22 ms·

IPFS is the Distributed Web

404 points by jasikpark 10y ago

knocte 10y ago
504 Gateway timeout A bit ironic :) (being distributed it shouln't be a single point of failure ;) )
- viraptor 10y ago
  It is distributed. The website should have a copy at /ipfs/QmRaS4AZriMzw9nekub7hojTnvQYsVTDqkYG7BggQsexNt (check TXT record). You just need to access it over the right protocol.
  - knocte 10y ago
    But I thought ipfs-js would make it run today within the browser...?
    - viraptor 10y ago
      To use js-ipfs, you still need to host the script somewhere. Doesn't help when the whole host doesn't respond.
      - knocte 10y ago
        Right, ok, but then ipfs.io is already using ipfs-js itself? Because some time ago I checked and the reference impl was python, and the ipfs-js port was not complete yet.
        haadcode 10y ago
        (IPFS dev here) js-ipfs, the Javascript implementation of IPFS, has made a lot of progress in the past 6 months. It's still early but totally usable. We've been working on go-ipfs and js-ipfs interop so that browser nodes can talk to "native" nodes. It's not fully ready yet but soon. This will open a lot of doors for a more advanced network and applications using IPFS. See https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs. As for your question re. ipfs.io using js-ipfs, the answers is no, it doesn't use js-ipfs implementation yet.
        david-given 10y ago
        Is there a working ipfs demo page anywhere? I've had a look around and can't find one (the closest appears to be Orbit, but the ipfs-js version is down). I'm particularly interested in using ipfs pubsub capabilities. It looks like an interesting way of allowing multiple users of a web app to talk to each other without needing (much) server side support.
        haadcode 10y ago
        Unfortunately there's no proper demo page :/ We're working on improving the docs (we know this is big issues atm). There's an old version (from June) of Orbit at http://orbit.libp2p.io http://orbit.libp2p.io which you can try. Much has happened since and we're working on bringing the js-ipfs version Orbit back to a working state. Re.Pubsub, I'm personally also very excited about it! :) The specs and general info are located here https://github.com/libp2p/pubsub https://github.com/libp2p/pubsub. go-ipfs merged pubsub into master some time ago with this commit https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/commit/e1c40dfa347e38bdc98126d422c495dc157b3642 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/commit/e1c40dfa347e38bdc9812... and we're working to get it into js-ipfs here https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/issues/530 https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/issues/530.
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Can I just take a moment to talk about how happy I am that the IPFS team is actually taking protocol documentation seriously, allowing for multiple implementations and the ability to understand how the protocol works? IPFS and Matrix seem to be the only teams doing this: Dat and SSB have vague protocol documentation at best, only documenting bits of the protocol at all.
girzel 10y ago
Hey I have a related question: so with IPFS we all host bits of the internet, and with IPv6 our machines are all directly world-accessible, right? So how do we prevent this from turning into a huge pwn-fest? If routers aren't doing NAT and a bit of firewalling along with that, would each machine be completely responsible for its own security?
- viraptor 10y ago
  > our machines are all directly world-accessible, right No. Nothing much will change probably. Home routers still usually block incoming ipv6 traffic unless configured otherwise.
- fulafel 10y ago
  Home routers are doing IPv6 firewalling by default, no need for NAT. NAT is strictly inferior to firewalling. (Of course you shouldn't put things on your internet-connected network that need the firewall, just look at it as a porous defense-in-depth element, just like with IPv4)
  - tmzt 10y ago
    Does that mean they are assigning random IPv6 addresses to computers on the network for each peer or connection and maintaining a mapping in memory?
    - viraptor 10y ago
      Normal static address is assigned. Whether it comes from the external range or from the link-local range doesn't really matter. You could potentially randomise the source at the exit to prevent identification of your hosts, but you don't have to. For most practical cases just imagine you're getting a big ipv4 range. Whatever you can do with it - you can do the same with ipv6. NAT, no NAT, filtering, static or dynamic assignment.
      - tmzt 10y ago
        That's what I'm asking. IPv6 feels like a regressiin over NATv4 because it can leak which internal device made a request. Is there a standard way to randomize addresses that works with ofd-the-shelf router firmware. Also, are link-local IPv6 leaking MAC addresses?
msane 10y ago
If you want to tamper with content on the web, the idea that content is fingerprinted in IPFS is a huge deal. IPNS (the name service) then becomes the vulnerability, but that is also distributed.
- tscs37 10y ago
  Well, as I understood IPNS is a bit limited; it only has one resource and there is only one authority that can change content, the node in this case. It does protect against DDOS, since old content remains visible and online but if the private key is leaked or the node is malicious, it has exactly 0 protection. Even worse, if the private key is stolen, you can't do much about it unless you have DNS setup... which brings you back to centralized.
  - IanCal 10y ago
    If the key is leaked, it means someone can alter what the name points to, but all previous versions would still be available as far as I understand it. No content is changed, only the pointer to the "newest" data.
    - tscs37 10y ago
      That is true but most external or IPFS-external sites will probably want to point at the IPNS link, bookmarks are gonna point at the IPNS link, etc. In the same way you could still use the old IP + header manipulation if someone took over a Domain in DNS, it's possible and you can use the old site but in reality you're gonna have lots of people on the malicious attacker's site.
      - IanCal 10y ago
        I think that's an important distinction though, and it doesn't mesh with what I thought you meant by > since old content remains visible and online but if the private key is leaked or the node is malicious, it has exactly 0 protection The old content remains visible and online if the private key is leaked, afaik. I think there was some discussion about having there be a chain, so each updated entry would point back to the previous one. I'm not sure where that is (and if it is) on the roadmap now, but that would also allow users to go back to a known good version. This mitigates some, though not all, problems.
idlewords 10y ago
I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem. That the current web is centralized has little to do with its technical design, and everything to do with economic and structural incentives that have made it that way. It's tempting to say "start afresh", but we'll just be trading our current problems for a new set of problems IPFS introduces. It's a law of nature that problems are always conserved. I would rather we do the hard work of fixing the web we've got, in particular the hard issue of how to re-decentralize it.
- kirubakaran 10y ago
  What do you suggest?
  - idlewords 10y ago
    There's the million-dollar question. I've been bashing my head against it for a few years now. I think an important thing is to give everyone a say in how these large computer networks affect their lives. How to do that in the context of a broken political system isn't clear to me at all.
    - hkt 10y ago
      The solution does not have to be technical. If you want to restore control to as wide a group as possible, start by running a centralised service with a membership structure. Not everybody is clever enough to run their own stuff, but almost everyone can use a website or an app. Allowing them a role in governance rather than operations is the key factor. I wish more people thought so.
      - ZenoArrow 10y ago
        > "Not everybody is clever enough to run their own stuff" It's possible to make home servers easy enough to use they're effectively plug and play. I've got my own ideas of how this can be done, others have different ideas, but the goal of easy home server infrastructure is the same. Once you have that, it becomes painless to take part in IPFS or similar.
fosh 10y ago
How do hosting providers fit in here, if at all? E.g., if I want to host a website on IPFS, do I publish it from my own machine and then wait a healthy amount of time for the content to be absorbed by the ether, or is there some way I can encourage other nodes to pick it up without requiring end-users to actively seek out my fresh material?
- danieldk 10y ago
  It seems that the role of a hosting provider could be: I pay you <amount> per month to fetch <hash> or <name> on <N> peers with bandwidth <bandwidth>. Of course, the economics are quite different. In the normal web, you need to add more resources when a page becomes more popular. In a distributed web, more resources are a side-effect of a page becoming more popular.
- viraptor 10y ago
  There's http://filecoin.io http://filecoin.io - still waiting to be started. It's connected to the ipfs project.
- diggan 10y ago
