Decentralised internet protocol support

[parpfish II]

Will Pale Moon or Basilisk support decentralised internet protocols like DAT and IPFS in the future?
Example: dat://tmcw.hashbase.io/2017/07/01/recently.html

Apparently Firefox 59 will:
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/ne ... -protocols

Thanks,
P.

[Moonchild]

Will Pale Moon or Basilisk support decentralised internet protocols like DAT and IPFS in the future?

Definitely not on our radar at the moment

Apparently Firefox 59 will:

Nope

will include extensions for the DAT, IPFS and Secure Scuttlebutt peer-to-peer protocols

so they will add system extensions as experiments, but clearly is in no way integrating this into the core of the browser at the moment.

[parpfish II]

Okay, thanks Moonchild for the info.
I took that article to mean that one would be able to open a DAT link and thus view the html site - but as you say not really take part in the p2p network / host / publish etc.
I think you're probably right in assuming this isn't going to be a big (i.e. widely adopted) thing for quite a few years yet. I fancy testing these waters - I'll experiment with Beaker. One of the things that appeals to me is the way "domains" are treated and sites served: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ep0ZIe ... u.be&t=776

P.

[Moonchild]

For the record, this is nothing new and has been employed for a long time in "darknets". TOR also has a similar publishing strategy for ".onion" domains that are internal to the TOR network. The presentation you pointed to highlights some of how this works, but the presentation ignores a few important things, too, like "oh just create a new 'website'" -- sure, but where is this 'website' going to be stored? Still on a server, and still requiring a route to that server. Or, if published as dynamic resources, it'll be stored in allocated storage on "full node" peer machines. But you can't use the latter for permanent and accessible storage because it may get purged from your p2p web at any point in time in that case. Of course you also can't store any private data that way, so... it'll still be very much the same as it is now, but with potentially more exposure to attackers, slower connectivity, and probably not very readable addresses/hostnames if it goes by cryptographic key.

As for how this would hook into a browser -- the "dat" scheme implies a protocol. That protocol has to be implemented in the browser to be able to access the data and display it, just like http, ftp, etc. Displaying the data is of course the same (html documents), but the transport of that data to the browser will be different.

[parpfish II]

Bittorrent websites basically. I understand what you're saying - but I wonder if people on big centralised content platforms like facebook and youtube, may at some point notice that "their" data / content is easily zapped (and very much outside their control) too.
https://www.zerohedge.com/news/2018-04- ... cus-actors

P2P wise, you're the server and then anyone else who downloads your site. But I get what you're saying re. 100% up-time. The internet is a vast network, surely the big question is whether the server can be distributed too? Do I want to cache and serve my favourite sites?

Perhaps it will only ever be a fringe for those voices that are not favoured by big platforms. Whatever happens, it's interesting that people are working on it and I'm not sure that they they "just don't get it".

P.

[Moonchild]

Bittorrent websites would never be able to hold any data that isn't public. So as I said anything private would still need a central server.. with a database, etc.
Comparing it with bittorrent also indicates the problem with it: if you have a torrent without seeders, then you can never get the file. So you may end up waiting literally forever to visit a website.

[parpfish II]

Well, they clearly don't know what they're doing. Someone should let them know before they waste even more of their time:
https://pfrazee.github.io/blog/achieving-scale

P.

[parpfish II]

Early days in some ways ... this chat covers some of the issues and problems being worked on. Something to keep an eye on IMO:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YFzr6vSNrrc

P.