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Comment by jstanley | Hacker News Reader

Is IPFS infamous for illegal content?

My perception was that it's still much too easy to trace the origin of content on IPFS and therefore not suitable for illegal things.

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It was used in Spain to host illegal websites organizing Catalonian independence. But yeah, its not a great pick for illegal activities against technically competent governments.

There's not much point in trying to hide what your doing, if what your doing is holding a public vote.

You have it somewhat backwards -- they wanted to get the word out, and the government had been suppressing discussion actively. They used IPFS to circumvent that.

'illegal'

It's as much infamous for illegal content as hard disks are. That is, you can choose to host some, but you can also choose not to.

Yeah, it will eventually support having blacklists. So if you get a cease-and-desist letter, you can simply blacklist the offending content. It doesn't completely solve the issue, but it should help mitigate getting into legal trouble with it.

For anonymous content, you'd probably have to handle the encryption/decryption yourself and use IPFS as the distribution.

It supports blacklists now too. The bigger mitigation is that IPFS is a "push" and not a "pull" system, so you only store content you have explicitly requested.

Your blacklist becomes someone else's favorites list.

Changing a single byte changes the entire hash, so blacklists aren't a great solution if censorship is what you're after.

Blacklists are double hashed, so they aren't useful for finding 'bad' content.

And who can assure that these blacklists won't be manipulated for someone's gain? Ie, surpressing activity they don't like on the network?

Yep, and even the content you've explicitly accessed, it's garbage collected unless you pin it. So that helps further mitigate the issue, in case you mistakenly stumble upon undesirable content.

All content received is automagically re-distributed by default, correct? It is similar to BitTorrent in this regard; very different from the more common client/server paradigm.

I will have to do a bit more research to see how the default clients handle caching popular, unrequested content.

No, if you run ipfs, you only host what you choose to host and things that you have recently requested. Your node doesn't passively accept content from others to host. (Otherwise, a joker would probably saturate the entire network's hosting capacity with /dev/urandom, or everyone would saturate the network's hosting capacity with their own encrypted backups, etc.)

I think there must be something wrong with the way ipfs presents itself, because I see this misconception (that just running ipfs causes you to host anything) often.

It's likely due to people thinking that "distributed" means "distributed by default". IPFS needs to gear it's docs to make people think in terms of Bittorrent (i.e. pinning, seeding, etc) and not in terms of RAID (i.e. sharding, high availability).

I wonder how much of it is the NSA and GCHQ's of the world trying to scare people away from using IPFS...

Willing to bet that guy didn't read the docs, maybe this is a public relations issue.

>> All content received is automagically re-distributed by default

> you only host [...] things that you have recently requested

Thank you for taking the time to correct my misunderstanding, but is this not restating what I wrote?

Or are you rejecting the other portion of the comment discussing caching popular content (never requested/received)?

Oh, I just realized I missed the word "received" in your first sentence! I don't have much to add to how you actually worded the sentence.

I think the automatic re-sharing of recently requested content is only for a short time period (elsewhere someone mentions 30 minutes). Probably not anything anyone should rely much on; it just sounds like a bonus to maybe soften the blow a little bit if you get a lot of activity suddenly.

Everyone's IP is public, and I think your home network gets exposed which I think is the worst part of it (or so I was told).

Depends on target market, so ideally non-technical perception (enterprise budget). There is probably still time to do effective marketing that conveniently doesn't emphasize it but discreetly assuages any concerns.

However, I am hard pressed to find any sizable HN discussion that doesn't mention it? It's basically worrying about what shows up as downsides when Googling, since most potential customers are starting from zero.

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