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Strategically, this (advertising IPFS as an anti-censorship tool and publishing censored documents on it and blogging about them) doesn't seem like a great idea
by cjbprime 10y ago
Strategically, this (advertising IPFS as an anti-censorship tool and publishing censored documents on it and blogging about them) doesn't seem like a great idea right now.
Most people aren't running IPFS nodes, and IPFS isn't seen yet as a valuable resource by censors. So they'll probably just block the whole domain, and now people won't know about or download IPFS.
We saw this progression with GitHub in China. They were blocked regularly, perhaps in part for allowing GreatFire to host there, but eventually GitHub's existence became more valuable to China than blocking it was. That was the point at which I think that, if you're GitHub, you can start advertising openly about your role in evading censorship, if you want to.
But doing it here at this time in IPFS's growth just seems like risking that growth in censored countries for no good reason.
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoThis is a very good point. However the benefits of content addressing are so great in terms of performance that I doubt it is possible to prevent it.
- maxfurman 10y agoThis view seems optimistic. I think you are overestimating the role of technical factors in political decisions.
- Normal_gaussian 10y agoThe technical factors are actually key to the political decision. Content addressing will occur at the browser level in order to improve caching behaviours, this will be implemented by organisations who are part of a political sphere (google, mozilla, apple) whose influence is largely determined by their technical performance. It is then a minor matter for it to move forward into a larger addressing scheme (likely to occur at the same time). IPFS is approaching the issue from the opposite direction of course, but the two are so tightly coupled that I doubt there will be much risk. IPFS is most likely to fail for any technical problems it may have.
- roywiggins 10y agoThe potential benefits are high but there would be no obvious, appreciable and immediate economic impact of blocking IPFS outright tomorrow.
- Qwertious 10y agoCorrect, but over time, Turkey would find their internet is progressively more broken as people switch over to IPFS. More importantly, I doubt the censorship-efficiency gains would be improved much by banning IPFS, since nobody really uses it yet, and I suspect selling the "anti-censorship" angle will get more non-anti-censorship adopters (i.e. people who just use it for performance gains) in non-Turkey places, compared to staying silent on the anti-censorship angle of IPFS. And more widespread non-Turkey adoption means more pressure on Turkey to allow IPFS.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- SkyMarshal 10y ago>if you want to. I'm not sure it's ever advisable. Most users will figure it out and get the word out anyway. Best for the company to focus its advertising on the other ways it provides value.
- SomeStupidPoint 10y agoI concur. There's a lot to be said for letting the government save face when they choose to back down, and shouting about how you defied them isn't always a great plan.
- WikipediasBad 10y agoAgreed. Also, if IPFS is not the preferred way to go about this kind of endeavor, there are the guys at https://lunyr.com/ https://lunyr.com/ who are building a Wikipedia in blockchain architecture. About time someone actually attempted this. Additionally, the guys at Everipedia also have the entirety of English Wikipedia imported and forked very nicely so there is at least another large scale effort with a robust dump of Wikipedia already in production. Lots of different attempts at keeping the vision of "sum total of human knowledge" on the web. :)
- komali2 10y ago>Sum total of human knowledge I like wikipedia, but I always felt like it was missing crucial pieces of information to make it the "sum total of human knowledge." For example, I can look at the articles for ISO_31-11, Spheres, and Sphere Eversions, but I don't think that information alone is enough for me to go from "society of post-apocalyptic 'we lost how to do math'" to "we can prove sphere eversion is possible once again." I chose this example because I'm shit at math and never learned much of it anyway so I can maybe be considered a mad-max post-apocalyptic uneducated peon? Anyway point is I think there's the crucial "teaching" step missing. Perhaps with a collection of a great deal more articles together, the result "prove eversion is possible" can be taught, but missing for example the ISO_31-11 article alone would make it monumentally difficult, I feel. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_31-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO_31-11 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_eversion https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sphere_eversion
- smokeyj 10y agoGithub is a centralized service so I don't know if the comparison is fair. Perhaps a better comparison is Bitcoin's adoption given the rhetoric of early adopters. It seems to me the whole point of decentralized services is to evade control. If IPFS isn't decentralized and censor resistant - then what exactly is the point of it?
- ycmbntrthrwaway 10y agoThe point of decentralization in case of BitTorrent is offloading files hosting to users. That is how Debian and Blizzard use it. It is better to advertise BitTorrent as such but then use it to avoid control. Same point was raised about Tor changing its mission (https://twitter.com/torproject/status/635856569201246208 https://twitter.com/torproject/status/635856569201246208), because it makes it vulnerable to states where "human rights", democracy etc. is associated with US propaganda. It is better to advertise IPFS, GNUNet and FreeNet as a cache layer instead of censorship resistance. CDNs are used usually used due to domain fronting application. Censorship has hard time trying to convince CDNs to block particular sites and services (Signal) and it can't block just like 30% of the internet because of one "violation". But any CDN that advertises itself as VPN or some sort of censorship resistance service is easy to block.
- bigbugbag 10y agoSo basically you're suggesting to make censorship resistance software invisible to people looking to resist censorship as a way to make them more useful and easy to find ? I would never had found and supported freenet if it was advertised as a cache layer, I would be surprise if the larger population would even comprehend what a cache layer is and how it could help them defeat censorship.
