IPFS Weekly Call, 10 Dec 2018

Previous Meeting Next Meeting

⏯

youtube image

►

From YouTube: IPFS Weekly Call 🙌🏽📞December 10th, 2018

Description

Newsletter: https://tinyletter.com/ipfsnewsletter

Textile.io Github Repo: https://github.com/textileio/textile-go

A

All right so everyone, my name's, sander I, work with textile photos.

A

We originally started because we wanted to build a really useful application on top of ipfs and we figured that mobile was the place to do it because it didn't seem like a lot of people were attacking that space and slowly over time, we've kind of grown our vision. Our mission is found more into wanting to provide a a more like a distributed database and application platform kind of like a we like to think of it as a decentralized iCloud.

A

So let me if I can share my screen here, not familiar with zoom, so bear with me.

B

There's a green thing at the bottom of the zoom window. That's a share like we that narrow.

C

Looks like you got it excellent.

A

Okay, so what is textile this is? You have a modified version of our readme, so it's really texty. So again, we like to think of textile is providing encrypted recoverable schema.

D

A

Cross application data storage, those on IP, ffs and loop p2p again, we think of it as like, a decentralized iCloud in the future, or that's that's kind of our mission, decentralize an overnight cloud that developers and users can build upon. So the what we want to enable people to do with textile and talk about users is to the applications and services securely store, your photos, videos, documents or any other type of file, chat with friends and family and access your data from anywhere wherever you are, so these are kind of a poor.

A

If you look at it, if you look at the core values of iCloud we're sort of trying to match those so iCloud, you know it's a great place for your.

D

A

Your files, it's accessible wherever you are, it's safe. It's up to date. You can, you know you can take your files with you. You.

D

Can put any type of file in.

A

There you can collaborate with others and, if you think about it, it's like you know your messages. If you're, if you're an Apple user, cube Apple devices, your.

D

Messages are part.

A

Of iCloud or the applications that you use are all powered by cloud. Obviously your data, so we thought about this. We originally in tak tacular photos because photos are just a really easy type.

D

A

To think about in terms of like user ownership, so everyone understands what you can do with photos. People understand, you know they there's different types of privacy around your photos. You don't want your entire camera roll to the beat open to the public, but you might want to share with the groups and so I'll skip some of this stuff. We are trying to enable people to build other apps like textile photos.

A

We have a mobile SDK that you can plug in for iOS and Android and we're trying to Bill it as something that just for the average application developer is someone that might not really be sold on decentralization. This is fairly but that they can dive into and actually find that it makes their life easier so like they can maybe skip user management.

A

They have a you know like a datastore just taking care of messaging, so something like a firebase or a realm for those of you familiar with that kind of stuff. So how does it work? The at.

D

A

Textile is what we think of as an account wallet. So it's an HD wallet, it's kind of inspired by Stellar's wallet, it's backed by a mnemonic phrase. So you can generate all these any number of deterministic accounts in in this wallet and then you would use each one of those to initialize the textile node and that's how your data, the syncs, between your different devices at a high level, so the the main sort of most important data structure.

A

Is this concept of operation basis, TR DT, to recall a thread so there's different type of updates to go into the threads.

A

There's peers joining leaving data being added comments, messages, and it's really just to get like half Street where each you know, if there's a case where a large misshapen, which is almost all the time, because if you're in the mobile world you're always going on and offline, so you get out of the sync really fast. So we end up having this really wide hash tree.

A

But this is our sort of our first stab at this. That's really not terribly complicated. It's just there's a deterministic merge rule. That happens. It basically just takes the earlier date and creates another block in the thread that can be recreated on other peers so like if they have the same few parents. We know they'll always result in the same exact block ash.

A

So all these all these little updates we call them blocks, are stored on my PFS and because they're hash linked together, you can Traverse back and recover a thread or, if you're joining it, someone else's thread. You can traverse back and get all the older history and it's to here. So this is an example here. I know this looks terrible explode up like this.

A

A

Here is an example: hypothetical users account wallet, so they've got these different accounts and let's say that in their first account they have these certain threads.

A

So we actually tracked your different devices and these could be other apps with with the thread, so it only tracks joins and leaves of those peers, and then this might be like someone's camera roll and it's a private thread that all the peers from that account of join, let's say and started adding files, and they might have like some videos or or like a chat thread so forget in thinking of like that icon analogy: you've got your photos, your your different chapter, heads and see so one of the other large components of this system is what we call Kathy nodes.

D

A

A

Obviously, we want to do everything we can peer-to-peer, but because of the need for in the mobile world, you want to really handle offline robustly. So you run into that all the time. So what we do is we put the same text down notes up into cloud. We run, we run them in on Amazon and they provide offline name boxing services to other peers. So if I send you a message and you're offline I will I will know I better from the previous thread that I've been with you or from your IPS user profile.

