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Seconded. I'm less concerned about illegal content per-se as I am concerned about spam. I created Neocities (https://neocities.org https://neocities.org) and w

Seconded. I'm less concerned about illegal content per-se as I am concerned about spam. I created Neocities (https://neocities.org https://neocities.org) and we get quite a bit of SEO and pharmaceutical spam that we need to remove. There would be no way to prevent that with IPFS. The one thing I could see this being useful for is storage with a private network. If you control all the nodes, then you could filter what goes into them. But I recognize that the point here is to make everybody run on the same network. Bitcoin has a similar problem. If transactions were free, it would be very easy for someone to just flood the network with garbage transactions and essentially make the blockchain useless for legitimate use. The way this is prevented is by charging a transaction fee (around 7 cents) for transactions that don't meet certain criteria. It's not an ideal solution (because it's fixed in the code and doesn't fluctuate to compensate for market demand), but regardless, it's the only way they've found to prevent this sort of spam. Without a solution like this, IPFS would not be able to be used in a decentralized, trustless manner. The solution here is probably some sort of monetary restriction, similar to the fees on Bitcoin. But I have no idea how you could implement that here. That said, if a solution is discovered, Neocities will be front row center to implementing it for our sites. I think this is a genius idea, I've been following it for a while, and I love it.

lotsofmangos 12y ago
It sounds like pull instead of push though, so the user presumably is only seeding things they have looked at, so a flag/delete/block button for them to remove and block something from their node might be good enough.
- hosh 12y ago
  There's a block exchange protocol where that can be built in: refuse exchanges relating to block X. There is also potential for a web-of-trust built on top of that as well. So rather than a centralized flagging system, if sufficient numbers of people you marked as trusted flag something, it's likely not something you want to make block exchanges with.
- patcheudor 12y ago
  I'd say this one falls into the "sort of" category. In web security we are constantly fighting cross site request forgery (CSRF) bugs. Basically a bad actor places a GET or POST request into a page you visit which makes a request to another asset you are likely to have visited while authenticated like Facebook. This GET or POST then leads to some action on your behalf without your knowledge leading to an action of consequence such as making a wall post on your behalf. Similarly, within the context of this solution a bad actor could embed links to objects they want you to cache without your knowledge by not rendering the objects in a visible manner in the DOM. Yes, this can happen today and yes, the technique could be used to frame someone. In fact there was presumably once a court case where the defense team claimed their defendant didn't browse child porn and to provide the judge an example that it's possible to have child porn on a machine without ever knowingly visiting such content they had the judge browse the defense team website where they loaded up a bunch of images which went into his browser cache but which he didn't see because they weren't visible in the DOM. They then asked the forensics investigator to see if the judge had browsed the particular content and of course he came back that the judge did. In the case of this solution, a bad actor could use unsuspecting visitors to a site or users of a rogue WiFi network to load up the particular bad content they want distributed.
whyrusleeping 12y ago
All content is self hosted until another party is interested enough to pull it locally. While spam will still be something that needs to be dealt with, spammers will be using their own disk space and bandwidth, and not that of other users.

lotsofmangos 12y ago

It sounds like pull instead of push though, so the user presumably is only seeding things they have looked at, so a flag/delete/block button for them to remove and block something from their node might be good enough.

hosh 12y ago
There's a block exchange protocol where that can be built in: refuse exchanges relating to block X. There is also potential for a web-of-trust built on top of that as well. So rather than a centralized flagging system, if sufficient numbers of people you marked as trusted flag something, it's likely not something you want to make block exchanges with.
patcheudor 12y ago
I'd say this one falls into the "sort of" category. In web security we are constantly fighting cross site request forgery (CSRF) bugs. Basically a bad actor places a GET or POST request into a page you visit which makes a request to another asset you are likely to have visited while authenticated like Facebook. This GET or POST then leads to some action on your behalf without your knowledge leading to an action of consequence such as making a wall post on your behalf. Similarly, within the context of this solution a bad actor could embed links to objects they want you to cache without your knowledge by not rendering the objects in a visible manner in the DOM. Yes, this can happen today and yes, the technique could be used to frame someone. In fact there was presumably once a court case where the defense team claimed their defendant didn't browse child porn and to provide the judge an example that it's possible to have child porn on a machine without ever knowingly visiting such content they had the judge browse the defense team website where they loaded up a bunch of images which went into his browser cache but which he didn't see because they weren't visible in the DOM. They then asked the forensics investigator to see if the judge had browsed the particular content and of course he came back that the judge did. In the case of this solution, a bad actor could use unsuspecting visitors to a site or users of a rogue WiFi network to load up the particular bad content they want distributed.

whyrusleeping 12y ago

All content is self hosted until another party is interested enough to pull it locally. While spam will still be something that needs to be dealt with, spammers will be using their own disk space and bandwidth, and not that of other users.