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0 sats \ 9 replies \ @rtr 26 Apr \ on: TCP/IP Alternatives? tech
Why would you want to redo TCP/IP? I guess if you're moving from IPv4 to IPv6, sure. But I don't see a reason to move away from such a core part of the network stack.
It seems to me that TCP/IP is always censorable at the ISP level, but maybe I'm wrong?
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I guess? But that's just the structure of the internet. ISPs are basically just gateways that connect you to other ISPs in other {areas, countries}. IP is just a protocol that allows you to logically address a machine in a network.
You'll be able to create your own internet in your own area using a bunch of wireless routers in a sort of meshnet style and still uses IP. But that doesn't rely on an ISP to communicate with other nodes in the meshnet.
Maybe packet radio as well. That's a way to communicate to farther networks without going through an ISP. It's a heck of a lot slower though.
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Yes. I am aware of packet radio. You're right. It's very slow. It just seems that critical projects like those on github can be taken down on a whim by third parties. I know a meshnet is very pie in the sky, but the current system seems very fragile.
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Yes. It's very fragile. It's actually insane when you really think about it. How a lot of the current infrastructure today are very fragile on certain places.
Reminds me of this XKCD comic:
I think the best way to deal with this fragility is to make sure that you have redundancy.
I mean, posting your repo in Github is great since there's a lot of people using it. But you should also have your repo backed up elsewhere, preferrably in multiple places, just in case Github kicks you out.
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That sums it up!
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I wouldn't call the internet "fragile". It's actually very robust at routing around local obstructions in the network - if there's a route, it tends to find it, eventually.
And a GitHub takedown, while impactful, does not spell the end of a project. Git calls the operation
clone for a reason - everyone who does that downloads the entire repository, with its entire history and all branches.You can recover a project from any developer's machine almost immediately (and with integrity checks), thanks to Git's decentralized nature.
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Thanks for the information. I know there has been talk of getting bitcoin core off of github. What's the rationale for moving it, and what alternatives are available, if you know?
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I'll start by pointing out that you don't need a "full-service" to just host code.
You can just expose a bare Git repo over any plain ol' HTTP server with something like
python -m http.server -d /path/to/repo.git
There's technologies like WebDAV and more modern ones that even allow write access.
Indeed, I believe this was the way that Linus Torvalds hosted his autority-copy of the Linux Kernel in the early days of Git.
That being said, there are plenty of alternatives.
Hosted:
- GitLab, but I believe they don't offer as much free stuff as GH.
- GNU Savannah, supported by the GNU Foundation. Your project must be FOSS under fairly strict Richard Stallman rules.
- SourceForge will get an honorable mention because it was THE Big Daddy back in the days. Massive enshittification caused them to slide into obscurity.
- JetBrains, Atlassian and other smaller players have offerings too, but perhaps too private-code focused.
Self-hosted
- Gitea, definitely my favourite. I use it for private code hosting that doesn't leave my network, but can supposedly scale to handle public projects.
- GitLab has an open source "community edition". Never used it.
As for rationale for moving something like Bitcoin Core off GitHub, I don't really see one at present. There is no smoke indicating a shutdown is on the horizon, so it doesn't justify the cost of a preemptive migration.
If a shutdown happens out of the blue, like I said, reemerging on another website is trivial, but they can shut down that too until the only thing left is a Gitea instance, or indeed a bare repo, hosted over Tor.
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Great information. Thanks!
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