site/helios/index.html
Local Dev 079822418e install.ps1: NRPT rules for all BNS-native TLDs (.bch .p2p .bit .nav)
Was only .bch. The daemon and CA already handle these four TLDs; the NRPT
rule was the missing piece that made .p2p / .bit / .nav queries never reach
the daemon at all (they went to ICANN's normal DNS and NXDOMAIN'd).

Dual TLDs (.de .ru .dev .ltd) intentionally NOT here. They need the
daemon's DNS-forwarding path to work reliably for unregistered names,
and there's still an open EDNS/AAAA forwarding bug in bnsd.js that
would break most German/Russian sites if we NRPT'd .de.

Adding more native TLDs (.x .sia .dgb .nt from Theseus's expanded set)
needs a CA rotation first — the current CA's nameConstraints only permit
bch/p2p/bit/deviant/nav/test/bcnr. Deferred.
2026-07-31 08:43:31 +02:00

117 lines
5.5 KiB
HTML

<!doctype html>
<html lang="en">
<head>
<meta charset="utf-8">
<meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1">
<title>Helios — searching the decentralized web — Silent Mode</title>
<meta name="description" content="Helios is the search engine Silent Mode is designing for the decentralized web — no central crawler to trust, no authority to rank, no advertiser to serve. Reads what BCH says exists.">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="../shared.css">
</head>
<body>
<nav class="topnav">
<a class="brand" href="../">⛓️ Silent <span class="g">Mode</span></a>
<a href="../tools/">Tools</a>
<a href="../prometheus/">Prometheus</a>
<a href="../sirius/">Sirius</a>
<a href="./" class="here">Helios</a>
<a href="../hermes/">Hermes</a>
</nav>
<header class="hero">
<div class="mark" style="font-size:52px">☀️</div>
<h1>Helios
<span class="pill p-designed" style="vertical-align:middle;font-size:12px;margin-left:.6rem">designed · not yet built</span>
</h1>
<p class="tag">A search engine for the decentralized web — <b>no central crawler to
trust, no authority to rank, no advertiser to serve</b>. Named for the sun, which
sees everything and takes no side. Reads what the chain says exists and lets you
find it by name, by tag, by content, by who you trust.</p>
</header>
<div class="wrap narrow">
<section class="plain">
<h2>The problem</h2>
<p class="lede">Every search engine that matters today is one company deciding what the
web looks like. It crawls what it wants, indexes what it chooses, ranks by what pays
it, and drops what its lawyers dislike. On the ordinary web that is livable — most
sites are on cooperating hosts and there is a shared understanding of what "the
open web" means. On a network where nobody hosts anything centrally and nobody
approves what gets published, a company-run search would recreate exactly the
gatekeeper the network was built to escape.</p>
<p class="lede">A search engine for the decentralized web has to be built with the
same rules as the network it searches: <b>no crawler that any single party runs, no
ranking any single party decides, and no listing any single party can remove</b>.
That is Helios.</p>
</section>
<section>
<h2>How Helios will work</h2>
<ol class="steps">
<li><b>The chain is the truth about what exists.</b>
<span>Every BNS name registered on Bitcoin Cash is a piece of a public index —
no crawler needed to find them. Helios reads the same records every resolver
reads, plus the on-chain <code class="inline">APS1</code> app listings from
<a href="../prometheus/">Prometheus</a>, plus any signed metadata records
(title, description, tags) that publishers attach to their names.</span></li>
<li><b>Content indexing is opt-in.</b>
<span>For the bytes behind a name (an HTML page, a document), Helios only
indexes what the publisher marks as indexable — a signed
<code class="inline">idx</code> record with a category and tag list. Nobody
crawls anyone. If a site does not want to be searchable, it isn't.</span></li>
<li><b>Ranking is by signed endorsement, not by an algorithm nobody understands.</b>
<span>Names on your trust list carry weight for you. Names on nobody's trust
list appear at the bottom. Nothing paid ever floats. Change trust lists, change
results — the ranking is transparent because it is <i>yours</i>.</span></li>
<li><b>The frontend can run anywhere.</b>
<span>Helios's index is data on chain plus data on Sia — a spec, not a service.
The reference frontend runs at <code class="inline">helios.silentmode.bch</code>,
but any client can build its own index and its own UI from the same public
substrate. If Silent Mode's Helios goes down, another Helios exists tomorrow.</span></li>
</ol>
</section>
<section>
<h2>What it will NOT do</h2>
<div class="grid">
<div class="card">
<h3>Track you</h3>
<p>No accounts, no cookies, no per-user history. Every search is the same request
shape; the server has nothing to profile.</p>
</div>
<div class="card">
<h3>Rank by payment</h3>
<p>There is no sponsored-result slot, no bidding, no advertising surface at all.
Storage costs money; searches don't.</p>
</div>
<div class="card">
<h3>Moderate content</h3>
<p>Helios shows you what your trust list vouches for. Filtering out categories or
publishers is your subscription choice, not the engine's policy.</p>
</div>
<div class="card">
<h3>Depend on one operator</h3>
<p>The index is public. If Silent Mode stops hosting Helios tomorrow, the data
and the spec are still there — anyone can run their own.</p>
</div>
</div>
</section>
<div class="note warn"><b>Status: designed, not built.</b> This page is a placeholder for
the intent. The record types (<code class="inline">idx</code>, <code class="inline">tag</code>)
need to be specified in the BNS protocol addendum, the reference frontend needs to be
built, and a trust-list subscription format needs to be settled with
<a href="../hermes/">Hermes</a> so both use the same shape. Watch this page.</div>
</div>
<footer>
<div>Silent Mode — a Deviant project.</div>
<div class="fine">Named for Helios, who saw everything from the sun's chariot and took
no side. Distinct from any Helios monitoring, security, or blockchain project — the
name is a common one from the same source.</div>
</footer>
</body>
</html>