5 ms·

This is such a natural use case for IPFS that commercial adoption seems inevitable; as first mover you can offer the concierge edition and optionally gain a ton

This is such a natural use case for IPFS that commercial adoption seems inevitable; as first mover you can offer the concierge edition and optionally gain a ton of credibility by open sourcing some of the core bits! It sounds like your marketing will need to explain: 1. How updates work and how you guarantee staying universes away from NSFW/illegal content -- answered separately because nobody wants to find out what IPFS is infamous for as a part of discovering your service. (Both explanations need to function at two levels: one for techies and one for their bosses controlling the purse strings.) This may be possible to pull in quickly from existing CC-licensed documentation. 2. How users can link to content through multiple redundant WWW gateways/other services, and how to pay (you and others) for more reliability. Reliable reachability is absolutely key here, and should be built on multiple existing 3rd parties that are already used as status pages. For example: pay extra to whitelabel an auto-Twitter retweet bot. Opportunity to be the "enterprise IPFS contact" here - explain from soup to nuts how to push status updates from anywhere (setup and simplified through your service but without requiring it be reachable) with any of multiple Yubikey/hardware auth tokens. -- Consider a completely separate marketing push/landing page that doesn't even mention IPFS until potential customers ask how it works. IPFS is a buzzword here but commercial customers probably count it as a negative (analogy: ICO on HN). Focus on the unique features IPFS offers and write up how those features solve the status page problem!

jstanley 9y ago
Is IPFS infamous for illegal content? My perception was that it's still much too easy to trace the origin of content on IPFS and therefore not suitable for illegal things.
- giancarlostoro 9y ago
  Everyone's IP is public, and I think your home network gets exposed which I think is the worst part of it (or so I was told).
- book_mentioned 9y ago
  Depends on target market, so ideally non-technical perception (enterprise budget). There is probably still time to do effective marketing that conveniently doesn't emphasize it but discreetly assuages any concerns. However, I am hard pressed to find any sizable HN discussion that doesn't mention it? It's basically worrying about what shows up as downsides when Googling, since most potential customers are starting from zero.
- 013a 9y ago
  It was used in Spain to host illegal websites organizing Catalonian independence. But yeah, its not a great pick for illegal activities against technically competent governments.
  - letlambda 9y ago
    There's not much point in trying to hide what your doing, if what your doing is holding a public vote.
    - alexeldeib 9y ago
      You have it somewhat backwards -- they wanted to get the word out, and the government had been suppressing discussion actively. They used IPFS to circumvent that.
  - gsich 9y ago
    'illegal'
- StavrosK 9y ago
  It's as much infamous for illegal content as hard disks are. That is, you can choose to host some, but you can also choose not to.
  - prophesi 9y ago
    Yeah, it will eventually support having blacklists. So if you get a cease-and-desist letter, you can simply blacklist the offending content. It doesn't completely solve the issue, but it should help mitigate getting into legal trouble with it. For anonymous content, you'd probably have to handle the encryption/decryption yourself and use IPFS as the distribution.
    - StavrosK 9y ago
      It supports blacklists now too. The bigger mitigation is that IPFS is a "push" and not a "pull" system, so you only store content you have explicitly requested.
      - joshfraser 9y ago
        Your blacklist becomes someone else's favorites list. Changing a single byte changes the entire hash, so blacklists aren't a great solution if censorship is what you're after.
        atrus 9y ago
        Blacklists are double hashed, so they aren't useful for finding 'bad' content.
        tscs37 9y ago
        And who can assure that these blacklists won't be manipulated for someone's gain? Ie, surpressing activity they don't like on the network?
      - prophesi 9y ago
MattHeard 9y ago
What do you mean by "concierge edition?"
- book_mentioned 9y ago
  I was going to link to ZoneEdit but apparently post-aquisition it has been concierge-d. Maybe NearlyFreeSpeech is a good non-cierge example. I think another contrast is Heroku vs AWS.

jstanley 9y ago

Is IPFS infamous for illegal content? My perception was that it's still much too easy to trace the origin of content on IPFS and therefore not suitable for illegal things.

giancarlostoro 9y ago
Everyone's IP is public, and I think your home network gets exposed which I think is the worst part of it (or so I was told).
book_mentioned 9y ago
Depends on target market, so ideally non-technical perception (enterprise budget). There is probably still time to do effective marketing that conveniently doesn't emphasize it but discreetly assuages any concerns. However, I am hard pressed to find any sizable HN discussion that doesn't mention it? It's basically worrying about what shows up as downsides when Googling, since most potential customers are starting from zero.
013a 9y ago
It was used in Spain to host illegal websites organizing Catalonian independence. But yeah, its not a great pick for illegal activities against technically competent governments.
- letlambda 9y ago
  There's not much point in trying to hide what your doing, if what your doing is holding a public vote.
  - alexeldeib 9y ago
    You have it somewhat backwards -- they wanted to get the word out, and the government had been suppressing discussion actively. They used IPFS to circumvent that.
- gsich 9y ago
  'illegal'
StavrosK 9y ago
It's as much infamous for illegal content as hard disks are. That is, you can choose to host some, but you can also choose not to.
- prophesi 9y ago
  Yeah, it will eventually support having blacklists. So if you get a cease-and-desist letter, you can simply blacklist the offending content. It doesn't completely solve the issue, but it should help mitigate getting into legal trouble with it. For anonymous content, you'd probably have to handle the encryption/decryption yourself and use IPFS as the distribution.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    It supports blacklists now too. The bigger mitigation is that IPFS is a "push" and not a "pull" system, so you only store content you have explicitly requested.
    - joshfraser 9y ago
      Your blacklist becomes someone else's favorites list. Changing a single byte changes the entire hash, so blacklists aren't a great solution if censorship is what you're after.
      - atrus 9y ago
        Blacklists are double hashed, so they aren't useful for finding 'bad' content.
        tscs37 9y ago
        And who can assure that these blacklists won't be manipulated for someone's gain? Ie, surpressing activity they don't like on the network?
    - prophesi 9y ago

MattHeard 9y ago

What do you mean by "concierge edition?"

book_mentioned 9y ago
I was going to link to ZoneEdit but apparently post-aquisition it has been concierge-d. Maybe NearlyFreeSpeech is a good non-cierge example. I think another contrast is Heroku vs AWS.