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Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

hashify.me

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Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#62

Post by samgranger »

Cool to see but stupid idea, who in their right mind would use this for production?! By using such a "technology", you lose SEO strength due to urls-not-being-like-this.html and even worse, what can stop me from publishing a fake press release on there site/spamming porn and getting that URL indexed? And what are the benefits? To also bring SOPA into this, couldn't I share copyrighted material on someone's site like this? How could they control that?! Besides blocking each URL manually. Just seems dumb. As a concept, cool, but for production.... Yikes?!

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#64

Post by samgranger »

samgranger wrote: post #62

Cool to see but stupid idea, who in their right mind would use this for production?! By using such a "technology", you lose SEO strength due to urls-not-being-like-this.html and even worse, what can stop me from publishing a fake press release on there site/spamming porn and getting that URL indexed? And what are the benefits? To also bring SOPA into this, couldn't I share copyrighted material on someone's site like…

Obviously you could also have a database with all content URL strings that you publish - but that makes this technology worth nothing at all.

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#67

Post by eternalban »

rsaarelm wrote: post #21

I've sometimes wondered about a system where the URL of a document is an actual hash, like SHA-1, of the document. That'd chance the semantics of hyperlinks from "link to document at this internet address" to "link to document with these contents", just like Hashify does, but it could do arbitrarily large documents. The tricky part with that system would be that you'd also need some new mechanism to retrieve the file…

> I've sometimes wondered about a system where the URL of a document is an actual hash, like SHA-1, of the document

Git.

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It may be of interest to view this duality as an analog to the duality of location addressing (iterative) vs value addressing (functional) in context of memory mangers. The general (hand wavy as of now) idea is a distributed memory system with a functional front-end (e.g. Scala/Haskell).

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#68

Post by eternalban »

orclev wrote: post #51

This is an ancient idea. I read a 2600 article back in the early 2000s or possibly late 1990s that did essentially this same thing using a bash script and one of the first URL shortening services available at the time.

   What has been will be again,
   what has been done will be done again;
   there is nothing new under the sun.

   - Ecclesiates 1:9

Re: Hashify: what becomes possible when one is able to store documents in URLs?

#69

Post by eternalban »

rsaarelm wrote: post #23
mhitza wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_resource_name

Right. Turns out my use of 'URL' everywhere in grandparent comment is a misnomer then. Should've used URN or URI. I'm not quite sure if URN is exactly right for the hash thing either, given that it both fails to unify things which humans would probably assign the same URN to, such as two image files of the same picture using different encodings, and it has the theoretical chance of assigning the same hash to two enti…

This (non-canonical) interpretation of the UR schemata works for me (in terms of dealing with ambiguity of the canonical specification):

Names: universally unique and fully scoping the life-cycle of the (logical) object. 1:1.

Identifiers: unique in context of an authority with a life-cycle that is maximally (but not necessarily) bounded by the life-cycle of the named entity (and of course, the authority that assigns it). e.g. http://www.ssa.gov/history/ssn/geocard.html is the authority that issues SSN identifiers. An entity can potentially have multiple such identifiers. 1:N

Locations: The location of an image or representation of the entity. 1:N (e.g. CDNs)

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