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The goals are laudable, and sometimes a backwards-looking implementation can get traction faster than a forward-looking one. But the reliance on Pods and URL lo

The goals are laudable, and sometimes a backwards-looking implementation can get traction faster than a forward-looking one. But the reliance on Pods and URL location-based identifiers roots it firmly in the past. I think the future is the robust content addressable distributed web. Which could give developers the same flexibility, and users the same friendly experience, but with everything virtualized in a peer to peer mesh. I’d like to see the developer smoothness of Solid married to future-proof content identifiers like this: https://github.com/ipld/cid/blob/master/README.md https://github.com/ipld/cid/blob/master/README.md

abeppu 8y ago
Would the content-addressable distributed web really "give ... users the same friendly experience"? I'm a bit outside my wheelhouse, and I don't fully understand what Solid means when they say "You own your data", but with content-addressable strategies, often users _don't_ really have ownership once something is published in the sense that you can't delete or change something if anyone else is serving a copy.
- hobofan 8y ago
  Very much depends on the concept of ownership, doesn't it? ;) I mean, you own it, but so does everyone else. I think the traditional(?) concept of ownership you are referring to, that allows people to "delete" information is very unnatural and feels akin to trying to reverse entropy. You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world.
  - nnq 8y ago
    The human concepts of ownership implies a very important right that people tend to overlook: the right to DESTROY it, to undo it, to "take back what you said". This is important, because for physical artifacts having the right to destroy/demolish means having the right to create new things in its place (if I inherit a historical monument castle and I can't f demolish it to a pile of sand by my liking, than that's a scam, I don't really own it; also I might want to demolish it for aesthetic/informational reasons too, to "wipe" a part of its history from the human collective knowledge base). And for informational artifacts, the right to "undo" or "take back" is also important, because the fact that what you say/publish is there to haunt you forever will have a chilling effect... lots of interesting things will go unsaid unwritten. You have to burn books/libraries/things from time to time, otherwise everyone becomes afraid to write new books or build new things! And on a physical level death has the same liberating effect. You know you're gonna die sometime anyway, so you can enjoy that cigarette, it increasing your risk of an incurable cancer by 1e-3 percent will not have consequences that will haunt you forever... Death and destruction are necessary for true freedom, at least for the kind of freedom I want to have. Things like block-chain/graphs combined with content adressability bring significant limitations to FREEDOM. Endless responsibility and accountability for everything you've done and said would make life of all creative and disruptive people a living hell. Heck, if you're not free from at least some of the consequences of your actions, then why do anything at all, why even carry on living. And on: > You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world. Yes you can, if you kill someone, a part of the information that is in their head and haven't been shared with anyone yet will be lost forever. That's a good thing imo. If everyone who's heard the bell is dead and hasn't told about it to anyone... has the bell truly rung? The information that it has is irrecoverable now. And you can thank your friend entropy for that impossibility to recover this data and for the liberating effect that this can sometimes have ;)
    - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
      > DESTROY ... and I can't f demolish it to a pile of sand by my liking, than that's a scam, I don't really own it There are other definitions of ownership more akin to stewardship. Some circumstances recognise others interests and therefore limit rights and elevate responsibilities. This, arguably, sensible.
    - danShumway 8y ago
