The Interplanetary File-system must be one of the most interesting technical concepts I’ve come across lately.

[warning: the below is pretty technical. Likely both confused and confusing, written to help me et my head round IPFS]

Globally distributed file-storage is something that’s been

just around the corner

for a long time now. Bittorrent and the like got us 90% of the way there, but functioned as mechanisms for sharing single files, rather than as a layer of infrastructure for other applications to be built on.

To download a file (as with bittorrent) you query its hash in a Distributed Hash Table. You get a list of users storing that file, and download it from them. As a file becomes more popular it becomes cached by more users, so no one node gets overloaded — again like bittorrent. The IPFS designers are also leaving room for more ambitious incentive schemes like Filecoin.

As for uploading: each user has a writeable directory, with an address generated from a keypair. This means the system can enforce only one user being able to write to a directory, without needing any central authority. Only you can upload to your directory, because only you can sign uploads with the private key corresponding to the public key in your directory name.

There’s also a git-like version history built into the filesystem. This feels like overkill to me. The advantage, though, is that you can provide a mutable-seeming directory structure, while under the surface the directory is an immutable data structure, namely a Merkle Tree. It also means that files don’t get deleted — the user just commits a version of the directory without the files. And perhaps you hope that other nodes won’t store the old data, but you have no way to enforce that.

Here’s how creator Juan Benet describes it:

IPFS provides a high through-put content-addressed block storage model, with content-addressed hyper links. This forms a generalized Merkle DAG, a data structure upon which one can build versioned file systems, blockchains, and even a Permanent Web. IPFS combines a distributed hashtable, an incentivized block exchange, and a self-certifying namespace. IPFS has no single point of failure, and nodes do not need to trust each other.

IPFS gives every user a writeable directory, with an address based on their key

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Has the internet been getting nastier, or do we just notice it more now? The latter, says Kameron Hurley:

Just because internet harassment shows up on CNN doesn’t mean it’s new. It just means it’s more visible.

And yes, we’re the ones who made it visible, after enduring a lot of bullshit.

After dealing quietly with abuse since the beginning of the internet, many folks, most of them women, decided to air the reality of the abuse they received, and though it took nearly a decade, men and mainstream media outlets finally started believing it was something that existed, and started signal boosting. Suddenly we were seeing posts that compiled all the horrible comments they got, the ones we deleted quietly back in the day. Not a day goes by now, it seems, when someone on Twitter isn’t retweeting some horrible thing some troll said to them.

Also a neat little anti-hate-mail trick:

I also reduced the number of email threats I got really easily, by simply changing my email address to a “publicity@” address instead of a “Kameron@” address. When someone sends you something hateful, they want to KNOW you’re getting it. They don’t want to think it’s being vetted by some publicist.

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A paragraph to make you feel lazy:

Smith, who is 28, decided to become an English-Korean translator when she completed her undergraduate degree at the age of 21, and saw the lack of translators in the field. She had not learned any foreign languages before, but moved to Korea to achieve her dream.

She went on to win the Man Booker International prize for translating Han Kang’s novel

The Vegetarian

.

Describing the Trump White House, the Washington Post comes up with a decent description of what life feels like when your workplace is stressfully, chaotically going down in flames:

For many White House staffers, impromptu support groups of friends, confidants and acquaintances have materialized, calling and texting to check in, inquiring about their mental state and urging them to take care of themselves.

…

This Republican added that any savvy White House staffer should be keeping a diary. “The real question is, how long do you put up with it?” this person said. “Every one of those people could get a better-paying job and work less hours.”

Unusually, here’s a Guardian article with comments worth reading. It’s about Graffiti, so the Guardianistas are out reminiscing about slogans of decades paste:

During Ronald Reagan’s early 80’s anti-Soviet Union sabre rattling era around corner from uni in two foot high lettering with brush in black on bright yellow building site hoarding:

MUTATE NOW! AVOID POST BOMB RUSH

Northwick Park roundabout, 1970s –

NICHOLAS PARSONS IS THE NEO-OPIATE OF THE PEOPLE

. Done by students from Harrow CHE nearby (now Uni Westminster art school or something) around 1972. A suburban masterpiece, it was still there 15 years later, and the source of much local frustration to drivers having to explain what neo-opiate is to their curious kids in the back seat.

I AM THE SCHIZOID OCTOPUS MAN

… Wilslow Rd. Manchester, most of the 1970s-4ft high, 50 ft long on a low brick wall in Rusholme.

ART IS A HAMMER, NOT A FUCKING MIRROR

on wall opposite Liverpool Art College Foundation Course building, mid 70s.

ONLY 60,000 SHOPPING DAYS TILL THE COLLAPSE OF CAPITALISM

— 1980’s Brixton

ALL MEN ARE RAPISTS. DISARM RAPISTS

. Coventry 1980 something. always made me shudder.

