[HN Gopher] Skynet - Build a Free Internet
___________________________________________________________________
Skynet - Build a Free Internet
Author : thesausageking
Score : 236 points
Date : 2021-01-10 04:39 UTC (18 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (siasky.net)
(TXT) w3m dump (siasky.net)
| knorker wrote:
| Is there a tl;dr how this differs from e.g. Freenet?
|
| I mean aside from the "we use blockchain herp derp".
| cyphermoon wrote:
| Among other things, the blockchain/crypto part ensures hosts
| and portals have a monetary incentive to host data, making
| their service scalable and sustainable.
| turblety wrote:
| If you are using Skynet for your project, I believe you need to
| run a node, which will require downloading the 23GB [1]
| blockchain from sia.
|
| I really hope these blockchain based projects can solve the
| sharding problem. These blockchains are getting so big.
|
| [1] https://siastats.info/blockchain_size
| tromp wrote:
| Does sharding help a fully verifying node to reduce the
| bandwidth needed for an Initial Block Download (IBD) ?
|
| Wouldn't it need to very each individual shard?
| noxer wrote:
| Its a myth that the whole chain is needed. Comes from BTC where
| you need the chain to recreate all transactions. It has zero
| practical use. If you would consider the current state of a
| blockchain to be "wrong" but everyone agreed to move forward
| anyway you may as well call it "correct" because by definition
| the majority decides what is right and what not in these
| systems. So you dont really need to validate the whole chain.
| All the splits and hard forks are well known and you can only
| agree or not use that particular chain. The accrual process of
| validating yourself is moot. Its not like you could find
| something new by running the exact same code thousands of other
| ran over that data before you.
|
| Plenty newer DTLs have ditched the chain validation process
| completely and you can start at any point in time with the
| ledger state of that time and start going forward to the
| present. Whether that is years or seconds doesn't really
| matter. It all depend of whether you have an accentual use case
| for historical transaction data or not.
|
| This is really important because second generation blockchains
| have way higher transaction throughput, integrated decentral
| exchanges (DEX) and other advanced feature that requires way
| more storage. Some already have reached uncompressed sizes of
| several TBs for the complete history.
|
| See technical documentation for the XRPL
| https://xrpl.org/ledger-history.html
| Taek wrote:
| My cofounder has been working on an upgrade for Sia that
| switches the core consensus engine to 'utreexo', which uses an
| accumulator rather than an entire blockchain history to verify
| new blocks and transactions. This brings down the effective
| size of the chain for users to just a couple of megabytes for
| the same history that currently takes 23 GB.
| killerstorm wrote:
| It would be cool if you can implement a light node (just
| enough to download files) in a browser extension, so people
| browse Skynet directly.
|
| Otherwise, if people mostly use web portals, then it's not
| really free and decentralized, as people are essentially at
| mercy of portals they use. In fact, if application code
| itself is served through a portal, it is less secure than
| normal web.
| Esiason wrote:
| Note: Taek is the same user that the SiaSetup website (the
| main source of documentation about the project) is
| criticizing as "unstable project management". Be warned about
| this man before sinking any significant amount of personal
| time or money into this project. Source:
| https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet#banned
| kordlessagain wrote:
| It's a Software drama!
| dang wrote:
| We've banned this account. Single-purpose accounts are not
| allowed on HN, and creating one just to stir up the
| community against a rival project or (worse) some person is
| a bad sign. Regardless of who's right in this, there's
| clearly a pre-existing agenda and probably an internecine
| conflict being imported to the community here, and that
| sort of campaign isn't in the spirit of this site.
|
| What would be in the spirit of this site is open,
| thoughtful critique that explained what the problems or
| criticisms are so that readers could make up their minds
| for themselves. "Be warned about this man" is a long way
| down from that. Please don't do that here, and especially
| please don't create accounts to do it with.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| cyphermoon wrote:
| This is incorrect. You don't need to run a Sia node to develop
| and deploy apps on Skynet. https://sia.tech/docs/#skynet
| killerstorm wrote:
| The REST API you linked to requires a local node:
| curl -A "Sia-Agent" "localhost:9980/skynet/portals"
|
| As I understand, there's also a public proxy
| https://siasky.net/. But being a single domain, it's not
| decentralized, is it?
|
| So with Skynet, you can either do "easy" or "decentralized",
| but not "easy and decentralized", right?
| Taek wrote:
| That's the crazy thing about Skynet. You can do both "easy
| and decentralized".
|
| For example, let's say you go to
| https://skyfeed.hns.siasky.net/ and you make an account
| (SkyFeed is a decentralized alternative to Twitter built on
| Skynet). You make some posts, follow some people, then
| siasky goes down.