      > than that's a scam, I don't really own it Legally speaking then, you don't own information about yourself like your address or past actions. The government won't let you erase that information. The only way to make your friends and family forget it is to kill them, which is obviously highly illegal. Even with efforts like Right to Be Forgotten, Europe isn't positing that you actually own information about yourself in the same way that you're doing here. Right to Be Forgotten is a) balanced against public interest, and b) only applies to information access and indexing. Right to Be Forgotten doesn't mean that you can demand a newspaper burn all copies of an article it wrote about you. The reality is that "ownership" means different things in different contexts. There's not a single definition. When we talk about "owning" data or Intellectual Property, we don't mean it in the same way that you "own" a wrench. How can you own something that is inside my head?
      - nnq 8y ago
        > How can you own something that is inside my head? If I put it there, I own it, and I should be able to destroy all proof that it's not purely a fabrication of your imagination. (Sure, you can still know it and use it to guide your decision, but it shouldn't be legally valid any more, and there should be no way for you to convince others it's true.) Yeah, obviously if it's in the heads of other people too, it would be more accounts in favor of that information being authentic, increasing the probability that I am lying about that in a legal situation. But key thing would be that it's a probability. I can destroy the certainty. That could swing depending on context, maybe I'm more trustworthy than the group of people arguing for the authenticity of that piece of information. Obviously there's great deal of criminal activities that can be protected by going too far with this, so it's a question of "tweaking the dial" until we get the right amount of informational "light" and "darkness". As Jung said, there are some who need light, and some who thrive in the shadows...
  - stevenicr 8y ago
    Anyone aware of any PFS / perfect forward secrecy that is baked into this or similar projects like briar, scuttlebut, ipfs, zeronet, kinds of things? I guessing it would be less likely an issue if your friends / associates have a downloaded copy of your messages for the past year if each week a different key pair was made to decipher a section of the data store or something.
- danShumway 8y ago
  Depends on where/how that data is distributed. A big focus with technologies like IPFS is to have data be local and to not upload it anywhere. OR, to encrypt data within a small, private swarm where not everyone can access it. This is important, because getting rid of a content-addressable strategy doesn't actually protect your data. In practice, running application logic locally and having small private swarms is better for privacy than what we have on the web right now. So say you're hosting your own data at a traditional URL and on IPFS. Well, if someone wants to save your data, they can do it with the same ease on both. They just download your stuff and save it. If you take your data down from IPFS and from the traditional URL before someone saves it, then your data is safe. So, again, same situation. What IPFS says is, "if someone re-hosts your data, can we cryptographically prove that it's the same data? And can we refer to the data by that signature rather than whatever the host is this week?" So, if your data goes down but someone else found it and rehosted it, stuff like URLs would still work (although in practice, the URL you'd use would be a pointer to the most recent version of your site, so even that isn't necessarily typical). This is a minor loss to data ownership because you can't literally invalidate a URL if other people are willing to host it. But that's the only thing you've lost. Under the web as it exists today, someone can still take all of your images and rehost them on Reddit or something. If you think it's easy to prevent that, go let the MPAA know what your strategy is so they can end piracy forever. So the problem with IPFS/DAT isn't fundamentally any different, it just means that URLs break less often, there are fewer Man-in-the-Middle attacks on your website, and there are fewer download links that lie about their payloads.
danShumway 8y ago
I agree with this, at least in general. Linking content location to content ID is a serious mistake. I'm not convinced it's worth investing time or effort into something that might make it harder to address the problem of URLs in the future. I get "solve one problem at a time", but I feel like URLs are so fundamental of a problem, you have to get them right first before you move on to other problems. And for the most part, we have gotten them right -- build whatever web replacement you're working on on top of DAT/IPFS, unless you have a really good reason not to :) A decentralized web is a web where content can be re-hosted and verified by anyone.
EGreg 8y ago
Well, maybe this is a fully-fleshed out vision: https://qbix.com/blog/2018/08/28/vision-for-a-new-truly-decentralized-web/ https://qbix.com/blog/2018/08/28/vision-for-a-new-truly-dece...

