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Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS
- chx 6y ago> I think this issues are going to continue till some big use cases emerge and protocol becomes main stream. Nailed it. Remember Freenet? https://web.archive.org/web/20130908073158/http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-side-internet-freenet https://web.archive.org/web/20130908073158/http://www.thegua... There's always a chance of Freenet being the IBM Simon and Apple Newton and IPFS is the iPhone. Or, the VFX1 vs the Oculus. But no. While surely the tech has evolved from a shitty Java app as Freenet was, all those other examples had immediately obvious use cases and just needed the tech to catch up which it did.
- Mediterraneo10 6y agoI remember discussions of Freenet on "news for nerds" forums in the early millennium, and it was obvious that that particular technology was doomed and would never be widely adopted. You see, people were reluctant to run a Freenet instance because that would involve hosting and passing on content from other users as well. While all Freenet content was encrypted, people were horrified by the thought that if the crypto algorithm were ever broken, they would suddenly be revealed to have been hosting child pornography on their computers (unwittingly, but still). Thus, distributed platforms today must allow people to pick and choose what content they wish to host.
- anotheracct_ 6y agoA good reminder that not everybody has reasoned opinions or should be listened to.
- xtracto 6y agoIt was also terribly slow.
- realusername 6y agoIndeed, I think it's the slowness which killed it more than anything. Also I remember it supported a very limited subset of CSS even for the time and no way to make websites dynamic since there were no JS, that for sure did not help.
- AgentME 6y ago>Thus, distributed platforms today must allow people to pick and choose what content they wish to host. IPFS works more like torrents than FreeNet. If you run an IPFS node, it only hosts content that you pinned on it yourself.
- brokenmachine 6y agoIPFS also has none of the anonymity. So it's a tradeoff.
- mirimir 6y agoIt hasn't even been necessary to break the encryption. Police can just run Freenet nodes, which serve child porn, and then log IPs of peers that download chunks of those files. While it's true that Freenet does a good job of obscuring data routing, arguably providing plausible deniability, it's in practice nontrivial to convince juries of that.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoThe question being, how that is supposed to be any different than any other service operated by anybody else? If a pedophile signs up for AT&T, is AT&T not routing their illegal data? Or Starbucks if they use the WiFi there? If they sign up for AWS or some other hosting provider, isn't the provider hosting their illegal data? The obvious solution is to make actual knowledge a prerequisite to liability. The pedophile who knows what it is goes to jail, the random person who is only providing a generic service to the public does not.
- mirimir 6y agoIn reality, police identify Freenet users that have "downloaded" child pornography. And then they arrest those people, impound all their gear, and file charges. So defendants now face the challenge of convincing juries that they were just relaying data to other users. And that's not trivial. Or at least, it's expensive to hire expert witnesses. So many just accept some plea bargain.
- AnthonyMouse 6y agoThese are the stories fearmongers tell because it happened to one or two people many years ago. The same thing has happened to hosting providers. Sometimes bad police are malicious or incompetent and screw up the lives of innocent people. But that doesn't have anything to do with Freenet, that can even happen to you driving down the street when some dirty cop needs a bust and decides to pull over a random car and plant drugs on it. The answer isn't to never do anything, it's to fix the systems that oppress innocent people for no good reason. And in the meantime you can't live your life in fear of low-probability oppression by defective authority figures.
- kick 6y agoIt seems more likely that IPFS is the GM-NAA I/O to something in the future's OS/360. The concept is cool, but it doesn't seem like it's there yet.
- Mindless2112 6y agoIPFS is waiting for the use case to catch up. If/when we start to colonized Mars, the InterPlanetary File System might actually be useful. (Only being somewhat tongue-in-cheek.)
- StavrosK 6y agoSmall static sites like this one sound like a good use case: https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmZCGRVJNjVJtEqtS2HwhELszNBSU2XNwuBkFEQTqM4RKG/ https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmZCGRVJNjVJtEqtS2HwhELszNBSU2XNwuBkFEQ...
- mirimir 6y agoActually, IPFS' network resilience is a great fit for high-latency overlay networks.
- devhugo 6y agoI believe that is their point.
- mirimir 6y agoWhere do you see that?
- devhugo 6y agoYou're right. I read your comment and thought it was in reference to the thought of an Inter Planetary network, not realizing you were talking about a present day usecase. Sorry. I've actually heard about IPFS being used by some private cloud/on prem operators to speed up delivery of container images.
- GekkePrutser 6y agoI hadn't heard much about IPFS but the way this is built, with the immutability and hash keys etc, sounds very much like FreeNet. That's the first thing I thought of, and predates this by about 20 years. I remember when that promised to be the next big thing and save us from the commercialisation of the internet that was in full swing then. Unfortunately, that didn't turn out very well. Let's just say the 'fringes of free speech' took the upper hand and really started defining the platform in the public view, to the point of being strongly associated with the platform. Why would you run a node if it was mainly used for horrible stuff. Same as what happened to tor services, but to a bigger extent. I really believe in the idea freedom of speech. But some kind of control is unfortunately needed. Otherwise a platform like this will always spiral out of control and kill itself. I think it's one of those things that sounds great in theory but doesn't work in real life. Perhaps some kind of user voting could be implemented, but it would be extremely slow, too slow to catch up with new content being published. It's a very hard thing to tackle. Free speech is unfortunately not as black and white as its advocates like to see it.