|
| So now you go to https://skyfeed.hns.skyportal.xyz/ -
| skyportal is another Skynet portal run by an independent
| party. When you log into Skyfeed, all of your previous
| activity is still visible. Your account and all of its
| information is hosted on the Sia network, which means
| siasky is nothing more than an access point, and you don't
| get any penalties as a user for switching access points.
| killerstorm wrote:
| Sorry, but this is not decentralized at all, as you are
| at mercy of siasky.net serving you the right code. If
| siasky.net is compromised it will serve you code which
| steals the account. This is strictly inferior to normal
| web, as you need to trust both the app developer and the
| portal code is served from.
|
| Having multiple mirrors is NOT decentralization.
|
| My criteria for "decentralized web" candidates are:
| * credentials are managed by a trusted component outside
| of controls of apps, let alone mirrors * content
| integrity is checked before it is used * switching
| between nodes happens automatically in
| background, there should be no SPoF (i.e. if download
| through node 1 fails client should automatically retry
| from node 2 and so on).
|
| I don't think you can achieve this without integrating
| with a browser.
| Taek wrote:
| We're closer than I think you give us credit. The only
| major component we're missing is that normal browsers
| don't have the ability to verify that the portal is
| serving you the right code - which is of course super
| important.
|
| Once you have that though, the rest can be done within
| the webapp itself. Credentials are managed by a separate
| webapp like https://sky-id.hns.siasky.net/, and some apps
| already have built in failover to try other portals if
| one is not responding.
|
| With the advent of utreexo, it's even possible to run
| full blockchain nodes inside of a webapp. Again you need
| an integrity check on the code served by the portal, but
| if you have that you can independently do everything
| else.
| cyphermoon wrote:
| The only missing piece is a browser plugin or a dedicated
| browser that verifies that each piece of content you are
| served corresponds to the hash you are requesting. This
| is on the global roadmap, as well as automatic portal
| switching. The philosophy of the project is absolutely in
| line with your thinking.
| dboreham wrote:
| Perhaps like the IPFS browser plugin?
| incrudible wrote:
| That's fine, you can switch if necessary. Like a backup,
| you don't need decentralization 99.9% of the time, but the
| 0.1% of time when you need it, it can save your ass.
| nathanganser wrote:
| We're using them without running our own node :P
| UShouldBWorking wrote:
| I agree! Ethereum is already to big and too expensive to use. I
| hold a lot but worry about both BTC and Ethereum. Normal people
| can no longer use either chain for everyday transactions and at
| this rate Ethereum will never work as a global computer. To me
| only Bitcoin Cash and Monero really have their use cases and
| code sussed out. Sia (and filecoin) work great but both have
| issues with their insentives, in Sia's case they issue too many
| coins and it's not profitable to host content.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| ETH has already solved scalability with Zero Knowledge Proofs
| and Optimistic Rollups. Some dapps are clocking 2000
| transactions per second. Also, ETH 2's initial beacon chain
| has launched and when ETH2 fully rolls out, there will be 64x
| that available on the network.
| EGreg wrote:
| Please elaborate.
|
| Also when will ETH2 roll out?
| zelly wrote:
| It's already out, but most people are still on the eth1
| chain
| Taek wrote:
| I think you misunderstand the state that Eth2 is in. It's
| technically "released", but Eth2 cannot be used to
| transact. If you move money to Eth2, it must stay in the
| same wallet/address until more features are rolled out.
|
| Everyone who uses Eth today is still on Eth1 because Eth2
| is only good for having your coins sit there and
| accumulate interest.
| EGreg wrote:
| And furthermore, it would be years until the actual ETH2
| is usable, right?
| chrisco255 wrote:
| No, they are making rapid progress on ETH2. The beacon
| chain is the root chain for the other 63 shards that will
| be launched. That is the chain that is currently running
| in parallel with the ETH1 chain.
|
| See Vitalik's blog on rollups:
| https://vitalik.ca/general/2021/01/05/rollup.html
| hobofan wrote:
| The official estimate[0] is 2022. Given the general track
| record of their development pace, I'd be surprised if it
| goes fully live before 2023.
|
| [0]: https://ethereum.org/en/eth2/
| chrisco255 wrote:
| It says shard chains ship in 2021. They are saying the
| ETH1 chain will be migrated to proof of stake in 2022.
| random_kris wrote:
| Hmmm I would backtrack on saying bitcoin cash.. Bitcoin
| lightning works, is in production and has real usage
| topranks wrote:
| Lightning network is a joke tbh. It's just gonna be a few
| large payment processors acting as banks (it can't be
| decentralised cos the routing will just break.).
