5 ms·

Yes, possibly this could be an optimisation; although then you get to worry about leaking information about your group's contents to the world - anything you se

Yes, possibly this could be an optimisation; although then you get to worry about leaking information about your group's contents to the world - anything you send, other clients in your group will ask random servers on the internet for, by a globally identifiable hash. In the best case, this just leaks my friends' meme sharing habits - in the worst case, this announces to the world "I am in a group sharing materials that my Government thinks are dangerous". If someone posts an original file to a public group and a private group, then anyone who downloads that file who isn't in the public group obviously knows that person well enough to be in a private group with them, leaking group membership metadata. And so on. Random identifiers for each instance of sharing a file to a group would thus be needed, reducing the usefulness of this optimisation quite a bit, where e.g. using the results of the group's p2p matrix discovery mechanism as your peer list to download blocks from has much the same results.

rglullis 6y ago
You are right about the problem of leaking metadata - just by asking for the file reveals to the world that you know about it. However, this is something that can be fixed on IPFS itself, and I believe it is even in their roadmap: the idea of adding "friend peers". Your IPFS node could ask for sensitive files to this privileged list of nodes only. So, your client can have a simple logic: if you have e2e encrypted message with IPFS-linked media, ask only the group member peers about the contents of the file. Messages that are not e2e (or marked as non-sensitive) can be asked to the global IPFS swarm.
- vertex-four 6y ago
  Sure, if IPFS gets that feature, maybe it's worth it. (Although maybe not - at that point IPFS is just an overweight tooling for downloading files from a list of known peers block by block.) I wouldn't hold my breath though.
  - rglullis 6y ago
    > at that point IPFS is just an overweight tooling... Only if you assume that your only use case is to have private communications. There are a lot of use cases and jurisdictions where sharing files do not have to be private and would benefit a lot from having redundant nodes doing the distribution. The tooling is already there, why not benefit from it?
    - vertex-four 6y ago
      There are no jurisdictions where all possible information can be shared safely without hiding it. And IMO, software should maintain privacy by default - doing something less private should involve actively opting into that. Matrix, for example, creates e2e encrypted rooms by default, and even for non-e2e rooms, it doesn't announce the contents of the rooms to unrelated servers. If you want to publish the fact that you're downloading a file to the world, you should have to actively opt into doing so, every time - you should treat this like reporting your downloads to your Government voluntarily.
      - rglullis 6y ago
        > There are no jurisdictions where all possible information can be shared safely without hiding it. This is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that there are plenty of people in countries doing illegal-on-paper things but are largely ignored by their Governments. No one in Brazil is worried about torrenting, even though it is not legal. No one connecting to a Swedish VPN provider worries much about getting copyright infringement letters, and so on. No one in Russia is worried about downloading music via VK, a social network with more ties to its Government than Facebook with the CIA. > software should maintain privacy by default (...) you should treat this like reporting your downloads to your Government voluntarily. I don't see any contradiction between what you are saying and what I am saying. Yes, it should be secure by default. Yes, people should be aware that anything that is not sent encrypted and securely should be considered public knowledge. So what? Nothing of what you said negates the fact that there is a huge number of use cases where people want things to be public (Youtube? Instagram? Basically every social network?) and that they will benefit from having it that way. You might not care about these use cases because you are too risk-averse to use them. Fine. There are plenty of other people who are totally okay with these risks. As long as they aware of the risks, why stop them? Worse still, between a system that does only one thing "super-privately" vs something that gives them privacy when they want it and also gives them "things where I don't care if is public or not", which one do you think people will use? Look at another post on the same thread, you have people sharing multi-GB Anime over IRC, ffs.

rglullis 6y ago

You are right about the problem of leaking metadata - just by asking for the file reveals to the world that you know about it. However, this is something that can be fixed on IPFS itself, and I believe it is even in their roadmap: the idea of adding "friend peers". Your IPFS node could ask for sensitive files to this privileged list of nodes only. So, your client can have a simple logic: if you have e2e encrypted message with IPFS-linked media, ask only the group member peers about the contents of the file. Messages that are not e2e (or marked as non-sensitive) can be asked to the global IPFS swarm.

vertex-four 6y ago
Sure, if IPFS gets that feature, maybe it's worth it. (Although maybe not - at that point IPFS is just an overweight tooling for downloading files from a list of known peers block by block.) I wouldn't hold my breath though.
- rglullis 6y ago
  > at that point IPFS is just an overweight tooling... Only if you assume that your only use case is to have private communications. There are a lot of use cases and jurisdictions where sharing files do not have to be private and would benefit a lot from having redundant nodes doing the distribution. The tooling is already there, why not benefit from it?
  - vertex-four 6y ago
    There are no jurisdictions where all possible information can be shared safely without hiding it. And IMO, software should maintain privacy by default - doing something less private should involve actively opting into that. Matrix, for example, creates e2e encrypted rooms by default, and even for non-e2e rooms, it doesn't announce the contents of the rooms to unrelated servers. If you want to publish the fact that you're downloading a file to the world, you should have to actively opt into doing so, every time - you should treat this like reporting your downloads to your Government voluntarily.
    - rglullis 6y ago
      > There are no jurisdictions where all possible information can be shared safely without hiding it. This is not what I am saying. What I am saying is that there are plenty of people in countries doing illegal-on-paper things but are largely ignored by their Governments. No one in Brazil is worried about torrenting, even though it is not legal. No one connecting to a Swedish VPN provider worries much about getting copyright infringement letters, and so on. No one in Russia is worried about downloading music via VK, a social network with more ties to its Government than Facebook with the CIA. > software should maintain privacy by default (...) you should treat this like reporting your downloads to your Government voluntarily. I don't see any contradiction between what you are saying and what I am saying. Yes, it should be secure by default. Yes, people should be aware that anything that is not sent encrypted and securely should be considered public knowledge. So what? Nothing of what you said negates the fact that there is a huge number of use cases where people want things to be public (Youtube? Instagram? Basically every social network?) and that they will benefit from having it that way. You might not care about these use cases because you are too risk-averse to use them. Fine. There are plenty of other people who are totally okay with these risks. As long as they aware of the risks, why stop them? Worse still, between a system that does only one thing "super-privately" vs something that gives them privacy when they want it and also gives them "things where I don't care if is public or not", which one do you think people will use? Look at another post on the same thread, you have people sharing multi-GB Anime over IRC, ffs.