- netsharc 10y agoFor example, BitTorrent probably advertises itself as a peer-to-peer data distribution protocol, but not as a way to get pirated content. But you and I know through some other way that you can install a BT client and get pirated content, right? Changing Tor to explicitly say "human rights" makes it a red flag in oppressive countries where they may claim these words mean "Western propaganda!". Previously anyone caught with Tor can say they're a network researcher or whatever, now anyone caught with them can be charged with "spreading Western propaganda". Just like if a torrent client would advertise themselves as a way to get pirated content. Anyone caught with the software can probably be easily convicted of copyright infringement, because they actually have software that advertises itself as copyright infringement software.
- kyledrake 10y agoMy god Chris, you're seriously interpreting this action as a business strategy? If being docile in the face of evil is Keybase's business strategy, I strongly urge you to re-prioritize, because if the government goes rogue, it's going to kick down your door looking for access to encrypted communications from dissidents, whether you're polite about it or not. How many John Does have you waffled on because it was a "better business strategy" so far?
- eriknstr 10y agoWhat he's saying is, IPFS will never be useful if it gets blocked before it has a chance to spread. If IPFS is blocked and the people that need anti-censorship tools can't use it then they might as well not have bothered.
- kyledrake 10y agoSo nobody should have done anything and we collectively should have just let Turkey censor Wikipedia with zero alternatives, that's the better solution here?
- shallot_router 10y agoNo, he's just saying they probably announced this at a point where their network is (presently) too weak to achieve what they want, so they may be shooting themselves in the foot a little bit. They're still doing the right thing, no doubt.
- kyledrake 10y ago> their network is (presently) too weak to achieve what they want That's certainly a plausible hypothesis, but without evidence, definitions of words like "weak" and a proper wash through the scientific method, I'm not convinced we can make conclusions like that at this point in time.
- 10y ago
- oh_sigh 10y agoSo China blocked github, and then eventually relented because it was too useful for people in China. Why wouldn't the same thing possibly happen to IPFS?
- inimino 10y agoBecause IPFS is useless at the moment compared to something like github.
- bigbugbag 10y agoMaybe you have an example of how IPFS could so useful to China that it would revert a block, but it seems to me that the reason of existence and purpose of IPFS goes against the tide of Chinese governement preventing it from ever being useful to them.
- Qwertious 10y agoThe government has limits on how much it can defy economics - if it inflicts too much unnecessary economic damage on its corporate powerbase, they'll go support other factions, who promise to rectify this. Relevant CGP Grey video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rStL7niR7gs
- tormeh 10y agoBecause it's not useful? Make IPFS useful - only then can it be used against censorship. Otherwise it ends up like Tor: Something governments can block without consequence.
- NicoJuicy 10y ago"Most people aren't running IPFS nodes, and IPFS isn't seen yet as a valuable resource by censors." It's on HN. Most relevant people will know about IPFS soon :)
- Chaebixi 10y ago> It's on HN. Most relevant people will know about IPFS soon :) I think that's overstating the importance and prominence of HN on a whole bunch of different axes.
- greglindahl 10y agoNot to mention that IPFS has been on HN repeatedly in the past.
- NicoJuicy 10y agoFrom HN it goes to the general newspapers also. So not sure why i would be overstating the importance.
- cmelbye 10y agoIt's open source software. Can't we just upload the source to a new site when the old one goes down? It's different than GitHub, which is a proprietary, centralized system.
- bigbugbag 10y agoOf course, you could even work around the domain blocking in a variety of way: using uncensored DNS, proxy, mirrors, use of IP address, sneakernet, and so on. The usual ways of working around domain blocking which has been demonstrated countless times to be ineffective.
- woodandsteel 10y agoOk, so you are saying this move is probably going to lead to IPFS being completely blocked by Turkey in the near future. If this prediction turns out to be mistaken, will you acknowledge it publicly?
- adamfisk 10y agoBlocking the domain is not an effective step. Every censorship circumvention tool's domain is blocked, except for ones that aren't popular and so are essentially unknown. As with many other areas, half the battle is just entering the arena. Until you do that it's hard to know what your real challenges will be. The IPFS team should be commended for entering the arena, and we should all help however we can.
- bigbugbag 10y agoSo basically you're saying "do not circumvent censorship and tell the world about it or your domain might get censored too", right ? How does that make any sense ? ipfs is still available to install from github, ditribution repository and other places. IIANM blocking the ipfs.io doesn't block the protocol. Moreover the Streisand effect shows that attempt at online censorship has the opposite effect and actually draws more attention to it making your point dubious.
- geofft 10y ago> So basically you're saying "do not circumvent censorship and tell the world about it or your domain might get censored too", right ? No, that is not what was said. What was said is, if you're going to claim to be able to circumvent censorship, actually be able to circumvent censorship first. There are connections (HTTPS to GitHub was a specific example that was given) which cannot be censored without significant collateral damage to the GDP of the country. IPFS is not yet one of them. IPFS should become one of them, and then make these sorts of claims.
- woodandsteel 10y agoThese things are usually an ongoing race between the government and the people fighting censorship. The first move here was Turkey blocking Wikipedia, next is Wikipedia on IPFS, then maybe later Turkey blocks IPFS, then IPFS gets on tor, which I understand is already coming pretty soon, and so on.
- woodandsteel 10y agoYeah, the Steisand effect is important. If Turkey blocked ipfs, it would get publicity on places like the NY Times and all sorts of people who had never heard of ipfs would learn about it, and many would get intrigued and look into it.