Comment by mynameislegion | Hacker News Reader

Comment by mynameislegion | Hacker News Reader

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Quote:

"In terms of censorship resistance, IPFS includes blacklists of forbidden content in the default distribution, though it's configurable so you can turn it off 'at your own risk'.

Personally I think all of this willful censorship stuff is just a phase to protect the protocol in its infancy. Blacklisting all forbidden content on a global filesystem is ridiculous. The only popular use case I see for that is blocking ads.

So censorship-free distributions of IPFS implementations that integrate with Tor will probably end up as the default if this ever catches on."

Unfortunately, IPFS' built-in censorship tools are not meant to be optional, nor are they temporary. https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/47 is an FAQ entry written by an IPFS member. Quote:

"IPFS has as a strict requirement that content be able to move as fast as the underlying network permits. this rules out designs like freenet's and other oblivious storage platforms, as the base case."

"Oblivious storage platforms" are systems like Tahoe-LAFS or OFF, where storage nodes are unaware of the actual content that they are handling, usually due to some sort of encryption. Quote:

"IPFS has as a design requirement that nodes be able to only store and/or distribute content they explicitly want to store and/or distribute. This means that computers that run IPFS nodes do not have to host 'other people's stuff', which is a very important thing when you consider that lots of content in the internet is -- in some for or other -- illegal under certain jurisdictions."

So, IPFS is explicitly censorable; if enough IPFS nodes refuse to carry some content, then that content is effectively unavailable. Quote:

"users and groups can express what content should or should not be stored and/or distributed. This is required by users to (a) comply with legal constraints in their respective countries, (b) required by users with stricter codes of conduct (i.e. content that is legal but undesired by a group -- e.g. a childrens website)."

So it's possible to create walled gardens in IPFS.

What does this all mean? IPFS is awesome for making content highly redundant and highly available, but it fails at being uncensorable, it fails at being oblivious, and it fails at advancing the state of security for those using it. The analogy to BitTorrent is not just facile, but also very accurate.

You can make oblivious storage (and even ORAM) on top of IPFS, without too much work actually. A critical point here is that making something oblivious by default is a nonstarter for 99% of users on the internet, because major consumer and corporate applications would never use something that (a) adds that much latency to requests, or (b) may have pushed "bad bits" to their computers. This is a design constraint BECAUSE of adoption.

The point is to establish IPFS as a base layer, and build the oblivious storage platform on top.

Which is exactly what we're doing with Peergos[1]. IPFS definitely made the right choice here.

[1] https://github.com/Peergos/Peergos

> So, IPFS is explicitly censorable; if enough IPFS nodes refuse to carry some content, then that content is effectively unavailable.

This is not a definition of censorship I'm familiar with. If no one wants to host a file, there's nothing for the censor to do. There are currently no IPFS nodes willing to store a copy of the essay I wrote on plate tectonics in eight grade, but that's not because it's been censored.

It "fails"? IPFS has never been about obliviousness, it's a distributed CDN.

A more compelling use case than ad blocking is child porn. One of the problems with networks like Freenet is that people do not want to donate resources to replicating and hosting unknown (but known to be substantial) amounts of CP. It's a personal moral thing as well as a legal thing-- it's not something I or most other people want to in any way support.

Security is another use case. It would in theory be possible for malware to be blacklisted by members of the network.

What you call a "problem" I call the fundamental strength of a network like Freenet over IPFS. If you can impose your moral beliefs on what content ought to be available on other users of the network, then the network is useless. Controversial and unpopular speech is the exact kind of content that these networks must be designed to support. If they can't do that, then they fail their primary purpose.

> If they can't do that, then they fail their primary purpose.

That's not the primary purpose of IPFS, and you've been given quotes/links saying as much.

It might be your primary purpose, in which case IPFS (on its own) isn't suitable, so use something else (e.g. FreeNet). Why criticise IPFS for not having the same goals as you, when you could say the same things about the World Wide Web, Gopher, IRC, email, Gnutella, DropBox, etc.?

For a content host (ie the one who bought the hardware, who pays the bills and maintains the equipment) any system that puts all the cost on me and gives all the benefit to someone else is useless. See the Tragedy of the Commons and Free Rider problems.

I'm sure for some people the externalization of the costs and risks are the benefit. But since most of those people won't be contributing anyway, who cares what they think.

Unpopular content falls off of freenet as well (or used to, I'll admit I haven't studied it in years). If no one is requesting it it won't end up stored on the various nodes and will eventually disappear.

The difference between Freenet and IPFS is that IPFS is opt-in for duplicating data, where as Freenet was not (you couldn't even opt-out, only on the total amount you would store).

Doesn't this "fundamental strength" also doom it to be abysmally slow?

Quick proof: If there were a network like Freenet (meaning, nodes can't control what content they host) that wasn't abysmally slow, companies that currently pay to host stuff (e.g. mobile app banner ads) would move their files on to it until it was abysmally slow again.

P2P networks like BitTorrent and Freenet are designed such that the most popular content is the most replicated and therefore, quickest to access. Popularity makes these networks stronger and faster, not slower.

Not to mention that content filtering can imply liability for anything that does manage to slip through.

That doesn't seem like a reasonable liability. If I've got a spam filter that's pretty effective, but some false negatives still happen I don't see how I'd be liable for that. Filters like these are always heuristics, they're not omniscient so can't be 100% correct (false positives and false negatives will happen).

Let's remember that when we are talking about censorship, there are different cases. There is blocking something 99+% of the population thinks should be blocked, like child porn. And then there is blocking things much of the population wants to see but the government doesn't like, like a political dissident's website or wikileaks docs. I would be happy with a solution that would make it possible to block the former, but not the latter.

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