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You're claiming that if a piece of information has an identity that makes it reachable, then that makes it censorable too, but you left out what would be requir

You're claiming that if a piece of information has an identity that makes it reachable, then that makes it censorable too, but you left out what would be required to make that censorship happen. The gov't would have to require the IPFS codebase to support a 'blacklist table' of hashes, and then make it illegal for a server to run a codebase without using the 'updated' latest table. The the gov't would have to come up with a mechanism where they maintain and update this blacklist and disseminate it. Meanwhile, if I want to make a blacklisted doc 'available again' all I'd have to do is add one bit or byte to the end of it, and the hash would change completely. Right now one single person at one single tech company (like a Twitter employee) can literally ban someone for life, for perfectly legit political speech. IPFS is the best-in-class effort to solve all that, and I'm actually a guy building a node that will go on the IPFS network.

progval 7y ago
> You're claiming that if a piece of information has an identity that makes it reachable, then that makes it censorable too, but you left out what would be required to make that censorship happen. The gov't would have to require the IPFS codebase to support a 'blacklist table' of hashes No, it only has to take down servers hosting its content. > all I'd have to do is add one bit or byte to the end of it, and the hash would change completely. This is unrelated to my point, but a nitpick: IPFS uses a rolling/chunking hash, so one could blacklist chunks of a file; so it's not as easy as adding a byte at the end.
- WClayFerguson 7y ago
  1) Regarding the gov't taking down servers publishing hashes it doesn't like, yes that's exactly what I said they'd have to do, if you go back and re-read my prior post. Glad you agree. But like BitTorrent or Bitcoin, they'd have to basically shut off the whole internet to disable it. Not gonna happen. 2) Regarding chunking in IPFS, the fact that files are chunked actually increases the burden on any authority attempting to implement a blacklist of hashes, and so that's in agreement with my points. Also if someone truly wants to fight censorship you'd just symmetric encrypt the data using a publicly available key so that it DOES change all hashes of ALL chunks every time you encrypt with a different key. And encrypting the same data under many different keys (creating different copies of whole file, is also my proposed solution to the problem of "Proof of Replication" in the IPFS system.)

progval 7y ago

> You're claiming that if a piece of information has an identity that makes it reachable, then that makes it censorable too, but you left out what would be required to make that censorship happen. The gov't would have to require the IPFS codebase to support a 'blacklist table' of hashes No, it only has to take down servers hosting its content. > all I'd have to do is add one bit or byte to the end of it, and the hash would change completely. This is unrelated to my point, but a nitpick: IPFS uses a rolling/chunking hash, so one could blacklist chunks of a file; so it's not as easy as adding a byte at the end.

WClayFerguson 7y ago
1) Regarding the gov't taking down servers publishing hashes it doesn't like, yes that's exactly what I said they'd have to do, if you go back and re-read my prior post. Glad you agree. But like BitTorrent or Bitcoin, they'd have to basically shut off the whole internet to disable it. Not gonna happen. 2) Regarding chunking in IPFS, the fact that files are chunked actually increases the burden on any authority attempting to implement a blacklist of hashes, and so that's in agreement with my points. Also if someone truly wants to fight censorship you'd just symmetric encrypt the data using a publicly available key so that it DOES change all hashes of ALL chunks every time you encrypt with a different key. And encrypting the same data under many different keys (creating different copies of whole file, is also my proposed solution to the problem of "Proof of Replication" in the IPFS system.)