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Cloudflare disables access to ‘pirated’ content on its IPFS gateway
- codetrotter 4y ago> That said, this raises the question of how the IPFS gateway is different from Cloudflare’s DNS resolver, which essentially operates as a gateway to the regular Internet. Cloudflare previously said that it will fight copyright-related DNS blockades, even if they’re backed up by a court order. > Apparently, that’s not the case for IPFS. But it’s also not the same situation at all. With DNS, blocking would mean making the whole site unavailable. With their IPFS gateway they are just filtering individual items.
- Caligatio 4y agoI'm not a lawyer but my guess is it has to do with the liability of transferring "illegal" content. There's no content crossing Cloudflare servers for DNS resolutions but there definitely is for IPFS. For IPFS vs CDN, I'm guessing relevant copyright laws give a service provider an out when it's a well-defined user/customer doing the copyright-related redistribution; no such agreement exists for content on IPFS. EDIT: Trying to read the relevant DMCA sections and precedent makes me happy I'm not a lawyer. Cloudflare was previously sued for copyright infringement (Mon Cheri Bridals, LLC v. Cloudflare, Inc.) and found not guilty. In Cloudflare's own blog about the decision, they said the suit was meritless for several reasons including "our services are not even necessary for the content’s availability online." My guess is there is sufficient ambiguity over whether operating a inter-protocol gateway puts them at increased legal liability.
- junon 4y ago> There's no content crossing Cloudflare servers for DNS resolutions but there definitely is for IPFS. Unless I'm missing some magical internet tomfoolery, that's not the case when you use their DNS proxy service, right?
- zauguin 4y agoAs far as I understand it Cloudflare's DNS proxy service is for it's authoritative DNS service (and therefore only transfers content of Cloudflare customers), while the parent referred to the DNS resolver (1.1.1.1) where arbitrary sites are looked up.
- Caligatio 4y agoI think what you call "DNS proxy service" is what I'm referring to as their CDN. As referenced by a sibling comment, I meant their public recursive DNS resolver service when I said "DNS resolutions."
- thayne 4y agoThey probably mean the copyrighted material isn't crossing their servers. Unless you are somehow encoding it in DNS records... For DNS specifically, it is analogous to saying a phone book shouldn't be liable for listing the phone number of someone who sells pirated DVDs.
- 0xParlay 4y agoParticularly curious since they also provide a Web3 gateway. While not copyright related does hosting/deploying a smart contract make them liable for possible illegal activity such as securities and state dept regs? Guess I could just try deploying tornado-cash..
- subbz 4y agoTrue. For the IPFS case they're not recording the IP addresses for possible blackmail. But that's just an idea.
- c7b 4y ago> With DNS, blocking would mean making the whole site unavailable. The site is still available, just not through its DNS entry. > With their IPFS gateway they are just filtering individual items. They can filter as broadly or as targeted as they want.
- blfr 4y agoI thought IPFS is rather poorly suited for piracy since the nodes' addresses are public. There is no onion routing or other protection. Speaking of which, is Freenet still alive?
- charcircuit 4y agoBy that logic torrents are bad for piracy too.
- dymk 4y agoThey are, you have to jump through hoops or live in the right country if you don’t want a DMCA notice from your ISP
- WeylandYutani 4y agoGet a seedbox. For about 20 Eurodollars a month you can pirate whatever you want 24/7 without having to deal with law firms or government interference. I saw the writing on the wall when my ISP was forced to block TPB and KAT.
- codetrotter 4y agoWhat happens when the seedbox company is raided and their lists of customers and other data is confiscated? A seedbox is a temporary protection. In the long term it is still a very real possibility that the customers of seedbox companies can get in trouble for their acts of piracy. Several VPN companies who claimed to keep no logs, were actually keeping logs. https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-vpn-services-found-recording-user-logs-despite-no-log-pledge https://www.pcmag.com/news/7-vpn-services-found-recording-us... So too it will turn out that some seedbox companies will have been keeping records about their customers and their activities. For those customers, it will not be a happy day.
- kodyo 4y agoWhen you knowingly break the law, you're taking a risk. It may be a stupid law, it may be an unjust law, but it's still a law and people with guns who enforce the stupid laws might show up some day. Only individuals can decide whether or not the risk is worth it.
- RobotToaster 4y agoI'm guessing this is targeted at libgen, I imagine some of the big publishers put pressure on them.
- mhoad 4y ago[flagged]
- ornornor 4y agoWho is “they” in that context? Cloudflare? There was no CF or internet in the 30s, I don’t understand your comment.