A

I'll know where your inboxes are so I can send to your various kind of a inboxes and then, when you come back online, you don't like those messages so looking at the anode of rambling fast, who is so feel free to interrupt me at any point so looking at the internal components here, so obviously we're, unlike the efest node, if it's in them in the mobile use case, it's just a client node. So it's only there to be able to traverse the network and we have two p2p services. There's the thread service.

A

That's the CRB teeth service that worthless trinkets, state pink ears, and then we have this cafe service that you can register with with different nodes and you'll open a user session. Just a JWT session and anytime you've got a data to the network, you'll actually pin it on those cafes and then there's the offline inboxing service I mentioned earlier and so locally. You want to be able to like list the files or photos, you've added type EFS and that's what this files API is for.

A

There's a similar one for just plain messages for listing the different messages in threads and then other components are: is the wallets file schemas I'll get into in a second and then this concept of file mills? It's related to schemas.

A

So one of the core pieces of what we're doing is trying to make as part of this decentralize iCloud mission is trying to make a way for people to easily add structured data type DFS. So we've come up with this system called it's similar to transload it that I've used in past block types and which is a really nice service or if you wanna in your application, need to define how, like it, ingests files or videos. So I want to take this image and I want to create these multiple different sizes and thumbnails.

A

So I'm, one of maybe extract some exif data that kind of thing so in textile photos we actually use a file schema. That looks like this, so this translates directly into a dag node and you can define what pieces you want encrypted and.

D

Each one of these links.

A

Not surprisingly, becomes a dagger node link, so this setup here says essentially, let's take the raw image data. Well, in this case, it doesn't care if it's an image so just take the raw data. We want to save the original and we're gonna. Send it to translate calls these robots like encoding robots and we call them Nils.

D

A

Textile, so you send the raw data to the vlog mill that just encrypted and stored it not DFS, and then it takes the output from that mill and it extracts the exist, a dot here that I don't take that simultaneously. It'll take the output from the raw and will create these different sizes. Here, using this image, we saw the same point so there's this is a mobile client in the mobile world it. Actually, this is running on the node in the phone.

A

It's not hitting like a remote at endpoint, but you can imagine if you want to make a service on a server and do something similar.

A

Let's see so with the results nana's, this is kind of small, but a dag instruction that looks like this. So we've got still. We only added one file here, so we've just got one index and we've got all these different links and then each each link results in a determined deed for data link and this /f here, which means it's going to show like the index of the data.

A

So I can show you that.

A

So the reason we do the index of the file is because, because it's the.

D

A

Not ideally deterministic, no, you don't want to keep adding the same file over and over, so each node locally will keep track of all the files that are in its node, and you can look at the pre ash of a file based on it's Puckle index.

A

You can use that with in combination with the options that were used to create that file to determine if it's already in the system, so you're not continually adding the same files so we're getting close to having a usable version that you could build on top of the main pieces were finishing off the mechanisms for account recovery, so we're doing all the backup to your cafes, but we're missing the piece where you ask the network for your all your thread back notes, so that's the tip of all your threads.

A

So, oh just be like give me all my you know in icon, world. That's really easy! You just ask Apple, hey I'm, proving that I am Who I. Am we do that they get out of apple idea, we're doing that with your mnemonic, see you say to the network. This is who I am I. Need like who's got my stuff, basically so we're doing that with mostly with pump zone so dedicated channels on all the cafe's that we ask for specific people, users back outs and.

A

Just a note about final coin: we we don't love the we always I. Think we see like I need to have these cafes, these federated nodes. This is something like this, but in terms of being the place where everything's pin we'd like to swap that out for for five points every, hopefully, we would running like a file calling node in the excel cafe.

A

Weirdest cures.

A

A

Guess I could show some.

D

Other types of schemas.

A

So you can use Jason the schemas here, so if your application needs to this one's kind of depressing like a third, if you want to ingest log data, for example, you can define on Jason's team. That looks like this. So it's got, you know this is the forgot. The name of the spec, but some log spec requires these fields and all those would be anything out of two threaded and then over here really small, but you can I guess the simplest. Each case of the program is just like a chat, so we have a textile.

D

A

Line client has a chat, sub commands, so you can just invite people to a thread and just start chatting. You know so what's going on here is the each message is being backed up to their respective cafes and because I'm local they're just talking directly to each other? If I was to take one offline, they would communicate via the boxing.

A

I think that's pretty overview.

C

Thank you very much. Sander we're actually going to get into the Q&A part. So if you have a question, if you can just put it in the chat, that would be excellent. Our our first question is from Hannah.