|
| As the original post said BCH and Monero are real world
| ways to transact right now.
|
| Although I figure long term the whole cryptocurrency space
| will implode (due to greed, infighting, technical problems
| etc.)
| casi wrote:
| Theres more bitcoin on ethereum than on lightning.
| cyphermoon wrote:
| You claim Sia issues too many coins. That is a myth.
| Inflation in 2021 will be no higher than 7%, declining every
| year after that. In case you are referring to the total
| supply, would it make you feel better to move the decimal to
| the left? Hosts have been saving and serving content since
| the launch of the Sia network years ago. It is profitable if
| done at scale. For more information,
| https://siastats.info/storage_pricing
| newbie789 wrote:
| I might be entirely wrong but I feel like I've seen multiple
| projects called Skynet in the past few years. I can't recall any
| others running currently because some of them might've become
| defunct and/or I've forgotten about them. I wonder what the
| appeal of the name is nowadays.
|
| (I have seen Terminator and am familiar with the origins of the
| name)
|
| I should clarify: It is another company's trademark or whatever
| as far as I know (again, could be wrong. Don't know how Disney
| litigates things in this domain).
|
| Again, I could also be wrong about this not being the only thing
| called Skynet in the past few years.
|
| I welcome responses!
| api wrote:
| Look it's Sia, the only non-vaporware ICO that quietly shipped a
| mostly working and usable version of what Filecoin raised 100X
| more to so far fail to ship (in a usable form).
| Esiason wrote:
| Sia is also about to initiate a large post-mine which will go
| directly to cashing out the dev's work on the protocol for the
| last 6 years. To me a post-mine cashout is worse than a pre-
| mine ICO because it more closely resembles shady bait-and-
| switch tactics than being up front about where the money to
| fund development will come from.
| dt3ft wrote:
| > Skynet's speeds rival centralized providers and surpass all
| decentralized offerings. A typical Skynet download starts in
| under 500 ms and can stream at rates as high as 1 Gbps!
|
| I tried to download the PDF sample on the frontpage and the
| download never actually started. It kept waiting for the server
| to begin transmitting the file...
| shaicoleman wrote:
| Didn't download for me either
| spzb wrote:
| Tried the mp4. After a wait of 30 seconds or so, it started
| downloading at about 15 MBit/sec on a 200 MBit/sec broadband
| connection.
| Taek wrote:
| 1 gbps us if you are running your own node, when you are on a
| public node you are sharing the speeds with hundreds of other
| users
| jbotz wrote:
| It worked and was essentially instantaneous for me.
| Taek wrote:
| Europe servers are struggling, US servers are doing fine.
| We're still building out our load balancing strategy.
| twostorytower wrote:
| Disclosure: I mined Siacoin for years and have hundreds of
| thousands of tokens.
|
| Sia is an amazing project with a team who is extremely talented
| and passionate, but Skynet is the future. They've built a fully
| decentralized CDN and it's incredible. Ten years from now, I can
| see it being the norm for startups and maybe even larger
| companies to use decentralized CDN's like this. I hope Coinbase
| adds Siacoin for trading soon, since they participated in
| integrating Rosetta.
| andrew_ wrote:
| Is it still profitable to mine Siacoin locally?
| tgtweak wrote:
| No, they've made purpose-built silicon for sia mining and it
| is no longer viable to mine on general purpose compute. As
| far as storage mining - it may be. last check (november)
| filecoin was the most profitable to host your disk space for
| but required a rediculous amount of compute as well as disk
| space (latest gen GPUs, 128G ram, near-100% uptime).
| viraptor wrote:
| It's relatively early days for filecoin though. I suspect
| that after "we've got space and availability, see?" period,
| the restrictions for hosting will be relaxed.
| [deleted]
| jondwillis wrote:
| How will they reduce the latency? 300-500ms seems about an order
| of magnitude slower than centralized CDNs.
| Taek wrote:
| Most of the latency right now is software slowdowns, our
| production testing suggests that with some more optimization at
| the software level we should be able to get below 80ms with
| today's protocol and host network.
|
| That's still not quite where the centralized CDNs are, but the
| numbers should only get better as the network grows and
| matures.
| leshokunin wrote:
| Didn't realize this was built on Sia. Interesting! I used to
| follow their development closely back in ~2017. I like how this
| product seems to be pretty straightforward to use. Hope it leads
| to more.
| jwmoz wrote:
| Go look at SCBTC daily.
| Taek wrote:
| The Sia and Skynet projects are focused on achieving a vision
| of a decentralized future for the Internet. Pumping the token
| value has never been a priority. SC is a utility token, and
| you should buy it if you want to use the Sia network.