- Traubenfuchs 4y agoMan. https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5yxxg/cloudflare-is-protecting-a-site-linked-to-a-neo-nazi-terror-group https://www.vice.com/en/article/j5yxxg/cloudflare-is-protect...
- ornornor 4y agoThanks. Wasn’t aware of this.
- wahnfrieden 4y ago[flagged]
- tedivm 4y agoSeveral actually. I've posted this before, but I've had issues with their security people essentially stalking me after I made some negative comments here awhile ago. It seems most of those people have been fired or have resigned after all the bad press, but for awhile their security team was pretty far right.
- Thorentis 4y agoI'm amazed that cloudflare ever provided a public ipfs gateway to begin with. That said, I don't think ipfs is actually useful for anything besides being an interesting thought experiment. Every problem it aims to solve, another protocol or tool specific to that problem solves it better. There is no real world use case I think of where I would ever consider using ipfs.
- rglullis 4y agoThe one thing missing for me on IPFS is the ability to have ACL rules for access based on gateway id. When I was working next to the people from protocol labs, they mentioned the idea of having lists of friend peers, but that wasn't enough.
- viraptor 4y agoIt solves some things that have an overlap with torrent 2. If you're interested only in single files, or collections of files which change but remain 99% the same, then ipfs is great and doesn't really have a widespread alternative right now.
- 3np 4y agoHow is IPFS better than torrents for changing files, considering that it uses content-based addressing?
- viraptor 4y agoChanging collections of files, not changing files. Let's say you have a collection of 1000 books. You get two more and publish a collection of 1002 books. With torrent, you'd have a completely separate download. With ipfs all previous users can now share the existing files as part of the new collection without doing anything special.
- 3np 4y ago> With torrent, you'd have a completely separate download That sounds more like a limitation of your bittorrent implementation. You think seeders have dozens of identical copies of each release hanging around on their drives just to be able to share it on separate trackers through separate torrents? :p Or is there some new feature in IPFS that's an actual differentiator here? It's been a while since I was fully up to date on protocol development.
- londons_explore 4y agoIt's a shame they don't provide a list of blocked content. A public list of what their gateway will not retrieve for you would fuel the Streisand effect...
- sva_ 4y agoYou can download the SQL tables including the hashes over at LibGen hxxps://libgen.is/dbdumps/
- moreresearchplz 4y agoBut those hashes are not identical to IPFS hashes as far as I know, sadly!
- eurasiantiger 4y agoDifferential crawling to the rescue!
- anecdotal1 4y agoMost people aren't aware that there are also like 20 different valid IPFS hash formats so they have to write code to generate blocks for all those variants or it is trivially bypassed. I had to do this for my IPFS gateway at my job.
- capableweb 4y agoAKA multibase + multihash AKA "self-describing base encodings" + "self-describing hashes" AKA https://github.com/multiformats/multibase https://github.com/multiformats/multibase + https://github.com/multiformats/multihash https://github.com/multiformats/multihash
- denkmoon 4y agoDo not use cloudflare if you value a free and decentralised internet.
- anaganisk 4y agoMain value proposition for non enterprise customers is, easy DDOS protection, edge caching of assets, DNS, domains and recently cloudflare workers which allow easy deployment of static sites. Webmasters and developers are an easy prey to at least DDOS protection and caching, their product is too good to avoid for many. I personally have a problem with cloudflare becoming a gatekeeper but at the end of the day, the value proposition is too good vs setting them up and managing yourself. Too many websites I use everyday have cloudflare in the front, and I just can't avoid them. Only because fighting spam is difficult for many.
- koheripbal 4y agoExactly. Without Cloudflate, preventing DDoS is extremely time consuming and expensive.
- vntok 4y agoWhat alternative would you recommend to their security suite of tools? Note that the alternative has to "just work", be efficient, require minimal maintenance, and be free or close-to free to use (< $100/mo). Otherwise, it's just not competitive.
- inimino 4y agoThe argument that a loss-leader or market takeover strategy should be resisted doesn't have to justify itself by claiming that an equally convenient alternative exists.
- vntok 4y agoA similar-enough alternative should exist in the first place, otherwise you're merely talking funny thoughts that have no bearing in the real world. Which is fine, it just needs to be explicitly conveyed. Why would you expect customers to migrate someplace else at all if there's no alternative?
