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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

#31

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mirimir wrote: post #30
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Me, I'll run my Freenet nodes in anonymously leased VPS, and access them via Tor.

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.

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

#33

Post by devhugo »

mirimir wrote: post #25
devhugo wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe that is their point.

Where do you see that?

You're right. I read your comment and thought it was in reference to the thought of an Inter Planetary network, not realizing you were talking about a present day usecase. Sorry. I've actually heard about IPFS being used by some private cloud/on prem operators to speed up delivery of container images.

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

#34

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…

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

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...

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

#35

Post by AnthonyMouse »

mirimir wrote: post #34
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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

> also had some 900 images of suspected child pornography on the hard drive, says a criminal complaint.

So not an example of someone being arrested just for operating a node, then.

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

#36

Post by jokoon »

I recently tried to use IPFS to share 20 gigabytes of data on a local network, using ipfs-desktop.

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.

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

#37

Post by bawolff »

mirimir wrote: post #29
bawolff wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But your argument was "All Freenet peers know each others IP addresses". All the nodes in the tor network also know each other's ip addresses. (I suppose clients arent really public, especially if you are using a obfuscating bridge). I don't understand how you are distinguishing between "plausible deniability" and "anonyminity". I feel like either both freenet & tor either have these properties or they both don't, depending on what your definition of those terms are.

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.

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

#38

Post by mirimir »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #31
mirimir wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Me, I'll run my Freenet nodes in anonymously leased VPS, and access them via Tor. 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 o…

Hey, I respect Freenet hugely. It's almost 20 years old, and it's been ~well maintained throughout. People do hate on Java, but I've had no problems with it, using OpenJDK in Debian.

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.

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

#40

Post by mirimir »

bawolff wrote: post #37
mirimir wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

But your argument was "All Freenet peers know each others IP addresses". All the nodes in the tor network also know each other's ip addresses. (I suppose clients arent really public, especially if you are using a obfuscating bridge). I don't understand how you are distinguishing between "plausible deniability" and "anonyminity". I feel like either both freenet & tor either have these properties or they both don't, de…

There's a key distinction between Tor and Freenet. With Freenet, all nodes host content, access content, and relay traffic for other nodes.

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.

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