On Tue, Nov 22, 2016 at 11:33 AM bawolff bawolff+wn@gmail.com wrote:
See also related discussion last year https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-November/084143.html
And the year before, and before that, and before that... it's a perennial proposal ;-)
Personally I think this whole thing is a bad idea
- Its questionable how much this would actually save anything. Cached
anon hits are pretty cheap
Indeed.
- This basically doesn't do cach invalidation. Lets just have
vandalism stay around for long periods of time
Yep, that's always been a problem in these proposals.
* Probably makes it much easier for third parties to determine what
you are browsing. (Censorship resistant p2p networks is still an open research problem last I checked)
Plus this.
- Probably makes it easier for adversaries to selectively censor
specific articles [I haven't looked at the implementation, but I'm going to guess here]
Basically because of the above.
- Questionable how it would verify content is legit. What's stopping a
malicious actor from putting random malicious js into the p2p network, or someone replacing articles with biased versions.
Same thing here. That being said....I'm curious if there's some sort of middle ground here. I wonder how much (c|w)ould be saved by serving static assets (CSS, UI images, etc etc) via P2P. Prolly not much in the US/Europe, but in places with poor latency this could be interesting.
-Chad