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Comment by tw1010 | Hacker News Reader

Naive question: if data on IPFS is permanent, meaning it's hard or impossible to remove things from it, what mechanisms, if any, exists to prevent unlawful content from being uploaded to it?

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Data on IPFS is not permanent, nodes only host cached or pinned content (the later is explicit).

> What mechanisms, if any, exists to prevent unlawful content from being uploaded to it?

Probably the same ones used against P2P, lawsuits and pressure on national governments to crack down against the offenders :)

So there is a way to figure out who is downloading what on IPFS? (At least assuming that you have assets comparable to national governments.)

Yeah, the nodes connect via IP addresses. You could proxy it through Tor or something though.

As far as I understand it, proxying it is dangerous because IPFS will announce all your IPs so that the shortest routes can be established. You probably need to run it in a VM/container that only has access to Tor and no other network adapter.

Ah, good to know.

I love the idea behind IPFS but it just doesn't feel mature enough yet. The documentation, examples, consistent APIs, etc, don't seem very solidified.

Thanks! We're hard at work making everything better, especially the documentation and examples bit, but lots of work on the APIs as well.

If you have anything concrete to suggest or help out with, please open up a issue in the relevant repository, this would be the entrypoint to find your way around in our Github organization: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs

Disclaimer: I work for Protocol Labs on IPFS

I want to contribute, experienced senior web dev. Where do I get started?

Jump into #ipfs on freenode (IRC) and tell us what area you want to contribute to and someone can point you in the right direction.

Otherwise, assuming you know JavaScript, https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissu... is a great place to start.

If you have some Golang experience, https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/issues?q=is%3Aopen+is%3Aissu... should work to find you some beginner issues.

> announce all your IPs

That's configurable. Check the format for the config here: https://github.com/ipfs/go-ipfs/blob/master/docs/config.md#a...

Keyword being `Announce` and `NoAnnounce`

It's pretty easy to configure ipfs to not advertise internal IP addresses.

Though it really should be the default behavior.

You don't really upload things to IPFS, since it works like Bittorrent: you make files available by adding them, but that doesn't copy those files anywhere. They're only transferred via the network to clients that specifically request them, which makes this a non-issue.

Now FileCoin, that's a different issue...

Could you elaborate on why Filecoin is a different issue? Is it because I have to specifically download (or allow others to upload to me) the files so I can host them?

With FileCoin (the IPFS-related ICO with no implementation), the idea is that you're offering your storage space to others in exchange for a fee. So somebody could use your system to store, say, child porn.

With plain IPFS that cannot happen, because you're only downloading what you're interested in. That's what I meant when I wrote that IPFS is like Bittorrent.

I would hope that safe harbor laws would protect you in a case like that, similar to how Amazon doesn't get busted if one of their customers uses AWS to store illegal material.

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