Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web • Hacker News Board

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#191

Post by vezycash » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 1:58 PM UTC

lolive wrote: post #158

vezycash wrote: post #149

IMO, there are two key barriers to a decentralized internet (other factors are minor in comparison.) (1) IPv4 (2) Bandwidth limits IPv6 makes NAT unnecessary. With IP scarcity gone, IP addresses might become permanent like phone numbers. ISPs are currently making money off fixed IP addresses. Market forces would change that eventually.

The need for a search engine seems, imho, to be the major argument versus (full) decentralization. Another formulation for that: there is a (valid) need for (some kind of) centralization. (and from there, you all go back to full centralization, first because of search, then because of convenience, at last because of laziness).

P2P File sharing services like LimeWire, kazaa, torrent... had acceptable search experience before being sued to oblivion.

Even if lawsuits didn't kill p2p networks, Virus / safety concerns would have. Imo, trust is a bigger issue than discovery, hence need for curation - centralization.

The reputation system of thepiratebay makes it my primary torrent site.

Laziness, convenience is more of a trust than a search issue.

Many uploads are viruses/adware/ransomware masquerading as movies, books, games...

This necessitates multiple downloads - it's frustrating. I remember downloading several gigs of rar and encrypted .avi movies files, only to be greeted with a message asking me to fill a survey to get password.

Yify - a reputable source eliminated this concern for movies.

If decentralization works out, I believe specialized search engines will emerge.

But note, trust is the bigger issue than search or content discovery for decentralization. If not, iTunes store, app stores and other walled gardens would have long failed.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#192

Post by bshanks » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 2:03 PM UTC

vlovich123 wrote: post #111

frio wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From a conference I attended years ago, the key motivator is that request/response networking is pretty much already broken when we get to the moon; once Mars comes into the picture, it'll be even more so. When each TCP packet requires an ACK, and an ACK takes minutes to arrive... things break down a bit. So, the idea behind IPFS and others (SSB comes to mind, except, yacht-themed) is that it's largely a collection o…

Each TCP packet does not require an ack, at least not as a "receive TCP packet send out ACK". They're returned collectively as a bitset for the last N packets instead based on your transmission window (which TCP stacks already tune based on your RTT). Can't see how you'd get rid of that if you're looking for reliable real-time transport medium. Additionally you can layer in forward error-correction above TCP to reduc…

I'm not a networking expert, but imo i think that with extreme delays, you would not want a real-time transport medium at all. The higher-level protocols would be built on top of a non-real time substrate. You would want to have so much forward error-correction that you could remove ACK completely (perhaps a higher level protocol could still be used to request retransmission in the rare case of failure, e.g. one could request a web page be resent via HTTP, but the hypothetical TCP replacement under that would have no concept of ACK).

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#193

Post by bshanks » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 2:11 PM UTC

amelius wrote: post #137

sixdimensional wrote: post #48

It strikes me that, if we are ever to expand the Internet into space on a universal scale (a la Vint Cerf and "delay tolerant networking", as an example), the inherent physics problems involved with distances and connectivity in space would probably make decentralization an absolute requirement. I mean, it seems it would not be uncommon for there to be a "local net" and a "universal peer-to-peer or mesh network net".…

On a related note, I'm wondering how distributed systems that rely on atomic clocks (e.g. Google Spanner) would work in the space era, given that relativity says that there's no such thing as a global clock.

Not a physicist but isn't it the case that any two observers can still compute at what time the other person perceived any given event, if they know each other's history of travel and the history of travel of the event?

So you would just have to agree that one observer's clock is the "master clock", and then everyone translates their local clock time into the corresponding master clock time (and all timestamps are written with respect to the 'time zone' of the master clock).

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#194

Post by collinmanderson » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 2:21 PM UTC

heavenlyblue wrote: post #155

codeka wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

None of that really matters if Mars is on the other side of sun from Earth. You'd need relay satellites to direct the signal around the sun, and even at the speed of light that's going to take tens of minutes, one way. As the parents suggest, even at Earth-Moon distances, we need to completely rethink things.

So who cares? Just adapt the TCP timeouts (resend timeouts) to 10 minutes. We’ll end up with the same, TCP-based system, except it’s going to be somewhat different, as time scales are not invariant for us humans.

My guess is we'll just have local datacenters on mars for the big services (google, netflix, etc). And then more websites will use services like cloudflare so they can get their website cached on mars. AWS will eventually have a mars datacenter. No need for IPFS.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#195

Post by basilgohar » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 2:36 PM UTC

collinmanderson wrote: post #194

heavenlyblue wrote: post #155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So who cares? Just adapt the TCP timeouts (resend timeouts) to 10 minutes. We’ll end up with the same, TCP-based system, except it’s going to be somewhat different, as time scales are not invariant for us humans.

My guess is we'll just have local datacenters on mars for the big services (google, netflix, etc). And then more websites will use services like cloudflare so they can get their website cached on mars. AWS will eventually have a mars datacenter. No need for IPFS.

