[HN Gopher] Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent ...
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Show HN: Decentralized, Mutable, Serverless Torrent Swarm Websites
Author : publiush
Score : 392 points
Date : 2021-12-10 18:26 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (github.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
| nynx wrote:
| This is what decentralization is about, not crypto.
| xwvvvvwx wrote:
| this literally uses a cryptocurrency (handshake) for domains
| Aeolun wrote:
| I thought Handshake looked nice, but it turned out to be just
| more crypto and coins.
| everfree wrote:
| How would you solve the problem of spam and squatting
| without the network requiring payment for domains?
|
| Subsequently, how else besides using a crypto coin would it
| be feasible for a decentralized network to take payment?
| Aeolun wrote:
| Good question, I'm just not satisfied with this answer.
|
| Requiring some form of payment is fine, but I'd like the
| 'currency' to be locked into the network so it doesn't
| become something you can trade.
|
| Maybe contribute to the network in exchange for a
| balance, that you can then exchange for domains after
| which it's gone.
|
| Ideally also figure out a way to limit people simply
| creating many accounts and using that, guess you can
| require upkeep for all domains, so when you stop
| contributing they disappear.
| publiush wrote:
| > Maybe contribute to the network in exchange for a
| balance, that you can then exchange for domains after
| which it's gone.
|
| You've just described handshake - when you purchase a
| domain, the coins are burned in exchange for the domain.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Just that one part? Or everything? I'm not quite sure how
| Handshake is generating balance in the first place,
| beyond a lot of mentions of coins and exchange tickers.
| everfree wrote:
| How would you accomplish PKI in such a way that would
| allow people to rotate keys to keep their account secure,
| but without allowing them to rotate their key into a
| different person's custody, thus doing a de-facto
| transaction that would enable someone to integrate the
| system with an exchange and put a price on account
| balances?
|
| Also, what kind of consensus mechanism would you use,
| with the understanding that without a way to
| transfer/sell balances, Proof of Work degenerates quickly
| into a 51% attack, and Proof of Stake is infeasible? Or
| do you have a different idea in mind to decentralize such
| a system?
|
| I'm asking these questions because knowing what I do
| about decentralized systems, in the end I can't see any
| way around a system like this having transferable
| balances. Either that or you centralize the part of it
| that keeps track of the network's history, making it
| basically akin to a big git repository.
| Aeolun wrote:
| > without allowing them to rotate their key into a
| different person's custody, thus doing a de-facto
| transaction that would enable someone to integrate the
| system with an exchange and put a price on account
| balances?
|
| I don't think this is possible in the first place.
| Someone will always be able to go around the system
| entirely and give someone their entire account. If somone
| wishes to sell all their names at the same time (or make
| one account per domain so they can sell it), there's
| little to prevent that. I think making it harder is
| probably more trouble than it is worth for most malicious
| actors though (especially as they have to work with each
| individual account to retain the domains).
|
| As to consensus mechanism, I have no idea. I don't have
| enough experience with such systems to say one way or
| another.
| k__ wrote:
| Made my day. Thanks.
| iskander wrote:
| I think the evolution of "decentralized" infrastructure will
| start to bring out a lot more overlap between "traditional"
| decentralization communities (building stuff like Beaker
| browser) and some of the useful bits of crypto.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| Yes, I think this is both the biggest opportunity, and the
| biggest challenge, especially as I think there's been a
| growing separation between those two communities in the
| last few months and years. There's so many good ideas and
| implementations (and investment in harder problems of
| distributed systems) in the crypto/blockchain/web3 space,
| and a lot of hard-won experience and genuine applications
| in, as you say, "traditional" communities. It's just a
| matter of finding some sort of common ground.
|
| I do think that the https://getdweb.net/ community is a
| model of how that crossover can work. It's also something I
| think a lot about at FFDW, which because of IPFS and
| Filecoin, has its feet in both camps.
| serverholic wrote:
| > some of the useful bits of crypto
|
| There is actually a ton of interesting and useful
| innovation happening in the crypto space that isn't
| necessarily crypto-specific. If hacker news wasn't so die-
| hard anti-crypto then more people would see that.
|
| - zero-knowledge proofs
|
| - quadratic funding
|
| - verkle trees
|
| - etc.
| iskander wrote:
| At the same time, I think it's a lot to expect of people
| to wade through the feverish speculative bubble to make
| sense of what technology is interesting. I think it would
| be nice if some of this stuff started making its way out
| of currency associated blockchain projects and into the
| wider world of decentralized algorithms and protocols.
| publiush wrote:
| There's a dilemma as the magnet links/hashes aren't easily
| shareable. One option is to create a DMT directory, but this
| would be centralized. Handshake is the most mature
| decentralized domain name project, and I opted for it. It
| uses coins to limit abuse, since anyone can flood a
| decentralized system. You don't need coins to browse and use
| federalist. That said, if there are any other immutable DNS
| systems that aren't centrally controlled that I could review,
| I'll definitely take a look!
| saurik wrote:
| FWIW, Unstoppable Domains is already supported by both
| Brave _and Opera_ (which I found interesting), and, from my
| determination, has a much greater chance of even more
| widespread adoption (due to it not being such a conflict
| with ICANN). (It has its own issues, but I frankly feel
| like _all_ of these projects are still a bit "sketch".
| That said, I am not really pro- the premise of websites
| relying on permanent human-mappable identifiers in the
| first place, as I feel there are a ton of philosophical
| failings that people mostly just try to pretend don't exist
| down that road. I would much prefer projects like this just
| use EVM addresses as their underlying address and then
| users could potentially allow ENS names to map to those if
| they absolutely must have names locally, but then the names
| aren't really the canonical bits: permanent unique names
| just have too many moral landmines to be acceptable.)
| panick21_ wrote:
| Have you checkout out the Gnu Name System from GNUNet?
| publiush wrote:
| The website for GNUnet seems to be down/404, but it looks
| like ownership of names is controlled by a central
| authority
| (https://manpages.debian.org/unstable/gnunet/gnunet-
| namestore...).
| summm wrote:
| If you want to do anything decentralized, I highly
| recommend to read all of the scientific papers from the
| gnunet authors. They theoretically solved a lot of
| problems a long time ago that modern distributed projects
| keep repeating. About the name system: It is a bit more
| complex than that. Everybody can "create" a domain, but
| others must import it's public key, somewhat compatible
| to a hosts file. The trick is that each domain can have
| arbitrary subdomains, also stored in the DHT. Now one can
| construct arbitrary deep trees. And everyone can choose a
| list of their trusted TLDs, and use them to resolve
| names. Say site.alice.bob.gnu (where .gnu is shipped with
| the client as default) and if I personally decide to
| trust Alice directly, I put her public key into my config
| file and from now on I can use site.alice instead without
| ever touching bob.gnu or .gnu again. Their DHT comes with
| unusual privacy guarantees due to clever cryptography.
| Furthermore gnunet already researched filesharing using
| content addressed blocks to allow for deduplication. Very
| clever. Unfortunately the implementation is not very
| usable and kind of stale. Some of these file sharing
| concepts are also better implemented by Freenet, which is
| a kind of anonymous decentralized web, even somewhat
| usable. A pity that those projects seem kind of stuck.
| duskwuff wrote:
| > The trick is that each domain can have arbitrary
| subdomains, also stored in the DHT. Now one can construct
| arbitrary deep trees. And everyone can choose a list of
| their trusted TLDs, and use them to resolve names. Say
| site.alice.bob.gnu (where .gnu is shipped with the client
| as default) and if I personally decide to trust Alice
| directly, I put her public key into my config file and
| from now on I can use site.alice instead without ever
| touching bob.gnu or .gnu again.
|
| Which is ridiculous -- it makes names unreliable as
| public identifiers. Sure, you can refer to Alice's site
| as "site.alice", but nobody else can resolve that name
| unless they share your configuration. Worse, it means
| that anyone who has a different key mapped as "alice"
| might see "site.alice" resolve to something completely
| different than what you see.
| jancsika wrote:
| In practice it'd probably end up like the sources.list in
| Debian. E.g., an enormous number of users just use
| whatever pasta is copied in there by default. Then
| special devs change it or copypaste a Debian spell to
| magically add repos for whatever special cases they have.