abeppu 8y ago

Would the content-addressable distributed web really "give ... users the same friendly experience"? I'm a bit outside my wheelhouse, and I don't fully understand what Solid means when they say "You own your data", but with content-addressable strategies, often users _don't_ really have ownership once something is published in the sense that you can't delete or change something if anyone else is serving a copy.

hobofan 8y ago
Very much depends on the concept of ownership, doesn't it? ;) I mean, you own it, but so does everyone else. I think the traditional(?) concept of ownership you are referring to, that allows people to "delete" information is very unnatural and feels akin to trying to reverse entropy. You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world.
- nnq 8y ago
  The human concepts of ownership implies a very important right that people tend to overlook: the right to DESTROY it, to undo it, to "take back what you said". This is important, because for physical artifacts having the right to destroy/demolish means having the right to create new things in its place (if I inherit a historical monument castle and I can't f demolish it to a pile of sand by my liking, than that's a scam, I don't really own it; also I might want to demolish it for aesthetic/informational reasons too, to "wipe" a part of its history from the human collective knowledge base). And for informational artifacts, the right to "undo" or "take back" is also important, because the fact that what you say/publish is there to haunt you forever will have a chilling effect... lots of interesting things will go unsaid unwritten. You have to burn books/libraries/things from time to time, otherwise everyone becomes afraid to write new books or build new things! And on a physical level death has the same liberating effect. You know you're gonna die sometime anyway, so you can enjoy that cigarette, it increasing your risk of an incurable cancer by 1e-3 percent will not have consequences that will haunt you forever... Death and destruction are necessary for true freedom, at least for the kind of freedom I want to have. Things like block-chain/graphs combined with content adressability bring significant limitations to FREEDOM. Endless responsibility and accountability for everything you've done and said would make life of all creative and disruptive people a living hell. Heck, if you're not free from at least some of the consequences of your actions, then why do anything at all, why even carry on living. And on: > You can't unring a bell, and you can't delete data from the world. Yes you can, if you kill someone, a part of the information that is in their head and haven't been shared with anyone yet will be lost forever. That's a good thing imo. If everyone who's heard the bell is dead and hasn't told about it to anyone... has the bell truly rung? The information that it has is irrecoverable now. And you can thank your friend entropy for that impossibility to recover this data and for the liberating effect that this can sometimes have ;)
  - TheSpiceIsLife 8y ago
    > DESTROY ... and I can't f demolish it to a pile of sand by my liking, than that's a scam, I don't really own it There are other definitions of ownership more akin to stewardship. Some circumstances recognise others interests and therefore limit rights and elevate responsibilities. This, arguably, sensible.
  - danShumway 8y ago
    > than that's a scam, I don't really own it Legally speaking then, you don't own information about yourself like your address or past actions. The government won't let you erase that information. The only way to make your friends and family forget it is to kill them, which is obviously highly illegal. Even with efforts like Right to Be Forgotten, Europe isn't positing that you actually own information about yourself in the same way that you're doing here. Right to Be Forgotten is a) balanced against public interest, and b) only applies to information access and indexing. Right to Be Forgotten doesn't mean that you can demand a newspaper burn all copies of an article it wrote about you. The reality is that "ownership" means different things in different contexts. There's not a single definition. When we talk about "owning" data or Intellectual Property, we don't mean it in the same way that you "own" a wrench. How can you own something that is inside my head?
    - nnq 8y ago
      > How can you own something that is inside my head? If I put it there, I own it, and I should be able to destroy all proof that it's not purely a fabrication of your imagination. (Sure, you can still know it and use it to guide your decision, but it shouldn't be legally valid any more, and there should be no way for you to convince others it's true.) Yeah, obviously if it's in the heads of other people too, it would be more accounts in favor of that information being authentic, increasing the probability that I am lying about that in a legal situation. But key thing would be that it's a probability. I can destroy the certainty. That could swing depending on context, maybe I'm more trustworthy than the group of people arguing for the authenticity of that piece of information. Obviously there's great deal of criminal activities that can be protected by going too far with this, so it's a question of "tweaking the dial" until we get the right amount of informational "light" and "darkness". As Jung said, there are some who need light, and some who thrive in the shadows...
- stevenicr 8y ago
  Anyone aware of any PFS / perfect forward secrecy that is baked into this or similar projects like briar, scuttlebut, ipfs, zeronet, kinds of things? I guessing it would be less likely an issue if your friends / associates have a downloaded copy of your messages for the past year if each week a different key pair was made to decipher a section of the data store or something.
danShumway 8y ago
Depends on where/how that data is distributed. A big focus with technologies like IPFS is to have data be local and to not upload it anywhere. OR, to encrypt data within a small, private swarm where not everyone can access it. This is important, because getting rid of a content-addressable strategy doesn't actually protect your data. In practice, running application logic locally and having small private swarms is better for privacy than what we have on the web right now. So say you're hosting your own data at a traditional URL and on IPFS. Well, if someone wants to save your data, they can do it with the same ease on both. They just download your stuff and save it. If you take your data down from IPFS and from the traditional URL before someone saves it, then your data is safe. So, again, same situation. What IPFS says is, "if someone re-hosts your data, can we cryptographically prove that it's the same data? And can we refer to the data by that signature rather than whatever the host is this week?" So, if your data goes down but someone else found it and rehosted it, stuff like URLs would still work (although in practice, the URL you'd use would be a pointer to the most recent version of your site, so even that isn't necessarily typical). This is a minor loss to data ownership because you can't literally invalidate a URL if other people are willing to host it. But that's the only thing you've lost. Under the web as it exists today, someone can still take all of your images and rehost them on Reddit or something. If you think it's easy to prevent that, go let the MPAA know what your strategy is so they can end piracy forever. So the problem with IPFS/DAT isn't fundamentally any different, it just means that URLs break less often, there are fewer Man-in-the-Middle attacks on your website, and there are fewer download links that lie about their payloads.

danShumway 8y ago

I agree with this, at least in general. Linking content location to content ID is a serious mistake. I'm not convinced it's worth investing time or effort into something that might make it harder to address the problem of URLs in the future. I get "solve one problem at a time", but I feel like URLs are so fundamental of a problem, you have to get them right first before you move on to other problems. And for the most part, we have gotten them right -- build whatever web replacement you're working on on top of DAT/IPFS, unless you have a really good reason not to :) A decentralized web is a web where content can be re-hosted and verified by anyone.

EGreg 8y ago

Well, maybe this is a fully-fleshed out vision: https://qbix.com/blog/2018/08/28/vision-for-a-new-truly-decentralized-web/ https://qbix.com/blog/2018/08/28/vision-for-a-new-truly-dece...