This papers over the whole "relying on large cloud providers" issues in the first place. A decentralized system will ensure that websites won't need to rely on large, centralized powers beyond core infrastructure providers (which we have to fight to ensure are neutral parties, ala Net Neutrality) to avoid concentration of power to a select few.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#196

Post by basilgohar » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 2:40 PM UTC

zaarn wrote: post #144

7373737373 wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd say that most websites are static enough to be pinned. With the others, the main problem is content determinism. If the same website renders differently on different platforms, they will have different hashes. The only reliable way to store them is in "unrendered" form. Which prevents the inclusion of external resources, something that most single-page interactive websites rely on. Naming is a consensus problem.…

Most websites; maybe. Most popular websites; unlikely. Even HN isn't static enough to be pinned considering there is a new comment about once a minute or so.

What is pinned would be the content that doesn't change. It may mean the site architecture would need to be changed to accommodate one of these decentralized models.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#197

Post by LinuxBender » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 2:41 PM UTC

hazz99 wrote: post #188

LinuxBender wrote: post #176

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry you are getting downvoted. This is very much correct and folks simply put a lot of faith in the proxy transport as the ends to a means. One vulnerability / bug (Tor has had many) can weaken that link. Tor is rarely installed correctly or in a secure manor. (forcing all packets through it and dropping anything that leaks from the browser, for starters)

Do you have any links on how to install it properly, and to test that? (Maybe through Wireshark or something similar) I admit I've haven't used it in-depth (although I've studied the protocol quite a bit)

I don't have one handy, though if you might find one in the documentation for Tails linux OS.

At a high level, the client workstation must not be allowed to send any packets to anything other than the socks port running on the Tor host. The Workstation must have a static arp entry for it's gateway. The Workstation should use a ram-disk linux distro and not persist anything to unencrypted disk. The Tor host must not allow anything inbound other than the Tor SOCKS port. The Tor node must only speak outbound on 80 and 443 (formerly known as the fascist firewall setup). Ideally, the Tor node should be running on a cheap VPS host, ideally payed for with a burner card and accessed via a VPN so that Tor traffic from the home ISP is not evident. The VPS host should be cycled from time to time.

This is of course a lot of setup work, but most of it can be automated.

[Edit] Speak of the devil. Here is a zero-day published on the Tor browser [1]

[1] - https://www.zdnet.com/article/exploit-vendor-drops-tor-brows...

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#198

Post by anderber » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 2:43 PM UTC

wila wrote: post #136

pfraze wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some things in p2p hypermedia (dat) that's not possible with http/s: * You can generate domains freely using pubkeys and without coordinating with other devices, therefore enabling the browser to generate new sites at-will and to fork existing sites * Integrity checks & signatures within the protocol which enables multiple untrusted peers to 'host'. This also means the protocol scales horizontally to meet demand. * V…

This is a very interesting topic, thanks for working on it and answering questions here. The first concern I had/have is about security. If everybody runs their own server, isn't this a security nightmare waiting to happen? I understand from the presentation that these websites won't run php or other server side scripts which at least take some concern away. Tara also showed how easy it was to copy a website, while p…

Not OP, but I believe when it comes to website copies, you can identify which one you are actually using by the url. So if someone makes a copy of dat://mylocalbank.com, their url would be just the hash (Eg. dat://c6740...)

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#199

Post by mrep » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 3:15 PM UTC

erikb wrote: post #185

mrep wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The big open question is: can we create an experience as compelling as Instagram or Twitter over the P2P web? > It's a hard technical challenge, and today the answer is no. This is why I completely dismiss almost every "distributed" solution. If you can show me a business model/design document for a distributed service that can scale to big tech levels, deliver a user experience that matches current solutions, whil…

Huh? Email >>>>> Twitter over like 40 years or more? You don't work as an engineer, right? If you would, you would know how low the quality of most centralized technology is that is created by big corps. Most of the good stuff is decentralized. But the problem is that decentralization also means that the edge has more responsibility. And that responsibility is what people don't want to have. So they rather use a cent…

Running your own email server is definitely not "easier" if you are actually trying to maintain any durability and availability SLA's with your average homeowners computer/storage/network.

And sure, you can use git by itself and send the diffs to each other over email. However, then you have to deal with coordinating where the head is which is a pain across every node since it is constantly changing. Thus, most people don't do it that way and instead use a centralized service like github.

Re: Decentralisation: the next big step for the world wide web

#200

Post by rspeer » Mon, Sep 10, 2018, 3:38 PM UTC

gsich wrote: post #154

rspeer wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Of course it was the case. What do you think things like Seti@Home were running on? People who owned computers had so many idle processor cycles that they were desperate to find something to do with them. If 24/7 home computers were never a thing, what did BBSes run on?

Same answer: Yes, but in this case your PC is doing something. It has a purpose. 24/7 without doing anything is a waste of energy.

This has somehow turned into your opinion on energy use (yes, it's good that desktop PCs can now decrease their energy use significantly while idle, which was not the case in the 90s).

But you made a claim that "this was never the case", when clearly there was an era of home desktop computing when your desktop could act as a hobbyist server. This era gave rise to BBSes, then MUDs, then Minecraft servers (and many things in between).