28 ms·

I understand that this is an early implementation. Nevertheless, I have a question: how does it make sure the site you receive is actually the a) correct one

I understand that this is an early implementation. Nevertheless, I have a question: how does it make sure the site you receive is actually the a) correct one (someone could distribute incorrect pages e.g. about controversial topics like North Korea or Climate Change; or inject some malicious code that e.g. uses your account to submit changes to wikipedia) b) most recent one (or at least a reasonably new one). I imagine the first one could maybe be somehow guaranteed through the protocol. Maybe you can just solve the second by invalidating your local copy after it is more than one day old. The github link on the homepage does sadly not work for me (firefox on linux), so I can't check.

osense 10y ago
> controversial topics like [..] Climate Change You're making me sad on a Friday afternoon.
- oceanofsolaris 10y ago
  Let's reformulate it then: topics where some actors have a strong incentive (monetary or emotional) to manipulate other peoples opinion.
  - osense 10y ago
    I guess that's better :) To expand a bit on my previous comment, the sad part is that even though we know that the topic is not really controversial scientifically, we somehow, subconsciously, refer to it as one. Elections and all that.
    - ensignavenger 10y ago
      Even accepting the science, there is plenty of room for controversy over what actions should be taken as a result.
      - blackflame7000 10y ago
        Yea the true controversy isn't weather the climate is changing but rather the rate at which it is occurring and the degree to which humans should intervene to take corrective action.
        ensignavenger 10y ago
        And amongst the options of ways to intervene which ones to choose? Some of which are probably mutually exclusive.
    - mikeash 10y ago
      All something needs to be controversial is for there to be a great deal of public disagreement about it. Climate change definitely qualifies. Unfortunately, this has just about nothing to do with factual basis, evidence, etc.
  - koolba 10y ago
    > Let's reformulate it then: topics where some actors have a strong incentive (monetary or emotional) to manipulate other peoples opinion. So North Korea doesn't exist right? :D
- hohenheim 10y ago
  I guess he phrased it wrongly. Climate issues is not a matter of controversy but rather there are organizations trying to spread false knowledge and being able to spread that using wikipediaP2P is what OP is concerned about.
- johnydepp 10y ago
  Absolutely correct!! You can't call 'Climate Change' a controversy now that we all are facing the consequences already!!
  - notheguyouthink 10y ago
    My coworker doesn't "believe" in global warming, but i have some sympathy on the lack of belief. I know that for most topics i make uninformed decisions based on the information created/curated by intelligent people. Eg, global warming, vaccinations, etcetc. Sure, some of it may seem obvious, but lets be honest - i have no clue about what a vaccination does in the body, nor how climate change works. They're not school-yard topics, i'm a moron when it comes to them. So, i play the numbers and base my understanding on a large consensus of educated people. As with the case of climate change. My coworker believes roughly the same, but unfortunately he chooses to believe "scientists who revoke climate change". He has some weird things to say, but ultimately he is doing the same thing as me. The only thing that bothers me on this subject, is we both believe in green energy, reducing pollution, and etcetc. We have basically the same opinions on what we should be doing for the environment (reducing pollution/etc) and how important it is. Yet, he still believes it is a hoax. That part i don't understand. Why would climate change be a hoax? Who is making money off of a "climate change hoax"? I don't get that part.. hell, part of the problem with green energy was that it didn't exist because no one was making money off it. Anyway, /rant. All i mean to say is that people on other sides of the fence likely aren't all that different than you.. well, unless you're a researcher in the field of climate change, of course.
    - hmexx 10y ago
