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Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS

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Re: Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS

#21

Post by mirimir »

Mindless2112 wrote: post #7
chx wrote: post #2

> I think this issues are going to continue till some big use cases emerge and protocol becomes main stream. 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 oth…

IPFS is waiting for the use case to catch up. If/when we start to colonized Mars, the InterPlanetary File System might actually be useful. (Only being somewhat tongue-in-cheek.)

Actually, IPFS' network resilience is a great fit for high-latency overlay networks.

Re: Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS

#22

Post by bawolff »

mirimir wrote: post #20
snvzz wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>While surely the tech has evolved from a shitty Java app as Freenet was, Shitty or not, freenet did and does still provide anonymity, which IPFS does not.

That's dangerously incorrect. Freenet provides no anonymity. What it provides is "plausible deniability". 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…

Well by that definition Tor doesn't provide anonyminity either.

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)

Re: Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS

#23

Post by bawolff »

GekkePrutser wrote: post #11
chx wrote: post #2

> I think this issues are going to continue till some big use cases emerge and protocol becomes main stream. 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 oth…

I hadn't heard much about IPFS but the way this is built, with the immutability and hash keys etc, sounds very much like FreeNet. That's the first thing I thought of, and predates this by about 20 years. I remember when that promised to be the next big thing and save us from the commercialisation of the internet that was in full swing then. Unfortunately, that didn't turn out very well. Let's just say the 'fringes of…

Freenet and IPFS are both content addressable retrieval systems, so they are similar in that way. However otherwise they are very different and there have been many other systems based on the idea of addressing things by hash. BitTorrent and DHT are two very notable systems of that type, and unlike freenet they are known for their speed. They are also known for people getting sued for piracy. I dont think the comparison between freenet and ipfs is very illuminating

Re: Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS

#24

Post by devhugo »

mirimir wrote: post #21
Mindless2112 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS is waiting for the use case to catch up. If/when we start to colonized Mars, the InterPlanetary File System might actually be useful. (Only being somewhat tongue-in-cheek.)

Actually, IPFS' network resilience is a great fit for high-latency overlay networks.

I believe that is their point.

Re: Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS

#26

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mirimir wrote: post #19
Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I remember discussions of Freenet on "news for nerds" forums in the early millennium, and it was obvious that that particular technology was doomed and would never be widely adopted. You see, people were reluctant to run a Freenet instance because that would involve hosting and passing on content from other users as well. While all Freenet content was encrypted, people were horrified by the thought that if the crypto…

It hasn't even been necessary to break the encryption. Police can just run Freenet nodes, which serve child porn, and then log IPs of peers that download chunks of those files. While it's true that Freenet does a good job of obscuring data routing, arguably providing plausible deniability, it's in practice nontrivial to convince juries of that.

The question being, how that is supposed to be any different than any other service operated by anybody else?

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.

Re: Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS

#27

Post by mirimir »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #26
mirimir wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It hasn't even been necessary to break the encryption. Police can just run Freenet nodes, which serve child porn, and then log IPs of peers that download chunks of those files. While it's true that Freenet does a good job of obscuring data routing, arguably providing plausible deniability, it's in practice nontrivial to convince juries of that.

The question being, how that is supposed to be any different than any other service operated by anybody else? 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…

In reality, police identify Freenet users that have "downloaded" child pornography. And then they arrest those people, impound all their gear, and file charges.

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.

Re: Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS

#28

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mirimir wrote: post #27
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The question being, how that is supposed to be any different than any other service operated by anybody else? 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…

In reality, police identify Freenet users that have "downloaded" child pornography. And then they arrest those people, impound all their gear, and file charges. 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.

These are the stories fearmongers tell because it happened to one or two people many years ago.

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.

Re: Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS

#29

Post by mirimir »

bawolff wrote: post #22
mirimir wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's dangerously incorrect. Freenet provides no anonymity. What it provides is "plausible deniability". 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…

Well by that definition Tor doesn't provide anonyminity either. 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)

I agree that Freenet allows publication that's both anonymous and not readily censurable. What it doesn't allow is anonymous access, except in the sense of plausible deniability that depends on highly technical arguments.

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.

Re: Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS

#30

Post by mirimir »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #28
mirimir wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In reality, police identify Freenet users that have "downloaded" child pornography. And then they arrest those people, impound all their gear, and file charges. 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.

These are the stories fearmongers tell because it happened to one or two people many years ago. 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 pla…

By all means, then, go for it.

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.

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