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HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

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Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#141

Post by OtterCoder »

imtringued wrote: post #120
vog wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with you, but your argument is deeply flawed. There's quite a far stretch between "Y can be built on top of X" and "X is good for Y". To provide an argument that might fill this gap: Most systems don't actually have a huge amount of data. Look at the data size and data growth of CRMs, special-purpose wikis, and so on: These are mostly smaller than 500 MB (excluding static content like images), and grow by les…

I don't really see why a CRM needs to be decentralised. You need to host it yourself to avoid a cloud vendor going out of business but other than that what problem do you solve by decentralising it?

Delivery. A cloud provides worldwide availability at the cost of trust. A distributed site can survive any one entity failing, which includes you, and it can serve from anywhere your users want it to.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#142

Post by feanaro »

htns wrote: post #136
feanaro wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There isn't much allure to it beyond "our hosting/CDN will be cheaper if we let the customers pay for it". This is a very business/customer-centric perspective. What about resistance to censorship, ease of sharing without relying on central third-parties, resistance to linkrot of non-commercial content or even content from a business that went under, etc?

Censorship resistance is illusory without any anonymity. It'd make me a little sad if anyone gets into IPFS because of its censorship resistance when freenet and tor hidden services already exist. The central third party is preferable to potentially anyone being able to start logging who is viewing a given piece of content.

I agree that anonimity is an important aspect of censorship resistance, in particular the avoidance of being easily targetted. However, avoiding single point of failures is just as important, and this is what IPFS (currently) solves. Eventually, Tor and/or i2p integration is likely to happen.

I don't think Freenet and IPFS mutually exclude each other, though. Freenet is a specialized tool with low usability. IPFS aims to be a core, widespread infrastructural protocol with high usability. In this way, I think they can co-exist and be complementary. The existence of a harder to use and more anonymous tool doesn't negate the usefulness of having a more widely used tool with lesser guarantees.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#143

Post by geezerjay »

laktek wrote: post #114
geezerjay wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're not describing a problem that users need fixing. You're describing how nice it would be for corporations to unload their own infrastructure requirements onto unsuspecting users to try to piggyback on their hardware. That's not a solution to any problem. That's in fact a problem being created for users. Consumers purchase hardware to fill their needs, and there's nothing to be gained for wasting their resources…

Isn't this the reason why they introduced Filecoin? To incentivize consumers to share their resources.

> Isn't this the reason why they introduced Filecoin?

That assumes that all users are morons. If they want to pay anything to use else's hardware and energy then they only need to pick up their wallet and offer real cash. Offering another Dogecoin competitor to convince people to give away their energy bill and hardware is just a fancy way to officially assert that the people who fall for these gimmicks are complete morons who give away their resources in exchange for glorified arcade tokens.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#144

Post by Luker88 »

carolc wrote: post #112
Luker88 wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In general? No. Just because you can, it does not mean you should use a distributed db. Please remember to say that distributed, open databases have very narrow use cases. Leaving aside use cases like credit card information, there are a lot of user information that is illegal to share unless the user explicitly consents. In the EU you can't even share your access logs by default. And how do you handle authentication…

> "Distributed filesystems and CDN in general are great, but let's use them for things that do not actually need a single bit of security, please." The notion that distributed filesystems are inherently, or can't be, secure is way off. I would argue that with these technologies, such as IPFS, they can be more secure. The use cases are not only "open databases" (by which I assume you mean open to public), private data…

The problem is not that only authorized clients can write, that is the easy part (signatures are enough for that).

The problem is limiting read access. Having a globally distributed db means that anyone can get a copy.

You can use ipfs for public data, and to store private encrypted data (with caveats: make sure you change the encryption key/nonce for every data change).

There is no way to modify private data depending on anonymous access without things like omomorphic encryption, and the whole system is completely void of any form of forward secrecy.

