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Re:GitHub Outage by kelseydh on Wednesday January 27, 2016 @08:56PM (#10985490)
Their source code pointing to Github is symbolic of exactly how this problem hasn't been solved yet.
Re:GitHub Outage by ianopolous on Wednesday January 27, 2016 @09:20PM (#10985632)
I didn't say it was solved, but they are very close. IPFS is essentially a global p2p git repo, with a cryptographically controlled branch namespace.
Re:GitHub Outage by kelseydh on Wednesday January 27, 2016 @09:44PM (#10985766)
That sounds very cool. I was just pointing out how divorced these ideas still are from the way we actually program and implement things on the web.

In an ideal world, a link to a source code repository (or a link to anything for that matter...) would never fail because there would be automatic mirrors to at least provide read-only access to it.

It sort of forces one to ask whether this is the result of fundamental mistakes within HTTP / DNS itself. It's not realistic for a web designer to put time into making external links fault tolerant by running some query to switch the routing link to an available node.

Re:GitHub Outage by ianopolous on Thursday January 28, 2016 @03:31AM (#10987086)
Content addressed links at least make this possible. With http you have to reach a particular server. If that server is down, the link is broken. With ipfs all you need is at least one machine on the entire network to be serving a file and the link will work and as an added bonus you can verify the hash of what you get so a mitm attack on that link is impossible.
Re:GitHub Outage by kelseydh on Thursday January 28, 2016 @09:13PM (#10993055)
Very interesting. Do you think ipfs could be used to mimic a server to host a static website that could be loaded by a browser?
Re:GitHub Outage by ianopolous on Saturday January 30, 2016 @10:19AM (#11002096)
You mean like this?

https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmNhFJjGcMPqpuYfxL62VVB9528NXqDNMFXiqN5...

:-) IPFS includes an optional http gateway to give the traditional web access to IPFS before browsers support the IPFS protocol natively.