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Comment by Ericson2314 | Hacker News Reader

A far cheaper solution is a browser extension that looks up DNS differently based on the age of a the link.

It wouldn't be hard to maintain a hand-crafted database of when domains are reused for something completely different, or even when the same conceptual website has breakages, and use that to choose between Internet Archive or live web accordingly. When one is browsing from an internet archive page, the date is known, when someone is browsing from a live website, heuristics can be used, along with "bisecting" dates when the link is dead.

Ultimately we want more content addressing to avoid this problem entirely (see below), Or DNS -> PubKey, PubKey -> latest content, with some law that the pubkeys shall not be reused for unrelated things. vs DNS which is mere ephemeral Huffman encoding. So see below for the stuff on IPFS. But the trick above is a good stop-gap, and indeed the database itself used to back the extension could be on IPFS.

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Trying to figure out the age of links referenced against a hand crafted database (or trying to figure out if the current version is "too different" based on age automatically) using a browser extension only serves to create an unreliable solution for a few using the extension. Cheaper sure but it's also doing a whole lot less.

Alternative content addressed systems may also work better for finding the content than someone hosting your DNS records for a long time but the bulk of the problem space is in guaranteeing active hosting in a way viewable to viewers of the age will be available for many years not addressing the content. On top of hosting and addressing the Internet Archive offers the ability to view old content on modern browsers even if modern browsers have 0 support for such content anymore (or if browsers ever had support at all even). Forward compatibility isn't something solved by a protocol.

> using a browser extension only serves to create an unreliable solution for a few using the extension. Cheaper sure but it's also doing a whole lot less.

This is rather pessimistic thinking. The same money that goes into buying up domains could go into lobbying browsers to add this functionality be default.

> bulk of the problem space is in guaranteeing active hosting in a way viewable to viewers of the age will be available for many years not addressing the content.

You're moving the goal posts. I am not saying "IPFS means we don't need the internet archive". We absolute do need the internet archive. Content addressing helps by making archiving transparent, so the archival copy is not worse than the original.

Fundamentally, consumers producers or archivists may be the party most interested in the continued existence of some information at different moments in the lifespan of that information. Location-based addressing forces the producers to shoulder the burden of hosting, but content-based addressing allows the work to be distributed among those 3 however we see fit. Of course the burdened must still be barred! That doesn't mean the flexibility isn't extremely useful.

> On top of hosting and addressing the Internet Archive offers the ability to view old content on modern browsers even if modern browsers have 0 support for such content anymore (or if browsers ever had support at all even). Forward compatibility isn't something solved by a protocol.

Yeah that's great too, and again not something I am arguing is not good, or not necessary.

I made something very similar, though instead of age, it enforces page authorship for links (using PGP signatures). https://webverify.jahed.dev/

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