clueless404
Yes, but for offload, all that matters is your local lan swarm.
> A room full of people using their phones is what I have in mind.
That might work to some extent, but how often do you (i) spend your time in rooms full of people and (ii) have no wifi.
> Anyway, the point was whatever’s the offload factor it would still be a net positive.
Not quite. If the offload factor is sufficiently small there is no rational reason to burn battery on it.
> Also one can imagine if IPFS gets popular, just as ISPs collocate CDN caches in the present model, WiFi routers could come with a local node of their own. The “Web Accelerator.” And now we’re talking!
Possible, but unlikely. Web cache hit ratios are abysmal, normally it's much cheaper to just up the bandwidth. A lot of business models would also have to change for the (large) and interesting content to become third party cacheable.
> There’s opportunity for caching at many network levels, but there’s no incentive to do so with HTTP.
There are also many business models where there is no incentive to cache either.
Moving towards IPNS namespaces would probably be a great start.
Example content sites like the below one (found in another comment) are a disaster just waiting to happen:
https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmU5XsVwvJfTcCwqkK1SmTqDmXWSQWaTa7ZcVLY...
This brings us back to my original point. Even with trusted IPNS namespaces, IPFS needs to protect its users. If nothing else IPFS should have some kind of content policy engine that warns or blocks the user from unintentionally leaving safe namespaces and/or retrieving random hashes.
P.S. 555.555.555.555 isn't really a great example IP :)
That's a reasonable approach, but due to the synchronous requirement I guess the offload factor would be minimal. When I want to download something I might as well enable wifi and see if it's available locally. After I'm done there's really no incentive for me to keep seeding or even have wifi turned on.
> P2P networks like Bittorrent pride themselves on being available despite high churn, so this is right up their alley.
This really isn't applicable to opportunistic mobile use of IPFS, as you are unlikely to have a large enough local swarm to guarantee uptime or availability.
No, it is not. Not from a legal perspective, which is all that matters in this context. With seeding you are making things worse for yourself, as you are not merely downloading but also distributing. Seeding is also relevant with regards to downloading, as IPFS automatically starts seeding what you download.
Sure, cold hard cash would suffice, but imaginary Internet points won't do. But even with cash there comes a point where you would turn off IPFS, because the alternative would be to have a dead phone for the rest of the day.
> Thankfully, I don't think it would be possible for my phone to consume that much power in a day.
Perhaps not that much battery, but it is quite easy to deplete your battery in much less than a day by having your hotspot on constantly, which is what IPFS would require.
Having run many a phone into the ground while hotspotting, I do not consider the battery investment insignificant. It's annoying enough when I drain my own battery when using the hotspot, I would never allow complete strangers to do that to me.
That feels optimistic. I doubt people have that much free space on their phones, especially those that don't have flash cards. Heck, a basic iPhone won't have. Even a 16GB model has something like only 12 GB free when it's empty.
> For such a mesh network, you don't even necessarily need to connect over WiFi - lower energy Bluetooth could be used too.
IPFS doesn't (currently) work over Bluetooth.
However, my main point is, that I don't think most people would be altruistic enough to participate unless they could plug in their phones on the plane.
How do you propose tweaking it without either publishing a directory of all the kiddy porn on IPFS or creating a bottleneck which incidentally is ideal for tracking and surveillance?
> How do you know if that link to a pdf from a friend contains kiddy porn?
You don't, but at least your browser won't shout out to the world: "Hey, everybody! This guy is downloading kiddy porn! IPFS does that and to add insult to injury then automatically goes on to seed it.
On the web you also have a sense of where you are. With IPFS you don't, it's all a bunch of hashes. There is no there there. There are no clues to tell you that you are in a seedy neighborhood. Everything is just available, one hash away, from kiddy porn to fine art. That makes navigating IPFSpace such a minefield, the next hash could take you anywhere.
> I'm really lost on how this is any different than HTTP/BitTorrent/etc.
Let me recap:
- BitSwap
- metadata leakage
- automatic seeding
- opacity and lack of control
> Again, stay away from random hashes just like you stay away from sketchy torrents and random http files.
How? Is there some kind of sniff test I don't know about?
Oh, really?