| nathanganser wrote:
| To me, Sia and Skynet are the best usecases to make
| decentralized tech mainstream.
|
| https://skyfeed-beta.hns.siasky.net/#/ is a social media built
| upon Sia and Skynet :)
| Hnsuz wrote:
| Skynet is down.. Could this be alternative for Google sensure
| anyway??
| HDMI_Cable wrote:
| This sort of seems like a competitor to IPFS, no?
| thesausageking wrote:
| Yes. One of founders talks about the two problems with IPFS
| they saw that led them to build it in this comment from a past
| thread:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24626748
| EGreg wrote:
| What did they mean:
|
| * Skynet uses a point-to-point protocol rather than a DHT,
| which not only makes it faster, it's also more robust to
| abuse. DHTs are pretty famously fragile to things like DDoS
| and active subversion, and Skynet has been designed to be
| robust and high performance even when malicious actors are
| trying to interrupt the network.*
|
| How is P2P used rather than DHT
| Taek wrote:
| To be a host on Skynet, you have to declare yourself on the
| Sia blockchain, which means users running a blockchain node
| (full node or lite node) are able to have a complete and
| limited list of all the possible hosts on the network. The
| Skylinks aren't just hashes, they contain a couple bytes
| extra of information as well.
|
| Between the explicit list of potential hosts and a small
| amount of hinting in the Skylink, you can narrow down the
| number of potential places a file is stored to be small
| enough that you can just ping all of them in parallel with
| a request for the data. You don't have to do any multi-hop
| routing to find the data.
|
| This saves latency.
| EGreg wrote:
| If the complete list is available, can't anyone simply
| download it and DDOS the entire network indefinitely?
|
| One of the roles of a good DHT is to localize any DDOS
| and refuse to propagate it further.
| feanaro wrote:
| Think about it this way. To be able to find who is hosting
| the file, we need a mutable shared data structure which can
| be updated with this information as it changes over time.
| In IPFS, this is fulfilled by the DHT, whereas in
| Skynet/Sia the blockchain takes over the role.
| EGreg wrote:
| So basically the reverse of Kazaa flooding vs BitTorrent
| DHT:
|
| https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~srini/15-441/F11/lectures/21-p2p.
| pdf
|
| I have had to deal with routing when building the
| Intercoin project. And spoke to several of the teams
| including at MaidSAFE. One way of selecting nodes from
| the global network is to have everyone's IP addresses.
| But them you make the entire network susceptible to DDOS
| attacks. One of the advantages of an additional search
| layer (DNS, DHT etc.) on top of IP is that it can
| mitigate DDOS. The other is if the IP actually changes.
|
| Just one of many discussions about the economics of
| fetching files: https://safenetforum.org/t/how-does-
| maidsafe-prevent-ddos-at...
| pentae wrote:
| So what's stopping an abuser from generating tons of accounts and
| spamming their network with junk causing everyone to have to host
| lots of junk data?
| qwantim1 wrote:
| I hope it's not the T-800[1].
|
| [1]- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Terminator_(character)
| Taek wrote:
| It's a paid network. https://siasky.net/ is free for the
| moment, but will be switching to a freemium model in the near
| future. As a portal, siasky will have the ability to ratelimit
| and block abusers.
|
| If you "abuse" the network using your own node, you will have
| to pay for everything you upload and download, which means the
| people storing it won't really think of it as abuse, you're
| just another paying customer.
| pentae wrote:
| Thanks for the clarification
| cyphermoon wrote:
| Cost. If this abuser was running his own Portal node to do so,
| he would simply be paying hosts to host his junk data. Hosts
| would be very happy to do so, as they set their own prices.
|
| If this abuser was trying to use a public Skynet portal, the
| same abuse prevention measures apply as for any other data
| storage service out there. IP banning, filtering, etc
| snorrah wrote:
| hey don't call yourself Skynet.
|
| names tainted.
| bitwize wrote:
| Well, it does provide a neat explanation for the Terminator
| franchise: the in-movie Skynet is an advanced version of this
| Skynet, which decided to conquer humanity because it was
| trained on data from all the fascists that are bound to flood
| Skynet with their rhetoric.
| troquerre wrote:
| We've been using Skynet for all our decentralized web projects at
| Namebase.io ever since they added Handshake naming support[1] --
| it's been fantastic. It now takes us days to build things that
| previously took our intern a month to do. With censorship
| entering the zeitgeist nowadays I wouldn't be surprised if the
| next big decentralized social network is build on Skynet.
|
| [1] https://siasky.net/docs/#handshake
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| > decentralized social network is build on Skynet
|
| AKA email.
|
| If Trump has been kicked off Twitter, there's nothing stopping
| him from providing an email newsletter where people can sign-up
| and recieve his crazy ramblings.
|
| Seriously wondering why people don't do this. Perhaps I
| shouldn't be giving Trump any ideas?
| pbk1 wrote:
| Don't worry, his newsletter providers are deplatforming him
| too.[0]
|
| [0] https://disrn.com/news/email-provider-suspends-trump-
| campaig...
