Daily Archives: June 14, 2016

Decentralized Web Summit pt.5: Panels & Talks

See part 1

See part 2

See part 3

See part 4

Security in a World of Black Hats

We all know that spam, phishing, hacks, identity theft, etc are big money and a big pain. This panel talked about what they are doing in their companies and strategies.

Ross Schulman, Open Tech Institute

Van Jacobson, Google

Mike Perry, Tor

Paige Peterson, MaidSafe

Brian Warner, Tahoe LAFS

One strategy they suggested was using safer code languages. Paige said that MaidSafe products are being rewritten in older languages. She mentioned C++, but I am not sure if they are using that or C++ was an example. I guess those older languages aren’t dead.

There is also something called a Freedom Box, which allows an individual to host their own part of the web. I’d like to take a look at this.

The speakers talked in general terms about what their companies are doing, but couldn’t make specific details public because the event was being livestreamed. That would open them up to hacking and other nastiness.

Moonshot Challenge: What Can You Do?

Juan Benet: websites divorced from locations

Trent McConaghy, Big Chain DB and IPDB: decentralize at scale

Karissa McKelvey, The DAT Project: breaking open scientific data

Denis Nazarov, MediaChain: connect content creators with audiences. MediaChain is an open universal media library that provides a content id to your artwork. This idea keeps the owner/creator information with the image.

Evan Schwartz, Interledger, an Internet protocol for money: he is interested int he future of money. He wants to help payment systems talk to each other. I actually had some idea what this company was talking about. If you use Google Pay and your vendor uses PayPal, Interledger will allow your systems to talk to each other so that you can still pay. In my mind, it gives everyone choices about what payment system works for them and doesn’t require us to have multiple passwords and our money spread around. Interledger helps with the routing of packets of money across networks. It will lead to agnostic payment systems

IPFS is a peer to peer hypermedia protocol

 

Resources:

    • slack.mediachain.com
    • github.com/mediachain
    • Ethereum is a public blockchain platform with programmable transaction functionality.[1][2] It provides a decentralized virtual machine that can execute peer-to-peer contracts using a cryptocurrency called Ether. (Wikipedia)
    • The block chain is a public ledger that records bitcoin transactions. A novel solution accomplishes this without any trusted central authority: maintenance of the block chain is performed by a network of communicating nodes running bitcoin software.[15] Transactions of the form payer X sends Y bitcoins to payee Z are broadcast to this network using readily available software applications. Network nodes can validate transactions, add them to their copy of the ledger, and then broadcast these ledger additions to other nodes.[11]:ch. 8 The block chain is a distributed database – to achieve independent verification of the chain of ownership of any and every bitcoin (amount), each network node stores its own copy of the block chain. Approximately six times per hour, a new group of accepted transactions, a block, is created, added to the block chain, and quickly published to all nodes. This allows bitcoin software to determine when a particular bitcoin amount has been spent, which is necessary in order to prevent double-spending in an environment without central oversight. Whereas a conventional ledger records the transfers of actual bills or promissory notes that exist apart from it, the block chain is the only place that bitcoins can be said to exist in the form of unspent outputs of transactions.[11]:ch. 5 (Wikipedia)
    • InterPlanetary File System (IPFS) is a content-addressable, peer-to-peer hypermedia distribution protocol. Nodes in the IPFS network form a distributed file system. IPFS is an open source project developed by Protocol Labs with help from the open source community.[1] It was initially designed by Juan Benet.[2] (Wikipedia)
    • Cory Doctorow’s presentation
      Tim Berners-Lee’s Solid project
      Twitter hashtag #DWebSummit