  So if you add a file to IPFS, it's not gonna be automatically picked up by the network. Only people who request it, will have the file. In the future, there will be hosting providers that allows you to upload a file to their IPFS "cloud" either as free hosting or paying for it, just as today. It'll just be easier for everyone to pass around a hash of the file rather than the file itself. Maybe there will even be an API that you can hook up into your application, so content will be seeded that way.
tscs37 10y ago
IPFS is a pretty nice project, but it's pretty slow at times.
- diggan 10y ago
  I work with IPFS so it would be very handy to know what you feel is slow exactly. We're working our hardest to make it as fast as possible but sometimes we fall through, so more information so we can fix it would be wonderful!
  - tscs37 10y ago
    Most "slowness" is related to content that is either relatively fresh on the network or or rare content. If my node is the only one seeding the file, accessing it via gateway.ipfs.io is slow but it's pretty obvious why; I'm the only provider. So while for very public content IPFS is rather fast, if you share a couple files with a few friends, it's a bit slower. Of course, this all depends on upload/download speeds, mine aren't stellar in both directions either. Plus I'm rather certain that my ISP is throttling any kind of P2P traffic.
    - diggan 10y ago
      Ah, I understand. Yeah, it's not much we can do about that but in the future it can be expected that you'll be able to use some sort of service to help you with the initial seeding of the content. So instead of you sharing a file from your home connection and five friends have to share that, you'll share your file with some hosting provider and once they have the file, you'll just send the same hash to your friends and you'll have at least 2 nodes providing the file.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
runeks 10y ago
> Each network node stores only content it is interested in [...] Isn't that the issue here? Storing data that will maybe be there later isn't really storing data. People want to publish something that must always be available, so why inject data into the IPFS network and hope it will be there in a year, rather than set up a $10/yr VPS? > With video delivery, a P2P approach could save 60% in bandwidth costs. In my opinion, this may be true, but total costs will be greater. P2P solutions are awesome because they are resilient, not because they are cheaper. Distributing pirated movies by dumping them on public FTP servers is much cheaper than BitTorrent. BitTorrent appeared because the centralized method was not resilient enough against adversaries, not because it was cheaper (quite the contrary).
- lukaslalinsky 10y ago
  If I get it right, the idea is that if you want to make sure it's there one year later, you set up your own server and host the files on your own. IPFS just allows others to distribute a mirror of the files.
  - runeks 10y ago
    Why would nodes in the IPFS network voluntarily act as a load balancer for my VPS? Usually I have to pay for load balancing, so I'm a bit suspicious when someone claims I can get it for free from IPFS.
    - lukaslalinsky 10y ago
      There is a lot of (mostly free) content that people are willing to distribute freely. Take Wikipedia for example, even though it's changing very fast, I imagine a huge portion of it is static. If the latest version of each page was served via IPFS, somebody could setup a local mirror and people nearby would automatically use that.
      - runeks 10y ago
        I don't disagree with the fact that IPFS has value. I just don't like the way it's presented as a generic transport protocol that's "superior" to HTTP.
manigandham 10y ago
Who exactly runs these nodes that store data?
- gant 10y ago
  Everybody that pins it or retrieved the file from someone else (second one to maximum cache size that is configurable). Files and folders are referred to by hash. Usually you still need to run a server to seed the files, but if a file becomes popular it will be served from anybody who also retrieved it and likely persist in the network even if your server goes down. Think of it as BitTorrent for the web. It has Gateways that allow current browsers to access the network and pointers to update content with a new version (that's /ipns/ not /ipfs/ - the old version persists as long as someone hosts it). What's also interesting is that due to the nature of the hashing algorithm (it's a merkle tree), you can "ipfs add" a directory, preserving the file structure inside, so websites on IPFS can use relative paths.
TimJRobinson 10y ago
So I've been thinking about creating a basic site running on IPFS and here's my dillema. The hash of each page is a sha256 of the contents right? So lets say you have 3 pages A, B and C, A links to B, B links to C, C links to A. How do you create all 3 pages with correct links to each other? When you create page A you have to have the SHA of page B, but then to create page B you have to have the SHA of page C and finally to create it you need the SHA of page A. You get into this cyclical loop where you can't generate any page and link to others. What is the solution to this problem?
- avodonosov 10y ago
  Two pages would be enough for that example
- solipsism 10y ago
  I just googled "ipfs cyclic link" and the answer is in the first result. How long have you been thinking about this "dilemma"?
- kirushik 10y ago
  Well, IPFS allows you to upload trees of files to a single IPFS node. So you just create three webpages, put them into a single folder and use `ipfs add` on this folder. Your webpages will be available with relative links, being exposed at addresses like `/ipfs/<Sha>/page_a.html` and `/ipfs/<Sha>/page_b.html`. Under the hood those pages will be standalone ipfs Duke nodes with separate hash addresses, and your root folder will be actually a set of pointers to those hash addresses — but you don't need to keep that in mind when uploading a site.
  - kirushik 10y ago
    One can also study ipfs project websites (ipfs.io, dist.ipfs.io and so on). Those are just static bunches of files (html and resources) hosted in ipfs and served with a standard ipfs gateway (located on gateway.ipfs.io address). Gateway just looks up _dnslink TXT records for corresponding domains, and serves files from the ipfs hash address specified there.
- deleted 10y ago
tijs14tijs 10y ago
Interesting, I have two questions: Can you create your private ipfs network? (accessible by anyone, upload only me) If you upload sensitive material to the global ipfs network, what do you think will happen?
- diggan 10y ago
  Private networks is something that we're working on (track it here: https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/146 https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/146) but it would be private-private, only access+upload between your nodes. "Accessible by anyone - upload only by you" is not gonna be supported since it doesn't really make sense. If someone has a hash of a file, they can rehost it because they can access it. In IPFS you're not locating files based on WHERE they are but their name rather.
  - ashark 10y ago
    > Private networks is something that we're working on Pretty sure you can already do it by setting up your a node on e.g. a Digitalocean droplet, removing all bootstrap nodes from its config file, and having everyone on the network replace the bootstrap node addresses in their config file with your server's address. Granted that's not a very user-friendly way to do it, but when I tried it it seemed to work.
    - diggan 10y ago
      Yeah, there is two things that is missing for it to be good. First is encryption of content in case something happens to leave the network and secondly rejecting the connections from anyone who is not supposed to connect to you. With your current setup, if/when a node gets connected to someone else (maybe someone connects directly to you), your entire network will connect from that, since the connections will be shared with the peers.
vegabook 10y ago
IPFS appears here every 6 months, every 6 months the same questions get asked, the same problems get raised, the same collective sigh of bewilderment/disappointment appears to emanate from the comments, and it goes away again for another 6 months. Everybody wants something this clever and community-spirited to work, but the basic problem is, I don't want my data to be vulnerable to slow, unreliable endpoints, or people switching off their IPFS servers. I can't really trust an unremunerated volunteer system with my data, and I don't believe that my keeping your data is remuneration enough for you to keep mine forever. Peer-to-peer is excellent for ephemeral streaming stuff like chat, file transfer, even gaming. But it is not good for permanence unless some monetary remuneration gets involved, either via a centralizing entity asking for payments (dropbox et al), or a distributed monetization system like bitcoin. Somewhere, somehow, someone needs to get paid to keep the system running.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  ...Which is why you keep your server up. It's not perfect, but it's still better than HTTP. And no doubt a cottage industry will spring up in paying nodes to pin specific data.
- c22 10y ago
  I would say the impermanence is one of the most appealing aspects of the system. Content that no one uses and that no one is willing to sustain gets culled from the network, what more could you ask for?
  - vegabook 10y ago
    I assume you would also like ext4 to automatically delete your seldom used files, without asking?