|
| And let's be honest-- if someone on HN were to post, "OMG
| the security updates repo got DDOS'd in Debian" it's not
| like the entire comment section is going to be filled
| with confused responses like, "Wait, do you mean the
| security updates for the gitlab repo that I added for my
| gitlab instance, or Debian's security repo for Debian the
| Universal Operating System?"
| jancsika wrote:
| It's fully decentralized from what I remember.
|
| Looks like Christian did a quick 4 minute synopsis here:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bB9SC4kD27Y
|
| If you like the idea of both the decentralized resolution
| and using the DHT as a PIR, you might look into it.
|
| Also-- if you find it's the case that it's not currently
| usable (which I'm guessing is the case), it might be
| worthwhile to mention on your README that you looked at
| this as an option and then briefly state the reason(s)
| why you can't use it in practice. If enough prospective
| users of gnunet do this it may motivate the maintainers
| to do something about the current state of the
| documentation and usability...
| anchpop wrote:
| There's ENS, which seems on sturdier footing than Handshake
| to me, but the gas on ethereum is ridiculous
| publiush wrote:
| Isn't Ethereum moving to Proof of Stake though?
| rglullis wrote:
| Yes, but PoS will not solve the problem of gas fees. Gas
| fees only come down when network capacity is higher than
| its demand.
|
| Layer-2 systems (which allow some of the operations to
| happen off-chain) is how Ethereum developers are trying
| to scale the network capacity.
| publiush wrote:
| My worry with Ethereum is that moving to proof of stake
| changes the project from a decentralized one to something
| a little less so.
| everfree wrote:
| Are you not concerned about the decentralization of
| Handshake's PoW consensus, considering that it uses a
| custom hashing algo that seems to be dominated in
| hardware production by a single company, Goldshell?
|
| I believe you may be missing the forest for the trees by
| worrying about Ethereum's decentralization when compared
| to Handshake's.
| rglullis wrote:
| Would you like to check how many people are running
| ETH2.0 validators [0] vs how many people are running
| Handshake nodes?
|
| [0]: https://launchpad.ethereum.org/en/
| chrisco255 wrote:
| ENS is adding layer 2 support soon. While gas sucks on
| layer 1, since it's only ~$5 a year for the domain, you
| can register something for like 10-20 years for not much
| more than the cost to register for one year (gas
| considered).
| xwvvvvwx wrote:
| My comment was not intended as a criticism of your project
| (which seems excellent), but rather an observation that
| crypto may be more useful than the parent had assumed.
| publiush wrote:
| Thank you, and no criticism taken! I agree. The problem
| with projects that incorporate cryptocurrencies these
| days has been that the cryptocurrencies themselves have
| been the focus and sometimes these projects have been
| going out of their way to incorporate them, in addition
| to a lot of projected hopes of what a system could one
| day become, not the reality of the utility of the system
| itself, today.
| chrisco255 wrote:
| ENS (Ethereum Naming Service) is built on immutable smart
| contracts on Ethereum. Domain names (ie example.eth) are
| permissionlessly registered for up to hundreds of years at
| a time for ~$5 a year.
|
| ENS domains can be resolved to Ethereum wallet addresses,
| IPFS, Bitcoin addresses or any other public key or string.
| rvz wrote:
| ENS seems to be centralized on to one smart contract
| holding all the domains under the .eth TLD (which already
| conflicts with the reserved 3 letter TLD for Ethiopia)
| under the control of a typical 'multisig' and 'DAO' which
| is based on 'trusting' the keyholders.
|
| Basically ENS boils down to being a subdomain provider
| with ICANN-like governance, an illusion to _'
| decentralization'_.
| MayeulC wrote:
| > magnet links/hashes aren't easily shareable.
|
| I'm OK with this (and that's more or less what IPFS does),
| you only need to pin a couple hashes, and one could build a
| website directory using this project. Or even a recursive
| DNS with zone delegation to other mutable torrents.
|
| I like the idea of outgoing links being other hashes.
| knownjorbist wrote:
| Crypto is a piece of the puzzle.
| rakoo wrote:
| Very nice work ! I wanted to do something similar a long time ago
| but never took the time. Congratulations !
|
| A few points:
|
| - is this using webtorrent-the-library or webtorrent-the-protocol
| ? If it's the latter it's a bit useless. The only reason the
| protocol exists is to make web browsers speak a similar language
| as bittorrent, but both protocols are strictly different. Which
| means if you want to talk both you need to implement both (and
| fortunately webtorrent-the-library does so)
|
| - The Readme says this is good for whistleblowing. Actually this
| is one of the worst ways of doing it. When using DHT you tell the
| whole world your IP is interested in a specific content. When
| using bittorrent your IP connects with other peers interested in
| a specific content. There is nothing easier for LE than watching
| a specific content of interest and see who is interested in it:
| journalists, sources, ... An anonymisation layer is mandatory for
| this use case
| peterth3 wrote:
| > This is great for blogging, whistle blowing, and other things.
|
| Could this support user authentication for uploading content?
| Maybe with something like metamask?
|
| Using this tech to make a medium/substack/twitter-style site
| would lower the barrier to entry for non-technical journalists.
| xrd wrote:
| I cloned it. I don't see how to get to the publius or federalist
| scripts. I wanted to try to create a blog; is this documented
| somewhere?
|
| It's an exciting project.
| publiush wrote:
| For federalist:
|
| git clone https://github.com/publiusfederalist/federalist
|
| cd federalist
|
| npm install
|
| npm start
|
| For publius, there are two options, I'll start with option 1,
| which is an immutable (no updates) model:
|
| git clone https://github.com/publiusfederalist/publius
|
| cd publius
|
| npm install webtorrent supercop.js
|
| ./key
|
| ./publius &
|
| Then you can either share that magnet link/browse that link, or
| take the further step to add it as a TXT record on the
| Handshake blockchain for a name.
|
| If you would like to do it mutably, there is an additional
| step:
|
| ./seed &
|
| Then, you can share the link created by this and create the TXT
| record with this one instead.
|
| When you update your blog, you can edit the files in the
| web3root folder, and then simply restart publius and seed.
| throwaway94294 wrote:
| Isn't this just trusting whoever runs https://query.hdns.io ?
|
| https://github.com/publiusfederalist/federalist/blob/3670867...
| publiush wrote:
| Good catch!
|
| It's temporarily using hdns.io as many people still do not have
| an hsd node installed. A later version will be shipped with a
| light weight SPV resolver, at which point, the last piece of
| the puzzle will be complete.
| conradev wrote:
| BitTorrent is so good and I am surprised that I don't see it in
| more places
|
| Using a private key for mutations is a great idea. I believe it
| is similar to how BitTorrent Live (undocumented) was implemented,
| where new content was added to a merkle tree. That is at least
| how RFC7574 proposed doing it
| naanbread wrote:
| Does this mitigate any aspect of DDOS?
| account-5 wrote:
| How did this thread about a decentralised serverless I internet
| protocol end up in a debate about US gun policy?
| rvz wrote:
| As the saying goes - 'The road to hell is paved with good
| intensions'.
| neiman wrote:
| This is a fantastic work!
|
| The best part of Federalist is reading and displaying the
| websites from BitTorrent using BEP-46. The Handshake part is less
| impressive for me personally, since it basically reads Handshake
| values from a service (query.hdns.io/dns-query).
|
| If Federalist adds a Handshake daemon, it will be much more
| decentralized, but at the same time much heavier on resources.
|
| For historical perspective, decentralized websites (or p2p
| websites) are here since like 20 years. Here's a super concise
| list of what I recall off the top of my head.
|
| - Freenet is the first project I'm aware of doing that
|
| - ENS+IPFS websites is a strong movement now (see
| esteroids.eth.limo, I'm a co-creator of this)
|
| - ZeroNet was going strong like 5 years ago, and even though it's
| less popular now it's still functional and a nice project.
|
| - Agregor browser brings decentralized website the Hypercore (a
| successor of DAT protocol)
|
| - BitTorrent was supposed to have a project especially for
| decentralized websites (Maelstrom web browser), but it didn't
| took off eventually
|
| - Magnetico is a search engine built on top of BitTorrent, very
| similar to Federalists, but without the Handshake part.
|
| - Skynet is a project meant almost only for decentralized
| websites, based on Sia. They have integration with ENS, and
| afaik, also with Handshake (check it out!)
|
| - Swarm, Namecoin etc. could also be used for decentralized
| websites. I saw some people doing demos with it, but can't recall
| any links/names atm.
