Sunday, October 16, 2022

Why the Internet Needs the InterPlanetary File System

Recommendable! The technology underlying the Internet has been outdated for some time and workarounds are being used.

"A more efficient [content] distribution scheme in that case would be for the data to be served to your device from your neighbor’s device in a direct peer-to-peer manner. ... Welcome to the InterPlanetary File System (IPFS). ...
The key to IPFS is what’s called content [based] addressing. Instead of asking a particular provider, “Please send me this file,” your machine asks the network, “Who can send me this file?” It starts by querying peers: other computers in the user’s vicinity, others in the same house or office, others in the same neighborhood, others in the same city—expanding progressively outward to globally distant locations, if need be, until the system finds a copy of what you’re looking for. ...
We designed IPFS as a protocol to upgrade the Web and not to create an alternative version. It is designed to make the Web better, to allow people to work offline, to make links permanent, to be faster and more secure, and to make it as easy as possible to use.
IPFS started in 2013 as an open-source project supported by Protocol Labs, where we work, and built by a vibrant community and ecosystem with hundreds of organizations and thousands of developers. IPFS is built on a strong foundation of previous work in peer-to-peer (P2P) networking and content-based addressing. ...
To make this happen, IPFS produces a fingerprint of the content it holds (called a hash) that no other item can have. That hash can be thought of as a unique address for that piece of content. Changing a single bit in that content will yield an entirely different address. Computers wanting to fetch this piece of content broadcast a request for a file with this particular hash. ...
Name persistence and immutability inherently provide another significant property: verifiability. Having the content and its identifier, a user can verify that what was received is what was asked for and has not been tampered with, either in transit or by the provider. This not only improves security but also helps safeguard the public record and prevent history from being rewritten. ..."

Why the Internet Needs the InterPlanetary File System - IEEE Spectrum Peer-to-peer file sharing would make the Internet far more efficient

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