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Ask HN: How is anonymous / distributed data hosting even possible?

1 points by dfps ↗ HN
I've been watching a few videos on distributed web (using everyones device as a port to connect to each other and share information), but I don't understand where the data would be hosted?

Also, following on the effective censorship of unpopular speech this month, people are now talking about ICANN and "giving them the ability to now take our domains."

EFF and First Amendment lawyers are also concerned about recent developments.

It appears, then, that there will be a lot of press now towards a free, anonymous net. But how can it exist in terms of material systems? Where would the data be hosted? What would connect the material?

2 comments

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stuffaandthings
To answer your first question, the data is hosted on devices part of the distributed network.

For example, if you have a static webpage it may either be present on every node in the network (so anyone else accessing your webpage would only be making a local request to their copy of the data) OR the webpage would be split up into many pieces distributed amongst all the nodes, so say your webpage is split into n chunks you fetch each chunk from Node_1 ... Node_n and use some algorithm to stitch it back together.

These are obviously over simplifications, but you should take a look at how Gnunet, Freenet, and Zergnet(?) and how they approach the distributed web. Also, looking at p2p networks might give you an idea of how this works as well.

dfps
Kind of like torrenting, right? But how stable is that data then? Isn't it too complicated, to find all that data and piece it together, and not lose any of it?

I will look at those, thanks.