| nyolfen wrote:
| i remember dreaming about something like this almost 20 years
| ago, when understanding torrents drew me into learning about
| networking and computing generally. huge props, it fills me with
| a warm feeling to see that these systems are not just possible
| but manifest.
| peter_retief wrote:
| Downloading, setting up and having a look. Using IPFS/IPLD at the
| moment. Will give feedback later
| Geee wrote:
| This doesn't solve the problem that users have to host files
| themselves, which makes the network unsuitable for many use
| cases. With torrents and IPFS, only popular content will be
| hosted by voluntarists with varying levels of service.
|
| This is the drawback of traditional decentralized networks
| compared to blockchain-based networks such as Sia/Skynet, where
| users can pay to get their files hosted with guaranteed service
| level.
| publiush wrote:
| You can pay seedbox services for hosting as well, but
| information the swarm cares about will continue to exist in the
| swarm. That being said, I think Sia/Skynet is a beautiful
| project and recommend everyone to check it out as well. I also
| saw a few other great projects listed in this thread which all
| sound fascinating.
| mrtksn wrote:
| What are some cool websites that I can visit right now?
| publiush wrote:
| It's new, so I don't think there are many out there yet. I do
| hope that this changes the landscape of the ecosystem for
| 'decentralization.' It's not supposed to be about tokens or
| organizational marketing hype. First, it's about free speech
| and freedom of information. "De-platforming" is now extinct.
| Only then, can you even begin to discuss anything else.
|
| I'm very thankful to WebTorrent, DMT, Handshake and Electron
| for making things possible.
| mrtksn wrote:
| Thanks, the work done is definitely cool but, as with any
| other decentralization project, I'm yet to find the content
| use cases.
|
| The only two kinds of successful content types that I'm aware
| of are pirated movies on Torrent and cryptocurrencies on the
| blockchain. They all depend on centralized discovery(torrent
| websites and exchanges).
|
| Which makes me wonder, are these decentralized websites or
| social media platforms attacking the right problems?
| publiush wrote:
| If someone wants to make a new kind of torrent website with
| federalist that doesn't rely on centralized servers, they
| now can! It would be helpful for me when I download my
| Ubuntu ISOs. ;)
| rektide wrote:
| > _I'm yet to find the content use cases._
|
| It's an alternative transport, not application layer. If
| you can imagine doing anything with the world wide web , or
| ftp, you can imagine what this is for. It can transport
| hypertext files around, or whatever other file type you
| want.
|
| In the web case, it'd just be some local http files you
| could open in a local file origin. There'd be no server.
| But that's still a way to exchange whatever art or media
| you could ever imagine.
|
| We are bounded only by imagination. The internet is built
| around the Internet Protocol (IP), a way of streaming data
| arbitrarily from one computer to another. It has been up to
| us to imagine uses, to chase new possibilities. What do you
| think the use cases for IP are? Can you see what that made
| possible? Your question is in effect that, and trying to
| grasp at how broad, how possible, how potentiated this
| great work is is dauntingly hard, for we could share any
| type of content we want with either.
| Latty wrote:
| Deplatforming still exists while any curated platform still
| exists, which will (hopefully) be always.
|
| It shouldn't be possible for you to end up with nowhere to
| speak, that's why the public square exists, and I accept
| there is a need for an online public square that is currently
| pseudo-fufilled by private social media sites, but that
| doesn't mean deplatforming is bad.
|
| Freedom of expression includes the freedom _not_ to endorse
| or express an idea, and platforms shouldn 't be forced to
| allow people to use them to amplify their speech, as then
| that right is violated, enforced expression is just as
| harmful as enforced silence.
| bluedays wrote:
| You seem to be arguing yourself in a circle.
| Latty wrote:
| Would you care to expand? I think my point is sound and
| relatively simple: deplatforming isn't the problem, the
| lack of a public square is. Deplatforming is, in itself,
| a form of protected expression.
| DarylZero wrote:
| If the prohibition of deplatforming is why we need a
| public square, it does sound inconsistent to say
| deplatforming isn't the problem.
|
| "The problem isn't deplatforming -- it's the lack of
| places where deplatforming is prohibited."
| Latty wrote:
| How is that inconsistent? Just because it's good to have
| access to something doesn't mean we want it _everywhere_.
|
| This goes for a lot of things. It would be a problem if
| there was nowhere you could urinate, but that doesn't
| make rules against urinating in the street bad.
|
| It is important that there are places you can't be
| censored, but that doesn't mean _every_ place should be
| forced to be unfiltered firehoses. Curation has value.
| Should every newspaper be forced to platform anyone who
| sends them an article?
|
| Enforced speech is just as harmful as prohibited speech.
| People should have the right to choose who they platform.
| publiush wrote:
| This is a project I've been working on to create decentralized,
| peer to peer, "serverless" websites using several technologies
| including webtorrent, dmt (mutable torrent BEP-46), and handshake
| decentralized domains.
|
| You can create either an immutable (uneditable) torrent site, or
| you can create a ed25519 keypair and create a mutable (updatable)
| torrent site.
|
| This is great for blogging, whistle blowing, and other things. It
| also scales well since torrent technology is great although it
| had previous been pigeonholed to other use cases.
|
| Please give it a try and let me know your thoughts! I don't take
| any credit for this since I just weaved the great technologies
| others already made together!
| RobLach wrote:
| Very cool and actualized proof-of-concept. "Decentralization"
| beyond a marketing term.
| derbOac wrote:
| How would you compare this in a use-case sense to something like
| Beaker browser?
|
| Also -- and I'm unfamiliar with handshake -- but is the sort of
| thing that could work over ad hoc networks?
| publiush wrote:
| The Beaker browser looks interesting -- it looks a lot like
| DHT/DMT (https://hypercore-protocol.org/), but I speculate it's
| likely more specialized for the use case.
|
| Handshake names are decentralized and on chain, so as long as
| you have access to read the chain, it would work over ad hoc
| networks as well (and offline/local).
| nubela wrote:
| Is there a mobile client?
| oscargrouch wrote:
| This is cool.
|
| I'm also working on a decentralized distribution mechanism based
| on torrents, and while i've being working on a different
| architecture, the network mechanism are basically the same with a
| couple of differences on the network level.
|
| In my case i'm working on a very customized version of chrome
| where the web api is actually available for native applications
| beyond Javascript.
| publiush wrote:
| That sounds interesting! I would love to hear more!
| oscargrouch wrote:
| Sure. is there a way to contact you?
| publiush wrote:
| Using SMTP, publiusfederalist and then the email provider
| is tutanota (.com)!
| lachstar-x wrote:
| Have you considered routing through or utilizing the Session
| network as well? It's an improved version of Tor and you
| could possibly build this into a dApp on the Oxen network
| (oxen.io)
| dane-pgp wrote:
| This looks like a great project, thank you.
|
| One aspect of censorship resistance is the ability for people to
| publish and read content anonymously (or pseudonymously). Could
| you add something to the README about that threat model?
|
| Also, I see that your IRC channel is hosted on Freenode. That
| seems an odd choice for a project that is opposed to censorship.
| Please consider a network with a better track record in that
| regard.
| publiush wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| It doesn't actually allow you to publish and read anonymously
| without Tor or a VPN, but I will definitely recommend using
| both of those on the README. I do want to be careful about what
| is and isn't claimed, as I believe the world has become a bit
| dissatisfied with overclaims from decentralization projects
| lately.
|
| I don't think I've come to the same conclusion about freenode
| (https://news.itsfoss.com/freenode-controversy/), and IRC is
| only decentralized if there isn't just one network anyway. I
| also don't think this is the right forum for this anyhow!
| You're definitely free to setup the same channel (#scarywater)
| on another network, and I'd be happy to be present there as
| well!
| southerntofu wrote:
| > I don't think I've come to the same conclusion about
| freenode (https://news.itsfoss.com/freenode-controversy/)
|
| This article really obscures some facts. For example, it
| implies that Lee was the person providing for freenode, when
| in fact he was just one of many donors: most servers in the
| network were donated by non-profits. Likewise, the article
| says Freenode operators were not staff because they were not
| paid: they still donated their time and resources to keeping
| the network alive. Also, it says Freenode was "taken over" by
| Christel, which to my knowledge is not exactly correct: from
| my understanding, she was indeed granted responsibilities,
| but was not supposed to govern (as in, give orders) to the
| network.
