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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

#91

Post by QAPereo »

int_19h wrote: post #59
tartuffe78 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The South in the U.S. Civil War?

The South expected massive cotton revenues to prop its economy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/King_Cotton

To be fair however, it was known how the war would proceed before the outset!

In the words of General Sherman:

You people of the South don't know what you are doing. This country will be drenched in blood, and God only knows how it will end. It is all folly, madness, a crime against civilization! You people speak so lightly of war; you don't know what you're talking about. War is a terrible thing! You mistake, too, the people of the North. They are a peaceable people but an earnest people, and they will fight, too. They are not going to let this country be destroyed without a mighty effort to save it… Besides, where are your men and appliances of war to contend against them? The North can make a steam engine, locomotive, or railway car; hardly a yard of cloth or pair of shoes can you make. You are rushing into war with one of the most powerful, ingeniously mechanical, and determined people on Earth — right at your doors. You are bound to fail. Only in your spirit and determination are you prepared for war. In all else you are totally unprepared, with a bad cause to start with. At first you will make headway, but as your limited resources begin to fail, shut out from the markets of Europe as you will be, your cause will begin to wane. If your people will but stop and think, they must see in the end that you will surely fail.

People are not rational however, and the wealthy landowners were facing the extinction of their wealth... so they started a war.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#92

Post by [deleted] »

red_admiral wrote: post #28
kilburn wrote: post #2

Author 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!

The crypto is far from ideal. The situation is very similar to password storage, where you want to not make it trivial to brute-force moderate-entropy passwords even if your database gets breached. We have functions designed specifically for that: scrypt, argon2 etc. https://www.npmjs.com/package/scryptsy is a pure JS implementation of scrypt for example. Even with scrypt the situation is not great, but using sha for…

[deleted]

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#93

Post by tcard »

literallycancer wrote: post #73
tcard wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer and I don't have an opinion on the Spanish government's or judicial system's concrete actions to stop a illegal law to take effect, but: the only websites, posters, etc. being seized are those paid for and organized by the Catalan government. Any association, political party, or individual is completely free to campaign for whatever they want, including independence. We have a Spain-wide constitution…

>We have a Spain-wide constitution. The Catalan government decided it has a democratic mandate by the people of its region to not abide by it. The NORMAL reaction by the state is to apply it, and stop the Catalan government from breaking it. It's only oppresive insofar laws and the judicial system are opressive. Of course, the American Revolution was also illegal by the laws of the British. It's also oppressive in th…

I'm not even arguing the Catalan government actions aren't _justified_, as the American Revolution may have been. My point is that the Spanish judiciary's reaction is just that of a normal, European, liberal democratic state under rule of law.

(It's my opinion that it's _not_ justified, though: there's a fair chance of getting through the necessary changes to allow a referendum and other self-government demands by following legal procedures, given the current Spain-wide political climate. I believe this is mainly a politically dishonest and populist move by the Catalan government. But that's besides the point.)

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#94

Post by toomuchtodo »

kodablah wrote: post #30
diggan wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Alternative approach: Instead of using the IPFS2HTTP gateways (that can easily be censored, as gateway.ipfs.io has already been censored in Catalunya), run a IPFS daemon locally that cannot be censored (but is not anonymous either). I live in Catalunya and wrote this tool for doing just that, in a easy way. It 1) starts a go-ipfs daemon locally, 2) opens up the referendum website in your default browser, via localhos…

> that cannot be censored I am not familiar with IPFS internals, but is there no pattern to the IPFS traffic that the ISPs can shape/block? Too bad about the entire IPFS domain being blocked, because besides the host, HTTPS traffic has safety in numbers. If only there was a way to proxy through google.com or some other popular domain too important to block.

> If only there was a way to proxy through google.com or some other popular domain too important to block.

Host IPFS nodes with http proxies on GCP and point the domain with multiple A records at those instances?