    - c22 10y ago
      That's absurd, ext4 solves a different problem. This is about distribution.
mcbits 10y ago
Suppose I'm poking around IPFS and unintentionally download some unauthorized copyrighted content. Is my computer going to automatically start sharing this content, exposing me and my ISP to legal action? Or if there is a way to prevent sharing particular content that I've accessed, what's to stop me from leeching everything and never sharing anything? (Edit: Ah, now I see "BitSwap" as possibly addressing my second question, but I'm still concerned about the first.)
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  For #1, yes. For #2, also yes, and there's nothing to stop you from leeching save the goodness of your heart and your own personal laziness.
  - mcbits 10y ago
    Since it's impossible to know who owns, claims to own, or has licensed any particular content, #1 is a fatal flaw unless users can officially receive immunity (which seems doubtful). Otherwise we'll have a situation like speeding on the highway, where "everyone does it" at the risk of a random ticket, but in this case the fines are thousands to millions of dollars.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      I don't see how it's bad: the hosting user receives no credit, and local mirroring keeps retrieval speeds high. Your users effectively become a giant CDN for you. Who would sue?
      - mcbits 10y ago
        I wouldn't sue anyone. But I can watch music videos on YouTube without contacting all of the the relevant rights holders to ensure both the uploader and YouTube have permission to show me the video. On a distributed file share lacking anonymity and/or immunity, I have to ensure that I have those rights before viewing (thus distributing) any content. Immunity is not likely to happen, as it would amount to granting redistribution rights to anyone who downloads a piece of content. So the political solution is out. Anonymity is a requirement. That's not to say IPFS is useless. It's just not going to "replace HTTP" or any significant part of the web as long as it's possible to see who's sharing what. Or if it does, the sharks will feed.
usgroup 10y ago
What I'd personally like to see is built in monetisation such that hosting and serving other peoples pages becomes a socialised cost and benefit although one would guess that such as feature would have to be deeply designed into the system itself, and cannot be added as an after-thought?
empath75 10y ago
As a devops guy, I sort of think ipfs seems more useful as a private, backend sort of solution where you trust all the nodes. I'm sort of vaguely imagining it running as a shared file system in AWS, running on docker containers.
- viraptor 10y ago
  > where you trust all the nodes Why do you think that's needed? Of course if majority of nodes cheated and said "sure, I've got that file" and send you random garbage instead so you have to retry, that would be bad. But if majority are running proper implementation, you don't really need to trust anyone.
  - kirushik 10y ago
    IPFS is content-addressed. That means that it's trivial to discard tampered content. Lying majority, sure, will impact your content retrieval speed — but dealing with cheaters seems to be as simple as adding their addresses in some ignore list (which can itself be IPFS-shared, if needed). I'm not sure of this blacklisting is implemented in current go-ipfs out js-ipfs codebase — but hash verification itself certainly is.
  - Kubuxu 10y ago
    You need just one node to send you the right data. No need for the majority.
    - viraptor 10y ago
      You need a reasonable number of nodes. Likely a large majority. Otherwise you'll just keep redownloading garbage data and discarding it. And likely doing it slower than bad nodes can leave/rejoin the network with new ips.
clueless404 10y ago
What problem does IPFS actually solve?
- jpalomaki 10y ago
  Content distribution. Many people however don't even realise this is a problem, because they have been spoiled by free-as-beer services provided by Google, CloudFlare, Github and various other companies.
  - clueless404 10y ago
    Just exactly how does IPFS solve content distribution? You still have to serve the content from a server, since you cannot depend on the kindness of strangers to persist your content.
    - lukasb 10y ago
      The idea is that some fraction of users will be configured to reshare content, which helps distribution for popular content scale. This seems to work in practice for bittorrent.
      - clueless404 10y ago
        Yes, but only for suitably popular content, as all the dead torrents will testify. This doesn't make IPFS very appealing to Joe Blow, content maker unextraordinaire.
        anc84 10y ago
        Joe Blow would just need to find some fans who think that keeping his content available for others is worth their while. I believe this could work amazingly well for netlabels and indie bands.
        clueless404 10y ago
supergreg 10y ago
If I try to host a javascript application that uses LocalStorage for saving data, it would be visible to any other ipfs JavaScript application because they all exist under the same domain, right? Have you thought about having the URLs be something like ipfs://<hash>/index.html instead of http://local http://local host/<hash>/index.html so browsers keep the LocalStorage for each ipfs hash separated?
- diggan 10y ago
  We're planning to use Same-origin policy to prevent this. It was first brought up here: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/651 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/651 You can read more about same-origin policy here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-o...
  - 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
    Putting a hash in the hostname/domain would also be using same-origin policy. The issue you linked refers to using suborigins, which seems to still be a draft proposal with no implementer buy-in outside of Chromium [1]. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231225 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231225
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- curioussavage 10y ago
  Could be wrong but I think [beaker](https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/) supports using the protocol like that. Of course its very experimental so if security is a concern then it probably has its own issues.
d--b 10y ago
I have a truly naive question about the distributed web: what makes the supporters of it think it will be any different from the original web. I mean, isn't it likely that at some point, there will be the need for a centralized search engine for it? Isn't it unavoidable that big companies like facebook runs their own non-distributed subnetwork, so that it can deliver standard functionality to all its users? The original web IS distributed already, isn't it? It's just that organically, the way people use it has become a lot more centralized, no? Or am I missing the main argument for a distributed architecture?
- splintercell 10y ago
  IPFS + Ethereum Smart Contracts = Distributed Web The idea is that we run that centralized search engine via Smart Contracts. In other words, using a decentralized currency such as Bitcoin and decentralized execution environment like Ethereum, we create softwares which pays people for providing CPU time and disk space (facilitated by IPFS). Few missing pieces of this puzzle are homomorphic encryption implemented on Smart Contracts level which will allow that CPU service. Once that's done then we can have the distributed web of the next level.
  - Taek 10y ago
    A search engine via ethereum is not going to scale, is not easily upgraded, and will fall far short of any properly centralized search engine. If you want a competitve decentralized search engine, you're going to need a different technology.
    - traverseda 10y ago
      I think that's why they talk about homomorphic encryption.
      - Taek 10y ago
        Homomorphic encryption as best I'm aware is more than a decade away from practical use. I believe the best libraries today have blowups of 100,000,000x in resource usage, meaning it's not even practical for basic crypto operations. Multiparty computation makes some security sacrifices (breaks if M out of N people cheat, breaks undetectably iirc), but I think the blowup is less than 10x for some operations and less than 1000x for the others. Still not pretty, but at least makes certain things possible. But not competitive search engines.
kefka 10y ago
Ive been using IPFS to port and make serverless webapps. http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbLPfyehFnViKZpU237P6a6DpjCfWFSoDBMQFGUAgYW2t/ http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbLPfyehFnViKZpU237P6a6DpjCfWFSoDBMQFGU...
- etherealG 10y ago
  what is it?
clueless404 10y ago
Does IPFS come with some kind of content filter or firewall to protect its users? When child porn inevitably shows up, how do you protect yourself from accidentally downloading and then seeding it?
- anc84 10y ago
  By simply not downloading and seeding it. ;) In IPFS you do not automatically relay things, you have to explicitly decide to.
  - clueless404 10y ago
