnet or Freenet or other existing DHT-based file distribution networks. How does this compare?
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> (Let the entire existence of the Web, with its myriad flaws, be a lesson to you: your crappiest demo may well become the thing you're known for twenty-five years later, so make sure your crappiest demo doesn't suck as bad as the Web does.) The web is amazing, and you are using it right now. It has flaws, but so does anything that achieves success at the level the Web has. How many technologies have a direct impact…
A big (biggest?) reason is that popularity is largely independent of quality. Things get popular for lots of reasons heavily affected by the shape of social networks and early choices by a small number of people involved—often based on what they have and have not heard of more than an analysis of what is better or worse. Quality plays a small role at best. This Nautil.us article[1] does a good job of summarizing the…
This is simply not true in the long-term. Good technologies survive because they are useful.
Of course quality is not enough to ensure success, but it sure as hell matters for long-term survival. Homer, Shakespeare and the wheel survived because they are very good / useful. Are there lost Homers? Of course there are. Will the Web survive 100 years? I have no idea, and neither do you. A decade? Most likely.
Be careful with conflating what is with your idea of what something should be. If you think something sucks and work on making it better, that's great! Keep doing it, and maybe someday we will have something that's even better. But don't diss the popular just because it isn't ticking all of the "it-should-be-this" boxes.
how does IPFS compare to bittorrent's project maelstrom? http://project-maelstrom.bittorrent.com
This looks great, congrats to everyone involved, this is really exciting stuff. I got a couple questions I didn't quite understood. 1 - What prevents someone from altering a JS file and serve it to other peers? 2 - Is it possible to obtain all the version of an object and see it's history of changes (like Git)?
"authenticated: content can be hashed and verified against the link"