Hacker News Reader

Comment by kodablah | Hacker News Reader

> Which means, if there's a new type of technology that lets people do just that--set up their own server anywhere and make it accessible via HTTP--then I don't see why we really need IPFS

I have a ton to say here, but I'll keep it to a few point. Tor onion services solve the setup-your-own-server issues, it's just not super easy yet. IPFS is needed regardless, because there is a need to distribute things when your machine isn't up and to solve discovery. What IPFS doesn't have natively is anonymity (tho there are onion transports conforming to libp2p transport iface) and distributed compute, but neither is that important.

View on HN

> Tor onion services solve the setup-your-own-server issues, it's just not super easy yet.

Lately I've been trying to make this easier. I developed ormesh (https://github.com/cmars/ormesh) in an attempt to simplify setting up hidden services for private use.

I think both Tor and IPFS are both awesome and useful decentralization projects, they just have different use cases & characteristics. AIUI IPFS lacks fine-grained access controls. Last time I looked, it seemed like I either had to run all my own infrastructure of IPFS nodes with pre-shared private keys, or open everything to the public and encrypt on top of that... I prefer the Tor hidden service model, where I can decide on a per-service basis how I want to share it, revoke client access if necessary, and have my traffic securely routed on existing infrastructure.

Edit: fixed link

Saw this on /r/golang (I was the one asking why the full Tor browser). I have considered similar [0]. A simple service (or portable exe) that has Tor statically linked and lets you reach/manage a machine from anywhere (think webmin-like web console on onion service) would have real value. Of course it can be authenticated and have the option to open direct connection (webrtc?) if you need fast media playing or direct download.

0 - https://github.com/cretz/software-ideas/issues/54

This is my first time discovering IPFS, so pardon if this my question is obvious/addressed elsewhere.

At what point does the "network" become too small. I.e. if your computer can only reach 10,000 devices... are those 10,000 devices supposed to be able to have access to all data for the entire world? (albeit out of date)

The scenario I'm thinking of here is similar to if Alaska suddenly got cut off from the rest of the world for a week, month, year.

Weird to see Tor as a connectivity solution. I guess if you really don't care about performance.

At the least it's a good NAT buster for signalling. May be able to piggy back a direct connection off of it (using it for just STUN-like reasons) but of course the increased performance of a direct connection comes at the cost of anonymity.

There are lots of better NAT busters that are way faster and more versatile.

Of course I'm partial because I made one: https://www.zerotier.com/

There are others ways too like libp2p, webrtc, etc.

Tor is an anonymity layer. By definition this requires worst case routing and artificially added latency, since if latency is low you can triangulate. Anonymity and efficient direct connectivity are antagonistic goals in a system.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com