Quantum hosting: a page exists while it has at least one observer

Our world is gradually moving to a state in which information is the most valuable resource. And the value of information is not least changed by its prevalence. GeekTimes, Habrahabr or Wikipedia are popular because of the information stored on their pages. Good movies and music are stored on torrents for much longer than pass-throughs.

Philosophical thoughts were also visited by the creator of the “ephemeral” hosting ephemeralp2p.durazo.us , which, in essence, does not host a single page, but only supports something like a torrent tracker.

From the start pageEphemeral anyone can enter any content into the form, and after sending the form the browser of this person becomes one of the nodes of the p2p network. A unique SHA-256 hash is created for the content, which is included in the full address of the created page.

Then anyone who receives the address of the created page can open it. Its content is not stored on the server, and is distributed by browsers of those network participants in which this page is open. True, the process of distributing and searching for a suitable donor is regulated by the server itself. When the last browser closes the page, its contents disappear without a trace. At the top of the page is the number of readers and other service information.

The author organized this project as an experiment to test the operation of web sockets. The project is written in languageElixir  is a parallel programming language that runs in an Erlang virtual machine, BEAM. Project code is available on github .

This way of distributing content has some interesting features. Firstly, content that is not stored anywhere and self-destructing is very convenient for distributing sensitive sensitive information that can be found only by knowing the corresponding hash, and only while someone else is distributing it. Secondly, since the hash is created based on the content of the page, then opening the page with a specific address, you will automatically make sure that you get exactly the content that you were counting on.

This Ephemeral article is available here .