4 ms·

So what happens when someone puts password leaks or other security breaches onto FIL or another decentralized storage system? Compromising photos of individuals

So what happens when someone puts password leaks or other security breaches onto FIL or another decentralized storage system? Compromising photos of individuals (revenge porn)? Underage pornography? Stolen credit card data? Critical state secrets or other sensitive information? I generally dislike the "DAE crytpo is bad because illegal activity" argument, but in the case of distributed file storage the harm profile is very different than "but it allows you to spend money on illegal things" with payment-only cryptos. Anything seedy you can do with bitcoin, you can also do with cash. The same is not true for centralized vs. decentralized cloud storage.

wmf 6y ago
What will happen is hosts will delete the offending data and lose their deposit on the contract (which will probably be small enough to write off as "shrinkage").
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- oarabbus_ 6y ago
  Well sort of defeats the purpose if hosts can do that, no?
  - wmf 6y ago
    What's the purpose of Filecoin?
    - oarabbus_ 6y ago
      I thought the purpose of a decentralized or blockchain storage service is that it's trustless - there's no single entity in control, who can unilaterally take off your content.
      - wmf 6y ago
        There's no single entity that can delete data from Filecoin, but precisely because of decentralization you can't prevent individual storage nodes from deleting data. And if all the nodes holding your data decide to delete it then it's gone.
jowsie 6y ago
You can already do this with regular old bitcoin. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abuse-imagery-bitcoin-blockchain-illegal-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abu...
Jtsummers 6y ago
Neither Filecoin nor IPFS guarantee content is available forever. In the general case of IPFS, someone must be pinning it or someone must have recently downloaded it (pinning keeps it around until you unpin it, if you download it you may share it out for a period of time). So suppose someone does upload some illegal content, if no one pins it or downloads it and the original node hosting it were to drop off (as may be reasonably expected if law enforcement becomes involved depending on what the content is) then it will disappear from the network. IPFS does not forcibly distribute the content across the network, only when it's accessed does it become distributed. And even then it's only temporary unless it's pinned and the pinning node remains online. Filecoin, being based on IPFS, will be similar but with the added limit of the content requiring payment. Without payment it would, presumably, disappear very quickly from the network. It's a very different style than, say, Freenet (or at least Freenet in the 00s, haven't looked at it recently) which makes it deliberately difficult to discover where content is being hosted and to remove it.

wmf 6y ago

What will happen is hosts will delete the offending data and lose their deposit on the contract (which will probably be small enough to write off as "shrinkage").

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
oarabbus_ 6y ago
Well sort of defeats the purpose if hosts can do that, no?
- wmf 6y ago
  What's the purpose of Filecoin?
  - oarabbus_ 6y ago
    I thought the purpose of a decentralized or blockchain storage service is that it's trustless - there's no single entity in control, who can unilaterally take off your content.
    - wmf 6y ago
      There's no single entity that can delete data from Filecoin, but precisely because of decentralization you can't prevent individual storage nodes from deleting data. And if all the nodes holding your data decide to delete it then it's gone.

jowsie 6y ago

You can already do this with regular old bitcoin. https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abuse-imagery-bitcoin-blockchain-illegal-content https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/mar/20/child-abu...

Jtsummers 6y ago

Neither Filecoin nor IPFS guarantee content is available forever. In the general case of IPFS, someone must be pinning it or someone must have recently downloaded it (pinning keeps it around until you unpin it, if you download it you may share it out for a period of time). So suppose someone does upload some illegal content, if no one pins it or downloads it and the original node hosting it were to drop off (as may be reasonably expected if law enforcement becomes involved depending on what the content is) then it will disappear from the network. IPFS does not forcibly distribute the content across the network, only when it's accessed does it become distributed. And even then it's only temporary unless it's pinned and the pinning node remains online. Filecoin, being based on IPFS, will be similar but with the added limit of the content requiring payment. Without payment it would, presumably, disappear very quickly from the network. It's a very different style than, say, Freenet (or at least Freenet in the 00s, haven't looked at it recently) which makes it deliberately difficult to discover where content is being hosted and to remove it.