[HN Gopher] Wildland - open data management protocol
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Wildland - open data management protocol
Author : omnibrain
Score : 115 points
Date : 2021-06-11 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wildland.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (wildland.io)
| foobarbecue wrote:
| https://docs.wildland.io/#multi-categorization is something I've
| always wanted, ever since I first started using computers. It
| seemed so strange to me that a file can only be in one directory
| structure. (Yes, links, I know, but that's a workaround IMO)
| carapace wrote:
| Many (most?) filesystems support hard links.
|
| > Multiple hard links - that is, multiple directory entries to
| the same file - are supported by POSIX-compliant and partially
| POSIX-compliant operating systems, such as Linux, Android,
| macOS, and also Windows NT4[2] and later Windows NT operating
| systems.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_link
| foobarbecue wrote:
| Perhaps what I'm really missing is the UI support for these
| features. Also ability to hard-link directories. Remains to
| be seen if wildland will satisfy.
| bionhoward wrote:
| Usage examples up front would be great for devs
| khimaros wrote:
| this seems like a good starting point:
| https://gitlab.com/wildland/wildland-tutorials/-/tree/master...
| viraptor wrote:
| Docs are not far away. Here's a practical introduction.
| https://docs.wildland.io/#a-practical-introduction-to-wildla...
| sneak wrote:
| Does anyone know of any other standards or libraries for self-
| describing directories (eg manifest files)?
|
| I have a need for this in my own data archiving and it would be
| nice to not reinvent the wheel.
| khimaros wrote:
| seems to have some overlap (at least conceptually) with
| https://remotestorage.io/
| folex wrote:
| How is discovery implemented? Is there a DHT or some gossipping?
|
| I found only this:
|
| > However, we believe it should be possible to bootstrap Wildland
| without any Wildland-specific infrastructure, such as supporting
| some custom network protocol
|
| Does this mean that RnD haven't yet touched networking?
| viraptor wrote:
| The way I understand it, it means that you can run a client on
| your manually defined data containers and not care about the
| networking aspect of wildland-specific environment.
| qainsights wrote:
| What problem it is solving? I have gone thru the docs, but
| couldn't figure it out the purpose :(
| Agnolo_Giotto wrote:
| As I commented above, from the practical introduction, it says,
| "Wildland is a collection of protocols, conventions, software,
| and (soon) a marketplace for leasing storage and in the future
| compute infrastructure. All these pieces work together with one
| goal in mind: to decouple the user's data from the underlying
| infrastructure."
|
| This would seem to make a user not dependent on any one
| platform to hold their data. So it improves data availability,
| platform lock-in risk and some censorship-resistance.
| slantyyz wrote:
| When I see that description you quoted, it just reads like a
| giant string of jargon.
|
| This probably dates me, but back in the day (1990ish), there
| used to be an application on Mac (System 7 or 8 I think)
| called the MBA Phrase Generator that would generate sentences
| like that.
| transpute wrote:
| Sept 2020 seminar on Wildland,
| https://golem.foundation/2020/10/10/WildCon1.html
|
| _> Wildland is a highly ambitious project to decentralize the
| web, help individuals to take back control of their data, and
| free users from dependency on on-line service providers ... To
| achieve this goal Wildland completely redesigns data management,
| by switching from a service-oriented to the data-oriented
| paradigm, and giving individuals explicit control over the choice
| of data storage infrastructure ... Wildland architecture also
| allows for the creation of decentralized and user-controlled
| social networking apps._
|
| Videos: https://vimeo.com/user124198022
| encryptluks2 wrote:
| Seems really cool, and I can tell that it probably is something I
| want to use... even locally, but the documentation assumes people
| know way too much already and only gives a couple strong
| examples. It appears to be an overlay FS for organizing and
| sharing data using possible blockchain solutions to then make
| that data accessible to other people, and vice versa. Am I
| getting that right?
| lucideer wrote:
| First thing I looked for was whether there's content encryption,
| but couldn't find any mention on the landing page.
|
| A deeper dig found it in the docs[0] but you may want to mention
| that up top.
|
| [0] https://docs.wildland.io/user-guide/encryption-
| backend.html#...
| dddw wrote:
| Hmm quite interesting. Might give it a spin.
| unixhero wrote:
| What is the license?
| mdaniel wrote:
| The client is currently GPLv3
| https://gitlab.com/wildland/wildland-client/-/blob/master/CO...