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#95

Post by timthelion »

mynewtb wrote: post #88
rljy wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do NOT need to explicitly pin content to help replicate it. Any content which is requested via IPFS is replicated by the daemon, up until it is GCed. The only thing that pinning does, is prevent the content from ever being GCed

You make it sound like if merely accessing a resource will make my ipfs node share it to others. Is that the case?

Yes.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#96

Post by timthelion »

red_admiral wrote: post #72
timthelion wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you mean by "the crypto is not ideal"? I was under the impression that there are not yet collisions for SHA-256 https://github.com/ipfs/faq/issues/22 Only for SHA-1 (which has 160 bit hashes) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SHA-1#Attacks

The attack mentioned on the page is brute-forcing someone's details from partial information: "it can be used to “fill the gaps” of information about any citizen. If you know someone’s birth date and the area where they live, you can obtain their government ID by trial-and-error on that website." The mitigation is slowing down the number of guesses/second that an attacker can try. In a well-designed key derivation fu…

Thanks for the clarification. That makes sense now.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#98

Post by pm90 »

literallycancer wrote: post #73
tcard wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a lawyer and I don't have an opinion on the Spanish government's or judicial system's concrete actions to stop a illegal law to take effect, but: the only websites, posters, etc. being seized are those paid for and organized by the Catalan government. Any association, political party, or individual is completely free to campaign for whatever they want, including independence. We have a Spain-wide constitution…

>We have a Spain-wide constitution. The Catalan government decided it has a democratic mandate by the people of its region to not abide by it. The NORMAL reaction by the state is to apply it, and stop the Catalan government from breaking it. It's only oppresive insofar laws and the judicial system are opressive. Of course, the American Revolution was also illegal by the laws of the British. It's also oppressive in th…

> If you try to let people choose, but the other side says no, what's there left to do?

Not much really. I think its really stupid of the Spanish Govt. to try to stick to formal constitutional means when there is a genuine, popular mandate for independence. What they seem to be saying is that a referendum is not allowed by current laws so it is illegal to have it. And their ham handed response is only agitating the region even more, legitimizing the separatists call for independence.

OTOH if they had provided a path for an actual referendum to be held, provided democratic means for allowing independence... who knows? Maybe there wouldn't be a popular mandate in the referendum. Maybe the central government could have worked closely with those people, parties and cities that wanted to continue being part of Spain and convinced more.

Its seems really rich of the Spanish govt. to claim they are following democratic processes to enforce a very undemocratic rule. They seem to be playing with semantics to enforce their will.

Disclaimer: Total outsider view, I'm neither from Spain or Catalan nor have I ever visited. My opinions are based solely on news reports.

Re: How the Catalan government uses IPFS to sidestep Spain's legal block

#99

Post by pipio21 »

mabbo wrote: post #61

I just left Barcelona a couple hours ago, the capital of Catalonia. Everywhere you look, Catalan flags, signs demanding 'democracia', demanding freedom. I'm told this is just normal for the region, but if this is normal then independence is eventual.

Well, it is normal since independentists have controlled Catalunya since 40 years ago. It used to be that 20% of the population was independentist through, now is over 50%.

For example, they choosed school principals among independentist so now over 85% of them are Catalan language teachers that tend to be independentist. This way kids could be directed to be independentist too.

The same happened with the local media, TV3, newspapers like La Vanguardia. If you were not independent public funds were not given to you. Those private media without the public funding could not live on their own.

Since 20 years ago they control education too, and kids are forced to speak Catalan as the main language, studing a very biased History full of lies like that Catalunuya was a reign in the past. They also put big sanctions on shops labeling things on Spanish until nobody dare.

They brought nearly a million muslim people to Catalunya to work so they do not speak Spanish, like people from Spain or South America does. This makes it the higher terrorist risk area in all Spain, including Ceuta and Melilla.

The problem was not independentist forces doing this, but the central gobertment that let this happen.

Now with half the population(controlling Catalunya) against the other (supported by the Govertment) there is a significant risk of civil war there.

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