- tal8d 6y ago> Let's just say the 'fringes of free speech' took the upper hand... Luckily for you that blurry line between mainstream and "fringe" is rapidly shifting, and the list of permissible opinions continues to shrink. More and more people will be forced to decide how important guilt by association is to them, and will either make use of the stigmatized tech - or simply shutup. > But some kind of control is unfortunately needed. To what end? Are we protecting the children? Are we preventing the rise of Turbo-Hitler? > Otherwise a platform like this will always spiral out of control and kill itself. How do you imagine that happens? Shaming from people saying exactly what you have just said, leading to reduced uptake, justifying censorship - because only bad people use the dark web. Here is a clue: look at what has happened to lesbians, they are already going through this. I know this because I frequent a thoroughly demonized site run by a free-speech absolutist (well, almost). One day a whole bunch of these women showed up to complain about some insane pre-op transsexual who had succeeded in getting them censored on every major platform. These ladies absolutely hated the site and everyone on it, but they had no alternative.
- snvzz 6y ago>While surely the tech has evolved from a shitty Java app as Freenet was, Shitty or not, freenet did and does still provide anonymity, which IPFS does not.
- mirimir 6y agoThat's dangerously incorrect. Freenet provides no anonymity. What it provides is "plausible deniability". All Freenet peers know each others IP addresses. There's no onion routing. There is the option of running in "darknet" mode. That is, connecting only with known peers. Ideally, people you know and trust. But that provides no access to data from the global Freenet opennet. For that, at least one darknet peer must risk peering freely with the global opennet. Although there's no onion routing, there is a very effective method for routing data through peer networks. With that, it's arguably impossible to distinguish those who share and access data from those who merely relay it. However, the "plausible deniability" argument depends on understanding how Freenet routing works. If you want to check out Freenet, never run a node at home. Use a VPS that you lease and access only via Tor. Ideally, connect to Tor via nested VPN chains. Use cryptocurrency that's been thoroughly anonymized. And setup the Freenet WebGUI as a Tor onion service.
- bawolff 6y agoWell by that definition Tor doesn't provide anonyminity either. A common definition of anonoyminity is that given a set of users, its impossible to determine which element (person) of the set did the action (published a document) [or have a better chance of guessing than guessing at random]. I think freenet mostly provides this property (with a bunch of devil in the details)
- mirimir 6y agoI agree that Freenet allows publication that's both anonymous and not readily censurable. What it doesn't allow is anonymous access, except in the sense of plausible deniability that depends on highly technical arguments. Tor actually does provide anonymity through onion routing. It's not effective against global adversaries, and doesn't claim to be. But it's hard to imagine how any low-latency overlay network could resist global adversaries. Chaff, caching and mixing would help, but they aren't that practical or effective unless you accept greater latency.
- jedieaston 6y agoHow long does it take to propagate an edit with this? The previous PoC I saw (2+ years ago) worked from a static dump from the Kiwix project.
- londons_explore 6y agoTheoretically milliseconds. Practically I don't think code for real time updates is written uet
- sthottingal 6y agoAuthor of this new PoC here. IPNS propagation is slow in the current implementation and it is a blocker for instant propagation irrespective of number of peers. In my discussion with IPFS developers, I was told that they are going to look into this issue in next versions.
- _threads 6y agoAwesome ! But Wouldn’t ZeroNet be a better fit for this case ? Changes propagation is built-in
- jokoon 6y agoI recently tried to use IPFS to share 20 gigabytes of data on a local network, using ipfs-desktop. Apparently it hashes the entire file, meaning it will read it entirely, so I killed it because it took way too long. Apparently there are other methods for fingerprinting large files, like reading a limited set of chunks. I asked on IRC but I did not get a thorough answer.
- imhoguy 6y agoTo share files in a local network FTP or SMB/CIFS may be better suited. IPFS is content addressable storage by design on entire files. Reading limited set of chunks poses some problem regarding data integrity and deduplication colisions. One bit flip in JPG may destroy the entire image - thankfuly with currently used hash functions the right and broken files will have different "fingerprint". One way hash functions have extremely low probability of collision with full file scan. However when you skip part of files the probalibity of collision is roughly equal to count of bytes not scaned divided by total file size.
- toomuchtodo 6y agoIt’s a shame modern file systems don’t generate and store common hash algorithms as file metadata.
- imhoguy 6y agoSome file systems like ZFS, btrfs support checksum on block level. However file level checksum is not trivial with random write file system. Imagine 1 byte is changed in 20GB file - that would require full file scan to update the checksum. Recalculating a file checksum from all block checksums could be a solution however far from any standard.
- brokenmachine 6y agoWouldn't a merkle tree, like torrents or dat use, avoid this? You'd only have to generate a hash of the changed chunk, then it's really low cost to update the root hash. https://datprotocol.github.io/book/ch01-02-merkle-tree.html https://datprotocol.github.io/book/ch01-02-merkle-tree.html
- andsens 6y agoOh damn. For a second there I confused IPFS with pingfs: https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs Not the same thing, not the same thing at all...