10 ms·

What 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

What 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 9y ago
So 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 9y ago
  No, 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 9y 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.
    - geofft 9y ago
      That's not a conclusion, it's a claim by a human in a discussion. It is certainly not the case that you need a double-blind study before you can have any opinion on a subject (and, I'd argue, a complete misunderstanding of the scientific method). It's certainly a more defensible claim than the completely irrelevant ad hominem you made about Keybase being "docile in the face of evil". Why was the commenter's employer relevant to the discussion?
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]
    - inimino 9y ago
      You not being convinced is no excuse for derailing the discussion. Behavior like this makes people think twice about even trying to engage with the crypto-loving, privacy conscious, free-speech market segment, because even trying to do anything in that direction is met with abuse.
- oh_sigh 9y ago
  I think the original comment was more about the style and wording of the announcement, not about whether this ipfs group should or should not have done this.
- geofft 9y ago
  That is like 100% not was said. I will re-explain it in simpler terms. We don't currently have a censorship-resistant way to get Wikipedia to Turkey, at all. IPFS is not it, because there's no reason for Turkey not to censor all of IPFS. There is no alternative to IPFS that Turkey won't censor, either. If IPFS wants to become it (which is a good goal that we should pursue), it first needs to become used / useful enough that Turkey won't be able to censor all of IPFS without significant economic damage to the country.
  - _prometheus 9y ago
    There are people in turkey replicating this snapshot right now. people browsing locally get it there. Even if all connections to outside the country get shut down it can be distributed locally.
    - geofft 9y ago
      What prevents Turkish ISPs from blocking peer-to-peer IPFS connections within the country? (I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how IPFS presents itself at the network layer, and whether an IPFS connection over TCP/IP is noticeably different from some other normal connection type, so I genuinely don't know the answer to this question. It looks like it uses SPDY over TLS, but maybe something in the certificate gives it away?)
      - lgierth 9y ago
        Connections over the libp2p-tcp transport are trivial to spot, but there's more transports available (Websockets, WebRTC, UTP), and even more in the works (Onion, QUIC, FlyWeb).
      - bigbugbag 9y ago
        I was wondering the same, but knowing the kind of DPI equipment that has been sold to Syria, Lybia and other countries I assume that it possible to detect, monitor, tamper and block pretty much any kind of traffic, including IPFS.
- derefr 9y ago
  "Ignore the plight of a few websites now, to protect millions of websites in five years," is sorta-kinda the point everyone is making. You have to let Luke Skywalker get old enough to actually have a chance of defeating Darth Vader before giving him a lightsaber and letting him hare off across the galaxy; otherwise you just get a dead Luke and the Empire wins. But that's not even the true compromise in this case, because you could have used any other, less network-fragile tool to accomplish the same goal. You could have called up Obi Wan (Freenet) or Yoda (Tor), but instead you handed the job to the ten-year-old kid.
  - bigbugbag 9y ago
    What a poor choice of analogy. This is not a hollywood movie this is the real world with actual people in an emergency situation right now. Your house is on fire and the firemen tell you they will not come to help because if they do they may not be able to deal with potential houses on fire in a not so distant hypothetical future ?
bigbugbag 9y ago
I don't get it. Once blocked does this now render ipfs useless regardless of spreading ? I mean what difference does it make if it's 10,000 or 1,000,000 that cannot use it because it's blocked ?

kyledrake 9y ago

So 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 9y ago
No, 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 9y 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.
  - geofft 9y ago
    That's not a conclusion, it's a claim by a human in a discussion. It is certainly not the case that you need a double-blind study before you can have any opinion on a subject (and, I'd argue, a complete misunderstanding of the scientific method). It's certainly a more defensible claim than the completely irrelevant ad hominem you made about Keybase being "docile in the face of evil". Why was the commenter's employer relevant to the discussion?
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
  - inimino 9y ago
    You not being convinced is no excuse for derailing the discussion. Behavior like this makes people think twice about even trying to engage with the crypto-loving, privacy conscious, free-speech market segment, because even trying to do anything in that direction is met with abuse.
oh_sigh 9y ago
I think the original comment was more about the style and wording of the announcement, not about whether this ipfs group should or should not have done this.
geofft 9y ago
That is like 100% not was said. I will re-explain it in simpler terms. We don't currently have a censorship-resistant way to get Wikipedia to Turkey, at all. IPFS is not it, because there's no reason for Turkey not to censor all of IPFS. There is no alternative to IPFS that Turkey won't censor, either. If IPFS wants to become it (which is a good goal that we should pursue), it first needs to become used / useful enough that Turkey won't be able to censor all of IPFS without significant economic damage to the country.
- _prometheus 9y ago
  There are people in turkey replicating this snapshot right now. people browsing locally get it there. Even if all connections to outside the country get shut down it can be distributed locally.
  - geofft 9y ago
    What prevents Turkish ISPs from blocking peer-to-peer IPFS connections within the country? (I'm having trouble figuring out exactly how IPFS presents itself at the network layer, and whether an IPFS connection over TCP/IP is noticeably different from some other normal connection type, so I genuinely don't know the answer to this question. It looks like it uses SPDY over TLS, but maybe something in the certificate gives it away?)
    - lgierth 9y ago
      Connections over the libp2p-tcp transport are trivial to spot, but there's more transports available (Websockets, WebRTC, UTP), and even more in the works (Onion, QUIC, FlyWeb).
    - bigbugbag 9y ago
      I was wondering the same, but knowing the kind of DPI equipment that has been sold to Syria, Lybia and other countries I assume that it possible to detect, monitor, tamper and block pretty much any kind of traffic, including IPFS.
derefr 9y ago
"Ignore the plight of a few websites now, to protect millions of websites in five years," is sorta-kinda the point everyone is making. You have to let Luke Skywalker get old enough to actually have a chance of defeating Darth Vader before giving him a lightsaber and letting him hare off across the galaxy; otherwise you just get a dead Luke and the Empire wins. But that's not even the true compromise in this case, because you could have used any other, less network-fragile tool to accomplish the same goal. You could have called up Obi Wan (Freenet) or Yoda (Tor), but instead you handed the job to the ten-year-old kid.
- bigbugbag 9y ago
  What a poor choice of analogy. This is not a hollywood movie this is the real world with actual people in an emergency situation right now. Your house is on fire and the firemen tell you they will not come to help because if they do they may not be able to deal with potential houses on fire in a not so distant hypothetical future ?

bigbugbag 9y ago

I don't get it. Once blocked does this now render ipfs useless regardless of spreading ? I mean what difference does it make if it's 10,000 or 1,000,000 that cannot use it because it's blocked ?