Once again, real life imitates the Silicon Valley show...
I don't know why you are being downvoted... I immediately thought Pied Piper, then had a bit of chuckle. Jian Yang!!!!
motherFUCK
Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
31–40 of 46 posts
Re: Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
#32I think the headline here is misleading. What they are offering is a prize to decentralize the internet - the actual network to which people connect in order to use the web. Judging from the other comments here, I don't think a lot of people have actually read the article. IPFS and blockchain are technologies that are built on top of the internet - they assume a network connection already exists.
Well, I also did actually read the article, and the contest website and even the explanatory PDF and I took away a different message. It doesn't appear to specifically require that the result is a network connection in the sense of an IP packet forwarding layer. They're looking, I think, for a services-equivalent outcome for temporarily or permanently disconnected communities, one that is at least gatewayed to the Internet. So the term "decentralise" is perhaps poorly chosen, it seems to me they're hoping for application services (probably including web requests) in a disconnected and/or ad-hoc mesh mode.
My gut feeling is that to create a long-term platform (rather than a point solution) we'd have to refit many extant application protocol stacks with CRDTs and reconceptualised crypto. Although for this contest I'd be imagining something less advanced, maybe a drone-based 4G hotspot loitering over communities with a copy of Wikipedia, a camera trained to detect signs of urgent distress, and a store-and-forward microblogging service like some automated Postman.
Someone should call Elon Musk and Vint Cerf about it, too, because I see many similarities between the outcomes for this and the outcomes for the Interplanetary Internet [1] which has been an ongoing research effort for years.
Re: Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
#33It can be done. It has been done, many times, from 1980s amateur packet radio to 2000s WiFi meshes. It's not inherently difficult. The hard problem is doing it with enough bandwidth to support cat videos. Netflix, and bloated web pages. Suppose you had a distributed emergency IP radio network available that could provide 56Kb as long as at least one solar powered node per square kilometer was working. It would delive…
FirstNet[1] is a national first responder wireless network meant to address this concern. It's predicated on the assumption that network operators have already sunk in money to maintain resiliency in the face of emergencies, thus marrying federal funds with (what is now) private sector wireless infrastructure dedicated to first responders who generally always have and use their mobile phones.
[1] https://www.firstnet.gov/news/firstnet-partners-att-build-wi...
Re: Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
#34Isn't the web already inherently decentralized (of course we all know there are forces trying to create their own walled gardens)? In the end, you just have to make something better that requires decentralization, and then it will win. In this way, the "survival of the fittest" for memes holds. What's a problem that only a decentralized web can solve? - Privacy? (Most) People don't care. Irrelevant. - Security? (Most…
I thought the article pretty clearly framed the problem they try to solve as "benefits of connectivity for places and situations that don't have direct or regular connectivity to the internet (and thus no reliable access to centralized services)".
I don't see the relevance of this comment to my original point. Also, why do you need a whole new "internet" to make what you describe (and the article describes) as an offline application?
Re: Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
#35CJDNS is a self-organising IP address allocation and routing layer. A node's public key acts as its IPv6 address, and routing uses a DHT of those nodes. This style of network has the property that you can take two independent CJDNS networks, link them together, and all nodes are mutually addressable/routable. This is in contrast to The Internet, whose addressing is centralised on IANA. cjdns is moderately active, tho…
CJDNS + IPFS to me is a grand vision for an idealized, completely distributed web. Combine that with some sort of distributed naming system (Namecoin, etc.), and you have a system that requires literally zero central authorities to operate. You just generate your own IPv6 addresses that are derived from a private key you generate yourself, and it works out of the box with all existing applications that support IPv6.…
Off topic: Hey Kyle, how are the Supporter Plans working out for neocities? It'd be great to see a blog post about how the sites doing!
Re: Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
#36US based only? A pity. People had a pretty good go at this in the early 2000s, when WiFi arrived on the scene. Most of those networks died and the ones that remain never took over the world [1]. The sticking points in the efforts that I was involved in were: 1) Hassle in obtaining and setting up the hardware (particularly permanent antennas). 2) Lack of density, meaning it was hard to find others to connect to. 3) Ad…
Some of these communities are actually very alive: https://map.hamburg.freifunk.net/
Re: Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
#37I think the headline here is misleading. What they are offering is a prize to decentralize the internet - the actual network to which people connect in order to use the web. Judging from the other comments here, I don't think a lot of people have actually read the article. IPFS and blockchain are technologies that are built on top of the internet - they assume a network connection already exists.
> IPFS and blockchain are technologies that are built on top of the internet - they assume a network connection already exists.
I wont speak for blockchains. Call them by the boring name as "Append-only databases with a consensus mechanism on what to add, with a proof-of-something to affirm that work of some soft was done".
IPFS is different. They have already planned that IP4 isn't the next thing. Or IP6, or IP8, and on. They created what they call a MultiAddr that encodes the protocol definition to explain to peers and IPFS what protocol stack to use, and then lay IPFS on top of that.
Obviously when a new protocol comes into play, they add a new multiaddr type for the new protocol, and off you go.
Re: Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
#38CJDNS is a self-organising IP address allocation and routing layer. A node's public key acts as its IPv6 address, and routing uses a DHT of those nodes. This style of network has the property that you can take two independent CJDNS networks, link them together, and all nodes are mutually addressable/routable. This is in contrast to The Internet, whose addressing is centralised on IANA. cjdns is moderately active, tho…
CJDNS + IPFS to me is a grand vision for an idealized, completely distributed web. Combine that with some sort of distributed naming system (Namecoin, etc.), and you have a system that requires literally zero central authorities to operate. You just generate your own IPv6 addresses that are derived from a private key you generate yourself, and it works out of the box with all existing applications that support IPv6.…
Is the CJDNS protocol written up anywhere so it can be reviewed? I'm curious but don't see any explanation of its operation anywhere.
Re: Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
CJDNS + IPFS to me is a grand vision for an idealized, completely distributed web. Combine that with some sort of distributed naming system (Namecoin, etc.), and you have a system that requires literally zero central authorities to operate. You just generate your own IPv6 addresses that are derived from a private key you generate yourself, and it works out of the box with all existing applications that support IPv6.…
Is the CJDNS protocol written up anywhere so it can be reviewed? I'm curious but don't see any explanation of its operation anywhere.
Re: Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web
#40Earlier quoted context omitted.
CJDNS + IPFS to me is a grand vision for an idealized, completely distributed web. Combine that with some sort of distributed naming system (Namecoin, etc.), and you have a system that requires literally zero central authorities to operate. You just generate your own IPv6 addresses that are derived from a private key you generate yourself, and it works out of the box with all existing applications that support IPv6.…
Is the CJDNS protocol written up anywhere so it can be reviewed? I'm curious but don't see any explanation of its operation anywhere.
tomfitz linked the whitepaper for you, and that's a great overview of the basics. However, some things have changed and I'm not sure the docs have updated with what's currently on GitHub.