C

Hannah you're right yeah.

E

A

Each message thread is encrypted with the threads the threads key public key. So these are each message is actually a protocol buffer.

A

So if it's pointing to like a d-bag know it or something it just you know, has a hash at that. You know so they're all really really tiny, but yeah there would be encrypted by the threads key.

A

So if I invite you to a thread, there's a couple ways to do that I can I can take the thread.

A

Key and I can encrypt it with your public key or I can encrypt it with a like at one time, just a es key and put that on my PFS and then send you a link to that, and then, if I, somehow give you that you could download that's for like if you're trying to get a new user and that's a good way to do it, because you can just text the URL so that doing that kind of it's like permanently public in a way.

A

So there are different thread types that we haven't fully fleshed out. There is right now the ones that are flushed out are open thread, which means anyone can create, invites anyone else and then a private thread which doesn't accept, invites, and that would be like for your free or account or device peers. We use an internal party for that I'm.

C

Sorry I hate to interrupt, if you don't mind we're actually going to move on to next question. If that's okay, not least two.

F

Questions, one is: do you use any of the built-in files apos like em FS for octopus, or did you build all that? Are you directly manipulating the tag and you built your own files related API and then totally unrelated? Are you familiar with triple I F the international image interoperability framework and their API is for images and manipulating images. Did you consider using that to use that as a reference reference point but think about schemas and things.

A

So the brief um we don't use that we just you know the the actual data is still broken up into into the blocks. So it's kind of more of our level concept above file.

A

And you know file, it could be adjacent object or but yes, it's when you create a photos, schema and then create a thread with that it does do the validation so like if I send you a DAC note that it's supposed to beat on it into that thread. My note might reject it, because it will walk that the data figure I've required links her in there I think the right content types.

A

But and then a second question, no I. That sounds awesome though I didn't know about that one. We should talk about yeah. Let me sweets is right right now. It's this I mean I, guess I kind of just like it's fairly analogous to transloaded the transloaded purpose in the sense of like it'll. You know walks through stuff, stepwise some figured out what needs to happen, but you have em, you know, so we.

D

Currently, only have.

A

Like a way to resize images and extract exit from it, but it's it's laudable like you could, if you wanted to figure out how to handle like PDFs or we definitely laundry video in the skin or audio or whatever. So that would be very time to get like a real respect.

C

Excellent. Thank you. Next question goes to Davi I.

B

Have a bunch so I'm having a hard time like.

B

D

B

Is amazing, work and I full support of creating the firebase or something and I know that the let me data working group is also working on something newer, I'm wondering if you are familiar with the work that they are doing and how much of this is like custom audience and how much like does it map to to pierced an app and pierced are.

A

Also last week, I talked with with with Pedro and Jeremy, and we're definitely like I really want to to not build like a castle and sky custom thing. So very much in reston collaboration, and you know, if there's built-in core.

D

A

Emerges from dynamic data, I'd love to use that.

A

A

B

I'm curious too, and there so like if there are some specific design decisions.

B

Match to the things like that.

A

B

A

Your star, so we have these profiles, that's really just a super basic like we don't. If someone had a really nice identity solution or something like that, it would just we would hope to just plug that in like we don't we don't really want to be the business of creating and yet another solution there or something that it requires you be in textile, so it would be awesome to be able to. You know, enter the textile into that space with you know an existing. Do you even like it.

C

Okay, we are going to take one more question from Jim.

D

Okay, just quickly, you guys have really done great work, trying to get this on iOS and Android, and that seems like incredible engineering effort, I'm, very curious about what limits you've seen with performance and power, consumption and performant and things we can help out with.

A

A

I can tell you it's not great. It's definitely.

A

And it's actually one of the trickiest things is starting and stopping the node and all that and laying around when.

D

It comes out line.

A

The the various things that you can do now, when you're online versus the various things you can do when it's just yeah started state or you can like add data to your local node and stuff like that, be can, for example, use any to live in peace ervices so that that's at this.

D

A

Would be I feel like it's gonna, be cumbersome for just someone to pick it up and start building with. We really want to improve that experience, but you know the things like that are.

D

A

Be I wish it better number or any any numbers around like power consumption. We just kind of like just hope. The phones get more powerful.

C

Well, sander. Thank you very much for giving your time and talking about textile.

A

C

Thank you very much. We will be following the developments of textile photos and yeah. If you need to get help from us, we're I mean you're part, it always ping us we can with ping you. Thank you. Everyone I would like to also thank Alan for taking notes and I'll see everyone next week have a great week take care bye.

A

B

Can I get it any bikes today, event like.