|
| Also, most of the drama took place _after_ this article was
| published. Many chans which remained on Freenode were pushed
| out by the new management who seemingly ran regexes on all
| incoming messages, automatically taking over or banning any
| chan which had mentions of libera.chat. That is, until new
| management actually dropped the entire database (a huge
| "fuck you" to the faithful who remained) and started again
| from scratch.
|
| All in all, Freenode's story is one of a collective project
| run by volunteers on their donated time/hardware turned into
| a top-down startup. It also seems the freenode.net homepage
| has been turned into some kind of newsboard without a lot of
| people but where lots of content appears to be "deleted".
| Strange new world: https://freenode.net/n/freenode/57/there-
| are-literally-78-us...
|
| > IRC is only decentralized if there isn't just one network
| anyway.
|
| Not exactly, as there is server-to-server federation to
| distribute the load (but it's not exactly decentralized in
| this case). But yes, decentralizing is better. But there's
| plenty of IRC servers where to host your chans: OFTC,
| tilde.chat, indymedia, hackint...
| rasengan wrote:
| Hi, so I'm Andrew Lee and can definitely comment on this as
| I'm directly involved:
|
| > For example, it implies that Lee was the person providing
| for freenode, when in fact he was just one of many donors:
| most servers in the network were donated by non-profits
|
| You're right, there were other server donors who provided
| servers on the network. However, the donations I provided
| were on a different order of magnitude financially. I
| provided many servers, of course, but also 7 figure funding
| [1]. That said, I'm definitely thankful for the server
| providers who were providing servers to us and continue to.
|
| > Also, it says Freenode was "taken over" by Christel
|
| All documentation both publicly and internally would refute
| this - Christel was fully in charge and the former staff
| was aware since it was explicitly written in the onboarding
| documents and on the website. Also, Tomaw was fully aware
| of this as well as of my ownership of freenode.
|
| > Also, most of the drama took place after this article was
| published.
|
| Again, untrue. Tomaw and I were in discussion and he was
| holding the network hostage for over a month prior to the
| article. prawnsalad of KiwiIRC and Snoonet was mediating
| and had had enough of Tomaw [2].
|
| > All in all, Freenode's story is one of a collective
| project run by volunteers on their donated time/hardware
| turned into a top-down startup.
|
| I think there is a misconception of the difficulty in
| running an IRC network. Given I have been a staff member
| off and on of other networks and continue to be on several,
| including on the coding teams, I can assure you that nobody
| would say this is a difficult time consuming thing. It's
| not like open source code contribution.
|
| Secondly, several members received monetary benefits - from
| me - in the form of flights, hotels, etc. like at DEFCON
| for example. The same people have looked me in the eye and
| said thank you before turning around and making up stories
| in a brazen attempt to slander me to take freenode. Not
| very upstanding people.
|
| I think it's pretty clear what they cared about when you
| review Libera months later and see that it's a closed group
| run by the former freenode staffers, and they are now the
| oligarchs of Libera.
|
| Finally, stop trying to force or pressure people to leave
| freenode. You're acting like the Libera staff who actually
| spent months writing open source projects with the same
| falsehoods asking them to leave. It's a form of censorship
| but worse it's bullying.
|
| As for me and freenode, we have been in legal discussion to
| truly decentralize the network and give it to the people -
| and that is what is happening. I have always been the
| custodian and financial supporter supporting freenode, even
| when the former staff was facing legal action from users
| who they had harassed, so this isn't outside of my resume
| and track record - I obviously care about it deeply.
|
| Freenode will belong to the people where it belongs, not
| the former staffers hands.
|
| [1] http://techrights.org/2021/05/22/freenode-
| misinformation-or-...
|
| [2] https://gist.github.com/prawnsalad/4ca20da6c2295ddb06c1
| 64679...
| rakoo wrote:
| Be careful about the integration with Tor, they explicitly
| discourage the use of torrents (since they're so heavy they
| make the whole network slower)
| schleck8 wrote:
| > censorship resistance
|
| Can someone tell me what is going to happen if let's say a
| terror group decides to use this for propaganda purposes, along
| the lines of religious fundamentalism/executions as we've
| witnessed before? Who is going to take the blame for providing
| them with what is advertised as an unblockable platform?
|
| Has abuse even been factored in?
| publiush wrote:
| This is an important debate that comes up all too often. I do
| think this is the proper forum for this, so I'm glad you
| brought this up and I would be happy to share my thoughts.
|
| The more information people have had in the history of
| humanity, the more freedoms and liberties we have also had.
| We would likely still be living in monarchies if not for the
| spread of information -- North Korea is a prime example.
|
| If information is good and people agree with it, they will
| consume it and the swarm will be well seeded and public
| consensus will have spoken. If information is bad and people
| disagree with it, they won't consume it and the swarm will be
| sparse at best, at which point, it will be easy for ISPs and
| others to block access to these swarms.
|
| Torrents have been around for a long time, but terrorists
| haven't really utilized them much. On the other hand, anime
| really has to give its thanks to Bram haha.
|
| Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to take
| away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in check.
| The same goes for information or discourse and the 1st
| amendment. The day we censor ourselves is the day we throw
| away liberty.
| noduerme wrote:
| Censorship would be shutting things down after the fact.
|
| I think the important question now is whether it's
| irresponsible to build channels that (A) terrorists will
| find useful, (B) will allow them to look more savvy and
| attractive than they actually are, (C) seed their ideas to
| a wider audience than they have - see [1] - and (D) count
| on less motivated people with nonviolent ideas and less
| time on their hands to offer countervailing ideologies and
| "win" the space. The space you're creating and enabling.
|
| [1] People with more time on their hands and/or a more
| absolute/violent agenda are more apt to find ways to game a
| system, whether it's a swarm or a newsfeed. Their time and
| motivation are asymmetrical to the normal functioning of a
| marketplace of ideas in which good/logical ideas are
| supposed to outperform bad/emotional appeals. The true
| question is not whether this platform can or will be gamed,
| or trying to guess and preempt how it will be gamed, but
| deciding whether it's immoral to exert your intellect to
| _give leverage to_ griefers by giving them more visible
| surface area. If the result is something that only
| marginally helps average people but drastically improves
| the lot of griefers, then the surface area you 're
| providing them to attack everyone else will be
| exponentially larger than the defensible area of reasonable
| ideologies you hope to have counter the bad ones.
|
| In other words, all the talk of open ideas is true in a
| truly open marketplace, but violence tends to fill a
| vacuum, and in a closed system or especially a new, empty
| space with experimental tooling, it is _entirely possible
| for bad actors to drive out good ones._
| noduerme wrote:
| Just to add to this. Back in 2012 I started coding
| something that I considered a necessary libertarian
| corrective to the centralized social networking world.
| I'm not going to post the idea here because I still
| consider it too explosive. Thankfully no one has done it
| yet. There came a point deep into the development when I
| realized that all my arguments to the contrary -
| _arguments which sounded exactly like yours_ - were
| wrong. The system I was building to free humanity from
| centralized, moderated, let 's say channeled forms of
| controversy, would be exploited by the worst, not the
| best. The fascists and the trolls would absolutely
| dominate the space, and if they did, the stakes would be
| life and death. And it would be _me_ who had built that
| space that _they_ were now using; a space they couldn 't
| have conceived of themselves. This was why I shut the
| project down. Looking back, I was right. What's happened
| with FB and Twitter and January 6th was a pale shadow of
| what my concept might have opened up, in those years,
| when anyone was looking for any new platform. The
| sickening thing is that while we're in the business of
| opening up communication and tell ourselves we're
| creating liberty, we do have to weigh the question of
| whether average Joes are ready for it and be honest with
| ourselves - a lot of times they're not.
| publiush wrote:
| I don't think that Facebook and Twitter are a bad thing
| at all. I think there is confusion as there is a massive
| power struggle and a lack of information on our side
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hWLjYJ4BzvI).
|
| Also, I don't know what you mean by "average Joes." I
| don't think any person is less competent than another,
| and I would rather help to give access to information to
| the people, frankly, if I thought someone did have less
| information.
|
| I'm a little confused by your position on people, and
| afraid of your position on freedom of information and
| equality.
| chii wrote:
| > a space they couldn't have conceived of themselves.
|
| It is hubris to think that only you could've conceived
| this idea. Eventually someone else would.