| but I don't see any repo for their website, nor the standard,
| whitepaper, whatever else, and their bootstrap and tutorial
| repos are All Rights Reserved
| isidor13 wrote:
| It's open source.
| petejodo wrote:
| This actually reminds me of an idea I once had. Rather than
| service providers holding onto your data, there could be
| something equivalent to custodians but instead of having
| lockboxes for your valuables, it'd be for your data. Service
| providers would then "borrow" your data from these custodians to
| provide their services.
|
| This looks sort of like that but marketed from the tech angle
| using docker as an analogy rather than a custodian. I'll have to
| take a deeper dive into this!
| jakobdabo wrote:
| I've had some thoughts about it too. In addition, I think,
| entities which want a piece of your data, should be able to
| somehow define "queries" and the "custodian" (in your terms)
| should be able either to tell yes or no (if you accept to
| answer to the query).
|
| I imagine it this way, you have some kind of device, wanna
| drink in a bar? The bartender can "query" whether you are over
| 21 or not, you see the query, authenticate (with bio and
| pin/password) and your device confirms that you are over 21.
|
| Wanna take a credit, the entity queries to check if your credit
| score is over 9000, and if you agree to let them know then your
| device just answers yes/no.
|
| But there must be ways to protect the data, ideally the data
| should be encrypted at rest (wherever) and decrypted only in
| your device in some kind of secure enclave, so that your
| custodian can sign the result of the query being sure that it
| is not altered.
| lurkerasdfh8 wrote:
| this is just a convoluted way to access information.
|
| Imagine the use case you want to apply a filter to all your
| photos.
|
| Either you give service provider access to all your photos,
| or they give you access to run the code out of their control.
|
| There's no way to compromise this.
|
| For this reason SOLID is pointless too. It is just a fancy
| way to saying "everyone will pay for their own S3 bucket and
| give access to random directories to random companies, oh and
| pay for the entire bandwidth"
| viraptor wrote:
| There's no _currently practical_ way to compromise. On
| theory we have homomorphic encryption which would be able
| to apply filters over opaque data. But it 's not fast
| enough yet.
| sambroner wrote:
| Very similar to Solid! Worth checking out. It's a Tim Berners-
| Lee project
| sbazerque wrote:
| Or Hyper Hyper Space:
|
| https://www.hyperhyperspace.org
| crispyporkbites wrote:
| Or the now defunct tent protocol https://tent.io
| https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tent_(protocol) from the
| team that made the also now defunct Flynn https://Flynn.io
| softblush wrote:
| Joanna Rutkowska (QubesOS) is part of the team for this
| chimen wrote:
| I have no clue what are they doing. My "data", your "data"...it's
| not here, nor there, it's everywhere.
| isidor13 wrote:
| Kinda like a decentralized Dropbox except the data is actually
| stored in a virtual container on your machine. That makes it
| censorship-resistant and cuts away the single point of failure,
| like ones where outages of Google affect a significant part of
| the global infrastructure. These containers are encrypted by
| default and access to them can be shared (key exchange) or be
| made public. They want to decouple user data from the operating
| system it's stored on. The goal is making it possible to store
| different data in different containers (think of them as
| folders) and being able to clearly define the access to each
| container. It solves a lot of problems with IT security, since
| it allows a framework (and in the future a user-friendly
| interface) for everybody to store their valuable data in very
| secure containers only they have access to (operating system,
| secret documents, keys) while running pretty much the rest of
| their system in isolated containers. This way even if you were
| to download some malware only the container it's running on
| would be contaminated, unlike nowadays where the hacker gains
| access to pretty much your whole storage space. They also
| define another kind of containers called 'compute manifests'
| where instances with access can perform computations; as far as
| I know legacy cloud storages like Google Drive don't allow the
| user to run executables in them, so that's quite revolutionary.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Apart from just "blockchhain", does anyone have context on what
| this means and/or what problem it's solving?
|
| > Part of each payment will be converted into GLM to generate a
| Proof-of-Usage token that will give you certain decision rights
| within Wildland's unique governance system.
|
| I found this while researching if GLM was their own token, and it
| actually _appears_ that it isn 't their own token, but it's
| possible Wildland was created to show off GLM:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/GolemProject/comments/i4qwng/wildla...
|
| Related to that, this is a lot less marketing-speak than their
| website:
| https://old.reddit.com/r/GolemProject/comments/nxfufh/golem_...
| but I still don't follow the relationship of "payment" to
| "decision rights" or "governance"
| wlodekg wrote:
| The relationship is explained in detail in the Wildland paper -
| https://golem.foundation/resources/documents/wildland-w2h.pd...
