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Comment by chc | Hacker News Reader

It sounds like you're essentially talking about caching proxies, since if the data only lived on NYT's server, it wouldn't matter whether you were looking it up by "data ID" or IP address. Don't we have that already? Is there some significant difference I'm missing?

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You can try it today:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freenet#Distributed_storage_an...

Trust is still needed for a variety of reasons including the prevention of a DoS attack on global storage capacity (injecting 10Tb/s of junk into the peer-to-peer data store).

The difference is that a caching proxy is a layer over the TCP/IP protocol. In other words, we're using a location-centric protocol to build a data-centric network. Now I'm not saying that this can't be done, it most certainly can. I'm saying that we would be able to, much easier, build a well-functioning, distributed data-centric network if the foundational protocol, on which we build the network ,is inherently data-aware and location-agnostic, instead of being location-aware and data-agnostic (as the TCP/IP protocol is).

Google, NYT, Amazon, et al. have data caching and it conceptually works in the same way as the idea of named data networking (on of the names of the idea above).

However, named data networking would push a cache to every network device between the requester and the provider for every piece of data. Unless an attacker is very close to the provider, they won't be able to take down the resource. The best they could do is take down the resource for themselves and their nearest neighbors.

Until someone poisons the cache by writing and requesting random junk and takes everyone offline at the same time. Remember DOS may be controlled by a few machines, but compromised machines tend to be randomly distributed throughout the world (ed: random but not uniform).

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