|
| If you released, and controlled it, at least you have a
| way to control the spread of misinformation on it.
| southerntofu wrote:
| Fascists aren't exactly known for thinking outside of the
| box, but rather for throwing their very large resources
| [0] at established methods (eg. militias and propaganda).
|
| Three examples from the tech world of the last two
| decades:
|
| - indymedia.org has arguably been a serious inspiration
| for the fachosphere (although they dropped the bottom-up
| part) in gathering information from many places/topics
|
| - raddle.me newsboard was developed by anarchists but the
| codebase ended up used by fascists
|
| - Trump's TruthSocial is just a rebranded Mastodon,
| although they tried to conceal that fact in the initial
| stages
|
| [0] Fascists of all stripes are famously very well-funded
| and supported by the industry. This is the case today
| (Trump, Bolsonaro, Zemmour, Le Pen..) and was the case
| historically, as portrayed in the "Fascism Inc"
| documentary: https://youtube.com/watch?v=-L5Xlgc8S2Q
| noduerme wrote:
| So far I'm the only one that has conceived of it, but
| even if it was conceived of by the leaders of the KKK,
| they wouldn't have as good a chance of building it
| successfully and making it work to their benefit as if a
| self-interested techie liberal libertarian did all the
| hard stuff for them. Pretty much none of the people dumb
| enough to spend their lives spreading online hate would
| be capable of building the platforms they use to spread
| their garbage. Show me a nazi who's using a computer and
| a network and a website they invented themselves, or
| could ever invent in a million years if left to their own
| self-destructive devices. It's not hubris to realize that
| they lack the intellect and means but are perfectly
| willing to game the results. Also, to wit, "if you
| controlled it" is hubris when you're talking about _any_
| large online platform, but it makes no sense at all if
| you 're talking about something decentralized.
| throwaway14356 wrote:
| well put. The things you forgot: 1) trolling is also a
| type of moderation. It will unmake whatever serious
| effort if 1-2 persons disagree hard enough. 2) sure,
| there will be facists but those technically seek is the
| opposite of the platform. 3) however weird or undesirabe
| some ideologie is we can give it time to come to its
| senses before we go full retard enforcing our own. if we
| cant the other idea deserves to win. its how humanity
| always did its thing. give us enough time and we the
| people burn everything to the ground and start fresh. its
| like a fee we must pay. millions have to die for the
| eventual idiot ruling class to be at least some what
| replaced by people with interests beyond their own.
|
| if the facists won the war our ideas would be the ones
| that desperately need to be silenced by them.
|
| just have the battle royal of weird ideas out in the
| open. if the muskian forced brain chipians win we do that
| for a while. it only seems more stupid than say
| mandatory/forced experimental medication for everyone,
| putting people in cages for smoking weed, starvation
| salaries, selling cars that go faster than the speed
| limit. etc etc
|
| maybe everything i wrote here is the best example of a
| stupid idea? should we investigate or just press delete?
| noduerme wrote:
| I mean, on the scale of weirdness is it weird that we
| sell guns you can't shoot at people, and cars that go
| faster than the speed limit, while locking people up for
| inhaling burning weeds? Uh, yeah. The thing is, we did
| arrive at this set of compromises by something _slightly_
| more logical, flexible, and iterable than one group of
| fanbois just forcibly outnumbering another group of
| idiots. What millions did die for, in the west, was not a
| cult leader or a weird set of ideas, but a legal
| framework. Which, creaky as it is, privileges the right
| of individuals to be treated as individuals and be
| innocent until proven guilty. Not perfectly at all. But
| more individual rights than have ever existed in history,
| and more than could ever exist under the rule of one
| depraved ideology or another. What we have, at the
| moment, is a system that appears to make no sense
| _precisely because it has measures in place to prefer
| individual rights over ideology_. To the extent we have
| any freedom or happiness at all, it 's in contradiction
| to the ideologies being pushed by people who want to have
| their turn to rule and rewrite the social contract. A
| cursory glance at the history of ideological movements
| shows that western democracy is a total aberration in its
| ability to hold murderous ideologues _slightly_ at bay.
|
| So. A battle royale of weird ideas is great, but only if
| it's in a ring where everyone leaves their guns outside,
| and no one's life hangs in the balance. Otherwise it's a
| bunch of trolls playing dress up with someone else's
| clothes, burning someone else's stuff, killing someone
| else's kids; see Stalinism and Nazism. The current
| generation is lost for knowledge of history, so they
| don't understand the fire they're playing with every time
| they think imposing their correct point of view by force
| is the only way. It's not their fault; their parents were
| mostly idiots. But they only exist because some people
| held the fort for an arena where you _could_ debate
| without existential peril to yourself or the opposite
| party. The framework is all. The ideas can come and go
| within it, and lots of seemingly stupid contradictions or
| compromises will arise, as you pointed out. But if any
| side is able to overturn the framework, then there will
| not be a fair battle of ideas ever again.
| noduerme wrote:
| Also, it's entirely possible that a lot of other people
| besides me have conceived of the idea - I'm sure I'm
| probably not the only one - and maybe all of them
| discarded it because they realized what it would lead to.
| I will say that if I ever see it in practice, I'll make
| it my life's mission to attack it and strangle it in its
| crib.
| sterlind wrote:
| Personally, I think the right state answer isn't
| censorship, it's infiltration. Find and bust the people
| creating the illegal content. That's what the Feds have
| done with unsavory hidden services.
| noduerme wrote:
| This is sort of the right answer, but it assumes someone
| is willing to devote as much time to each individual
| terrorist as the terrorist themselves is willing to spend
| creating networks and preparing violence, or that there's
| a well-enough agreed upon set of ideas that a given
| society can make a mass effort to infiltrate those
| networks. Usually that happens via government or very
| rarely journalism; there aren't any great examples of
| vigilante anti-terror or anti-mafia or anti-pedo
| infiltration networks I'm aware of. Again, because crime
| (or you could say, 'evil') is an asymmetrical affair, and
| it takes full time 100 LEOs to find one kid before he
| blows up his school. It's not really possible for private
| vigilante networks to compete with that, even if average
| people did have as much free time as full-time
| psychopaths.
| schleck8 wrote:
| > Just because there are gun abusers, you wouldn't want to
| take away the 2nd amendment which keeps the government in
| check
|
| I don't think this is a good comparison. The second
| ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not mistaken, i. e.
| shortly after the war for independence on american soil
| against an empire, which was fought with militias (hence
| the third ammendement). That's a totally different scenario
| than the 21st century.
|
| It should be monitored who acquires an assault rifle. Or
| you end up with the highest rate of school amok per capita
| globally[1], because gun owners are either mentally
| unstable themselves or not capable of preventing a mentally
| unstable person from getting hold of the rifle due to a
| lack or knowledge. Licenses make just as much sense as they
| do for cars.
|
| Which brings me to the division of powers. The constitution
| balances executive, legislature and judiciary in its three
| articles. It is very difficult for either of these organs
| to abuse power without being met with a restriction. This
| has been the concept since the very beginning, as you
| surely know judging by the gh handle, and you bet the
| federalist paper authors favored an institutional solution
| over arming each citizen.
|
| In other words, the second ammendement is just as little of
| an ultimate for checks and balances as the web 3 is for
| whistleblowing. We already have securedrop and globalleaks.
| Going a step further is possible, but not strictly
| necessary, and should not be treated as such in my opinion.
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/1155011/number-
| school-sh...
| yesbut wrote:
| > It is very difficult for either of these organs to
| abuse power without being met with a restriction.
|
| I think, as we have seen over the past ~40 years, it is
| very easy for either of them to abuse power. On the other
| hand, it is very difficult for voters to implement
| legislation that improves the lives of everyday people in
| any meaningful way. That is really what the Constitution
| did. It created a complex system of government with veto
| points around every corner to, in the words of James
| Madison, "protect the minority of the opulent (wealthy
| property owners) against the majority (the plebs)". And
| this is certainly how it is currently functioning. I
| stopped romanticizing the constitution years ago.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federalist_No._10#Backgroun
| d
| throaway46546 wrote:
| Assault rifles were banned in 1986. The only assault
| rifles available on the civilian market are registered
| pre-ban ones. Due to limited supply they tend to be quite
| expensive ($10,000+). You have to register with the ATF
| and pay a special tax to purchase one.
