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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

#481

Post by enriquto »

StavrosK wrote: post #253
enriquto wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

being a catalan expat with some expertise in computers, is there any useful way that i can help this weekend? (I am not afraid of losing anonymity nor being condemned or prosecuted by the spaniards, I actually would find it rather amusing.)

Download and run the IPFS daemon for your OS (from ipfs.io) and access the banned websites/files locally . That will make you serve them to other people. There's a set of them on the pinning service I run ( https://www.eternum.io/ipns/QmZxWEBJBVkGDGaKdYPQUXX4KC5TCWbv... ), so they're in no danger of disappearing, but you'd help in case Spain banned the eternum.io node.

i'm doing this since this morning, there is actually a lot of traffic!

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

#482

Post by hamilyon2 »

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…

Just fill 9/10 of database with plausible crap. It would be pretty useless to brute-force it (and any part of it) then.

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

#483

Post by nunobrito »

spaniard89277 wrote: post #456
contravariant wrote: post #272

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Valencia was one of the places I was hinting at (although I suppose they removed the river that originally made it a convenient place for a port). Anyway, I wasn't completely aware of that part of the history, thanks. That said I don't quite agree that Catalonia wasn't oppressed. I'm not qualified to say which regions were oppressed the most, but economic prosperity isn't the opposite of oppression. If anything the r…

Other regions were oppressed AND kept down economically. There was even innovators, like Barreiros, a galician-born car and truck manufacturing brand that was cut off from growing more because of SEAT, that had quite a big impact in Catalonia, in terms of capital flows, jobs etc.

This is true. Galicia has been continuously kept down since centuries so that Madrid could take the spotlight.

Part of my family is Galician, I'm Portuguese myself. Still, instead of breaking Spain apart I would actually prefer to see the whole of Iberia working together as a union.

The main problem seems to be where the capital would be placed since only Castilians would want Madrid. I only wish that we could agree on a small but memorable place like Santiago de Compostela as centre for that union.

Fragmented even more, our Iberia has little voting power in regards to negotiating with France and Germany in the European Union. If Catalunya has to separate, so let it be. In the end of the day we are all together on the same boat, can only wish that we could row together too.

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

#484

Post by kwhitefoot »

StavrosK wrote: post #253
enriquto wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

being a catalan expat with some expertise in computers, is there any useful way that i can help this weekend? (I am not afraid of losing anonymity nor being condemned or prosecuted by the spaniards, I actually would find it rather amusing.)

Download and run the IPFS daemon for your OS (from ipfs.io) and access the banned websites/files locally . That will make you serve them to other people. There's a set of them on the pinning service I run ( https://www.eternum.io/ipns/QmZxWEBJBVkGDGaKdYPQUXX4KC5TCWbv... ), so they're in no danger of disappearing, but you'd help in case Spain banned the eternum.io node.

> access the banned websites/files locally

What exactly does this mean?

Do you mean by accessing this address:

https://ipfs.io/ipns/QmZxWEBJBVkGDGaKdYPQUXX4KC5TCWbvuR4iYZr...

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

#485

Post by joeyspn »

petre wrote: post #364
KuiN wrote: post #309

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not often I find myself agreeing with a UK unionist but it's a point of honour that the Scottish referendum 2014 passed off largely as an orderly point of democracy. Westminster is often seen as heavy-handed North of the border but everyone is proud of that expression of democracy (however there are still words to be had about subsequent political events!).

At least the UK gov't wasn't banning Scottish referendum websites.

No, but Tony Blair suspended the Northern Ireland assembly several times and reimposed direct rule from London, which is probably where the Catalan issue is headed, because everything is illegal from the state's point of view.

Texas has had secessionist movements also for some time, but it'd be also illegal to do a binding referendum, and Washington would take the required steps to stop it.

https://www.texastribune.org/2016/06/24/can-texas-legally-se...

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

#486

Post by pm90 »

gpvos wrote: post #382
pm90 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 r…

> there is a genuine, popular mandate for independence That remains to be seen. There are still less than 50% proponents of independence, according to what I read. The recent Spanish actions may have increased that number though.

That is exactly the point I am trying to make. If the Spanish Central Government had handled this better, it probably could have convinced more Catalan against independence. But its actions have antagonized more and it doesn't look like it will end well.

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

#487

Post by kgwgk »

ibci wrote: post #476
gpvos wrote: post #377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, only slightly less than 50% wants independence. They are very vocal though. Also, since education in Catalonia is entirely in Catalonian (also they have their own history books), and use of Spanish in public is heavily discouraged, children will grow up in a mostly Catalonian environment, which makes it likely that that percentage will grow over time.

What the... You've never been in Catalonia, am I right? 1. It's false that the education in Catalonia is entirely in catalan. I've had tons of classes in spanish. 2. It's false that the use of spanish in public is discouraged. If you go to Barcelona I'd say that you're going to hear 50/50 spanish and catalan in public. 3. It's not clear if the percentage of people who defend an independent country are above or below…

> 2. It's false that the use of spanish in public is discouraged. If you go to Barcelona I'd say that you're going to hear 50/50 spanish and catalan in public.

Despite the efforts of the Catalan government, it will be much closer to 100% Catalan in the environments where they can dictate what language may be used. Do you hear 50/50 Spanish and Catalan in the media controlled by the Catalan government, for example? They push the usage of Catalan over Spanish as hard as they can, going beyond what is legally possible in some cases (see http://blogs.ua.es/sevila1/2016/05/30/nulidad-de-parte-del-p...).

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

#488

Post by vidarh »

amelius wrote: post #112

As an outsider, it's strange that nobody here seems to question whether the referendum really makes sense. Forgetting about Catalonia for a moment, isn't it fundamentally amoral that a part of the country where prosperity has (by mere chance) concentrated suddenly wants to split off? Isn't this taking wealth-inequality to the next level? Of course the people in a prosperous part of the country want to split off. Abso…

I agree with you that the wealth inequality is an issue.

But I also find it amoral for anyone to try to stop someone else from ruling themselves.

It would seem a large part of the problem is the morality of strongly enforcing strong property rights in itself.

In other words, if you see the wealth inequality as sufficiently amoral, then that should not be enough to stop independence, but there might perhaps be worthwhile arguments over what terms to negotiate independence on.

But it is harder to have sympathy when Spain as a whole has not done more to redress that wealth imbalance earlier.

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

#490

Post by euyyn »

Maken wrote: post #475
euyyn wrote: post #265

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> was an independent state in all ways aside from military and foreign policy It was still an absolute monarchy with the same monarch; it's not like the Aragonese were free to choose their own destiny. Still, the Constitutions Charles promised them to uphold must have given them something , I just don't know what it was. That's why I'd like to know how they compare to the current rights granted by the autonomía.

The King of the Corona was far from an absolute monarchy, and there limits to what the monarchy could do. The Fueros were a kind of primitive Constitution pacted between the king and the kingdom (mostly the nobility), and nobody was above it. Of course this put severe conatrains to the royal power, and the Habsburg had been trying for a long time to get rid of the Fueros and it was the first thing the Borbons did whe…

What were these limits? What did the Constitutions allow the nobility do against the will of the king, assuming a king that wanted to uphold them?

> nobody was above it.

It's not like there was an independent judiciary branch with the power to enforce that against the nobles or the king. Case in point: the king decided to eliminate them and he just went and did it.

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