|
| There's also a talk on this very subject available at
| https://vimeo.com/473452625
| mdaniel wrote:
| Great, thank you for those resources
|
| For followers on, the answer is in section 3.3.2 of the
| whitepaper (currently page 31) and boils down to:
|
| > A very important feature of the PoU token is that it is
| designed to not become a speculative crypto asset. As it is
| permanently locked with the user's public key, it cannot be
| transferred and hence traded. While we envision delegation of
| voting power along the lines of liquid democracy principles,
| this delegation can always be revoked by the user
|
| so the PoU tokens granted back to the user is actually not
| related to the monetary relationship between the user and
| Wildland, but is a side-effect of merely participating in the
| experiment. Those tokens appear to grant the user voting
| rights on the product roadmap of Wildland, although it's not
| obvious how one would "spend" those PoU tokens given that
| they can't be transferred back to Wildland in order to buy a
| feature
|
| They talk about it in terms of voting based on the
| accumulation of PoU, which I think understand, but if Jeff
| Bezos got to vote 54B times for President and did not have to
| _spend_ any one of those 54B assets to do so, the country
| will perpetually do whatever Jeff wants without any real risk
| of overtaking that king of the hill status
| Agnolo_Giotto wrote:
| From the practical introduction, it says, "Wildland is a
| collection of protocols, conventions, software, and (soon) a
| marketplace for leasing storage and in the future compute
| infrastructure. All these pieces work together with one goal in
| mind: to decouple the user's data from the underlying
| infrastructure."
|
| This would seem to make a user not dependent on any one
| platform to hold their data. So it improves data availability,
| platform lock-in risk and some censorship-resistance.
| mdaniel wrote:
| Thank you for your reply
|
| So, I pay Wildland USD$100, they spend USD$80 on Google Cloud
| to provide some "s3" storage, possibly instances or cloud
| function execution or whatever, and then they give me back
| GLM$20(??) because ... they want GLM to flourish?
|
| If "a user [were] not dependent upon any one platform," then
| why would anyone pay Wildland to be in their alleged
| marketplace? Why wouldn't I buy GLM on coinbase (or wherever
| folks do that kind of thing, since AIUI PoU means I can't
| mine them) and then save myself the hassle of paying Wildland
| for only some percentage of GLM refunded to me?
|
| And all of this talk about our brave new semantic d-web 3.0
| future, but until Google Photos or my insurance company lets
| me "grant" them access to my photos or medical documents or
| whatever, it's just college dorm talk, IMHO -- who is the
| target audience for this webpage?
| viraptor wrote:
| Have a look at https://wildland.io/2021/06/11/introducing-
| client-v0.1.html and examples which talk a bit more about
| the client usage. GLM seems to be a completely optional
| add-on feature, not something wildland is based on.
| tibbetts wrote:
| This project would benefit from someone with some marketing
| skills being clearer about not what it does, but who would use it
| and why.
| guywhocodes wrote:
| I couldn't understand what it does and I'm working on something
| not too dissimilar (I think)
| t0mas88 wrote:
| I don't even get enough grasp of what it does to decide whether
| I want to spend more time to figure out if it's useful to me.
| It can't be that hard to explain the thing your project
| solves/makes possible for me in 5 to 10 lines right?
| joshspankit wrote:
| Ditto. Nor do I know how it addresses any of the top-5 issues
| when it comes to data (consistency, speed of access, scaling,
| etc)
| mdaniel wrote:
| I don't believe it addresses many of those things, but it
| might address scaling given that its very concept is
| federation
|
| But, AIUI, *the problem* it is solving is that
| [conceptually] instead of the user leasing S3 space from
| AWS, and putting their photos on Someone Else's Computer,
| but then being wholly responsible for the ACLs required to
| grant or revoke access to said photos, in this model the
| user can instead give out a lease of access to the photos
| to dedicated groups, and the storage comes from The Whole
| Internet (ala Filecoin)
|
| Again, AIUI, this is much closer to a virtual-host model: I
| can create
| joshspankit.photos.example.com/timeline/2022/02/30/Trip to
| Antarctica/ which only you can access, and only the photos
| I put in that container, and I can revoke that at will by
| deleting joshspankit.photos.example.com at which point your
| lease evaporates
|
| Plus, blockchain something something
| mushufasa wrote:
| Exactly. Tell me what problems it solves, not what features it
| has.
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(page generated 2021-06-11 23:00 UTC)