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Maybe a very dumb question, but why didn't they build anonymity into it rather than advise users to route it over Tor? My guess is it may have something to do w
by hd4 9y ago
Maybe a very dumb question, but why didn't they build anonymity into it rather than advise users to route it over Tor? My guess is it may have something to do with the Unix philosophy. It's still a great tool regardless.
- problems 9y agoIPFS isn't designed for anonymity, it's designed for performance. If you want a similar tool designed for anonymity, Freenet is it.
- whyrusleeping 9y agoBuilding anonymity into a tool is not trivial. Doing it right is very hard. Doing it right also has significant drawbacks in terms of performance for people who don't need anonyminity. Tor is a great, well studied and well supported way for people to browse anonymously, so yeah, definitely a bit of the unix philosophy in there. That said, we plan on building anonymity tooling into ipfs in the future, its just non-trivial.
- deleted 9y ago[deleted]
- lgierth 9y ago@whyrusleeping is right, and adding to that, there's a work-in-progress Onion transport which is already being used by OpenBazaar in their fork of go-ipfs. The respective work on making IPFS's routing work safely in an anonymous use case will be upstreamed soon.
- placeybordeaux 9y agoWhy build something that is very hard to get right if there's already a way to accomplish what you want?
- Nokinside 9y agoBuilding anonymity to every tool provides less anonymity than building tools for anonymity that work with multiple protocols and applications. It's better to use ipfs trough I2P or Tor if you need anonymity and hide your actions in larger traffic.
- lgierth 9y agoCurrently I'd advice against directly running IPFS over Tor or I2P, because it'll likely leak your IP addresess. OpenBazaar have successfully made it work as an Onion service, and their work is going to be upstreamed into go-ipfs soon.