As someone who works with encryption and security, I can not recommend storing anything private on distributed systems. Leaks way too much data, and there are too many caveats. You can have securely designed applications, but I see no way to safely port common websites completely on distributed infrastructure without leaking a lot of data that today is supposed to be kept secret.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#145

Post by noam87 »

Semiapies wrote: post #137
noam87 wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

- Even assuming all this, a hybrid approach of HTTP + IPFS (or DAT) is still better than what we have now, since IPFS is essentially a worldwide CDN for static files.(Sorry: an inter-planetary one.) - The content-addressing aspect makes it perfect for distributing commonly used libraries. - We already cache all this content locally. What a waste! Why do I have to fetch jQuery from fricking California when it's sittin…

Why do I have to fetch jQuery from fricking California when it's sitting on my girlfriend's phone in the other room? Just for one? Because, if you have the ability to do that, your girlfriend's phone has the ability to detect whether anybody nearby is accessing any arbitrary file or page. It just has to host a copy of that page and see whether anyone pulls it.

I don't know the internals of IPFS DHT implementation, but the whitepaper mentions Kadmelia and Coral. Coral tries to optimize for ping latency (you're not literally fetching from nearest geographical neighbor, I simplified to make a point).

Unless I misunderstand your point, but honestly it seems like people here are engaging more in "gotcha" nay-saying than honest efforts of criticism... it would've taken you two minutes of googling to find out this is a non-issue.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#147

Post by acd »

I would like distributed web methods like IPFS to be a w3c World Wide Web consortium standard.

Combine IPFS and crypto currencies for payments and we have a new distribution standard. Then one could have distributed movie sites like Netflix and YouTube where you pay for royalties to legally file share the content.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#148

Post by dymk »

lgierth wrote: post #97
yeukhon wrote: post #46

So a couple questions even reading this... 1. The availability depends on the number of peers like BitTorrent? If so, and if no seed is available, how does one access the content, esp in the context of an intranet? 2. Any change to how we run infrastructure except not serving HTTP?

The one huge advantage of content-addressing over location-addressing (= URL with domain name and path) is that the original source isn't solely responsible for keeping the content online and the link working. Anyone can help out by keeping a copy. With location-addressing additional copies of the content aren't just largely hidden, they also get into a weird mode of competition with the original URL. With content-ad…

> is that the original source isn't solely responsible for keeping the content online and the link working

No, the original source is still the one solely responsible, unless there's some agreement between parties to cache content for them.

Anyone can help, yes, but it's not their responsibility to keep content online unless there's some agreement between the original content source and other nodes, which is of course not the case by default.

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#149

Post by lgierth »

dymk wrote: post #148
lgierth wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one huge advantage of content-addressing over location-addressing (= URL with domain name and path) is that the original source isn't solely responsible for keeping the content online and the link working. Anyone can help out by keeping a copy. With location-addressing additional copies of the content aren't just largely hidden, they also get into a weird mode of competition with the original URL. With content-ad…

> is that the original source isn't solely responsible for keeping the content online and the link working No, the original source is still the one solely responsible, unless there's some agreement between parties to cache content for them. Anyone can help , yes, but it's not their responsibility to keep content online unless there's some agreement between the original content source and other nodes, which is of cour…

Content-addressing doesn't alleviate the problem 100%, since content can still fall off the network - but it improves the structure of the network in a way that makes it tremendously easier to keep content around. You don't need control over the original domain name to help in distributing a certain piece of content.

My colleague Matt addressed this beautifully in a recent talk at the NSDR Symposium: https://archive.org/download/ndsr-dc-2017/04_Speaker_3_Matt_...

// edited to fix URL

Re: HTTP is obsolete. It's time for the Distributed Web (2015)

#150

Post by empath75 »

myhf wrote: post #140
ivanhoe wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But you still have all maintenance related problems? How do you upgrade a hard disk or memory, go to their home? What happens if their home net is down or slow, no one can visit the site? Back in the days I was running a few web servers from my office directly, and it's a lot of extra work that is just not worth it.

Why would you need to upgrade a hard disk or memory?

Have you ever worked in a datacenter.
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