      Views don't have to be binary like "it's a hoax" or "the end is near". In between those 2 you have stuff like: - World may be warming but I don't believe we should act yet - World may be warming but I don't believe the actions we are taking make a difference - World is warming but I don't believe we know whether the result will be necessary a "bad thing" - World is warming but I don't believe we know the main cause - World is warming but I don't care what happens in 100 years - World is warming but I feel we should wait longer to see if models are correct before spending money on it - I feel humans overestimate their ability to model the future - I feel there are bigger problems we should be tackling.. ...and a million other reasons. I don't believe global warming is a hoax, but a combination of reasons like the ones above makes me personally not worry or care about the issue.
- zymhan 10y ago
  You know how I know you're in Europe? Because the idea that it's controversial in the US hasn't already numbed you. And that it's still morning here on the east coast :)
- wyager 10y ago
  For every person who thinks global warming isn't real (for some reason), there's someone who thinks we're all going to get killed by a giant global warming-induced tsunami like in that awful movie. Climate change is controversial, because people are making many claims without sufficient evidence (e.g. completely trusting some set of our current predictive models) or using it as a justification for political ends (like subsidizing electric cars).
  - grzm 10y ago
    "people are making many claims without sufficient evidence (e.g. completely trusting some set of our current predictive models)" Do you believe climate change is a problem and should be addressed but see others making claims beyond what the evidence supports? Or do you think climate change isn't an issue? If the former, what in particular are you thinking of? If the latter, what would it take to convince you that it's an issue?
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - grzm 10y ago
      This is an honest question. If you think the questions are unfair, or off base, or phrased poorly, I'd appreciate a comment.
- BrianMickeyD 10y ago
  Me too!
shmageggy 10y ago
This doesn't answer your question, but it says it's based on CacheP2P, which itself says (http://www.cachep2p.com/api.html http://www.cachep2p.com/api.html) it's 99.99% WebTorrent (https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/). It doesn't look like WebTorrent is meant to deal with content that is continually changing, and I wasn't able to determine (after about 30 seconds of looking) how either of the two layers on top address that
- oceanofsolaris 10y ago
  Thanks for actually looking into the mentioned problems instead of going on a tangent about climate change ;) CacheP2P seems to solve the problem by including a list of sha1 hashes for all files that are distributed through P2P. Speculation time: I guess distributing the sha1 hashes for every wikipedia page is a bit too much (especially considering they are always changing). So with every page, you would only distribute the hash for those sites that are directly linked from it. If you provide the correct sha1 hash for every linked website (which in turn includes the hashes of all linked websites from it...), you would form some kind of merkle-tree of wikipedia pages. Except that the graph of wikipedia pages is certainly highly cyclic (thus no tree), so this isn't feasible. And all the pages change all the time. So this naive approach has already two strikes against it and does certainly not work. I will try to have a look at the source code at some later point, I guess.
  - posterboy 10y ago
    Edit: 2.5 Mb was wrong, shame on me -_- 5 Million articles, 512b per Hash, if that's enough, gives 2.5 Gb. Updates can be much smaller. Multiply that by 10 for hashes of the nearest users, who have a copy, and that's still manageable. Just of the top of my head. edit: inb4 a blockchained approach.
    - gcr 10y ago
      It's 320 MB. 5 million articles times 64 bytes per hash (512 bits) divided by 1e6 bytes per MB is 320.
guerrerocarlos 10y ago
- Github link fixed. - Ideally Wikipedia could add just a signature in the page metadata and the extension could check it against it's public key. - CacheP2P has one solution implemented (checksums of links contents defined in the metadata of each page), but would require Wikipedia to enable it.
- oceanofsolaris 10y ago
  Hi, thanks for replying. I think the idea of a distributedly mirrored wikipedia is great, so thanks for this project (even if some users seem to encounter high cpu load using it). So, do I understand correctly that each page (that has been distributed through WP2P) includes the hashes for all the linked pages? But I assume these hashes are only for the content, not the metadata of the linked pages. So a malicious actor could still inject a bad page (that includes bad hashes for linked pages) if he wanted. It is true that signed wikipedia pages would be a really neat idea, since it would enable this as well as other distributed projects to make sure they are displaying the "real" version of the site.

