
Immutable URLs (2013) - dgellow
https://medium.com/strong-opinions-lightly-held/immutable-urls-91925a8c9373#.8qs5jnol9
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tomcam

      What if URLs were immutable? 
      What if once content was posted to a URL (maybe a new kind of URL, the immutable IURL) 
      it could never be changed? 
      The contents of the site and the URL itself 
      would be hashed together 
      and out would come a key that could never be altered. 
      Not even the theme and styling of the page could be rebranded. 
      It would be frozen like Han Solo at the end of Empire Strikes Back
    

An interesting concept, and I think fatally flawed. There is a simple question
of plumbing. Who'd pay for the kind of infrastructure required to make that
happen? How would it be backward compatible with existing URLs?

Far more important would be issues of identity and freedom. They are related
to Facebook's awkward handling of gender and name identities. What if you
posted something embarrassing, libelous, or injurious to your professional
career?

What if you became a "new person" through a religious transformation, witness
protection, or some other kind of powerful ideological repositioning (think
conversion to or from ISIS, for example)?

What if you want to become anonymous, or link yourself to a formerly anonymous
publication after the fact?

It seems to me that freedom consists not just of being how you wish to be
defined, but control over how you wish to be undefined.

~~~
mort96
You also obviously often want to slightly change the content of say a blog
post, fixing typos or factual inaccuracies and such. Tracking down every old
link and replacing it with an updated one would be a big undertaking.

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paulddraper
There has been lots of work with this concept.

For example, [http://trustyuri.net/](http://trustyuri.net/)

Or it can be something like sha256://abc123... where the URI is the hash of
the contents. It is infinitely cachable, doesn't require SSL for authenticity
(just for privacy), and is location independent (can be hosted anywhere).

I forget how link cycles are resolved, but anyway that's the idea.

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rkeene2
I do something similar for
[http://hashcache.rkeene.org/](http://hashcache.rkeene.org/)

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nunyabuizness
This is the core use case of IPFS: [https://ipfs.io/](https://ipfs.io/)

Neocities has just collaborated with Protocol Labs to host their content
"permanently" on IPFS.