    > By simply not downloading and seeding it. ;) You seem to have glanced over the qualifier I used: accidentally. Given a hash for an IPFS resource, how do you know it does not contain child porn before you retrieve it? Once you have downloaded it you have committed a crime. There are no take backs with strict liability crimes and IPFS provides no anonymity, so there is a record of you downloading and seeding child porn. > In IPFS you do not automatically relay things, you have to explicitly decide to. Really? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that immediately once you retrieve a hash via IPFS, you cache it and start seeding it.
    - pdkl95 10y ago
      > Given a hash for an IPFS resource, how do you know it does not contain child porn before you retrieve it? Given a URL for an HTTP resource, how do you know it does not contain child porn before you retrieve it? > seeding https://freenetproject.org/help.html#childporn https://freenetproject.org/help.html#childporn
      - clueless404 10y ago
        > Given a URL for an HTTP resource, how do you know it does not contain child porn before you retrieve it? You don't, but then again regular browsing does not automatically download the illegal content, start seeding it and announce to the world that you have it on your computer. Big difference. Also since IPFS deals with content hashes, you not only could and should, you absolutely must ensure any content you download via IPFS does not contain known instances of illegal content. >> > seeding > > https://freenetproject.org/help.html#childporn https://freenetproject.org/help.html#childporn How is this in any way relevant? Freenet provides anonymity, IPFS does not. Again, big difference.
kylehotchkiss 10y ago
There's an interesting emphasis on developing nations not engaging with the Internet, but I think that might be partially cultural too. What tools have we given the developing world to really engage with the internet? The easy-to-use publishing platform often require an email and usually a real name. Both of these things may be unavailable to countries where being connected to thoughts posted online could be dangerous. Most content is not written in simple english, and there's just not much incentive for somebody who may not know how to think critically/complexly (due to lack of western education) to engage with the internet. I think distributed web is an interesting idea, and that IPFS really lists out some issues with the internet that we'd all win in solving, but I think maybe some of these, like developing nation web access, are solvable with current tech, and more culturally based solutions
- drivingmenuts 10y ago
  I think the better solutions come from within the society, rather than being imposed from without (Cuba's flash-drive sneakernet). An outsider might provide the gross implementation, but it should be up to the locals to work out the messy details, even if it means they don't connect to the net, as a whole, on a regular basis. It's their lives on the line, they're going to have the best ideas on how to preserve them. An outsider is going to be, at best, somewhat ill-informed and at worst, inimical to the solution.
bfrog 10y ago
how does this differ from maidsafe?
teekert 10y ago
Some content here to play with: [0] Interestingly some links to copyrighted material end in ¨Unavailable for Legal Reasons¨ however, running the daemon and issuing an ¨ipfs get hash¨ the download does start. [0] https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU5XsVwvJfTcCwqkK1SmTqDmXWSQWaTa7ZcVLY2PDxNxG/ipfs_links.html https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU5XsVwvJfTcCwqkK1SmTqDmXWSQWaTa7ZcVLY...
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  The "unavailable for legal reasons" message appears to be issued by the ipfs.io gateway - IMO perfectly reasonable.
  - teekert 10y ago
    Sure but it´s not really unavailable I mean.
    - bergie 10y ago
      Yep, but ipfs.io refuses to distribute it. Doesn't mean other IPFS hosts necessarily do
voltagex_ 10y ago
Beware anyone on a metered connection - in 20 or so minutes, the ipfs daemon has used 3 gigabytes of bandwidth.
- mark_l_watson 10y ago
  Did this useable continue indefinitely? I would hope that there was a socket throttling option.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    Frustratingly I couldn't reproduce this and the bandwidth-using part of the IPFS daemon appears to be completely opaque - i.e. I had no clue what was using all the bandwidth (other than the fact there were 200+ connections). No visibility into an app means it's unlikely to stay on my system.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ShakataGaNai 10y ago
So I've got a (let's say) WordPress blog. Where's the "here's how to get your existing content on IPFS in less than an hour" guide?
- 0xCMP 10y ago
  I think it'd have to be saved statically. Which actually makes this question interesting: How do you store comments on an IPFS site? Constantly updating a single file on IPFS?
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Interesting question. I know nothing about IPFS other than what I've read in the past five minutes on Wikipedia, but: 1. HTML wants badly for a nested relational document format. Essentially tin or mutt's "in reply to" and "references" headers. 2. A comments stream is a) a parent document to which b) multiple child documents, themselves possibly having c) parent-child relationships, d) are associated. Rather than thinking of "threaded discussion == single document" think "threaded discussion == a set of related documents". That gives the option of having a discussion "occurring" across multiple sites, with some form of trust, whitelist, blacklist, or other mechanisms for reflecting what you do or don't include in the discussion. Individual comments, as their own docs, could also be freestanding instances. Finding children from the parent becomes an interesting question. There's also the matter of versioning a document. Tying a git-like capability to this could be interesting.
j45 10y ago
I really hope something like this takes off. Connecting and indexing documents has been the challenge of a few internet generations. Creating a document at a point of filing is a subtle but potentially large shift. Hopefully this lands on homebrew soon to aid it's growth.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
I heard about IPFS at the Decentralized Web Conference in SF last spring. It sounded promising, long term. Anyone here using it right now? What are the costs for running it on a VPS, for example, bandwidth, storage, and CPU load?
z3t4 10y ago
We keep things that are important, and throw away the garbage. But if we keep everything, there will be mostly garbage.
- inimino 10y ago
  It's impossible to keep everything. A system like this one keeps the things people access, rather than the current system where content remains available only at the will (and expense) of the publisher.
JulianMorrison 10y ago
This sounds like distributed Geocities, where you can have any content you like so long as it's static, or at least, changes in iterations of static files like a HTML-generator blog. If you do anything that needs a central server, suddenly its advantages vanish. I could imagine Wikipedia using this; I couldn't imagine gmail doing so.
- inimino 10y ago
  Most of the pages on the Web are still static HTML or something close to it, though.
  - JulianMorrison 10y ago
    Maybe but very few of them can do their job with only static HTML.
    - inimino 10y ago
      I would say most of the articles linked to on HN could be static HTML pages. How practical HN itself would be on IPFS seems less clear.
descript 10y ago
IPFS is vaporware. They are going to launch a token and try to take your money
delegate 10y ago
ipfs is fantastic, but it is half the solution. We also need a distributed p2p application framework, with which nodes can securely communicate and allow building distributed apps, like search. We can think differently with ipfs. Traditional web allows everyone to publish content somewhere, hoping that search engines will index it. With ipfs, the same file (with the same content) is only indexed/stored once and then you reference the hash to get to the content. This fact changes the problem of search. Take all the world's movies. With ipfs + p2p network, you only need one back end in the form of a distributed search index, which can index all the movies in the world. Same with the world's music. You only need one back end which can index all the music. The index can be as simple as {"movie title": [sha256]}, where the array contains the hashes of different 'encodings' of the same content (eg. 'dvd rip', 'blue ray' or 'mp3'). Content can be indexed by all kinds of properties of course and it can grow organically over time to include more and more details. With ipfs plus the p2p network we'll build 'apps', not 'pages'. People can have a list of 'apps' running on their machines - which are node instances in various distributed applications, sharing the same p2p network and using ipfs as storage. Apps can have 'backend' and 'front end' parts - the back end is the part which participates in the p2p network, while the 'front end' provides a human interface to the back end, were users can search/browse/view the content. Apps are distributed as git repositories stored in ipfs, while the 'core' running on the user's machine compiles the sources (inside a build vm) and loads the resulting binaries into containers running in virtual machines. This would make it easy for devs to write and publish new distributed apps, making the network totally decentralised and virtually unstoppable. Ps. If you feel that this insanity could work, then I'd love to discuss it in more depth - delegate78@gmx.com
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

