Hacker News Reader

Comment by bspammer | Hacker News Reader

Someone made an IPFS mirror of Wordle before it got acquired: https://bafybeic4blel5vf4il73n3nzt6vw7npsov6or3cp3myjms4npii...

This link (theoretically) can't be taken down.

View on HN

dweb.link points to a IP address owned by Protocol Labs, presumably they own the domain as well. Being a US company, they need to adhere to US law. A take-down request can very well happen, especially since NYT is also a US company. Protocol Labs also seems to have responded to take-down requests before on their gateways.

That link can be "taken down", blocked or limited in other ways.

What can't happen, is that the content it is pointing to, can't be "scrubbed" from the internet. As long as you have the CID (essentially a hash), you'll be able to get it (probably) from some node out there in the world.

If you have the IPFS Companion[0] browser extension installed (or use Brave, which includes it natively) then the dweb.link URL will be translated automatically into an ipfs:// URL and resolved locally. Blocking the CID at the public gateway, or even taking down the gateway, would have no effect.

[0] https://docs.ipfs.io/install/ipfs-companion/

"(theoretically)" is a good simple way to put it, but I wonder what would be simple + more accurate. In theory computers, internet, could be destroyed, or the servers simply shut off, never updated & left to bitrot, etc.

Maybe cannot be "individually" taken down.

I would think the copyright holder to the source code (could be the original writer, the NYT, …) would win any case on that.

It’s essentially the same as if someone made an IPFS mirror of the Microsoft Windows source code.

Microsoft's been agitated that the Windows source gets put in a torrent every few years. They haven't been able to rid the planet of that, yet. IPFS is a less-efficient DHT, basically. They might "win" a case legally, but they won't actually be able to take anything down. The value of that sort of technology isn't actually the hosting (very easy to keep something available even over traditional HTTP), but a stable URL/URI (less easy to do, but still solved by BitTorrent years ago).

I had one on Yggdrasil[0] before I said meh, and took it down.

[0] - https://yggdrasil-network.github.io

Reply on news.ycombinator.com