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| Haha thanks for that.
|
| Although there's nothing stopping him or anyone else
| running their own email provider.
|
| Which is what is so great about email.
| mod wrote:
| Until Gmail stops accepting mail from his domain.
|
| Which happens to normal people all the time.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| Yes that certainly does happen. Which is why I don't use
| Gmail :)
| mod wrote:
| But your friends do.
| Fjolsvith wrote:
| With huge numbers of people following Trump off of
| Twitter, FB, et all, expect a huge hit to their stocks.
| CodeGlitch wrote:
| If the POTUS is not using Gmail, and I'm not either, at
| which point does Google get to block that?
| Esiason wrote:
| Be warned of the large post mine coming to SiaCoin soon (the
| crypto-currency that powers Skynet). Massive inflation is
| coming to SiaCoin because of this to pay off Skynet Labs as
| they exit development on the Sia core protocol. David (aka
| Taek), the original creator, is leaving the Sia project to
| become a third party dev (working for the new Skynet Labs VC
| funded company) and will no longer be working on making the Sia
| core protocol actually work better. Lots of outstanding issues
| in the Sia core protocol still and with Sia losing their
| founding dev it raises concerns if the Sia protocol will ever
| be able to mature. Read more at https://SiaSetup.info (and more
| specifically https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-
| skynet)
| Taek wrote:
| The "post mine" is something that has been discussed in the
| community for many months, and is not something we are hiding
| - in fact it's stickied at the top of /r/siacoin and has
| appeared in all of our announcment channels and official
| newsletters.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/siacoin/comments/iox6ly/proposal_th.
| ..
|
| It is also not correct to say I am "leaving" the Sia project,
| I will continue to work on Sia and Skynet as I always have,
| but administrative control over the codebase is being handed
| over to a non-profit foundation with a mandate of placing the
| community health and vision as its primary priority.
|
| My own primary responsibility is to the bottom line of my
| company, and to the extent that Skynet Labs' bottom line is
| no longer perfectly aligned with the community's interests,
| we have created a foundation to ensure the community has a
| voice in how development progresses for the base layer.
|
| I know that the 18,000 word letter you linked raises a lot of
| concerns about the project - from the history, to the speed
| of developemnt, to the core codebase, to the new Skynet
| initiative, to the economic model, to the team behind the
| project and the leadership behind the project, to the
| documentation, to the new initiative to hand over the project
| to the community, to the communtiy itself - but I don't
| believe the letter was written from a place of good faith,
| and I don't believe that most of the arguments hold up to
| scrutiny, especially if you compare the progress and decision
| making of the Sia project to competitors like Filecoin,
| Maidsafe, and Storj
| als0 wrote:
| In layman's terms, how much does this cost?
| 74d-fe6-2c6 wrote:
| How does Skynet relate to Tim Berners-Lee's Solid project
| (https://solid.mit.edu/)?
| ghoomketu wrote:
| I'm asking in earnest but since I'm not very savvy when it comes
| to blockchain and decentralised internet, can this be used for
| piracy (movies mp3 etc)? What about really nefarious stuff like
| CP? Do we know who is responsible and is it possible to report
| and take down links? Also does running a node involve you in
| anything unknowingly?
|
| Or does it have nothing to do with anonymity/bullet-proof links
| and is merely just a very cheap storage?
|
| P.S. Sorry if this sounds like noob questions but i wasn't able
| to answer it by looking at their homepage.
| cyphermoon wrote:
| Skynet can be used for any sort of data.
|
| Public facing portals and hosts serving unencrypted data are of
| course responsible for the content they serve.
|
| People can upload content in two ways: either by using a public
| facing portal such as siasky.net or by spinning up their own
| portal client (Sia node) and communicating with hosts directly
| via the distributed network.
|
| It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take down
| links and stop serving that content, for example after
| accepting copyright infringement requests.
|
| It it also possible for anyone to spin up their own portal and
| keep content pinned as long as any host on the network will
| accept it. For example, skyportal.xyz is another public portal.
| Same goes for hosts.
|
| The Skynet (Sia) model aims for thousands and thousands of
| hosts spread geographically. It becomes extremely difficult to
| delete any piece of data from the network entirely as long as
| someone wants to make sure it stays up.