Brixton, 1978:

FIGHT TO MAKE LIFE POETRY

American doctors need to be very careful to classify each treatment they give, to ensure they can claim payment from insurance companies. Looking at the list of possible treatments, though, makes you wonder if they are being

slightly

more specific than needed. For example:

• X35XXXD Volcanic eruption, subsequent encounter
• W5629XA Other contact with orca, initial encounter
• W2202XA Walked into lamppost, initial encounter
• X962XXA Assault by letter bomb, initial encounter
• Z62891 Sibling rivalry
• X05XXXA Exposure to ignition or melting of nightwear, initial encounter

[props to Hacker News for locating most of these]

This LRB comment on the history of shorthand picks up on the slightly unnerving first wave of enthusiasm around Pitman’s shorthand. It appealed to the same kind of geeky idealists who in other generations would speak Esperanto or write open-source software: men who believed that the road to brotherly love was through mastery of a new, better means of communication:

You can still read every syllable from the first International Shorthand Congress and Jubilee of Phonography, thanks to transcripts produced by ‘an army of phonographers . . . not at all concerned with the economic rewards of shorthand, important as these are, but only with the service – personal, social – even professional – which one Pitmanite can render another in any part of the world.’ One delegate described shorthand as a ‘bond of brotherhood’. Like the open-source movement a century and a half later, Pitmanism was idealistic, distributed and male.

The street may find its own uses for things, but so does the academy.

RapGenius started as a way to comment on rap lyrics. The expansion to other song lyrics — accompanied by dropping ‘Rap’ from the name — was pretty obvious.

Less so is the appeal to the extreme highbrow. Perpetual super-student Chris Aldrich turned me on to the “off-label” uses in a glowing blog post. He mentions a Harvard MOOC on the early Christianity, which sent 20,000 students to Genius to comment on the letters of Paul the Apostle. There’s also a community busily glossing Latin texts. Want to read Caesar’s Gallic Wars? Bang.

Sanskrit is lagging — I was only able to find one item in the language, the Buddhist

Heart Sutra

. And that, sadly, is as yet unannotated.

This must be one of the best election campaign posters of all time.



No, it wasn’t a joke. Amanda Feilding, Countess of Wemyss and March, trying in 1979 to become an MP, had at that point had a hole in her head for the best part of a decade.

In 1970 she drilled through her skull with a dentist’s drill. Then she wiped off the blood and went off to a fancy dress party.

Her husband Joey Mellon filmed the procedure — when they showed it at a film festival, they supposedly caused several audience members to faint.

Joey also had a hole in his head. He documented it all in his book Bore Hole

[customers who bought this also bought: Hieronymous Bosch; Hell’s Angels; The Psychopath Test]

More: Christopher Turner, in Cabinet Magazine

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl is permanently associated for me with winter in Berlin.

It fixed itself there in the winter of 2009-10. I’d fallen in love, in a way that I’d not believed myself still capable of, and my emotions had burst open into areas I hadn’t felt since I was a teenager. It was also one of the coldest winters, and cold has always energised me. I’d go out the door in the morning, onto uncleared month-old snow, be jolted awake by the cold air, and only restrain myself from running with the knowledge that I’d slip over if I did.

Howl was the constant mental soundtrack when I was outside — as I paced through a park eating carrots on my lunch-break, or earned scathing looks for muttering to myself in the u-bahn. It was the perfect accompaniment for my manic, convoluted rush of half-forgotten emotions — extreme states and rootless poverty, bursts of arrogant passion just a whisker away from despair or self-destruction.

Since then, Howl has always been somewhere in my head. Especially at a time like now, when the cold loosens up my head and I can recover an echo of how it once felt. There’s a miniature revelation as the poem becomes physical rather than intellectual, as the ecstatic intensity briefly becomes comprehensible. I tap fingers, twirl pens; the body fidgets and the mind free-associates.

All this has happened again these past few days. It’s always half a surprise — no more, no less. There’s a strange interplay between my past and my present and Allen Ginsberg, and some point where Howl suddenly bursts into colour. So rather than dissect it I’ll just repeat some of the lines which — for no obvious reason — shine most brightly to me:

      who ate fire in paint hotels or drank turpentine in 
              Paradise Alley, death, or purgatoried their 
              torsos night after night 
       with dreams, with drugs, with waking nightmares, al- 
              cohol and cock and endless balls, 
       incomparable blind; streets of shuddering cloud and 
              lightning in the mind leaping toward poles of 
              Canada & Paterson, illuminating all the mo- 
              tionless world of Time between, 
       Peyote solidities of halls, backyard green tree cemetery 
              dawns, wine drunkenness over the rooftops, 
              storefront boroughs of teahead joyride neon 
              blinking traffic light, sun and moon and tree 
              vibrations in the roaring winter dusks of Brook- 
              lyn, ashcan rantings and kind king light of mind, 

You can (should!) read the full poem here