404 points by jasikpark 10y ago

knocte 10y ago

504 Gateway timeout A bit ironic :) (being distributed it shouln't be a single point of failure ;) )

viraptor 10y ago
It is distributed. The website should have a copy at /ipfs/QmRaS4AZriMzw9nekub7hojTnvQYsVTDqkYG7BggQsexNt (check TXT record). You just need to access it over the right protocol.
- knocte 10y ago
  But I thought ipfs-js would make it run today within the browser...?
  - viraptor 10y ago
    To use js-ipfs, you still need to host the script somewhere. Doesn't help when the whole host doesn't respond.
    - knocte 10y ago
      Right, ok, but then ipfs.io is already using ipfs-js itself? Because some time ago I checked and the reference impl was python, and the ipfs-js port was not complete yet.
      - haadcode 10y ago
        (IPFS dev here) js-ipfs, the Javascript implementation of IPFS, has made a lot of progress in the past 6 months. It's still early but totally usable. We've been working on go-ipfs and js-ipfs interop so that browser nodes can talk to "native" nodes. It's not fully ready yet but soon. This will open a lot of doors for a more advanced network and applications using IPFS. See https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs. As for your question re. ipfs.io using js-ipfs, the answers is no, it doesn't use js-ipfs implementation yet.
        david-given 10y ago
        Is there a working ipfs demo page anywhere? I've had a look around and can't find one (the closest appears to be Orbit, but the ipfs-js version is down). I'm particularly interested in using ipfs pubsub capabilities. It looks like an interesting way of allowing multiple users of a web app to talk to each other without needing (much) server side support.
        haadcode 10y ago
        Unfortunately there's no proper demo page :/ We're working on improving the docs (we know this is big issues atm). There's an old version (from June) of Orbit at http://orbit.libp2p.io http://orbit.libp2p.io which you can try. Much has happened since and we're working on bringing the js-ipfs version Orbit back to a working state. Re.Pubsub, I'm personally also very excited about it! :) The specs and general info are located here https://github.com/libp2p/pubsub https://github.com/libp2p/pubsub. go-ipfs merged pubsub into master some time ago with this commit https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/commit/e1c40dfa347e38bdc98126d422c495dc157b3642 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/commit/e1c40dfa347e38bdc9812... and we're working to get it into js-ipfs here https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/issues/530 https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/issues/530.
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        Can I just take a moment to talk about how happy I am that the IPFS team is actually taking protocol documentation seriously, allowing for multiple implementations and the ability to understand how the protocol works? IPFS and Matrix seem to be the only teams doing this: Dat and SSB have vague protocol documentation at best, only documenting bits of the protocol at all.

girzel 10y ago

Hey I have a related question: so with IPFS we all host bits of the internet, and with IPv6 our machines are all directly world-accessible, right? So how do we prevent this from turning into a huge pwn-fest? If routers aren't doing NAT and a bit of firewalling along with that, would each machine be completely responsible for its own security?

viraptor 10y ago
> our machines are all directly world-accessible, right No. Nothing much will change probably. Home routers still usually block incoming ipv6 traffic unless configured otherwise.
fulafel 10y ago
Home routers are doing IPv6 firewalling by default, no need for NAT. NAT is strictly inferior to firewalling. (Of course you shouldn't put things on your internet-connected network that need the firewall, just look at it as a porous defense-in-depth element, just like with IPv4)
- tmzt 10y ago
  Does that mean they are assigning random IPv6 addresses to computers on the network for each peer or connection and maintaining a mapping in memory?
  - viraptor 10y ago
    Normal static address is assigned. Whether it comes from the external range or from the link-local range doesn't really matter. You could potentially randomise the source at the exit to prevent identification of your hosts, but you don't have to. For most practical cases just imagine you're getting a big ipv4 range. Whatever you can do with it - you can do the same with ipv6. NAT, no NAT, filtering, static or dynamic assignment.
    - tmzt 10y ago
      That's what I'm asking. IPv6 feels like a regressiin over NATv4 because it can leak which internal device made a request. Is there a standard way to randomize addresses that works with ofd-the-shelf router firmware. Also, are link-local IPv6 leaking MAC addresses?

msane 10y ago

If you want to tamper with content on the web, the idea that content is fingerprinted in IPFS is a huge deal. IPNS (the name service) then becomes the vulnerability, but that is also distributed.

tscs37 10y ago
Well, as I understood IPNS is a bit limited; it only has one resource and there is only one authority that can change content, the node in this case. It does protect against DDOS, since old content remains visible and online but if the private key is leaked or the node is malicious, it has exactly 0 protection. Even worse, if the private key is stolen, you can't do much about it unless you have DNS setup... which brings you back to centralized.
- IanCal 10y ago
  If the key is leaked, it means someone can alter what the name points to, but all previous versions would still be available as far as I understand it. No content is changed, only the pointer to the "newest" data.
  - tscs37 10y ago
    That is true but most external or IPFS-external sites will probably want to point at the IPNS link, bookmarks are gonna point at the IPNS link, etc. In the same way you could still use the old IP + header manipulation if someone took over a Domain in DNS, it's possible and you can use the old site but in reality you're gonna have lots of people on the malicious attacker's site.
    - IanCal 10y ago
      I think that's an important distinction though, and it doesn't mesh with what I thought you meant by > since old content remains visible and online but if the private key is leaked or the node is malicious, it has exactly 0 protection The old content remains visible and online if the private key is leaked, afaik. I think there was some discussion about having there be a chain, so each updated entry would point back to the previous one. I'm not sure where that is (and if it is) on the roadmap now, but that would also allow users to go back to a known good version. This mitigates some, though not all, problems.

idlewords 10y ago

I worry that this is another example of throwing technology at a social and political problem. That the current web is centralized has little to do with its technical design, and everything to do with economic and structural incentives that have made it that way. It's tempting to say "start afresh", but we'll just be trading our current problems for a new set of problems IPFS introduces. It's a law of nature that problems are always conserved. I would rather we do the hard work of fixing the web we've got, in particular the hard issue of how to re-decentralize it.

kirubakaran 10y ago
What do you suggest?
- idlewords 10y ago
  There's the million-dollar question. I've been bashing my head against it for a few years now. I think an important thing is to give everyone a say in how these large computer networks affect their lives. How to do that in the context of a broken political system isn't clear to me at all.
  - hkt 10y ago
    The solution does not have to be technical. If you want to restore control to as wide a group as possible, start by running a centralised service with a membership structure. Not everybody is clever enough to run their own stuff, but almost everyone can use a website or an app. Allowing them a role in governance rather than operations is the key factor. I wish more people thought so.
    - ZenoArrow 10y ago
      > "Not everybody is clever enough to run their own stuff" It's possible to make home servers easy enough to use they're effectively plug and play. I've got my own ideas of how this can be done, others have different ideas, but the goal of easy home server infrastructure is the same. Once you have that, it becomes painless to take part in IPFS or similar.

fosh 10y ago

How do hosting providers fit in here, if at all? E.g., if I want to host a website on IPFS, do I publish it from my own machine and then wait a healthy amount of time for the content to be absorbed by the ether, or is there some way I can encourage other nodes to pick it up without requiring end-users to actively seek out my fresh material?

danieldk 10y ago
It seems that the role of a hosting provider could be: I pay you <amount> per month to fetch <hash> or <name> on <N> peers with bandwidth <bandwidth>. Of course, the economics are quite different. In the normal web, you need to add more resources when a page becomes more popular. In a distributed web, more resources are a side-effect of a page becoming more popular.
viraptor 10y ago
There's http://filecoin.io http://filecoin.io - still waiting to be started. It's connected to the ipfs project.
diggan 10y ago
So if you add a file to IPFS, it's not gonna be automatically picked up by the network. Only people who request it, will have the file. In the future, there will be hosting providers that allows you to upload a file to their IPFS "cloud" either as free hosting or paying for it, just as today. It'll just be easier for everyone to pass around a hash of the file rather than the file itself. Maybe there will even be an API that you can hook up into your application, so content will be seeded that way.

