Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS
github.com
github.com
Nailed it. Remember Freenet? https://web.archive.org/web/20130908073158/http://www.thegua...
There's always a chance of Freenet being the IBM Simon and Apple Newton and IPFS is the iPhone. Or, the VFX1 vs the Oculus. But no. While surely the tech has evolved from a shitty Java app as Freenet was, all those other examples had immediately obvious use cases and just needed the tech to catch up which it did.
If a pedophile signs up for AT&T, is AT&T not routing their illegal data? Or Starbucks if they use the WiFi there? If they sign up for AWS or some other hosting provider, isn't the provider hosting their illegal data?
The obvious solution is to make actual knowledge a prerequisite to liability. The pedophile who knows what it is goes to jail, the random person who is only providing a generic service to the public does not.
So defendants now face the challenge of convincing juries that they were just relaying data to other users. And that's not trivial. Or at least, it's expensive to hire expert witnesses. So many just accept some plea bargain.
The same thing has happened to hosting providers. Sometimes bad police are malicious or incompetent and screw up the lives of innocent people. But that doesn't have anything to do with Freenet, that can even happen to you driving down the street when some dirty cop needs a bust and decides to pull over a random car and plant drugs on it.
The answer isn't to never do anything, it's to fix the systems that oppress innocent people for no good reason. And in the meantime you can't live your life in fear of low-probability oppression by defective authority figures.
Here's a recent one:[0]
> Gibson’s arrest grew out of an ongoing probe of the “Freenet” — an online network that allows users to anonymously share images, chat on message boards and access sites, the probable cause statement says.
0) https://eu.courierpostonline.com/story/news/2020/02/09/craig...
So not an example of someone being arrested just for operating a node, then.
Me, I'll run my Freenet nodes in anonymously leased VPS, and access them via Tor.
But actually, I won't, because there's not much of interest there.
Some would say that's the way to do everything. But it doesn't exactly make it easy for the average Joe.
And that's kind of the point too. Police behave badly more often when there is a network with 500 people on it because they don't really understand it and nobody is paying attention to anything. But when there are only 500 people on it, the 500 people can all be using five proxies and blockchains and credit default swaps and whatever else.
Meanwhile by the time it's popular enough that Joe wants to use it, it's also popular enough that Inspector Clouseau is no longer on the case by and large.
But I don't buy the argument that it's targeted just because it's too small. No matter how many used Freenet, it would get targeted because it's way too laid back about child porn. Sure there's child porn on Tor onion sites, but it's not so easy to find, since the Hidden Wiki has been cleaned up. On Freenet, however, it's a top level category on one of the featured search sites.
Also I remember it supported a very limited subset of CSS even for the time and no way to make websites dynamic since there were no JS, that for sure did not help.
IPFS works more like torrents than FreeNet. If you run an IPFS node, it only hosts content that you pinned on it yourself.
Shitty or not, freenet did and does still provide anonymity, which IPFS does not.
All Freenet peers know each others IP addresses. There's no onion routing. There is the option of running in "darknet" mode. That is, connecting only with known peers. Ideally, people you know and trust. But that provides no access to data from the global Freenet opennet. For that, at least one darknet peer must risk peering freely with the global opennet.
Although there's no onion routing, there is a very effective method for routing data through peer networks. With that, it's arguably impossible to distinguish those who share and access data from those who merely relay it. However, the "plausible deniability" argument depends on understanding how Freenet routing works.
If you want to check out Freenet, never run a node at home. Use a VPS that you lease and access only via Tor. Ideally, connect to Tor via nested VPN chains. Use cryptocurrency that's been thoroughly anonymized. And setup the Freenet WebGUI as a Tor onion service.
A common definition of anonoyminity is that given a set of users, its impossible to determine which element (person) of the set did the action (published a document) [or have a better chance of guessing than guessing at random]. I think freenet mostly provides this property (with a bunch of devil in the details)
Tor actually does provide anonymity through onion routing. It's not effective against global adversaries, and doesn't claim to be. But it's hard to imagine how any low-latency overlay network could resist global adversaries. Chaff, caching and mixing would help, but they aren't that practical or effective unless you accept greater latency.
