Show HN: Dweb.page – Your Gateway to the Distributed Web | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Dweb.page – Your Gateway to the Distributed Web

github.com

70 pointsNoc221 comments

It's been quiet around IOTA for a while, ... incomprehensible why anyone would use IOTA for anything. it is run by people (come_from_beyond and other questionable characters whose understanding of Math can best be summed up as "Numberwang"). People who think that collision resistance doesn't have to be a primary feature of a hash functions.

the IOTA guys have been ignorant towards any criticism from the cryptography experts (ask people like Matthew D Green and others). IOTA is a total clusterfuck. Don't use it. Or if you do please check at least twitter to see what people with an actual idea are really saying.

https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2018/04/25/1524628801000/FUD--in...

https://twitter.com/peterktodd/status/938397135862714373

https://twitter.com/search?q=%40matthew_d_green%20IOTA

Also if you find problems with the project, would be a great idea to use the issue tracker: https://github.com/PACTCare/Dweb.page/issues/2

Here also my repsons, since people might not open the github issues: “I’m aware of these early issues, and I’m also aware that they replaced the hash function with KECCAK-384 for the proof of work and in general have grown a lot since then as well as hired a lot of people including cryptographers. But all that aside, this project uses IOTA simply as an immutable database with some additional spam protection. For the encryption, we are using the web crypto API (AES256-GCM). If you have ideas for a potential IOTA replacement feel free to share them. I’m completely open here. For example, I looked into orbitdb, but I haven’t included it for multiple reasons (e.g., hosting an ipfs gateway inside a website isn’t ideal and it hasn’t any spam protection).”

You might find Holochain to be a suitable replacement for IOTA.

https://holochain.org/

Interesting project. Thanks for sharing it, without the typical cryptocurrency fight. I’m in this simply for learning and playing around with the technology.

Why on earth would you use IOTA for this? Even ignoring its ignominious history, the security paper itself acknowledges that IOTA currently isn't an "immutable ledger" at all:

>at the moment the log entries on IOTA will be deleted after a certain time and won’t be stored indefinitely on the ledger. Therefore, it is highly recommended to download the generated CSV files from time to time, which contain all the information about the logs. It is expected that the IOTA Foundation will release a solution for this problem in the coming month.

The advantage of IOTA compared to for example OrbitDB is that you want some kind of proof of work for the metadata. Otherwise everyone can just create instantly millions of fake entries. However, regarding the mentioned snapshot problem, you can of course then create a simple copy of the IOTA tangle entries on orbitDB.

"Distributed Web" -- Wikipedia fails me, but some clarity emerges from

https://ipfs.io/

"IPFS aims to replace HTTP and build a better web for all of us."

https://medium.com/textileio/enabling-the-distributed-web-ab...

"the basic idea is we identify content by its cryptographic hash... I can simply ask the IPFS network for the file with that exact CID, the network will find the peers that have the data (using a DHT), retrieve it, and verify (using the CID) that it’s the correct file."

Could this possibly make search engine monopolies impossible?

Tutorial: How to host your own file transfer service on your pc https://blog.florence.chat/tutorial-how-to-host-your-own-fil...

Thanks for all the upvotes! I quickly created a tutorial on how to host your own writable ipfs gateway and support the distributed web: https://blog.florence.chat/tutorial-host-your-own-ipfs-node-... If you find any errors or have any questions just let me know.

Looks great. Especially because it seems to have a distributed search solution. How well will IOTA scale?

Does IPFS really not have a Windows installer? Because that actually requires a lot less effort for non-technical people than a chdir and then running something in cmd.exe

An ipfs installer would be awesome. I tested the integration of the js version of ipfs, but for me, it doesn’t make sense that every single project starts there own IPFS server in the background. Imagine in the future you have like ten tabs open in your browser and you 10 server running. Also, it’s a lot slower performance-wise, and you have problems gettings this running in older browsers, etc. Regarding the scaling we choose IOTA basically because we believe it’s the best solution regarding the scaling aspect and of course because it’s feeless.

please don't shoot yourself in the foot and do a little bit of googling before seriously considering this for anything. IOTA is a total garbage fire. See other comments here.

For IPFS you can use Siderus Orion: https://orion.siderus.io as it is designed for non-technical people

Thanks!

That's great. There should be an MIT option though.

Your logo looks almost identical to web.com's logo.

Interesting. The logo actually took me only a few minutes is based on my previous logos (e.g. pact.care). I’m always just using quicksand plus dot, since I’m not a designer

Perhaps not the best name, given the similarity to `dweeb`.

I know :-D, but there are also these articles: https://hacks.mozilla.org/2018/07/introducing-the-d-web/ https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/sep/08/decentral...

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