osense 10y ago

> controversial topics like [..] Climate Change You're making me sad on a Friday afternoon.

oceanofsolaris 10y ago
Let's reformulate it then: topics where some actors have a strong incentive (monetary or emotional) to manipulate other peoples opinion.
- osense 10y ago
  I guess that's better :) To expand a bit on my previous comment, the sad part is that even though we know that the topic is not really controversial scientifically, we somehow, subconsciously, refer to it as one. Elections and all that.
  - ensignavenger 10y ago
    Even accepting the science, there is plenty of room for controversy over what actions should be taken as a result.
    - blackflame7000 10y ago
      Yea the true controversy isn't weather the climate is changing but rather the rate at which it is occurring and the degree to which humans should intervene to take corrective action.
      - ensignavenger 10y ago
        And amongst the options of ways to intervene which ones to choose? Some of which are probably mutually exclusive.
  - mikeash 10y ago
    All something needs to be controversial is for there to be a great deal of public disagreement about it. Climate change definitely qualifies. Unfortunately, this has just about nothing to do with factual basis, evidence, etc.
- koolba 10y ago
  > Let's reformulate it then: topics where some actors have a strong incentive (monetary or emotional) to manipulate other peoples opinion. So North Korea doesn't exist right? :D
hohenheim 10y ago
I guess he phrased it wrongly. Climate issues is not a matter of controversy but rather there are organizations trying to spread false knowledge and being able to spread that using wikipediaP2P is what OP is concerned about.
johnydepp 10y ago
Absolutely correct!! You can't call 'Climate Change' a controversy now that we all are facing the consequences already!!
- notheguyouthink 10y ago
  My coworker doesn't "believe" in global warming, but i have some sympathy on the lack of belief. I know that for most topics i make uninformed decisions based on the information created/curated by intelligent people. Eg, global warming, vaccinations, etcetc. Sure, some of it may seem obvious, but lets be honest - i have no clue about what a vaccination does in the body, nor how climate change works. They're not school-yard topics, i'm a moron when it comes to them. So, i play the numbers and base my understanding on a large consensus of educated people. As with the case of climate change. My coworker believes roughly the same, but unfortunately he chooses to believe "scientists who revoke climate change". He has some weird things to say, but ultimately he is doing the same thing as me. The only thing that bothers me on this subject, is we both believe in green energy, reducing pollution, and etcetc. We have basically the same opinions on what we should be doing for the environment (reducing pollution/etc) and how important it is. Yet, he still believes it is a hoax. That part i don't understand. Why would climate change be a hoax? Who is making money off of a "climate change hoax"? I don't get that part.. hell, part of the problem with green energy was that it didn't exist because no one was making money off it. Anyway, /rant. All i mean to say is that people on other sides of the fence likely aren't all that different than you.. well, unless you're a researcher in the field of climate change, of course.
  - hmexx 10y ago
    Views don't have to be binary like "it's a hoax" or "the end is near". In between those 2 you have stuff like: - World may be warming but I don't believe we should act yet - World may be warming but I don't believe the actions we are taking make a difference - World is warming but I don't believe we know whether the result will be necessary a "bad thing" - World is warming but I don't believe we know the main cause - World is warming but I don't care what happens in 100 years - World is warming but I feel we should wait longer to see if models are correct before spending money on it - I feel humans overestimate their ability to model the future - I feel there are bigger problems we should be tackling.. ...and a million other reasons. I don't believe global warming is a hoax, but a combination of reasons like the ones above makes me personally not worry or care about the issue.
zymhan 10y ago
You know how I know you're in Europe? Because the idea that it's controversial in the US hasn't already numbed you. And that it's still morning here on the east coast :)
wyager 10y ago
For every person who thinks global warming isn't real (for some reason), there's someone who thinks we're all going to get killed by a giant global warming-induced tsunami like in that awful movie. Climate change is controversial, because people are making many claims without sufficient evidence (e.g. completely trusting some set of our current predictive models) or using it as a justification for political ends (like subsidizing electric cars).
- grzm 10y ago
  "people are making many claims without sufficient evidence (e.g. completely trusting some set of our current predictive models)" Do you believe climate change is a problem and should be addressed but see others making claims beyond what the evidence supports? Or do you think climate change isn't an issue? If the former, what in particular are you thinking of? If the latter, what would it take to convince you that it's an issue?
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - grzm 10y ago
    This is an honest question. If you think the questions are unfair, or off base, or phrased poorly, I'd appreciate a comment.
BrianMickeyD 10y ago
Me too!

shmageggy 10y ago

This doesn't answer your question, but it says it's based on CacheP2P, which itself says (http://www.cachep2p.com/api.html http://www.cachep2p.com/api.html) it's 99.99% WebTorrent (https://webtorrent.io/ https://webtorrent.io/). It doesn't look like WebTorrent is meant to deal with content that is continually changing, and I wasn't able to determine (after about 30 seconds of looking) how either of the two layers on top address that

oceanofsolaris 10y ago
Thanks for actually looking into the mentioned problems instead of going on a tangent about climate change ;) CacheP2P seems to solve the problem by including a list of sha1 hashes for all files that are distributed through P2P. Speculation time: I guess distributing the sha1 hashes for every wikipedia page is a bit too much (especially considering they are always changing). So with every page, you would only distribute the hash for those sites that are directly linked from it. If you provide the correct sha1 hash for every linked website (which in turn includes the hashes of all linked websites from it...), you would form some kind of merkle-tree of wikipedia pages. Except that the graph of wikipedia pages is certainly highly cyclic (thus no tree), so this isn't feasible. And all the pages change all the time. So this naive approach has already two strikes against it and does certainly not work. I will try to have a look at the source code at some later point, I guess.
- posterboy 10y ago
  Edit: 2.5 Mb was wrong, shame on me -_- 5 Million articles, 512b per Hash, if that's enough, gives 2.5 Gb. Updates can be much smaller. Multiply that by 10 for hashes of the nearest users, who have a copy, and that's still manageable. Just of the top of my head. edit: inb4 a blockchained approach.
  - gcr 10y ago
    It's 320 MB. 5 million articles times 64 bytes per hash (512 bits) divided by 1e6 bytes per MB is 320.

guerrerocarlos 10y ago

- Github link fixed. - Ideally Wikipedia could add just a signature in the page metadata and the extension could check it against it's public key. - CacheP2P has one solution implemented (checksums of links contents defined in the metadata of each page), but would require Wikipedia to enable it.

oceanofsolaris 10y ago
Hi, thanks for replying. I think the idea of a distributedly mirrored wikipedia is great, so thanks for this project (even if some users seem to encounter high cpu load using it). So, do I understand correctly that each page (that has been distributed through WP2P) includes the hashes for all the linked pages? But I assume these hashes are only for the content, not the metadata of the linked pages. So a malicious actor could still inject a bad page (that includes bad hashes for linked pages) if he wanted. It is true that signed wikipedia pages would be a really neat idea, since it would enable this as well as other distributed projects to make sure they are displaying the "real" version of the site.