|
| Erasure coding redundancy ensures very high resilience from any
| single host going offline.
| incrudible wrote:
| > It is possible for individual portals and hosts to take
| down links and stop serving that content, for example after
| accepting copyright infringement requests.
|
| I think this needs to be solved at the protocol level. What
| if the portal is hosted in a DGAF jurisdiction, but I'm
| running my node in a different jurisdiction? What forces the
| _portal_ to keep my interest in mind?
| Taek wrote:
| As a user you have the ability to control what apps you
| use, what feeds you use, who you follow, etc.
| Decentralization doesn't mean it's completely free of
| moderation, it means users have the ability to pick their
| moderators and the ability to decide what is allowed on
| their feed and what is not.
| incrudible wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the way it works then.
|
| I was assuming that if I run a node serving content, I do
| not deal with curating that content at all. I just offer
| my bandwidth/storage for compensation, like a CDN.
|
| I don't want to be involved in curation or moderation at
| all, I just don't want to be held liable in case I
| inadvertently serve something that is illegal in _my_
| jurisdiction.
| MacsHeadroom wrote:
| Nodes don't serve content. They serve blocks of encrypted
| data to other nodes. Portals run a node AND piece
| together content from blocks received from many nodes
| THEN serve the content.
|
| You could also piece together content yourself by being
| your own portal. But running a node does not necessitate
| running a portal.
| incrudible wrote:
| Thanks for the explanation. I suppose that's close to how
| TOR nodes work from a liability standpoint.
| sanxiyn wrote:
| All files are stored encrypted. You can use it for privacy as
| well as storing child pornography.
|
| Edit: Above is about Sia. Apparently Skynet is different.
| cyphermoon wrote:
| That is incorrect. Only files on the basic Sia client are all
| stored encrypted. Skynet stores all files by default in
| cleartext. It is up to Skynet users or app developers to
| ensure files that are uploaded are encrypted client side.
|
| On a side note, child pornography is not the intended or
| primary use case for Skynet and is condemned by the dev team
| and the community at large. There is no evidence to suggest
| anyone is using Sia or Skynet for this type of content, and
| portal operators aggressively censor such content and report
| it to authorities.
|
| Skynet is intended for privacy and data ownership while also
| offering users unprecedented features in terms of portability
| and composability.
| Taek wrote:
| It's not really correct to say that Skynet stores all files
| 'by default in cleartext'. Skynet is a platform for
| building applications. Whether data is encrypted or
| cleartext is up to the app developer.
|
| The files uploaded via https://siasky.net/ are cleartext,
| but the files uploaded via https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/
| are encrypted. There are also entire dropbox-like apps that
| are encrypted by default, for example
| https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/
|
| Most Skynet usage is app-driven, and therefore whether or
| not things are "encrypted by default" will depend on the
| apps that are used.
| drukenemo wrote:
| Although this is a very fair question, I cannot help but notice
| that the first thing people associate with the word freedom
| today is with a negative angle. This is really troubling me, as
| it used to be a more cherished value.
| marvin wrote:
| True, unlimited freedom in this sense inevitably means the
| ethically very worst use cases, because this is the limit of
| freedom in any society: Material that is illegal and will
| have the authorities use all reasonable efforts to stop its
| spread. Whether that's political discussion or CP depends on
| the society.
|
| If I had asked this question, it would be to gauge how far
| along the freedom spectrum this service has been designed to
| operate. There are distribution systems that are capable of
| even evading the most capable authorities, but their user
| experience is absolutely horrible.
|
| Any system like this will strike a balance, maybe also
| designing provisions for removing "material that is _really_
| bad ". Either out of an ethical obligation, or in order to
| not risk being shut down wholesale.
|
| A system that was truly free and unlimited, would be the tool
| of an anarchist. Few people wish the implication of such a
| technology.
| jstummbillig wrote:
| I think this maps reasonably well to a rise of both
| technological abuse and accountability when producing things
| for the internet now, compared to what it used to be.
| drukenemo wrote:
| Who control the controllers?
| KMag wrote:
| One of these days, I'm going to actually sit down and
| read through Juvenal's Satires[0]. I've read Plato's
| Republic and Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, but not any of
| the Roman classics.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Satires_(Juvenal)
| oriettaxx wrote:
| I would skip and opt for Stoics:
|
| "Don't want the world to work like you want it to work.
| Love how it actually works and you will be happy."
| justtopostthis3 wrote:
| Until you wake up one morning and realize that all the
| things you loved about how the world works have changed.
| KMag wrote:
| Yes, particularly after observing how poorly society is
| adapting to pervasive social media.
