5 ms·

IPFS gives you immutable links

by nathias 5y ago

mro_name 5y ago
cool!
- iggldiggl 5y ago
  Except now you can't update the contents of a page not even one tiny bit without also changing its URL, which is equally useless. While I concede that the ability to retrieve the previous version of a page by visiting the old URL (provided anybody actually still has that old content) might come in handy sometimes, I posit that in the majority of cases people will want to visit the current version of a page by default. Even more so, I as the author of my homepage will want the internal page navigation to always point to the latest version of each page, too. So then you need an additional translation layer for transforming an "always give me the latest version of this resource"-style link into an "this particular version of this resource" IPFS link (I gather IPNS is supposed to fill that role?), which will then suffer from the same problem as URLs do today.
  - mro_name 5y ago
    a content-derived uri is a necessity for some things (indisputable facts, scientific papers, opinions at a moment in time, etc.) but foolish for others. Think of a website displaying the current time or anything inherently mutable. But having unchanged documents move to new locations on the same domain without a redirect but a 404 is just utter unforgivable failure. Or silently deleted documents, also an uncool nuisance. Both happen a lot. That's what comes to my mind, when I read the initial quote.
  - mro_name 5y ago
    > the internal page navigation to always point to the latest version of each page, Let the webserver redirect the uri without version to the most recent one. Problem solved. Remember, redirects are valid, logical uris.
    - iggldiggl 5y ago
      Which still requires some additional configuration effort compared to today, though.
      - mro_name 5y ago
        lol, you mean everything is more work than just letting things crumble. Fine then, but not cool.
        iggldiggl 5y ago
        Me updating page contents happens (relatively) often. Me re-working my whole page structure which would break existing conventional URLs happens very rarely. Because conventional URLs don't care about updates to a page's contents, this means the common case of only updating pages requires no additional configuration. I only need to invest additional time setting up redirects on the rare occasion that I actually do re-arrange file names etc. IPFS URLs on the other hand are revision-specific, so they break (or rather actually get out of date and eventually break if at some point in the future nobody has a copy of that version cached/pinned somewhere any more) as soon as I fix even one tiny little typo, so I need to set up some sort of URL mapping service right from the start.
superkuh 5y ago
Until the IPFS devs decide that IPFS protocol v1 might become insecure in the medium term and create an new, secure, better, incompatible IPFS protocol v2 and every link, every search index, every community ever suddenly disappears. Don't laugh. It happened to Tor two months ago. The onion service bandwidth has been reduced by about 2/3 over November as distros and people upgraded to incompatible Tor v3 only software. https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.png?start=2015-09-05&end=2021-12-04 https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.pn... The weakness is always the people.
- spijdar 5y ago
  > The onion service bandwidth has been reduced by about 2/3 over November Back to 2019 levels of bandwidth? I feel like I may be misreading that graph, but I'm more curious about what bandwidth suddenly spiked the last two years more so than the drop back down. At any rate, I always understood the main point of Tor was providing an overlay network for accessing the internet and maintaining secure anonymity as much as possible, with its own internal network being more of a happy side effect. I don't think IPFS would be as quick to kill compatibility with a vulnerable hashing algo compared to Tor since they're not aiming for security and anonymity as primary goals.

IPFS gives you immutable links

mro_name 5y ago

cool!

iggldiggl 5y ago
Except now you can't update the contents of a page not even one tiny bit without also changing its URL, which is equally useless. While I concede that the ability to retrieve the previous version of a page by visiting the old URL (provided anybody actually still has that old content) might come in handy sometimes, I posit that in the majority of cases people will want to visit the current version of a page by default. Even more so, I as the author of my homepage will want the internal page navigation to always point to the latest version of each page, too. So then you need an additional translation layer for transforming an "always give me the latest version of this resource"-style link into an "this particular version of this resource" IPFS link (I gather IPNS is supposed to fill that role?), which will then suffer from the same problem as URLs do today.
- mro_name 5y ago
  a content-derived uri is a necessity for some things (indisputable facts, scientific papers, opinions at a moment in time, etc.) but foolish for others. Think of a website displaying the current time or anything inherently mutable. But having unchanged documents move to new locations on the same domain without a redirect but a 404 is just utter unforgivable failure. Or silently deleted documents, also an uncool nuisance. Both happen a lot. That's what comes to my mind, when I read the initial quote.
- mro_name 5y ago
  > the internal page navigation to always point to the latest version of each page, Let the webserver redirect the uri without version to the most recent one. Problem solved. Remember, redirects are valid, logical uris.
  - iggldiggl 5y ago
    Which still requires some additional configuration effort compared to today, though.
    - mro_name 5y ago
      lol, you mean everything is more work than just letting things crumble. Fine then, but not cool.
      - iggldiggl 5y ago
        Me updating page contents happens (relatively) often. Me re-working my whole page structure which would break existing conventional URLs happens very rarely. Because conventional URLs don't care about updates to a page's contents, this means the common case of only updating pages requires no additional configuration. I only need to invest additional time setting up redirects on the rare occasion that I actually do re-arrange file names etc. IPFS URLs on the other hand are revision-specific, so they break (or rather actually get out of date and eventually break if at some point in the future nobody has a copy of that version cached/pinned somewhere any more) as soon as I fix even one tiny little typo, so I need to set up some sort of URL mapping service right from the start.

superkuh 5y ago

Until the IPFS devs decide that IPFS protocol v1 might become insecure in the medium term and create an new, secure, better, incompatible IPFS protocol v2 and every link, every search index, every community ever suddenly disappears. Don't laugh. It happened to Tor two months ago. The onion service bandwidth has been reduced by about 2/3 over November as distros and people upgraded to incompatible Tor v3 only software. https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.png?start=2015-09-05&end=2021-12-04 https://metrics.torproject.org/hidserv-rend-relayed-cells.pn... The weakness is always the people.

spijdar 5y ago
> The onion service bandwidth has been reduced by about 2/3 over November Back to 2019 levels of bandwidth? I feel like I may be misreading that graph, but I'm more curious about what bandwidth suddenly spiked the last two years more so than the drop back down. At any rate, I always understood the main point of Tor was providing an overlay network for accessing the internet and maintaining secure anonymity as much as possible, with its own internal network being more of a happy side effect. I don't think IPFS would be as quick to kill compatibility with a vulnerable hashing algo compared to Tor since they're not aiming for security and anonymity as primary goals.