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I continue to regret that the window for the major browsers to incubate and support a content-addressable URL scheme based on then-current distributed hash tabl
by twoodfin 3y ago
I continue to regret that the window for the major browsers to incubate and support a content-addressable URL scheme based on then-current distributed hash table algorithms closed ~20 years ago and has shown no signs of being reopened.
- GaggiX 3y agoI don't understand why this was downvoted several times, what's the problem with the parent comment? Edit: well it seems that I have absorbed his downvotes, better this way ahah
- Gigachad 3y agoBecause 99% of the time people don't want immutable addresses. They want something that points to the latest and most up to date version. And when you really do want to freeze something in time you just use one of the page archive services. P2P just flat out doesn't work for mobile devices too which are pretty much the entire internet userbase now.
- ndriscoll 3y agoIf it can be made fast, content addressed p2p distribution is a perfect replacement for e.g. imgur to offload bandwidth costs for the fediverse.
- justinclift 3y agoMaybe with 6G. :)
- tetsuhamu 3y agoif you load an image from imgur.com, you could also upload to several other users, and pay for the bandwidth and battery loss yourself!
- jasonjayr 3y agoHad content based urls been a thing 20 years ago, presumably there would have evolved technology for mobile ISPs to host border caches that end users could trust 100% without worry of nefarious manipulation.
- zaphirplane 3y agoIs content here mean, assets and/or web pages ? How would it work for a webpage that loads a bunch of Javascript libraries from some CDN ? The page can have significant changes over time as the JavaScript libraries change
- jonhohle 3y agoContent addressable means the URI contains some information uniquely describing the content (typically a cryptographic hash). So if you load https://cdn/js/e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b934ca495991b7852b855.js https://cdn/js/e3b0c44298fc1c149afbf4c8996fb92427ae41e4649b9... you’ll always know it will contain exactly the same contents, regardless of where it comes from (and that can be verified by the client as well).
- zaphirplane 3y agoIn the hypothetical I describe the content of web app is fixed the app itself isn’t Kind of like linking to the newest song, the link is static the content changes
- ikiris 3y agoWhy would an ISP want to pay the cost of doing this?
- birracerveza 3y agoBecause they would profit from selling data on their users' activity, as usual
- runeks 3y ago
- silotis 3y agoDHTs have had support for mutable pointers for a long time. The bittorrent DHT has BEP44 which was published in 2014. http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html http://bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0044.html
- ranger_danger 3y agoMaybe but it doesn't matter much if people don't use it. Just like torrent v2
- Negitivefrags 3y agoI don't know if I agree. Perhaps in 99% of pages you want the latest version, but I think in 99% of requests you want an immutable thing. Generally speaking web pages are made up of vast numbers of immutable resources.