"In some cases, nodes must work for their blocks. In the case that a node has nothing that its peers want (or nothing at all), it seeks the pieces its peers want, with lower priority than what the node wants itself. This incentivizes nodes to cache and disseminate rare pieces, even if they are not interested in them directly."
https://github.com/ipfs/papers/blob/master/ipfs-cap2pfs/ipfs...
What's to say BitSwap won't proactively decide to download and start seeding some rare pieces of kiddy porn?
> You only distribute what you download.
As if that wasn't bad enough.
> Don't download kiddy porn, and you won't distribute kiddy porn.
How are you to know if a hash contains kiddy porn or not?
You need to know if the hash contains kiddy porn before you download it, but to know if it contains kiddy porn you have to download it. Classic Catch-22.
The only rational response to a system like this is not to use it.
> How does BitTorrent protect me from unknowingly downloading kiddy porn?
By not randomly downloading stuff from the Internet. By only downloading torrents, I have explicitly chosen to retrieve (hopefully from vetted and reputable sources). By giving me complete control and feedback on what I'm seeding.
Obviously not ideal, but far better than what IPFS does.
I also don't get how this central censorship authority is going to work. I very much doubt IPFS wants to become the Internet Police for Saudi Arabia.
The whole thing is a futile attempt to appease lawmakers and dictators, since any filtering will be done clientside. Nothing is stopping the client from ignoring any blacklists.
Any great or small firewall will just find it easier to block the whole thing than do some silly whack-a-mole deep packet inspection.
How is IPFS not going to become a haven for kiddy porn aficionados?
If the censorship authority publishes a list of blacklisted hashes, that's the same as publishing a directory of all the available kiddy porn. Oops!
If the censorship authority requires each hash to be queried individually, it becomes a real honeypot for the state surveillance machinery.
Not exactly great choices.
The creators of IPFS may not have any liability, but they open up its users to severe issues of liability due to the way it operates.
IPFS will become toxic real quick, if it becomes know that IPFS can make you an unintentional distributor of kiddy porn and pirated content.
The core problem is that IPFS' default mode of operation is actively user hostile. This is a big problem, and the reason IPFS needs to protect its users. IPFS not only leaks what you retrieve, it also makes you an (unknowing) distributior of everything you retrieve. All it takes for you to commit a crime and/or copyright infringement, not only as a consumer but also a as a distributor, is to be tricked into retrieving one hash.
In conclusion, IPFS needs not only to not be outlawed, it also needs to be safe to use. As it is IPFS is not safe to use. Hence IPFS needs to do something to become safe to use, i.e. to protect its users.
Not that this central authority will solve this issue either. It just opens another can of worms.
Who will review claims and reports? Who will be authorized to add hashes to the blacklist? How will counternotices be handled? How will different juridistictions and conflicting laws be handled? Who will be liable for content that makes it past the filters? Who will pay for all this?
The world is a messy place and IPFS does nothing to protect its users.
Sure, you can manually publish archives over IPFS, but that's not something that automatically creates an IPFS cache copy of whatever you are surfing.
No matter what incentive scheme you device , it's not going to help you with your battery.
Zeronet offers no anonymity, you have to use Tor for that.
You can't go downloading and seeding random hashes if this exposes you to criminal charges and/or law suites.
Good luck adding all DDOS bot IPs to your null route.
Pinning may be manual, but is not content automatically cached and seeded (until purged from the cache) once any content is retrieved?
> I disagree, IPFS is a pretty reasonable plan for resiliency in the case of static web content, as previously discussed.
How is it a reasonable plan to exploit the naive and the uninformed or to depend only on those that are outside your juridistiction and unassailable by their own?
> If instead of "kindness of strangers" you frame it as a "market with incentives" to maintain information availability it is both less condescending and more accurate to how situations are likely to play out with things like DMCA'd content.
What incentives exactly would those be?
I also find it interesting that you object to kindness from strangers.
>>So, while better than traditional HTTP
> (which is all it needs to be)
That might not be sufficient for IPFS to get enough adoption, tho.
>>IPFS isn't really immune to takedowns nor very resilient.
> That wasn't the goalpost we originally set, nor one of the project's longterm objectives, so I'm not sure the relevance.
Fair enough. It is however relevant in the sense that it both removes a use case and acts as a disincentive for users to participate, as there is no liability shielding.
What is it for then? For scaling distribution, you say. What problem does it solve? How, what and why? Is it better than BitTorrent for that use case?