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| Huh? Pretty sure you can still buy an AR-15 in a lot of
| states, am I missing something?
| anamax wrote:
| What makes an Armalite Rifle-15 significant to you?
|
| I ask because it isn't actually all that interesting as
| far as guns go.
|
| It shoots a fairly low-power cartridge, roughly
| equivalent to 30-30, which means that it isn't powerful
| enough for deer hunting in some states. That's part of
| why it's easy to shoot even for XX folks. (Another part
| is the ergonomics; the stock and hand-grip make it easier
| to shoot correctly from the shoulder than most rifles.)
|
| It's semi-auto, but so are most guns these days. It
| doesn't shoot any faster than other semi-autos. Standard
| capacity magazines aren't any larger.
|
| It is possibly the most popular rifle of all time,
| certainly in the last 50+ years.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| An AR-15 style rifle is not an assault rifle. The
| definition of an assault rifle is "a selective fire rifle
| that uses an intermediate cartridge and a detachable
| magazine". Selective fire means "the capability of a
| weapon to be adjusted to fire in semi-automatic, burst
| mode, and/or fully automatic firing mode". These were
| banned by the 1986 Firearm Owners Protection Act.
|
| There are "assault weapon" bans like that in my home
| state of California that ban certain cosmetic features on
| guns. These are completely pointless as an AR-15 is
| functionally no different from any other semi-automatic
| firearm.
|
| Examples:
|
| Assault Rifle
|
| https://i.imgur.com/pGnxHRD.jpg
|
| "Assault Weapon"
|
| https://i.imgur.com/xhsZ2dK.jpg
|
| Not an "Assault Weapon"
|
| https://i.imgur.com/VKtpdSy.jpg
| dave_sullivan wrote:
| This is the kind of autistic pedantry I come to HN for. I
| don't know what I was thinking.
| throaway46546 wrote:
| thank you
| publiush wrote:
| When we have a government without corruption, we probably
| won't need to be armed. That isn't the case today. Checks
| and balances work in a young government, but after
| hundreds of years, friendships, camaraderies, it's not
| difficult to have loosely coupled groups infiltrating all
| branches. Things eventually crumble as perfect systems
| are hard.
|
| This is akin to the monarchies, where a king may have
| risen to power as a good leader, but a later king may not
| have been so kind.
|
| These things aren't perfect, but having multiple systems
| to pick up where other systems fail provides us the
| ultimate leverage in the end.
|
| Would you take airbags out of cars because they sometimes
| fail and always harm those who feel their impact and
| chemicals and everyone is "supposed to wear seat belts by
| law" anyway?
| afavour wrote:
| > When we have a government without corruption, we
| probably won't need to be armed. That isn't the case
| today. Checks and balances work in a young government,
|
| I'd argue the opposite: it's the threat of armed
| resistance that only works with a young government.
|
| The idea that an armed group could overthrow the
| government in the US today has always struck me as
| fanciful. The army would shut down such an attempt very,
| very easily.
| skinkestek wrote:
| You forget the ties between the army and the 2nd
| amendment people, don't you?
|
| I'm no American but I can't really see most soldiers
| starting to shoot their own?
| afavour wrote:
| In that case surely the second amendment isn't necessary,
| then. You've already got the army!
| skinkestek wrote:
| Look to Turkey for a failure of that model.
|
| Although I should say that I am always convinced by those
| who say that that particular coup was staged by Erdogan
| as a pretext.
| wyager wrote:
| > The second ammendment was appended in 1791 if I'm not
| mistaken,
|
| When the first amendment was written, they only had
| primitive printing presses. Obviously it does not apply
| to the internet, electronic printers, etc.
| m1sta_ wrote:
| This is quickly devolving into a Facebook "conversation".
| I'm disappointed.
|
| In any case, there is a very good argument for the first
| amendment changing in response to today's challenges,
| culture, and technology.
| toolz wrote:
| Why are school shootings the bar here? Do we care about
| murdered children, or very specifically only murdered
| children in school by a gun? Certainly the US has tons of
| room for improvement, but it seems very disingenuous to
| cherry-pick a subset of what people actually care about
| just to oversell your point.
| m1sta_ wrote:
| It's an example, and a compelling one. That is not the
| same as cherry picking.
| DennisAleynikov wrote:
| School shooting statistics are a deeply uncompelling
| example.
|
| Tragedies are often non statistically relevant
| schleck8 wrote:
| Luckily in this case they are.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Or you end up with the highest rate of school amok per
| capita globally
|
| The US has a high rate of firearms fatalities. Around two
| thirds of these are suicides. Around zero thirds of them
| are school shootings.
|
| School shootings are sufficiently rare that when they
| happen, they make national news. Which is catastrophic,
| because studies have shown that media coverage of school
| shootings induces school shootings. It's attention-
| seeking behavior by the criminally insane, so if you show
| them that it generates attention, it increases their
| attraction to the act. Most US media outlets know this
| and do it anyway, because it generates a lot of hits.
| This is the primary reason why the US has relatively more
| than other countries, including other countries with a
| high rate of firearms ownership.
|
| > Licenses make just as much sense as they do for cars.
|
| It doesn't work for this. If you have a driver's license
| and know it will be taken away if you drive drunk, that's
| an effective deterrent. School shooters tend to be young
| people with no prior criminal history. They would pass a
| background check. Having a license to take away after the
| fact is meaningless when after they fact they're going to
| prison forever.
|
| In theory where this does something is for criminal
| gangs, where you say you want to deny people with a
| criminal history a firearm. Criminal gangs actually are a
| significant fraction of firearms fatalities. But here's
| how that works out: People with a criminal history who go
| back to a life of crime just get a gun through their
| criminal organization the same way they get the illegal
| drugs they're dealing.
|
| Meanwhile, people with a criminal history who reform
| themselves will commonly _also_ carry a gun, for self-
| defense against criminals from their past life. Laws
| against this don 't deter it when the alternative is
| getting murdered. Then this otherwise reformed criminal
| gets caught in possession of a firearm yet not committing
| any other crime, so they go back to prison and get
| another chance to get caught up with criminals. A large
| number of black people are currently in prison for no
| other crime than "felon in possession of a firearm," and
| were in possession of it for no other reason than self-
| defense. Or weren't in possession of it at all but were
| near enough to one owned by someone else for a bad cop to
| opportunistically file the charge.
|
| Banning possession of a technology is weak. If you
| wrongfully shoot someone, you should go to prison. If you
| have a gun and don't harm anyone with it, no one should
| have a problem with that.
| dmingod666 wrote:
| Between 2009 to 2018 there were 288 school shooting
| incidents in the US. During this time there were a total
| of 5 similar incidents in the rest of the world.
| Something is definitely wrong.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > Something is definitely wrong.
|
| Oh absolutely. More than one thing.
|
| The US is structurally messed up in a dozen different
| ways and it puts people in a corner. People are angry and
| have no idea what to do about it. Undirected rage because
| people don't know where to direct it.
|
| Then the media directs it to shooting up schools by
| plastering that all over the screen. It could just as
| easily be pipe bombs or political assassinations or
| riots.
|
| Or something actually constructive. But actually solving
| the problems that many organizations exist only to
| mitigate means you have to fight them, and they often
| win. Especially when people are led to believe that
| supporting those organizations is the way to eliminate
| the problems that they now exist to preserve.
| forty wrote:
| > People with a criminal history who go back to a life of
| crime just get a gun through their criminal organization
| the same way they get the illegal drugs they're dealing.
|
| just because they can have weapons somehow is not a
| reason to make it very easy and legal.
|
| > people with a criminal history who reform themselves
| will commonly also carry a gun, for self-defense against
| criminals from their past life.
|
| Firearm are not defense tools. If someone shoot you, I
| don't see how it will save your life or protect you.
|
| > Banning possession of a technology is weak. If you
| wrongfully shoot someone, you should go to prison. If you
| have a gun and don't harm anyone with it, no one should
| have a problem with that.
|
| I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of a
| reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively.
| There are certainly less death by firearm though.