That's not to say they have the same threat model or provide the same protections. They are very different systems that have different properties - but at a broad-brush high level they both roughly allow you to publish stuff without people being able to easily track the information back to you under various assumptions.
> But it's hard to imagine how any low-latency overlay network could resist global adversaries.
This is a bit of an aside, but making a scalabe low-latency anonymous network is tricky. If you drop the scalabe requirement you can use dining cryptographers.
But with Tor, only clients (including onion services) host and access content, and they don't relay traffic. Conversely, relays merely relay traffic, and don't host or access content. Also, only entry guards ever see the IP addresses of clients. And they only see encrypted data going to middle relays.
So attacks like police have used against Freenet are impossible. Because clients never connect directly to each other. The closest analog is taking over an onion site, and then serving malware to users. But that's much harder than running nodes, serving child porn, and logging IPs.
Also, given that relays retain no content, operators have so far managed to escape liability.
Unfortunately, that didn't turn out very well. Let's just say the 'fringes of free speech' took the upper hand and really started defining the platform in the public view, to the point of being strongly associated with the platform. Why would you run a node if it was mainly used for horrible stuff. Same as what happened to tor services, but to a bigger extent.
I really believe in the idea freedom of speech. But some kind of control is unfortunately needed. Otherwise a platform like this will always spiral out of control and kill itself. I think it's one of those things that sounds great in theory but doesn't work in real life.
Perhaps some kind of user voting could be implemented, but it would be extremely slow, too slow to catch up with new content being published. It's a very hard thing to tackle. Free speech is unfortunately not as black and white as its advocates like to see it.
It seems like every single thread about IPFS on HN has several people asking "what happens if you run an IPFS node and a random person online puts something illegal on it?", and that's just not a thing that happens with IPFS.
Luckily for you that blurry line between mainstream and "fringe" is rapidly shifting, and the list of permissible opinions continues to shrink. More and more people will be forced to decide how important guilt by association is to them, and will either make use of the stigmatized tech - or simply shutup.
> But some kind of control is unfortunately needed.
To what end? Are we protecting the children? Are we preventing the rise of Turbo-Hitler?
> Otherwise a platform like this will always spiral out of control and kill itself.
How do you imagine that happens? Shaming from people saying exactly what you have just said, leading to reduced uptake, justifying censorship - because only bad people use the dark web.
Here is a clue: look at what has happened to lesbians, they are already going through this. I know this because I frequent a thoroughly demonized site run by a free-speech absolutist (well, almost). One day a whole bunch of these women showed up to complain about some insane pre-op transsexual who had succeeded in getting them censored on every major platform. These ladies absolutely hated the site and everyone on it, but they had no alternative.
I'm not doing the demonizing, just pointing out that this inevitably happens.
PS: Who's against lesbians??? I'm pretty sure they are by law protected against discrimination, including the US?
The solution is very simple: enforce the law, force the choice between platform and publisher. If there truly is a need to curtail free speech on a legally protected platform - pass a law making that speech illegal. I'd be curious to see how many heads explode when people learn that "hate speech" is not illegal - and couldn't be made so in the US without hilarious consequences.
I'd rather not name the individual in Canada that was targeting women, but I will say this: some biologically born men have found an interesting loophole in both the political arguments and legal protections afforded on the basis of class and identity. Some lesbians were unimpressed with the idea that they had a moral obligation to grant equal sexual preference to both biologically born women and biologically born men who declared themselves to be women. This is something that has been going on for a while now, and nobody is really allowed to talk about it - because "hate speech".
Apparently it hashes the entire file, meaning it will read it entirely, so I killed it because it took way too long. Apparently there are other methods for fingerprinting large files, like reading a limited set of chunks. I asked on IRC but I did not get a thorough answer.
IPFS is content addressable storage by design on entire files. Reading limited set of chunks poses some problem regarding data integrity and deduplication colisions. One bit flip in JPG may destroy the entire image - thankfuly with currently used hash functions the right and broken files will have different "fingerprint". One way hash functions have extremely low probability of collision with full file scan. However when you skip part of files the probalibity of collision is roughly equal to count of bytes not scaned divided by total file size.
Practically I don't think code for real time updates is written uet
Not the same thing, not the same thing at all...