tscs37 10y ago

IPFS is a pretty nice project, but it's pretty slow at times.

diggan 10y ago
I work with IPFS so it would be very handy to know what you feel is slow exactly. We're working our hardest to make it as fast as possible but sometimes we fall through, so more information so we can fix it would be wonderful!
- tscs37 10y ago
  Most "slowness" is related to content that is either relatively fresh on the network or or rare content. If my node is the only one seeding the file, accessing it via gateway.ipfs.io is slow but it's pretty obvious why; I'm the only provider. So while for very public content IPFS is rather fast, if you share a couple files with a few friends, it's a bit slower. Of course, this all depends on upload/download speeds, mine aren't stellar in both directions either. Plus I'm rather certain that my ISP is throttling any kind of P2P traffic.
  - diggan 10y ago
    Ah, I understand. Yeah, it's not much we can do about that but in the future it can be expected that you'll be able to use some sort of service to help you with the initial seeding of the content. So instead of you sharing a file from your home connection and five friends have to share that, you'll share your file with some hosting provider and once they have the file, you'll just send the same hash to your friends and you'll have at least 2 nodes providing the file.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

runeks 10y ago

> Each network node stores only content it is interested in [...] Isn't that the issue here? Storing data that will maybe be there later isn't really storing data. People want to publish something that must always be available, so why inject data into the IPFS network and hope it will be there in a year, rather than set up a $10/yr VPS? > With video delivery, a P2P approach could save 60% in bandwidth costs. In my opinion, this may be true, but total costs will be greater. P2P solutions are awesome because they are resilient, not because they are cheaper. Distributing pirated movies by dumping them on public FTP servers is much cheaper than BitTorrent. BitTorrent appeared because the centralized method was not resilient enough against adversaries, not because it was cheaper (quite the contrary).

lukaslalinsky 10y ago
If I get it right, the idea is that if you want to make sure it's there one year later, you set up your own server and host the files on your own. IPFS just allows others to distribute a mirror of the files.
- runeks 10y ago
  Why would nodes in the IPFS network voluntarily act as a load balancer for my VPS? Usually I have to pay for load balancing, so I'm a bit suspicious when someone claims I can get it for free from IPFS.
  - lukaslalinsky 10y ago
    There is a lot of (mostly free) content that people are willing to distribute freely. Take Wikipedia for example, even though it's changing very fast, I imagine a huge portion of it is static. If the latest version of each page was served via IPFS, somebody could setup a local mirror and people nearby would automatically use that.
    - runeks 10y ago
      I don't disagree with the fact that IPFS has value. I just don't like the way it's presented as a generic transport protocol that's "superior" to HTTP.

manigandham 10y ago

Who exactly runs these nodes that store data?

gant 10y ago
Everybody that pins it or retrieved the file from someone else (second one to maximum cache size that is configurable). Files and folders are referred to by hash. Usually you still need to run a server to seed the files, but if a file becomes popular it will be served from anybody who also retrieved it and likely persist in the network even if your server goes down. Think of it as BitTorrent for the web. It has Gateways that allow current browsers to access the network and pointers to update content with a new version (that's /ipns/ not /ipfs/ - the old version persists as long as someone hosts it). What's also interesting is that due to the nature of the hashing algorithm (it's a merkle tree), you can "ipfs add" a directory, preserving the file structure inside, so websites on IPFS can use relative paths.

TimJRobinson 10y ago

So I've been thinking about creating a basic site running on IPFS and here's my dillema. The hash of each page is a sha256 of the contents right? So lets say you have 3 pages A, B and C, A links to B, B links to C, C links to A. How do you create all 3 pages with correct links to each other? When you create page A you have to have the SHA of page B, but then to create page B you have to have the SHA of page C and finally to create it you need the SHA of page A. You get into this cyclical loop where you can't generate any page and link to others. What is the solution to this problem?

avodonosov 10y ago
Two pages would be enough for that example
solipsism 10y ago
I just googled "ipfs cyclic link" and the answer is in the first result. How long have you been thinking about this "dilemma"?
kirushik 10y ago
Well, IPFS allows you to upload trees of files to a single IPFS node. So you just create three webpages, put them into a single folder and use `ipfs add` on this folder. Your webpages will be available with relative links, being exposed at addresses like `/ipfs/<Sha>/page_a.html` and `/ipfs/<Sha>/page_b.html`. Under the hood those pages will be standalone ipfs Duke nodes with separate hash addresses, and your root folder will be actually a set of pointers to those hash addresses — but you don't need to keep that in mind when uploading a site.
- kirushik 10y ago
  One can also study ipfs project websites (ipfs.io, dist.ipfs.io and so on). Those are just static bunches of files (html and resources) hosted in ipfs and served with a standard ipfs gateway (located on gateway.ipfs.io address). Gateway just looks up _dnslink TXT records for corresponding domains, and serves files from the ipfs hash address specified there.
deleted 10y ago

tijs14tijs 10y ago

Interesting, I have two questions: Can you create your private ipfs network? (accessible by anyone, upload only me) If you upload sensitive material to the global ipfs network, what do you think will happen?

diggan 10y ago
Private networks is something that we're working on (track it here: https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/146 https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/146) but it would be private-private, only access+upload between your nodes. "Accessible by anyone - upload only by you" is not gonna be supported since it doesn't really make sense. If someone has a hash of a file, they can rehost it because they can access it. In IPFS you're not locating files based on WHERE they are but their name rather.
- ashark 10y ago
  > Private networks is something that we're working on Pretty sure you can already do it by setting up your a node on e.g. a Digitalocean droplet, removing all bootstrap nodes from its config file, and having everyone on the network replace the bootstrap node addresses in their config file with your server's address. Granted that's not a very user-friendly way to do it, but when I tried it it seemed to work.
  - diggan 10y ago
    Yeah, there is two things that is missing for it to be good. First is encryption of content in case something happens to leave the network and secondly rejecting the connections from anyone who is not supposed to connect to you. With your current setup, if/when a node gets connected to someone else (maybe someone connects directly to you), your entire network will connect from that, since the connections will be shared with the peers.

vegabook 10y ago

IPFS appears here every 6 months, every 6 months the same questions get asked, the same problems get raised, the same collective sigh of bewilderment/disappointment appears to emanate from the comments, and it goes away again for another 6 months. Everybody wants something this clever and community-spirited to work, but the basic problem is, I don't want my data to be vulnerable to slow, unreliable endpoints, or people switching off their IPFS servers. I can't really trust an unremunerated volunteer system with my data, and I don't believe that my keeping your data is remuneration enough for you to keep mine forever. Peer-to-peer is excellent for ephemeral streaming stuff like chat, file transfer, even gaming. But it is not good for permanence unless some monetary remuneration gets involved, either via a centralizing entity asking for payments (dropbox et al), or a distributed monetization system like bitcoin. Somewhere, somehow, someone needs to get paid to keep the system running.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
...Which is why you keep your server up. It's not perfect, but it's still better than HTTP. And no doubt a cottage industry will spring up in paying nodes to pin specific data.
c22 10y ago
I would say the impermanence is one of the most appealing aspects of the system. Content that no one uses and that no one is willing to sustain gets culled from the network, what more could you ask for?
- vegabook 10y ago
  I assume you would also like ext4 to automatically delete your seldom used files, without asking?
  - c22 10y ago
    That's absurd, ext4 solves a different problem. This is about distribution.

mcbits 10y ago

Suppose I'm poking around IPFS and unintentionally download some unauthorized copyrighted content. Is my computer going to automatically start sharing this content, exposing me and my ISP to legal action? Or if there is a way to prevent sharing particular content that I've accessed, what's to stop me from leeching everything and never sharing anything? (Edit: Ah, now I see "BitSwap" as possibly addressing my second question, but I'm still concerned about the first.)