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| > just because they can have weapons somehow is not a
| reason to make it very easy and legal.
|
| Laws have costs and benefits. When the benefits are not
| actually realized in practice, that's relevant.
|
| > Firearm are not defense tools. If someone shoot you, I
| don't see how it will save your life or protect you.
|
| If someone is trying to kill you and you kill them first,
| this is more likely to lead to your survival than if you
| just let them kill you. And if this is more likely to
| happen, they are more likely to not attempt to kill you
| at risk to their own life.
|
| This is especially relevant for people in bad
| neighborhoods where the police can't be expected to do
| this job or provide an effective deterrent, and many of
| the victims are people who have a criminal history.
|
| An obvious and common case being where you get caught
| committing a crime, are pressured into testifying against
| someone else to avoid going to prison for ten years
| instead of one, and then you get out of prison and they
| or their people are after you.
|
| > I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of
| a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively.
| There are certainly less death by firearm though.
|
| Ban red cars and there may be fewer accidents involving
| red cars, but is that really the right metric?
|
| Firearms are aggressively prohibited in Mexico and they
| have an even bigger homicide problem than the US. There
| is a high rate of firearms ownership in Canada, and they
| don't. The reason for this difference is where we should
| direct our attention.
| forty wrote:
| > I live in a country that ban guns, and I'm not aware of
| a reason why it would affect anyone's life negatively.
|
| I notice you haven't answered that part :)
| forty wrote:
| > If someone is trying to kill you and you kill them
| first, this is more likely to lead to your survival than
| if you just let them kill you. And if this is more likely
| to happen, they are more likely to not attempt to kill
| you at risk to their own life.
|
| Maybe there is a gentleman rule among firearm owners to
| let the other side the opportunity to shoot first, but
| there is always the risk of someone not following that
| rule.
| ipaddr wrote:
| Your terror group is someone else freedom fighter. What is
| celebrated today is scorned tomorrow.
|
| Asking what if some group we want to stop uses a technology
| misses the point. Paper can be used by terrorist to make
| plans for terror and communicate should we reconsider paper?
| Who is to blame when paper and pen are used to do things we
| disapprove of?
| viraptor wrote:
| There's a big difference here: paper is typically traceable
| to the source without much hassle. This tech is partially
| traceable to redistributors only.
| ipaddr wrote:
| That's a weak reason. I could make my own paper.
| viraptor wrote:
| I think you missed the point. It's not about literally
| tracing the physical source of the paper. I mean the
| network of printing, distribution, any feedback, etc.
| leave traces where there's a fairly short chain of people
| to follow before you find the initial source. This is
| completely different from online distribution. No agency
| will complain if you distribute information on paper -
| they're more likely to say "thank you, please continue,
| we'd like to learn about your whole network of
| collaborators".
| wyager wrote:
| Yes, censorship resistant means censorship resistant. Over
| time it becomes more apparent that the desire for a "middle
| ground" between extremely regressive censorship and absolute
| freedom is incoherent, because if you give people even the
| slightest wiggle room, they can create systems like this. I
| personally prefer a world where I'm allowed to have a general
| purpose computer, and incidentally it's also possible for
| ISIS to post propaganda online.
| serverholic wrote:
| Reminds me of government trying to get companies to install
| cryptography back doors. If the good guys can get in, then
| so can the bad guys.
|
| Same with this. If bad guys can be censored then so can
| good guys.
| ancode wrote:
| Wouldn't be resistant to censorship if you could prevent
| people from putting videos you don't like on it, would it?
| blooalien wrote:
| > I don't take any credit for this since I just weaved the great
| technologies others already made together!
|
| You should _absolutely_ take credit for _your_ part in this.
| Others may have created the technologies you used, but _you_ tied
| them together into something "more" than the individual pieces.
| There's room enough for all players to take their credit for
| their part in this existing.
| petre wrote:
| WebTorrent has never worked for me. It's included in Brave now
| but whenever I try to open a magnet link it just sits and waits
| while qbittorrent downlads everything i before I can manage to
| make a cup of coffee.
| nabakin wrote:
| > Can WebTorrent clients connect to normal BitTorrent clients?
|
| > In the browser, WebTorrent can only download torrents that
| are seeded by a WebRTC-capable torrent client.
|
| https://webtorrent.io/faq
| timbit42 wrote:
| Would this work over I2P?
| publiush wrote:
| BitTorrent works on I2P so I believe this should as well but I
| haven't tried.
| throwaway41597 wrote:
| Hi, thank you for this! Is it wrong to say that without going
| through a privacy layer like I2P, you'd publicly link your IP
| to the decentralized websites you visit?
| publiush wrote:
| That is correct without I2P, Tor or a VPN.
| timbit42 wrote:
| Tor doesn't support UDP so I don't think it would work.
| champagnois wrote:
| These sorts of things are still blockable through DNS and IP
| filters cutting off access to the root nodes and such I would
| guess.
|
| As such, what is the use case?
| publiush wrote:
| Seeds for the torrents can change and, although not
| recommended, in terms of bloating the Tor network, using Tor
| will also help. With the recent attack on exposing Tor users,
| it may not be a bad thing if everyone starts torrenting on the
| Tor network actually.
|
| Everything, of course, can be blocked at some point, but the
| thing to remember is that there are other kinds of contracts
| that existed long before smart contracts - and these things are
| already leveraged in society.
|
| The internet isn't going to disappear tomorrow, but I would
| agree there are longer term risks, so let's build today.
|
| There's been a lot of talk about decentralization lately, and
| Cypherpunks write code. So I wrote code instead of a blog post.
| rektide wrote:
| Wow that's a big huge dollop of nihilism, of why even bother.
| It's very unclear what your slam even means, what you are
| trying, technically, to express as the problem. Which makes
| your rejection even harder to handle with faith & respect.
|
| I also don't think it's accurate. Handshake is a
| cryptographically certified way of establishing identity .
| Since torrents are now mutable via handshake, it seems like
| webtorrents can be updated & moved as needed. Further, peer-
| exchange processes mean that having the initial seeds up
| probably isn't even a requirement. Even if one particular ip
| address or site gets cut down, the swarm can use other
| webtorrent trackers to re-spawn & carry-on.
|
| Aside from your criticism being either inaccureate or
| misleading, I'd also say the use case doesn't need to, imo, be
| 100% perfect in every way to be worthwhile. I'm glad someone
| did seek better, & bothered. A decentralized, updateable,
| browser-based torrent is incredible leap for a web of data, for
| interconnection. Even if it's not 100% completely uncensorable,
| it's many leaps in the right direction, towards
| decentralization. Especially decentralization without
| coordination/consensus, which I think is great & vast
| improvement over the harsh & strict type of computing that
| *coins have dominated the field with. This work is far more
| interesting to me.
| champagnois wrote:
| You are assuming bad faith here.
|
| The project is marketed as unblockable, etc and yet we both
| conclude it is blockable from the start with existing network
| management tools that are deployed in places like Iran and
| China.
|
| I was asking a genuine question of use case.
| rektide wrote:
| > _and yet we both conclude it is blockable_
|
| Extremely polarizing language for something that is way
| more a scale to me, and I don't agree that this technology
| is blockable. I already elaborated some scenarios where
| hosting can respawn easily, with no coupling to any
| particular infrastructure. That to me is pretty
| unblockable. There's other resilliencies offered here.
|
| The story keeps getting better, given all the resilience
| features at Bittorrent's core: webtorrent clients could
| connect to multiple trackers just fine. Since it's tracker
| based, there's no need for any specific host to stay
| online. We can all just use the existing tracker network.
|
| Even if the entire tracker network is taken down- something
| that has never happened to bittorrent & which is beyond
| imagining to me- bittorrent still has a peer exchange
| network & allows for peers to manually be added. Whence
| peer exchange can kick in & keep resilliency going.
|
| I'm sorry but I have no agreemenet whatsoever with you on
| blockability. This has multiple vast layers of resillience
| that are excellent, which have never seen active threat
| against them.
|
| What would make you happy? Do we need a system able to
| resist long term nuclear winter to be unblockable? What's
| the goal here? You've still been extremely unclear what
| your technical complaints actually are, extremely specious,
| & aggressive. And now you are also putting words in my
| mouth.
|
| > _You are assuming bad faith here._
|
| I think I've done quite well working around doing that, &
| worked hard to find something to discuss. In contrast, you
| have yet to specify a specific technical case at all, to
| explain what issue you actually have or what you think the
| problem or scenario you are imagining is. And you use
| aggressive position & hard words to double down on your
| argumentless snub, which to me reads like a bad faith
| follow-up, one I challenge you to do better on.
|
| I mostly think you don't know the tech. Which is fine.
| Bittorrent is fairly complex & has a lot of layers to it.