|
| 3-4 years ago, I was nearly a free speech maximalist. I
| hope we figure out a way to properly educate middle school
| and high school students about cognitive biases, logical
| fallacies, statistical fallacies, and other tools needed to
| properly deal with social media. Right now, society is just
| adjusting very poorly to the advent of social media.
| talhah wrote:
| I wish more schools taught us the tools to deal with
| social media.
|
| At my school we're just given stale advice about
| cyberbullying and about posting things we'd regret.
|
| People don't even question the legitimacy of things often
| or think critically about it. It's as if their critical
| thinking is numbed. I don't know how else to put it, but
| it's rather interesting.
| marvin wrote:
| The Internet is like we've suddenly invented sugar,
| alcohol or firearms, without any of the societal tools to
| limit its damage. Laws, norms, defense forces, taboos.
|
| It's really something straight out of singularity-related
| philosophy. A technology with massive benefits and
| dangers that's rolled out worldwide in only a couple of
| decades. If you look at social media as a whole, let's
| say it was in effect a single decade.
|
| I'm sure we'll get a handle on social media eventually,
| with some damage along the way. But the underlying
| driver, fast technological change, won't disappear. This
| is not the last time we'll get into similar trouble.
| Closi wrote:
| I think it's because people end up asking "what can I
| functionally do on this platform that I can't functionally do
| on another platform", and it's easier to think of these
| 'negative' examples.
| Proven wrote:
| > can this be used for piracy (movies mp3 etc)? What about
| really nefarious stuff like CP?
|
| How can it be private if it's possible to check what the
| content contains? If it's private you can't tell which network
| packet contains CP and which cat videos.
|
| > Do we know who is responsible and is it possible to report
| and take down links?
|
| How can you report it if you haven't viewed it? If you've view
| it and then report it, how do you think would that work out for
| you?
|
| > Also does running a node involve you in anything unknowingly?
|
| If it's censorship-free then you serve all content unknowingly.
| phreack wrote:
| I had zero knowledge of what any of this was (Sia, Skynet, etc),
| tried looking it up on the page but the technical terms were too
| many and there was no glossary I could find. So I started
| searching, read the Readme on Sia's project on Gitlab, and then
| came upon this website [1] which harshly demonizes both Sia and
| Skynet due to maintainers banning a critic, and allegedly being
| generally toxic.
|
| This is very much not a good look at all for the whole thing, and
| I suggest the developers should both solve this problem amicably
| ASAP, and also add very clear 'WHAT THIS IS AND HOW IT WORKS'
| links on every page related to the project, with many real world
| examples of how/why use this and with nearly no use of specific
| jargon that's not introduced clearly during explanations.
|
| [1] https://siasetup.info/guides/using-skynet
| dghelm wrote:
| For a more accessible description of what sia & skynet do,
| https://siastats.info/sia101 is a good starting place.
| Esiason wrote:
| https://siastats.info/sia101 is a nice newbie guide to Sia
| and Skynet but the more technical guides and troubleshooting
| knowledge exists at https://siasetup.info
| zaptheimpaler wrote:
| Why is this free? Who is paying the Sia nodes to store the data?
| forgot_old_user wrote:
| How much does it cost?
| cyphermoon wrote:
| Portal and renter nodes pay hosts for the data in Siacoin.
| These payments are managed by file contracts that renters and
| hosts agree on and sign cryptographically. These contracts
| involve periodic verification that the data is being hosted.
| Failure to verify involves an automatic financial loss for
| hosts.
| ranguna wrote:
| Am I the only one that can't download the examples, it just gets
| stuck. Also the dapp example throws me a json saying that skynet
| is blocked.
| Taek wrote:
| Are you in Europe by any chance? We haven't finished setting up
| load balancing yet and the Europe server is getting hit really
| hard right now.
|
| The dapp sample was blocked because it was mistaken for a
| phishing attempt (it's the Uniswap frontend) and Namecheap
| required us to block the link. Sloppy of us not to change the
| link to an unblocked example, we'll do that on Monday. In the
| meantime, here's a dapp sample:
| https://marstorage.hns.siasky.net/
| mortenjorck wrote:
| It's only a matter of time before this project gets a cease &
| desist from Disney.
|
| (Disney owns 20th Century Studios, formerly 20th Century Fox,
| owner of the Terminator franchise.)
| aszantu wrote:
| they could call it skynettery afterwards xD
| Taek wrote:
| We get somewhere between dozens and hundreds of DMCA's per
| week, and we comply with all of them. We can't actually take
| content off of Skynet itself (similar to how you can't actually
| take content off of IPFS), but we can have our portal
| (https://siasky.net) refuse to serve content with known-
| infringing or known-abusive hashes.
