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Comment by s17n | Hacker News Reader

URLs lasting forever was a beautiful dream but in reality, it seems that 99% of URLs don't in fact last forever. Rather than endlessly fighting a losing battle, maybe we should build the technology around the assumption that infrastructure isn't permanent?

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>maybe we should build the technology around the assumption that infrastructure isn't permanent?

Yes. Also not using a url shortener as infrastructure.

URNs were supposed to solve that problem by separating the identity of the thing from the location of the thing.

But they never became popular and then link shorteners reimplemented the idea, badly.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform_Resource_Name

Yes.

domain names often exchange hands and a URL that is supposed to last forever can turn into malicious phishing link over time.

In theory a content-addressed system like IPFS would be the best: if someone online still has a copy, you can get it too.

It feels as though, much like cryptography in general reduces almost all confidentiality-adjacent problems to key distribution (which is damn near unsolvable in large uncoordinated deployments like Web PKI or PGP), content-addressable storage reduces almost all data-persistence-adjacent problems to maintenance of mutable name-to-hash mappings (which is damn near unsolvable in large uncoordinated deployments like BitTorrent, Git, or IP[FN]S).

DNS seems to solve the problem of a decentralized loosely-coordinated mapping service pretty well.

True, but then you're back on square one. Because it's not guaranteed that using a (DNS) name will point to the same content forever.

But then all content should be static and never update?

If you serve an SPA via IPFS, the SPA still needs to fetch the data from an endpoint which could go down or change

Even if you put everything on a blockchain, an RPC endpoint to read the data must have a URL

> But then all content should be static and never update?

And thus we arrive at the root of the conflict. Many users (that care about this kind of thing) want to publications that they’ve seen to stay where they’ve seen them; many publishers have become accustomed to being able to memory-hole things (sometimes for very real safety reasons; often for marketing ones). That on top of all the usual problems of maintaining a space of human-readable names.

No, not all content should never change. This is just the core of the dilemma: dynamic content (and identifiers) rots faster that static content (content addressed). We can have both, but not at the same time.

Note that IPFS is now on the EU Piracy Watchlist which may be a precursor to making it illegal.

Didn't know that, interesting. Although maybe it's not that surprising...

URL identify the location of a resource on a network, not the resource itself, and so are not required to be permanent or unique. That's why they're called "uniform resource locators".

This problem was recognized in 1997 and is why the Digital Object Identifier was invented.

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