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
For #1, yes. For #2, also yes, and there's nothing to stop you from leeching save the goodness of your heart and your own personal laziness.
- mcbits 10y ago
  Since it's impossible to know who owns, claims to own, or has licensed any particular content, #1 is a fatal flaw unless users can officially receive immunity (which seems doubtful). Otherwise we'll have a situation like speeding on the highway, where "everyone does it" at the risk of a random ticket, but in this case the fines are thousands to millions of dollars.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    I don't see how it's bad: the hosting user receives no credit, and local mirroring keeps retrieval speeds high. Your users effectively become a giant CDN for you. Who would sue?
    - mcbits 10y ago
      I wouldn't sue anyone. But I can watch music videos on YouTube without contacting all of the the relevant rights holders to ensure both the uploader and YouTube have permission to show me the video. On a distributed file share lacking anonymity and/or immunity, I have to ensure that I have those rights before viewing (thus distributing) any content. Immunity is not likely to happen, as it would amount to granting redistribution rights to anyone who downloads a piece of content. So the political solution is out. Anonymity is a requirement. That's not to say IPFS is useless. It's just not going to "replace HTTP" or any significant part of the web as long as it's possible to see who's sharing what. Or if it does, the sharks will feed.

usgroup 10y ago

What I'd personally like to see is built in monetisation such that hosting and serving other peoples pages becomes a socialised cost and benefit although one would guess that such as feature would have to be deeply designed into the system itself, and cannot be added as an after-thought?

empath75 10y ago

As a devops guy, I sort of think ipfs seems more useful as a private, backend sort of solution where you trust all the nodes. I'm sort of vaguely imagining it running as a shared file system in AWS, running on docker containers.

viraptor 10y ago
> where you trust all the nodes Why do you think that's needed? Of course if majority of nodes cheated and said "sure, I've got that file" and send you random garbage instead so you have to retry, that would be bad. But if majority are running proper implementation, you don't really need to trust anyone.
- kirushik 10y ago
  IPFS is content-addressed. That means that it's trivial to discard tampered content. Lying majority, sure, will impact your content retrieval speed — but dealing with cheaters seems to be as simple as adding their addresses in some ignore list (which can itself be IPFS-shared, if needed). I'm not sure of this blacklisting is implemented in current go-ipfs out js-ipfs codebase — but hash verification itself certainly is.
- Kubuxu 10y ago
  You need just one node to send you the right data. No need for the majority.
  - viraptor 10y ago
    You need a reasonable number of nodes. Likely a large majority. Otherwise you'll just keep redownloading garbage data and discarding it. And likely doing it slower than bad nodes can leave/rejoin the network with new ips.

clueless404 10y ago

What problem does IPFS actually solve?

jpalomaki 10y ago
Content distribution. Many people however don't even realise this is a problem, because they have been spoiled by free-as-beer services provided by Google, CloudFlare, Github and various other companies.
- clueless404 10y ago
  Just exactly how does IPFS solve content distribution? You still have to serve the content from a server, since you cannot depend on the kindness of strangers to persist your content.
  - lukasb 10y ago
    The idea is that some fraction of users will be configured to reshare content, which helps distribution for popular content scale. This seems to work in practice for bittorrent.
    - clueless404 10y ago
      Yes, but only for suitably popular content, as all the dead torrents will testify. This doesn't make IPFS very appealing to Joe Blow, content maker unextraordinaire.
      - anc84 10y ago
        Joe Blow would just need to find some fans who think that keeping his content available for others is worth their while. I believe this could work amazingly well for netlabels and indie bands.
        clueless404 10y ago

supergreg 10y ago

If I try to host a javascript application that uses LocalStorage for saving data, it would be visible to any other ipfs JavaScript application because they all exist under the same domain, right? Have you thought about having the URLs be something like ipfs://<hash>/index.html instead of http://local http://local host/<hash>/index.html so browsers keep the LocalStorage for each ipfs hash separated?

diggan 10y ago
We're planning to use Same-origin policy to prevent this. It was first brought up here: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/651 https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues/651 You can read more about same-origin policy here: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-origin_policy https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Security/Same-o...
- 0xcde4c3db 10y ago
  Putting a hash in the hostname/domain would also be using same-origin policy. The issue you linked refers to using suborigins, which seems to still be a draft proposal with no implementer buy-in outside of Chromium [1]. [1] https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231225 https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=1231225
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
curioussavage 10y ago
Could be wrong but I think [beaker](https://beakerbrowser.com/ https://beakerbrowser.com/) supports using the protocol like that. Of course its very experimental so if security is a concern then it probably has its own issues.

d--b 10y ago

I have a truly naive question about the distributed web: what makes the supporters of it think it will be any different from the original web. I mean, isn't it likely that at some point, there will be the need for a centralized search engine for it? Isn't it unavoidable that big companies like facebook runs their own non-distributed subnetwork, so that it can deliver standard functionality to all its users? The original web IS distributed already, isn't it? It's just that organically, the way people use it has become a lot more centralized, no? Or am I missing the main argument for a distributed architecture?

splintercell 10y ago
IPFS + Ethereum Smart Contracts = Distributed Web The idea is that we run that centralized search engine via Smart Contracts. In other words, using a decentralized currency such as Bitcoin and decentralized execution environment like Ethereum, we create softwares which pays people for providing CPU time and disk space (facilitated by IPFS). Few missing pieces of this puzzle are homomorphic encryption implemented on Smart Contracts level which will allow that CPU service. Once that's done then we can have the distributed web of the next level.
- Taek 10y ago
  A search engine via ethereum is not going to scale, is not easily upgraded, and will fall far short of any properly centralized search engine. If you want a competitve decentralized search engine, you're going to need a different technology.
  - traverseda 10y ago
    I think that's why they talk about homomorphic encryption.
    - Taek 10y ago
      Homomorphic encryption as best I'm aware is more than a decade away from practical use. I believe the best libraries today have blowups of 100,000,000x in resource usage, meaning it's not even practical for basic crypto operations. Multiparty computation makes some security sacrifices (breaks if M out of N people cheat, breaks undetectably iirc), but I think the blowup is less than 10x for some operations and less than 1000x for the others. Still not pretty, but at least makes certain things possible. But not competitive search engines.

kefka 10y ago

Ive been using IPFS to port and make serverless webapps. http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbLPfyehFnViKZpU237P6a6DpjCfWFSoDBMQFGUAgYW2t/ http://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmbLPfyehFnViKZpU237P6a6DpjCfWFSoDBMQFGU...

etherealG 10y ago
what is it?

clueless404 10y ago

Does IPFS come with some kind of content filter or firewall to protect its users? When child porn inevitably shows up, how do you protect yourself from accidentally downloading and then seeding it?

