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When I last looked at dat some time ago I seem to recall that there was no way to revoke a dat or set a TTL-type field. Can dat forget? E.g. If I created a da

When I last looked at dat some time ago I seem to recall that there was no way to revoke a dat or set a TTL-type field. Can dat forget? E.g. If I created a dat, that was it and the data in the dat was then potentially out there forever and ever and ever in the distributed network. There was no way to tell a client "this dat is only good for 90 seconds/minutes/hours/days/years/decades/etc - after that please drop/delete". I know there is this desire in certain circles for Blockchain-stylee "everything is stored for ever and we can cryptographically prove every single byte all the way back to the dinosaurs!" sentiment, but I am not sure that really jives with a distributed data/Web publishing protocol (at least in my mind) - I want to be able to reliably "delete" something. If I know that anything I ever publish will be irrevocably around forever, it has a chilling effect on what I choose to do and publish with dat (plus maybe legal challenges? IANAL but e.g. GDPR? Right to be forgotten?) E.g would we actually gain anything if hypothetically Google supported dat and so then every single Google search result page ever generated was stored forever in a dat? Would future users benefit from storing decades of archived versions of Google search result pages for "Facebook" (because people search for "Facebook" then click the first result instead of just typing "facebook.com") or "weather" which then need to be endlessly duplicated around the network for the rest of eternity? Seems unlikely to be of any benefit to me - surely better to mark some of it as ephemeral and let the data naturally timeout and die? Does anyone know if that has changed with dat and data can now die? Or have I just misunderstood?

tangent128 7y ago
Data in a dat, just like data in a torrent, only lives as long as there are peers interested in seeding that particular dat; it's not a blockchain-style "everybody has to replicate everything". You can't unilaterally withdraw content somebody else is also seeding; the best you can do to my knowledge is publish a new version that replaces all the dat's content with a "please delete your history of this archive" message, but as with any distributed system you have no real way of knowing if that was respected.

tangent128 7y ago

Data in a dat, just like data in a torrent, only lives as long as there are peers interested in seeding that particular dat; it's not a blockchain-style "everybody has to replicate everything". You can't unilaterally withdraw content somebody else is also seeding; the best you can do to my knowledge is publish a new version that replaces all the dat's content with a "please delete your history of this archive" message, but as with any distributed system you have no real way of knowing if that was respected.