For all who hope a decentralized web is in our immediate area future – anyone who, for example, has recently the measurable ways in which major technological oligarchs play an active role in shaping our democracy, perhaps – there is good news: Tuesday, Privacy Browser Brave has released an update that makes it the first to appear peer-to-peer protocol for presenting web content.
Known as IPFS, what stands for InterPlanetary File System, the protocol allows users to load content from a decentralized network of distributed nodes rather than a centralized server. It is a new – and much-announced – technology, and may eventually be the Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) which dominates our current internet infrastructure.
“We are delighted to be the first browser to offer IPFS integration with the release of today’s Brave desktop,” said Brian Bondy, CTO and co-founder of Brave. “The integration of the IPFS open-source network is an important milestone in making the web more transparent, decentralized and resilient.”
The new protocol promises several inherent advantages over HTTP, with faster web speeds, lower publisher costs and a much smaller possibility of government censorship between them.
“Today, web users around the world do not have access to restricted content, including for example parts of Wikipedia in Thailand, more than 100,000 blocked sites in Turkey and critical access to COVID-19 information in China,” said IPFS project leader Molly Mackinlay tells Engadget. “Now anyone with an internet connection can access this critical information via IPFS in the Brave browser.”
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In a email to vise, Founder of IPFS, Juan Benet, said he was concerned that the internet had become as central as it was, raising the possibility that it could “Disappear at any moment, bring all the data together – or at least break all the links.”
“Instead,” he continues, “We strive for a fully distributed web, where applications do not reside on central servers but operate on the entire network from users’ computers … a web where content can move through any unreliable intermediaries without losing control give up the data. , or to endanger it. ”
After the invasion of the Capitol on January 6 by a right-wing mob, a there has been heated debate between publishers and platforms about what types of content should be allowed to see the light of day. IPFS will democratize the Internet in part by wrestle control from the hands of a few people – which means that decisions like these on permanent muzzle band President Donald Trump on Twitter or yank Parler of the host service would be much more difficult to make one-sided in the future.
Vversion 1.19 of Brave is available to download from today.