How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
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Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
#2Author here. I've tried to keep the article as apolitical as possible, while giving some context to provide the setting.
Anyway, I'm very interested in knowing if the used crypto is sound or not, and stirring a discussion around possible alternative approaches.
Ask me anything if you want to know further!
Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
#3"it is nearly-impossible for any actor to block access to this content because it is replicated around the network automatically, using peer-to-peer encrypted connections that would be very hard to identify and block at the ISP level. Maybe China could do it, but Spain definitely cannot."
How would China do it?
Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
#4"it is nearly-impossible for any actor to block access to this content because it is replicated around the network automatically, using peer-to-peer encrypted connections that would be very hard to identify and block at the ISP level. Maybe China could do it, but Spain definitely cannot." How would China do it?
China has the ability (primarily at layer 8 but also at layer 2) to fail closed in the case of unknown but suspicious content from outside, and also has (again, primarily at layer 8) enough control over ISPs to demand filtering on peer-to-peer traffic. Spain doesn't have that infrastructure, and deploying it would cause enough false positives to negatively affect the economy of non-Catalan parts of Spain.
Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
#5"it is nearly-impossible for any actor to block access to this content because it is replicated around the network automatically, using peer-to-peer encrypted connections that would be very hard to identify and block at the ISP level. Maybe China could do it, but Spain definitely cannot." How would China do it?
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Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
#6"it is nearly-impossible for any actor to block access to this content because it is replicated around the network automatically, using peer-to-peer encrypted connections that would be very hard to identify and block at the ISP level. Maybe China could do it, but Spain definitely cannot." How would China do it?
I imagine because China has spent more time on the required infrastructure to make this happen. Spain is trying to stop something that is set to happen on Oct 1, so they have a finite amount of time to suppress the information.
Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
#7"it is nearly-impossible for any actor to block access to this content because it is replicated around the network automatically, using peer-to-peer encrypted connections that would be very hard to identify and block at the ISP level. Maybe China could do it, but Spain definitely cannot." How would China do it?
I'm not an IPFS expert, but my guess is they have the great firewall, so they can MITM every connection and inspect all of the packets for this type of content and do whatever to the originator/packets.
Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
#8"it is nearly-impossible for any actor to block access to this content because it is replicated around the network automatically, using peer-to-peer encrypted connections that would be very hard to identify and block at the ISP level. "
It's right that the connections are encrypted, but it's NOT correct to say that content is automatically replicated (but it's a common misconception). Instead, content who is wanted by other peers is the only content that gets replicated. You need to explicitly "pin" content to help replicate it.
This is different from Freenet where content is indeed pushed out to other peers in that fashion.
Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
#9"it is nearly-impossible for any actor to block access to this content because it is replicated around the network automatically, using peer-to-peer encrypted connections that would be very hard to identify and block at the ISP level. Maybe China could do it, but Spain definitely cannot." How would China do it?
I'm not an IPFS expert, but my guess is they have the great firewall, so they can MITM every connection and inspect all of the packets for this type of content and do whatever to the originator/packets.
Does the great firewall just happen between outside and inside (Chinese) connections? With IPFS, you could have a direct connection to peers and you could have a direct link (same WiFi for example) where nothing leaves your network when downloading.
As long as one peer in the network has a outside connection, all peers could access that content via relay for example.
Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block
#10"it is nearly-impossible for any actor to block access to this content because it is replicated around the network automatically, using peer-to-peer encrypted connections that would be very hard to identify and block at the ISP level. Maybe China could do it, but Spain definitely cannot." How would China do it?
If IPFS is not entirely stateless the protocol to set up the state will always have identifiable information, like how TLS is easily blocked in the same way. Also, a protocol-agnostic approach is traffic analysis with machine learning (this is being used to identify custom-protocol VPNs).