| KMag wrote:
| GP was joking about the name of the project itself infringing
| on Disney trademarks, but (as a peer notes) Fox/Disney hasn't
| registered a trademark on Skynet.
| lgats wrote:
| Several trademarks exist for skynet, none are registered
| to/owned by Disney https://uspto.report/Search/Skynet
| LockAndLol wrote:
| Can somebody explain what the difference between this and IPFS
| is? I see block chain mentioned so I assume you pay for storage
| but that page just allows you to upload anything right away
| without payment. Is this actually an alternative to FileCoin?
|
| https://ipfs.io
|
| https://filecoin.io
| [deleted]
| RMPR wrote:
| After skimming a bit, I don't see how they plan to deal with
| abuse. Especially if there's no size limitation on files.
| tmikaeld wrote:
| There seems to be a lot of issues other than that.
|
| https://siasetup.info/concerns-about-sia-and-skynet
|
| "Sia hosts have always had questionable liability over what
| they store as hosts. These concerns are likely to amplify with
| Skynet, where a host may hold a whole unencrypted file and
| serve it to a portal or public users, exposing the host as
| being the one that holds a file that may infringe copyright or
| be illegal in some other way."
| Taek wrote:
| I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but most
| jurisdictions have strong protections for providers hosting
| third party content so long as the providers are not aware
| that the content is problematic. If a provider is notified
| that there is problematic content on their machine, they have
| an obligation to take it down in a reasonable timeframe.
|
| Sia hosts already have tooling for complying with DCMAs and
| abuse notices. To the best of my knowledge, no Sia host has
| yet received one, but we are prepared for when that moment
| happens.
|
| Most of the rest of the issues in that letter are overstated
| and ungenerous. Sia/Skynet is an early project, with a small
| team and a limited budget. Of course it is not as polished as
| its centralized alternatives, but if you compare to better
| funded projects like Storj and Filecoin, I believe it's very
| difficult to say in good faith that our team is not up for
| the task.
| bitwize wrote:
| > I am not a lawyer and this is not legal advice, but most
| jurisdictions have strong protections for providers hosting
| third party content so long as the providers are not aware
| that the content is problematic.
|
| We cannot rely on that continuing to be the case. Neither
| Trump nor Biden want Section 230 to keep going as it is.
| cyphermoon wrote:
| Portals and hosts manage abuse reports. It is their
| responsibility to filter content. Of course, anyone can spin up
| their own portal and pin content that is being censored.
| However, that is their private business. No low size limitation
| on files is a feature, not a bug. Files on public portals are
| currently kept for 90 days on a best effort basis. If you want
| to make sure your files stay pinned, you will soon be able to
| sign up for a paid account.
| Taek wrote:
| We're just finishing up the database code to handle this, but
| most Skynet portals intend to operate on a freemium model. If
| you use Skynet for free, you get a certain amount of storage
| and a ratelimit on your usage of the platform, and if you
| upgrade to a flat monthly fee you get more storage and better
| access speeds.
| qwantim1 wrote:
| Another thing named Skynet?[1]
|
| [1]- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skynet
| KMag wrote:
| Maybe they should rename it to YATNS/Yet Another Thing Named
| Skynet?
| miki123211 wrote:
| What's the difference between Sia and Skynet? This is the point
| that confuses me most.
|
| I thought Sia is the low-level layer and Skynet is the high-level
| layer, but one of the comments says that Sia encrypts data and
| Skynet doesn't, so that makes no sense.
|
| Too many names that aren't clearly explained in a very obvious
| place is a plague that many otherwise cool projects suffer from.
| dghelm wrote:
| Yeah, there's actually organizational changes happening to help
| remedy this. At risk of over-simplifying: - Sia is the
| blockchain project that lets renters and hosts create a market
| for storage space. (using SiaCoin as the cryptocurrency) -
| Skynet uses this market to provide a data backend for a web
| ecosystem for developers and users. They access the ecosystem
| through "portals," which are actually just specialized hosts on
| the sia network.
|
| Data on the Sia network is encrypted at a storage layer (as
| part of splitting it up to send it to hosts), but Skynet files
| are accessible to anyone who has its hash (portals, ISP, etc
| could see this info when you access the URL). The file contents
| are not encrypted by default because they're meant to be
| widely-accessible, but you can encrypt files on the client-side
| before sending the, to Skynet, which is what
| https://skysend.hns.siasky.net/ and some other projects do.
| Esiason wrote:
| Documentation about Sia and Skynet can be found at
| https://SiaSetup.info in the "Learn" subsection.
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