Live data from Hacker News

IPFS is the Distributed Web

ipfs.io

161–170 of 286 posts

Re: IPFS is the Distributed Web

#161

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How would you prevent fraud? Say I have a site that sells Awesome Products. L337Hacker mirrors my site, does a DDOS on the original and lets IPFS take over, redirecting the shopping cart to his own site. Is this a potential scenario? If so, is there any way to prevent it?

All IPFS URLs contain the hash of the content, so you can't change it. There's a mechanism to allow for URLs which can point to varying bits of content, but I'm not aware of a paper which shows its security properties.

Upon further reading, it appears that it may be impossible to verify the security of an IPFS cached page, simply because the hash is calculated post-fetch on the client. That allows any sort of shenanigans to be performed on the original content before it's stored.

If content is created specifically for IPFS-caching (similar to Freenet or Onion), then it may be possible to be authoritative, but content cached from the web should never be considered so.

Re: IPFS is the Distributed Web

#163

Some content here to play with: [0] Interestingly some links to copyrighted material end in ¨Unavailable for Legal Reasons¨ however, running the daemon and issuing an ¨ipfs get hash¨ the download does start. [0] https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU5XsVwvJfTcCwqkK1SmTqDmXWSQWaTa7ZcVLY...

The "unavailable for legal reasons" message appears to be issued by the ipfs.io gateway - IMO perfectly reasonable.

Sure but it´s not really unavailable I mean.

Re: IPFS is the Distributed Web

#164
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because mirroring content on IPFS is trivial and transparent to the consumer. All it takes is a single user (or an arbitrary number) outside of US jurisdiction and the content is more or less DMCA-immune. The equivalent is not practical in traditional HTTP, where content at risk of being taken down is scraped from the server and that snapshot-in-time is hosted as a mirror, generally at a different domain.

> Because mirroring content on IPFS is trivial and transparent to the consumer. Which is also why a regular consumer should never use IPFS and why prosumer should immediately disable caching and seeding upon install. > All it takes is a single user (or an arbitrary number) outside of US jurisdiction and the content is more or less DMCA-immune. Perhaps so, but if your plan for resiliency is based on the kindness of st…

> Perhaps so, but if your plan for resiliency is based on the kindness of strangers in countries where the DMCA nor censorship does not apply, it's not much of a plan.

Have you ever used Bittorent? It works great.

Re: IPFS is the Distributed Web

#165
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's the million-dollar question. I've been bashing my head against it for a few years now. I think an important thing is to give everyone a say in how these large computer networks affect their lives. How to do that in the context of a broken political system isn't clear to me at all.

Any bashing on Named Data Networking? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Named_data_networking Rather than the system getting less reliable exponentially as it scales up, it gets more reliable exponentially as it scales up. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg&t=1667 Integrity and trust are properties of the data; not of the way that you obtain ​it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqGEMQveoqg&t=3006 There's no rout…

IPFS is, more or less, an implementation of Named Data Networking.

Re: IPFS is the Distributed Web

#166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You won't have any luck with that argument in court. If you doubt me, see all verdicts for infringement when bitorrenting.

But this is very different: This is more like the original copyright holder putting something on BitTorrent, inviting people to download it freely, and them suing anybody who seeds it: By putting the data on a P2P protocol, you've kind of implicitly stated that you're okay with people seeding, or whatever the local terminology for the same is.

Um, no.

You have no guarantees that the content put up via IPFS is by the original copyright owner.

Thus immediately after you receive the infringing content over IPFS and start seeding it, you are infringing on the copyright owners rights. You have no recourse and no legal defenses to protect you.

Re: IPFS is the Distributed Web

#168
post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Regardless of whether I think this is a bit of a far fetched use case or not, this really does nothing for Joe Blow and his content distribution needs. But let's roll with it anyway. How does IPFS solve this problem, and more specifically how does IPFS solve this problem any better than just publishing a torrent of Joe Blows collected ramblings?

Sorry, I don't really care about your theoretical questions. IPFS is nice and fun technology. If you don't want to participate, you don't have to.

> theoretical

I don't think that word means what you think it means.

Asking what problem a technology solves is a very practical question. Countering with "IPFS is a nice and fun technology", is the very opposite, i.e. alluding to that there might be some theoretical benefits to it, but that your mainly into it for gits and shiggles.

Re: IPFS is the Distributed Web

#169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well apart from battery, If I was an ISP, I´d like it if a Youtube movie would flow from one persons mobile to the hotspot of the train said person is sitting on and on towards another person on the train. This scenario would require significantly less bandwidth overall. Same goes for neighbors accessing the same information. And this can be extrapolated to many situations. The IPFS powered internet would perhaps lea…

> Well apart from battery, ... and that's pretty much the deal killer for this on mobile, even ignoring everything else. > If I was an ISP, I´d like it if a Youtube movie ... except you are not allowed to download videos from YouTube or most (if not all) the popular video content services. > a Youtube movie would flow from one persons mobile to the hotspot of the train said person is sitting on and on towards another…

> ... and that's pretty much the deal killer for this on mobile, even ignoring everything else.

It is, for now, indeed.

> Except you are not allowed to download videos from YouTube

I think youtube would be interested in some load balancing if they could keep the income from commercials. Wait, what, there wouldn't be a need for YouTube. We'd only need a way to pay content creators build into the system (Ethereum coupling somehow?? I'm not sure, can views be tracked in IPFS?).

> This scenario would require significantly less bandwidth overall.

The same amount of bits are pumped around but they have to cover significantly less physical distance and hubs. This reduces bandwidth.

> Somehow I doubt that. Total costs would most likely go up, but they would perhaps be more spread out.

Me pumping bits from my neighbor's house to mine instead of us both via the backbone from some server in a central location requires less (expensive) infrastructure between me and that central location.

> Consumers don't spend anything for accessing content on the Internet

indirectly they (we) pay for the copper and the fiber.

Post reply on HN