- buildbuildbuild 4y agoQuite the slippery slope. Cloudflare still hosts the IPFS-backed UI to Tornado Cash for example. (OFAC-sanctioned)
- rasengan 4y agoIPFS was also one of the ways LLAMA was being well distributed. This is really a sad day for “people”
- 1attice 4y agoI thought of this immediately too. I know that Meta is doing its level best to wipe LLaMA's weights from the face of the Internet, but I also suspect (and cannot prove) that various organs of the US state (CIA, NSA, FBI) are also trying. If they're not, I'm even more afraid, because one of their most important jobs is being alarmed so I don't have to be. I'd wager a few dollars that Cloudflare had a visit. And, as an aside, I'd say it's a matter of when, not if, a GPT-4-scale model is leaked, possibly GPT-4 itself. If not to the open Internet, then to China. OpenAI is (for now) staffed by humans, and humans are vulnerable to seduction, spearphishing and spycraft.
- Zuiii 4y agolol what are you talking about? The weights are being linked to on Meta's repo right now: https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/73/files https://github.com/facebookresearch/llama/pull/73/files The idea that Meta is frantically running around trying to "wipe" these weights is ridiculous. They're either doing this to disclaim liability in case a new law imposes it retroactively, or they are trying to create uncertainty around its use to dissuade serious US competitors from using it for their own products. > but I also suspect (and cannot prove) that various organs of the US state (CIA, NSA, FBI) are also trying. I would be very surprised if they were given that it would only handicap the US while leaving other countries to advance unabated. Again, the only real thing facebook did here is show that we can have smaller models that are competitive to larger ones. The information to build and train these models is public. The code to do this is public. The capability to this so is public. The cat is out of the bag and humanity is better off for it. What humanity needs to do now is figure out how best to adapt.
- 1attice 4y agoThe tracker for that torrent was taken offline by Meta. There was a story about it on HN a while ago. Don't believe me? Try to torrent. Do homework. SMH.
- tpmx 4y agoThis will probably hit winworldpc.com :(
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- rnd0 4y agoTo be fair, IPFS has always been flakey there. For the past year I haven't even bothered trying it.
- loeg 4y agoHuh, Cloudflare still fronts big pirate torrent sites. I guess it's not proxying content directly for that use.
- JeremyNT 4y agoI never understood why this was allowed for so long. IPFS is primarily used to store infringing content, yet few users directly interacted with IPFS. Instead, they usually rely on Cloudflare basically serving as a free proxy. It's like the early days of mega or something, just with a layer of indirection that serves as plausible deniability. Why Cloudflare bothers to provide this presumably costly service at all is confusing to me. I guess maybe they drank the crypto kool-aid and thought that it might some day be profitable?
- nyolfen 4y agoipfs is not a crypto project
- JeremyNT 4y agoBut filecoin is. IPFS is crypto adjacent and got plenty of hype because of it.
- nyolfen 4y agobitcoin uses sha256, is that crypto?
- miohtama 4y agoIPFS is also not used to store content. It’s peer-to-peer distribution network similar to Bittorrent.
- acdha 4y agoKind of but there’s a fairly large community overlap because they were trying to use FileCoin to support development, and a lot of cryptocurrency projects wanted to use it to work around technical limitations (e.g. many NFTs referenced IPFS gateways) to the point that I’ve had a number of marketing people use it as an example when asked for an example of a “web3” project which does something useful.
- nyolfen 4y ago
- neilv 4y agoCloudflare is in the doghouse with me in recent weeks, because they started blocking my Firefox ESR from important Web sites (even when I disable uBlock Origin, FF Advanced Tracking Protection, and DoNotTrack). Cloudflare is fine with Chromium from the same residential IP address, however, but I don't want to use Chromium for those Web sites. I also don't want to have to try to debug the obnoxious behavior of some third-party company that perhaps doesn't care whether it's blocking legit users from its customers. The Kafkaesque Cloudflare "prove you're a human" infinite loop is hopefully not a foreshadowing of an imminent Internet dystopia, with Cloudflare the vanguard of it.
- kotaKat 4y agoI get that loop daily with full on the latest Chrome with no extensions on a fully patched Mac from a residential IP address that isn't blacklisted anywhere (minus the usual ISP residential IP SMTP blacklist). Totally frustrating that Cloudflare is basically the Internet's biggest gatekeeper with a mysterious black box behind it that punishes legitimate users.
- mike_d 4y agoI wish more of the HN crowd would understand that Cloudflare were never the good guys. Their business model has always been man-in-the-middle the entire internet. Every site you put behind Cloudflare contributes to the future where they have the singular ability to decide what networks can connect to others.
- kube-system 4y agoIt’s not like that’s a secret, it’s the whole point of their service.
- hypertele-Xii 4y agoThe obvious sometimes needs repeating lest we forget the forest for the trees.
- 4y ago
- Dwedit 4y agoIPFS is basically bittorrent. Not participating makes perfect sense.
- anacrolix 4y agoThat's a discredit to BitTorrent.