Sadly the design contains some flaws that need addressing. From their whitepaper (http://static.benet.ai/t/ipfs.pdf) The architecture is essentially creating 1 giant Bittorrent swarm where each piece may be seeded by different people. See section 3.4.4 of whitepaper. This approach suffers from the "double coincidence of wants" problem. There will be a billion items if this takes off. Matches are rare and could take hours/days.
"Aside from BitSwap, which is a novel protocol". These types of protocols have been worked on for over 8 years. Nobody has ever been able to protect them from an Eclipse or Sybil attack. Early work: http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~cse400/CSE400_2005_2006/Wang/Writ... Deployed system from my research group, improved upon for 7 years now: http://www.pds.twi.tudelft.nl/~pouwelse/A_network_science_pe...
I don't know enough about those kind of security attacks to comment.
My comment "you guys are great!" refers to their team as people not necessarily the project itself. I've worked with them before, and they are awesome folks.
That would change the internet, and the world.
- very soon, you wont need to install anything to use IPFS. it will "just work" with js on today's browsers.
- for best perf, yes, we need browser implementations. and... those have begun :)
Do you have links to browser implementations?
On sites not known to me, I typically block most (read all) .js at first, just to make sure that these sites do not leak too much information about me to external tracking tools, advertisers or the like.
So using .js seems to me a bit problematic in regards of people not enabling it by default (but this is an absolut minority, if I look at the stats of the sites I analyze).
It works very well for me so I'd recommend it to others, if they're not already aware of it.
I doubt they're building it in JS for giggles.
In order to make changes like this stick my guess would be that you need to reach a tipping point before interest fades, and to do that you need to take away the browser vendors ability to say 'no' or 'maybe later'.
As you point out, people who don't run JS by default represent a tiny percentage of traffic, so would have to be a secondary concern to be supported later.
Furthermore the right to be forgotten only mandates hiding results when someone searches specifically for a name, for example. The results are still allowed to come up for unrelated search terms.
The court judgement - http://curia.europa.eu/juris/document/document_print.jsf?doc... - paragraph 26 says "As regards in particular the internet, the Court has already had occasion to state that the operation of loading personal data on an internet page must be considered to be such ‘processing’ within the meaning of Article 2(b) of Directive 95/46" - so by the Court's reasoning the Directive potentially applies to any web page, not just search engines.
The "right to be forgotten" is a phrase used in the argument for de-listing, and later became the name for the ruling itself. This was however not a right that the court granted, but rather the court points out that the data protection directive stipulates that personal data shall be: """ (c) adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purposes for which they are collected and/or further processed;
(d) accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date; every reasonable step must be taken to ensure that data which are inaccurate or incomplete, having regard to the purposes for which they were collected or for which they are further processed, are erased or rectified; """ and judges (in paragraph 93) that in particular, data that was once in compliance might not be at a later time.
It also states that the failure of the particular data in this case to be those things means the person described by them can invoke the right to object to the processing, in this case having personal data listed on a page as a response to a "search made on the basis of his name" (in paragraph 94).
It is not completely clear, but I think the query being judged upon includes only the name of the person, and adding a keyword relating to the particular year, or bankruptcy actions, would be enough to make the data "adequate, relevant and not excessive".
Easy: The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
Oh, right, we're not calling this censorship yet. Funny how quick we are to put up mirrors to Tibet and Tank Man content but somehow we're on the hook to protect London businesspeople and corporations from criticism? Like Bitcoin or Bittorrent and other decentralized applications, it will not be able to follow the dictates of nation states and it will be on nation states themselves to filter appropriately. There's no one to call to remove "unwanted" content. No one to hit with fines, taxes, lawsuits, and fees.
Also, there's a discussion to have in regards to EU shakedowns of US companies. These billions of dollars in fees that go straight to the EU don't seem like consumer protection to me, but fundraising. Billions of dollars in fees for "bundling media players" or "having an Android monopoly" should give any wannabe entrepreneurs pause. Its a shame that the EU is unquestionable on sites like HN and reddit. There's a lot of questionable morality here and obvious signs of corruption. So yeah, not being able to be dictated by the EU or any nation state is a feature, not a bug.
So this isn't per se a problem. But what happens, when I act as a "mirror" in this net and have mirrored some questionable content (who ever might define questionable is up to anybody to imagine). Will I get a shake down from the authorities, as oftentimes happened with people having tor exit nodes?
I fear that the clash would come rather sooner then later, as a lot of people do have a lot of incentives for a centralized web (money, politics, control, power).
But the right to be forgotten is a flawed concept to me, and I think any tech that makes its implementation more problematic will do us a favour.
I would kindly suggest that we consider examples from history when laws backed by the majority have resulted in horrifying, depraved violence and deprivation; then contemplate whether it is indeed moral to shape law through majority opinion.