anc84 10y ago
By simply not downloading and seeding it. ;) In IPFS you do not automatically relay things, you have to explicitly decide to.
- clueless404 10y ago
  > By simply not downloading and seeding it. ;) You seem to have glanced over the qualifier I used: accidentally. Given a hash for an IPFS resource, how do you know it does not contain child porn before you retrieve it? Once you have downloaded it you have committed a crime. There are no take backs with strict liability crimes and IPFS provides no anonymity, so there is a record of you downloading and seeding child porn. > In IPFS you do not automatically relay things, you have to explicitly decide to. Really? Correct me if I'm wrong, but I was under the impression that immediately once you retrieve a hash via IPFS, you cache it and start seeding it.
  - pdkl95 10y ago
    > Given a hash for an IPFS resource, how do you know it does not contain child porn before you retrieve it? Given a URL for an HTTP resource, how do you know it does not contain child porn before you retrieve it? > seeding https://freenetproject.org/help.html#childporn https://freenetproject.org/help.html#childporn
    - clueless404 10y ago
      > Given a URL for an HTTP resource, how do you know it does not contain child porn before you retrieve it? You don't, but then again regular browsing does not automatically download the illegal content, start seeding it and announce to the world that you have it on your computer. Big difference. Also since IPFS deals with content hashes, you not only could and should, you absolutely must ensure any content you download via IPFS does not contain known instances of illegal content. >> > seeding > > https://freenetproject.org/help.html#childporn https://freenetproject.org/help.html#childporn How is this in any way relevant? Freenet provides anonymity, IPFS does not. Again, big difference.

kylehotchkiss 10y ago

There's an interesting emphasis on developing nations not engaging with the Internet, but I think that might be partially cultural too. What tools have we given the developing world to really engage with the internet? The easy-to-use publishing platform often require an email and usually a real name. Both of these things may be unavailable to countries where being connected to thoughts posted online could be dangerous. Most content is not written in simple english, and there's just not much incentive for somebody who may not know how to think critically/complexly (due to lack of western education) to engage with the internet. I think distributed web is an interesting idea, and that IPFS really lists out some issues with the internet that we'd all win in solving, but I think maybe some of these, like developing nation web access, are solvable with current tech, and more culturally based solutions

drivingmenuts 10y ago
I think the better solutions come from within the society, rather than being imposed from without (Cuba's flash-drive sneakernet). An outsider might provide the gross implementation, but it should be up to the locals to work out the messy details, even if it means they don't connect to the net, as a whole, on a regular basis. It's their lives on the line, they're going to have the best ideas on how to preserve them. An outsider is going to be, at best, somewhat ill-informed and at worst, inimical to the solution.

bfrog 10y ago

how does this differ from maidsafe?

teekert 10y ago

Some content here to play with: [0] Interestingly some links to copyrighted material end in ¨Unavailable for Legal Reasons¨ however, running the daemon and issuing an ¨ipfs get hash¨ the download does start. [0] https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU5XsVwvJfTcCwqkK1SmTqDmXWSQWaTa7ZcVLY2PDxNxG/ipfs_links.html https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU5XsVwvJfTcCwqkK1SmTqDmXWSQWaTa7ZcVLY...

voltagex_ 10y ago
The "unavailable for legal reasons" message appears to be issued by the ipfs.io gateway - IMO perfectly reasonable.
- teekert 10y ago
  Sure but it´s not really unavailable I mean.
  - bergie 10y ago
    Yep, but ipfs.io refuses to distribute it. Doesn't mean other IPFS hosts necessarily do

voltagex_ 10y ago

Beware anyone on a metered connection - in 20 or so minutes, the ipfs daemon has used 3 gigabytes of bandwidth.

mark_l_watson 10y ago
Did this useable continue indefinitely? I would hope that there was a socket throttling option.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  Frustratingly I couldn't reproduce this and the bandwidth-using part of the IPFS daemon appears to be completely opaque - i.e. I had no clue what was using all the bandwidth (other than the fact there were 200+ connections). No visibility into an app means it's unlikely to stay on my system.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

ShakataGaNai 10y ago

So I've got a (let's say) WordPress blog. Where's the "here's how to get your existing content on IPFS in less than an hour" guide?

0xCMP 10y ago
I think it'd have to be saved statically. Which actually makes this question interesting: How do you store comments on an IPFS site? Constantly updating a single file on IPFS?
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  Interesting question. I know nothing about IPFS other than what I've read in the past five minutes on Wikipedia, but: 1. HTML wants badly for a nested relational document format. Essentially tin or mutt's "in reply to" and "references" headers. 2. A comments stream is a) a parent document to which b) multiple child documents, themselves possibly having c) parent-child relationships, d) are associated. Rather than thinking of "threaded discussion == single document" think "threaded discussion == a set of related documents". That gives the option of having a discussion "occurring" across multiple sites, with some form of trust, whitelist, blacklist, or other mechanisms for reflecting what you do or don't include in the discussion. Individual comments, as their own docs, could also be freestanding instances. Finding children from the parent becomes an interesting question. There's also the matter of versioning a document. Tying a git-like capability to this could be interesting.

j45 10y ago

I really hope something like this takes off. Connecting and indexing documents has been the challenge of a few internet generations. Creating a document at a point of filing is a subtle but potentially large shift. Hopefully this lands on homebrew soon to aid it's growth.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

I heard about IPFS at the Decentralized Web Conference in SF last spring. It sounded promising, long term. Anyone here using it right now? What are the costs for running it on a VPS, for example, bandwidth, storage, and CPU load?

z3t4 10y ago

We keep things that are important, and throw away the garbage. But if we keep everything, there will be mostly garbage.

inimino 10y ago
It's impossible to keep everything. A system like this one keeps the things people access, rather than the current system where content remains available only at the will (and expense) of the publisher.

JulianMorrison 10y ago

This sounds like distributed Geocities, where you can have any content you like so long as it's static, or at least, changes in iterations of static files like a HTML-generator blog. If you do anything that needs a central server, suddenly its advantages vanish. I could imagine Wikipedia using this; I couldn't imagine gmail doing so.

inimino 10y ago
Most of the pages on the Web are still static HTML or something close to it, though.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  Maybe but very few of them can do their job with only static HTML.
  - inimino 10y ago
    I would say most of the articles linked to on HN could be static HTML pages. How practical HN itself would be on IPFS seems less clear.

descript 10y ago

IPFS is vaporware. They are going to launch a token and try to take your money

delegate 10y ago

ipfs is fantastic, but it is half the solution. We also need a distributed p2p application framework, with which nodes can securely communicate and allow building distributed apps, like search. We can think differently with ipfs. Traditional web allows everyone to publish content somewhere, hoping that search engines will index it. With ipfs, the same file (with the same content) is only indexed/stored once and then you reference the hash to get to the content. This fact changes the problem of search. Take all the world's movies. With ipfs + p2p network, you only need one back end in the form of a distributed search index, which can index all the movies in the world. Same with the world's music. You only need one back end which can index all the music. The index can be as simple as {"movie title": [sha256]}, where the array contains the hashes of different 'encodings' of the same content (eg. 'dvd rip', 'blue ray' or 'mp3'). Content can be indexed by all kinds of properties of course and it can grow organically over time to include more and more details. With ipfs plus the p2p network we'll build 'apps', not 'pages'. People can have a list of 'apps' running on their machines - which are node instances in various distributed applications, sharing the same p2p network and using ipfs as storage. Apps can have 'backend' and 'front end' parts - the back end is the part which participates in the p2p network, while the 'front end' provides a human interface to the back end, were users can search/browse/view the content. Apps are distributed as git repositories stored in ipfs, while the 'core' running on the user's machine compiles the sources (inside a build vm) and loads the resulting binaries into containers running in virtual machines. This would make it easy for devs to write and publish new distributed apps, making the network totally decentralised and virtually unstoppable. Ps. If you feel that this insanity could work, then I'd love to discuss it in more depth - delegate78@gmx.com

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]