| There aren't great primers to get filled in on it.
| Bittorrent is a great basis, one that countless millions
| have been spent trying to block & take down & combat, but
| the system has been extremely resillient. Magnet links
| "just work", fantastically well, and are super easy to
| share, to get started, over any medium one wants. The
| underpinnning distributed P2P technologies are broadly
| capable of taking over from there. I don't think your
| short, undetailed, savage doubt is contributive or
| accurate: you should better define your issues if you are
| going to throw such a hard heavy opinion down against great
| tech.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't argue in the flamewar style on HN. We want
| curious conversation here.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| [deleted]
| rektide wrote:
| > _Eschew flamebait. Avoid unrelated controversies and
| generic tangents._
|
| I very much think resolving this conversation is of the
| utmost importance, is absolutely core to the topic at
| hand. There should at least be some idea of what the
| criticism here is. I would really like to see that.
|
| I have not at all been perfect. But I have tried to
| surface technics, to get to the heart of the technical
| matters at hand. To illuminate & increase the information
| here, in the core topics at hand.
|
| I respect your intervention here dang & agree this is
| going bad. And I could improve. But I think I am very
| very very narrowly not-passing here, and this seems like
| an essential defense to me. I've been wanting very badly
| to get to the real topic, to affirm & help us to work
| with the next HN rule after "Eschew flamebait":
|
| > _Please don 't post shallow dismissals, especially of
| other people's work. A good critical comment teaches us
| something._
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| Block-resistant and censorship-resistant are terminology
| I've seen used in other projects. I agree that ublockable
| and uncensorable are hard phrases to sell here, they kind
| of immediately beg to be challenged.
| lolspace wrote:
| What would happen if I created an illegal site? CP or selling
| guns?
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| If you created and seeded long enough to get active traffic,
| the host and DHT peer IPs might be flagged by LE. Once flagged
| the IP info passed to different investigators for prosecution
| purposes. Depending on your level of anonymity (VPN, tor, none,
| other) the investigation is either a dead-end or success. If
| success, warrant granted, home searched, PC seized. That's one
| potential scenario.
| lolspace wrote:
| But they can't take down the website?
| serverholic wrote:
| People don't have to use your website.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Presumably nobody would know it was yours until you added
| contact information to it.
| gpm wrote:
| How do you handle security updates to Chromium?
| publiush wrote:
| This project has just begun and is still in its infancy. My
| hope is that the community will come together to take it to
| another level. Chromium updates are generally handled by the
| Electron team!
| michaelscrypt wrote:
| How is this different from ZeroNet [https://zeronet.io/]?
| generalizations wrote:
| Also, it's a variation on the concept. It's really good when we
| have multiple implementations of a general design.
| sprash wrote:
| Seems to be not much different from zeronet. It even makes the
| exact same mistakes like not building in anonymization by
| default (preferably using i2p). Zeronet hovever is much more
| mature and has a very active community.
| ccakes wrote:
| At a quick glance, no Bitcoin
| nephanth wrote:
| Iirc, zeronet used to not have bitcoin before the craze, so
| this would be like early zeronet I guess
| zcw100 wrote:
| No but Handshake does use coins which I assume to be some
| sort of blockchain "Handshake uses a coin system for name
| registration"
| xrd wrote:
| Is it just me, or is that site down?
| betwixthewires wrote:
| Bravo dude! Absolutely phenomenal work. I'm going to star this
| and attempt to tinker with it in a few days. I love seeing stuff
| like this get built, IMO the more interesting tools like this get
| built the better the world becomes.
| publiush wrote:
| Thank you so much!
| newguyhere2 wrote:
| this is actually nice, imagine a world where devices have
| software like this and acts as a node, so like install it on your
| smart coffee pot, tv, etc. seems silly but i think as time
| progresses and as technology advances and gets cheaper and
| cheaper to build that we will one day have normal everyday
| appliances os's in them, maybe even a type of wifi that will
| eventually create mesh networks
| bordercases wrote:
| Suck It Jian Yang
| vgb2k18 wrote:
| I would love it if someone could change my mind on this:
|
| The words unblockable and uncensorable have been misused in the
| documentation.
|
| Real-world example: 99% of my colleagues cannot bring their own
| devices into our corporate workplace to access torrents via DHT.
| There are some network rules and filters in place to block most
| non 443 traffic. Those 99% are effectively blocked.
|
| Setting a remote HAProxy server to mask miscelaneous traffic as
| https was a practical way out through the firewall, which then
| exposed my HAProxy server to a block by IP rules.
|
| This is an idea I'd love to be wrong about. Bock-resistant is the
| most appropriate statement for this project in its present form.
| Change my mind :)
| publiush wrote:
| There are projects who are using collateral freedom to block
| censorship like Wireleap (https://wireleap.com/blog/routing-
| layer/). This would help in the circumstance you describe.
| sudosysgen wrote:
| You have to set up your https tunnel on AWS or GCP and then
| tunnel that to your own server. They will not range block AWS,
| and you can vary the IP every day.
| algo_trader wrote:
| Well done, good luck. Always wanted to implement something like
| this.
|
| > dmt (mutable torrent BEP-46),
|
| Is dmt supported (made scalable?!) by the existing torrent infra
| structure (DHT/trackers/etc??). Sorry if this question doesnt
| make sense.
| algo_trader wrote:
| Also, is this suitable for publishing an RSS-like feed which
| out polluting the world with a new torrent for each atom?
| publiush wrote:
| Yes and no - DMT (https://github.com/lmatteis/dmt) is
| implemented into this so you can use a single hash in the DHT
| for the 'site', but that will be updated to point to a new
| torrent infohash on every update.
| easrng wrote:
| It depends. You an either have your mutable torrent point to
| the head of a liked list like this: head
| | |- post.txt +- prev.torrent
| prev | |- post.txt +- prev.torrent
|
| You get the idea. With the not yet widely-supported
| BitTorrent v2, you can just add files to a new torrent and
| seeders of the old torrent will seed the files that are also
| in the new torrent too.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| What are the challenges slowing the v2 deployment? Client
| uptake?
| bscphil wrote:
| My reading of the situation is that for 99.99% of data
| currently transferred by Bittorrent, v1 works just fine.
| And for many use cases, the ability to do something like
| _change_ an already created torrent would actually be
| detrimental. It 's not that v2 is actively bad, it's just
| that it's designed for a different audience than
| currently uses Bittorrent, and will take time for that
| new audience to find it.
| publiush wrote:
| Thank you! I believe it's somewhat scalable, but one thing to
| note is that DHT itself is not as fast as using a tracker.
| f0e4c2f7 wrote:
| Seems cool at first glance! I've never heard of Handshake, will
| be looking at that more in particular.
|
| So I see the address in the screenshot starts with federalist://
|
| Is it possible to access these sites with a normal web browser
| from the internet too?
| oscargrouch wrote:
| from the look of it, you will need to have the handshake
| resolver installed and replaced as your local dns resolver.
| With that it will return you a the public key address on the
| bittorrent DHT which can be solved by some torrent client.
|
| There it should have a torrent info payload that your client
| can turn into a ordinary torrent, where you can proceed to
| download the files, and can open in your browser on your local
| filesystem.
| publiush wrote:
| Thank you!
|
| I do think there is a way - since the beautiful WebTorrent
| (https://github.com/webtorrent/webtorrent) can do so in
| browser. I'm keen to see something like this in a normal web
| browser (if possible as an extension even), hopefully developed
| by someone with better skills than me haha!
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Instead of blockchain/web3, I wish these type of projects would
| pop up more. They are drowned (in my circles) out by
| 'decentralized everything blockchain' hype... we need this
| indeed.
| serverholic wrote:
| This does use blockchain...
| tluyben2 wrote:
| Only the 'DNS' though right? Just the full-in-for-everything
| should be less as it does not work. But thanks for the
| correction.
| warabe wrote:
| Seems a great project! I've always dreamed creating something
| like this! One thing I want to know is, your project support
| users' anonymity?
| publiush wrote:
| Out of the box, there is no anonymity built into federalist.
| You can use Tor or VPN to for anonymity. As this develops from
| a POC for developers to an end user software application, I
| imagine federalist will have many of these things built in
| directly or support to hook in (eg Tor and SOCKS) natively.
| everfree wrote:
| How does this compare to IPFS+ENS (InterPlanetary File System +
| Ethereum Name Service)?
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