zlib-searcher VS multibase

A week or so ago this really quite nice book Linz / Z-library IPFS search frontend was unveiled:

https://zlib.zu1k.com/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34176479

Now is appears to be offline. Is the only good answer to self-host?

https://github.com/zlib-searcher/zlib-searcher

https://github.com/zlib-searcher/zlib-searcher

> IPFS now uses base58btc exclusively

That's blatantly wrong. IPFS supports 25 different base representations (https://github.com/multiformats/multibase/blob/master/multib...).

In fact, recently, two community members decided to implement a new base encoding with emojis for fun:

https://cid.ipfs.tech/#%F0%9F%9A%80%F0%9F%AA%90%E2%AD%90%F0%...

https://github.com/multiformats/multihash supports at the very least SHA1 SHA2-256 SHA2-512 SHA3/Keccak Blake2b-256/Blake2b-512/Blake2s-128/Blake2s-256 Blake3 and Strobe. Hashes in IPFS are being standardised through the IETF and W3C https://www.ietf.org/id/draft-multiformats-multihash-05.html.

If you need rhash, you are welcome to submit a PR! We also have a grants program you can use to be rewarded for this.

I'm still working on the project, at the moment you need to do the following (and the recovery procedure is a bit cumbersome -- there will be a GUI at some point for all of this since ultimately the project is intended for regular people):

% paperback backup [- or the file to back up] -n [threshold] -k [number of shards to make]

The command will print out the contents of the main document QR codes since at the moment the program can't scan the QR codes in the PDFs so you need to manually input the data. Note that the QR codes don't contain Base64 since that is not an efficient way of encoding binary data using QR codes. The QR code data is all encoded in Base10 (but the recovery code can handle any base data because I use multibase[1] prefixes).

And then to recover:

% paperback recover --interactive [- or the path to output the data to]

And it will ask you for the main document data (just copy-paste it, putting an extra newline after each segment) and then the shard data (you can copy-paste the "text fallback" segments from the QR codes) and shard codewords -- also with a newline after each section section. The prompts tell you what to input

"paperback expand" (create new shards from existing ones) works the same way (and also requires --interactive).

I plan to add support for just taking the PDF file and scanning the data from it directly but it seems a bit complicated to do at the moment, and I'm presenting a talk on this project next month at Linux.conf.au so I'm working on that talk right now.

[1]: https://github.com/multiformats/multibase

remove the B (which indicates the uppercase base32 encoding base from https://github.com/multiformats/multibase) and use all the rest (including the ML) as the filename, followed by .data