from Hacker News

Mozilla and NSF offer $2M prize to decentralize the web

by livingparadox on 6/22/17, 4:36 PM with 39 comments

  • by tomfitz on 6/23/17, 4:09 AM

    CJDNS is a self-organising IP address allocation and routing layer. A node's public key acts as its IPv6 address, and routing uses a DHT of those nodes.

    This style of network has the property that you can take two independent CJDNS networks, link them together, and all nodes are mutually addressable/routable. This is in contrast to The Internet, whose addressing is centralised on IANA.

    cjdns is moderately active, though most links between nodes are via an overlay on top of the public Internet. The goal is to have physical/wireless links between geographically close nodes.

    Use https://peers.fc00.io/ to find a cjdns node geographically close to you.

    Decentralized protocols such as ipfs/scuttlebutt work particularly well on cjdns, as a file shared on ipfs in one network, will automagically become available on another network, once those networks are linked.

    cjdns: https://github.com/cjdelisle/cjdns

  • by maxton on 6/23/17, 12:31 AM

    I think the headline here is misleading. What they are offering is a prize to decentralize the internet - the actual network to which people connect in order to use the web. Judging from the other comments here, I don't think a lot of people have actually read the article.

    IPFS and blockchain are technologies that are built on top of the internet - they assume a network connection already exists.

  • by Animats on 6/23/17, 6:01 AM

    It can be done. It has been done, many times, from 1980s amateur packet radio to 2000s WiFi meshes. It's not inherently difficult. The hard problem is doing it with enough bandwidth to support cat videos. Netflix, and bloated web pages.

    Suppose you had a distributed emergency IP radio network available that could provide 56Kb as long as at least one solar powered node per square kilometer was working. It would deliver VoIP and SMS, plus slow data connections. It would have HF links for long-haul connections even if telco services were unavailable. Who would use it?

    FEMA tried distributing HF radios to first responder agencies, as a backup in case everything else went down. They can't even get most agencies to turn them on and talk for a monthly test.[1]

    [1] https://www.dhs.gov/shares

  • by femto on 6/23/17, 4:58 AM

    US based only? A pity.

    People had a pretty good go at this in the early 2000s, when WiFi arrived on the scene. Most of those networks died and the ones that remain never took over the world [1]. The sticking points in the efforts that I was involved in were:

    1) Hassle in obtaining and setting up the hardware (particularly permanent antennas).

    2) Lack of density, meaning it was hard to find others to connect to.

    3) Address allocation and routing never really worked out, due to the need for central coordination.

    I've been thinking about it ever since... Lots of ideas, but no 100% practical solution (yet).

    It'll be interesting to see what happens this time, after 15 years of further development.

    [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_wireless_community_net...

  • by jdormit on 6/23/17, 2:47 AM

    The developers behind Scuttlebutt [0] should apply for this! It pretty much perfectly meets Mozilla's criteria.

    [0] https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt

  • by jeffdavis on 6/23/17, 7:42 AM

    This challenge isn't about the web, it's about the internet.

    Web centralization is another problem and one I'm more worried about. Google and facebook control so much of it and they are so opaque.

  • by wintorez on 6/23/17, 8:17 PM

    I think the future of the web will be peer-to-peer communication between browsers. When you open a web site, you will join a pool of users who are already on that site. There will be some super nodes, who act similar seeders, and the rest will be leachers. The more you spend time on a site, the more you will become a seeder.

  • by fragmede on 6/24/17, 6:31 PM

    The team working on Lantern/Outernet is working in this area, using a satellite to beam wikipedia to all of the Earth.

    https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/lantern-a-global-satellit...

    https://www.raspberrypi.org/blog/outernet/

    http://outernet.is/

  • by TheCycoONE on 6/23/17, 1:04 AM

    The OLPC project using wireless mesh networks essentially addressed these very problems.

  • by michaelobriena on 6/23/17, 12:05 AM

  • by EGreg on 6/23/17, 7:14 AM

    Does this include software or only hardware applications?

  • by Unbeliever69 on 6/23/17, 1:42 AM

    Isn't this the problem that Blockstack is solving?

  • by rdiddly on 6/23/17, 2:10 AM

    Once again, real life imitates the Silicon Valley show...

  • by tabeth on 6/22/17, 9:56 PM

    Isn't the web already inherently decentralized (of course we all know there are forces trying to create their own walled gardens)? In the end, you just have to make something better that requires decentralization, and then it will win. In this way, the "survival of the fittest" for memes holds.

    What's a problem that only a decentralized web can solve?

    - Privacy? (Most) People don't care. Irrelevant.

    - Security? (Most) People don't care. Irrelevant.

    etc.

    Even Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies would be irrelevant if it were not for their volatility, resulting in speculation, creating a feedback loop.