If you’re coming into this relatively new, or even if you need a little brush-up, let me state: Steve Meretzky has earned the title of “Game God” several times over, having been at the center of the early zenith of computer games in the 1980s and persisting, even thriving, in the years since. He continues to work in the industry, still doing game design, 35 years since he started out as a tester at what would become Infocom.

But more than that – besides writing a large amount of game classics in the Interactive Fiction realm, he also was an incredibly good historian and archivist, saving everything.

EVERYTHING.

When we finally connected during production (as it turned out, we lived within 10 miles of each other), Steve showed me his collection of items he had from the days of Infocom (which spanned from roughly 1981 through to the company’s eventual closing and absorption by Activision in the early 1990s).

-http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/4834

I just heard about IPFS last night. It sounds really neat and useful.

From my limited understanding of it, it's like a combination of the following ideas:

• BitTorrent
• Git

The content on the internet will be distributed P2P much like BitTorrent files are. The content is immutable like Git blobs, which means even if the "originating website" goes down or is abandoned, it will always be accessible forever on the distributed system, as long as someone, somewhere has it. And because it's immutable you know that no matter who you retrieve it from, it is the original, unmodified file.

I learned about it from this TechCrunch article:

As a peer-to-peer distributed file system that seeks to connect all computing devices with the same system of files, IPFS seeks to improve on HTTP in several ways. Two, Juan told me in a recent conversation, are key:

“We use content-addressing so content can be decoupled from origin servers, and instead, can be stored permanently. This means content can be stored and served very close to the user, perhaps even from a computer in the same room. Content-addressing allows us to verify the data too, because other hosts may be untrusted. And once the user’s device has the content, it can be cached indefinitely.”

IPFS also addresses security problems that plague our HTTP-based Internet: Content-addressing and content-signing protect IPFS-based sites, making DDoS attacks impossible. And to help mitigate the damage of discontinued websites, IPFS also archives important public-record content, and can easily store important, public-record content.

IPFS’s final core improvement is decentralized distribution, which makes it possible to access Internet content despite sporadic Internet service or even while offline: “We make websites and web apps have no central origin server,” Juan explained. “They can be distributed just like the Bitcoin network is distributed.” This is actually something that HTTP simply cannot do, and would especially be a boon to networks without top-notch connectivity (i.e., the whole developing world), and for access outside of metropolitan areas.

-http://techcrunch.com/2015/10/04/why-the-internet-needs-ipfs-before-its-too-late/

Here are a few videos demonstrating the idea and use of IPFS:







Does anyone else here who knows more about this or the other similar technologies it's built upon (such as Bitcoin) have an opinion on this?

GOG is currently running a promotion where you buy a "piñata" for $3 and it will contain a random indie game ranging in value from $9.99 to $44.99.

While their "randomization" algorithm gives priority to games you don't already own, if you happen to get a game you do already own, it will be a giftable copy.

They're also running a regular sale where certain games are discounted a certain amount.

http://www.gog.com/