
Wikipedia-IPFS: An exploration to host Wikipedia in IPFS - bpierre
https://github.com/santhoshtr/wikipedia-ipfs
======
chx
> I think this issues are going to continue till some big use cases emerge and
> protocol becomes main stream.

Nailed it. Remember Freenet?
[https://web.archive.org/web/20130908073158/http://www.thegua...](https://web.archive.org/web/20130908073158/http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2009/nov/26/dark-
side-internet-freenet)

There's always a chance of Freenet being the IBM Simon and Apple Newton and
IPFS is the iPhone. Or, the VFX1 vs the Oculus. But no. While surely the tech
has evolved from a shitty Java app as Freenet was, all those other examples
had immediately obvious use cases and just needed the tech to catch up which
it did.

~~~
Mediterraneo10
I remember discussions of Freenet on "news for nerds" forums in the early
millennium, and it was obvious that that particular technology was doomed and
would never be widely adopted. You see, people were reluctant to run a Freenet
instance because that would involve hosting and passing on content from other
users as well. While all Freenet content was encrypted, people were horrified
by the thought that if the crypto algorithm were ever broken, they would
suddenly be revealed to have been hosting child pornography on their computers
(unwittingly, but still). Thus, distributed platforms today must allow people
to pick and choose what content they wish to host.

~~~
mirimir
It hasn't even been necessary to break the encryption. Police can just run
Freenet nodes, which serve child porn, and then log IPs of peers that download
chunks of those files. While it's true that Freenet does a good job of
obscuring data routing, arguably providing plausible deniability, it's in
practice nontrivial to convince juries of that.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
The question being, how that is supposed to be any different than any other
service operated by anybody else?

If a pedophile signs up for AT&T, is AT&T not routing their illegal data? Or
Starbucks if they use the WiFi there? If they sign up for AWS or some other
hosting provider, isn't the provider hosting their illegal data?

The obvious solution is to make actual knowledge a prerequisite to liability.
The pedophile who knows what it is goes to jail, the random person who is only
providing a generic service to the public does not.

~~~
mirimir
In reality, police identify Freenet users that have "downloaded" child
pornography. And then they arrest those people, impound all their gear, and
file charges.

So defendants now face the challenge of convincing juries that they were just
relaying data to other users. And that's not trivial. Or at least, it's
expensive to hire expert witnesses. So many just accept some plea bargain.

~~~
AnthonyMouse
These are the stories fearmongers tell because it happened to one or two
people many years ago.

The same thing has happened to hosting providers. Sometimes bad police are
malicious or incompetent and screw up the lives of innocent people. But that
doesn't have anything to do with Freenet, that can even happen to you driving
down the street when some dirty cop needs a bust and decides to pull over a
random car and plant drugs on it.

The answer isn't to never do anything, it's to fix the systems that oppress
innocent people for no good reason. And in the meantime you can't live your
life in fear of low-probability oppression by defective authority figures.

~~~
mirimir
> These are the stories fearmongers tell because it happened to one or two
> people many years ago.

Here's a recent one:[0]

> Gibson’s arrest grew out of an ongoing probe of the “Freenet” — an online
> network that allows users to anonymously share images, chat on message
> boards and access sites, the probable cause statement says.

0)
[https://eu.courierpostonline.com/story/news/2020/02/09/craig...](https://eu.courierpostonline.com/story/news/2020/02/09/craig-
gibson-washington-township-child-pornography-suspect-paulsboro-student-
photographs/4666054002/)

~~~
AnthonyMouse
> also had some 900 images of suspected child pornography on the hard drive,
> says a criminal complaint.

So not an example of someone being arrested just for operating a node, then.

~~~
mirimir
No, but the article implies that he was identified by the fact that he was
running Freenet.

------
jokoon
I recently tried to use IPFS to share 20 gigabytes of data on a local network,
using ipfs-desktop.

Apparently it hashes the entire file, meaning it will read it entirely, so I
killed it because it took way too long. Apparently there are other methods for
fingerprinting large files, like reading a limited set of chunks. I asked on
IRC but I did not get a thorough answer.

~~~
imhoguy
To share files in a local network FTP or SMB/CIFS may be better suited.

IPFS is content addressable storage by design on entire files. Reading limited
set of chunks poses some problem regarding data integrity and deduplication
colisions. One bit flip in JPG may destroy the entire image - thankfuly with
currently used hash functions the right and broken files will have different
"fingerprint". One way hash functions have extremely low probability of
collision with full file scan. However when you skip part of files the
probalibity of collision is roughly equal to count of bytes not scaned divided
by total file size.

~~~
toomuchtodo
It’s a shame modern file systems don’t generate and store common hash
algorithms as file metadata.

~~~
imhoguy
Some file systems like ZFS, btrfs support checksum on block level. However
file level checksum is not trivial with random write file system. Imagine 1
byte is changed in 20GB file - that would require full file scan to update the
checksum. Recalculating a file checksum from all block checksums could be a
solution however far from any standard.

~~~
brokenmachine
Wouldn't a merkle tree, like torrents or dat use, avoid this? You'd only have
to generate a hash of the changed chunk, then it's really low cost to update
the root hash.

[https://datprotocol.github.io/book/ch01-02-merkle-
tree.html](https://datprotocol.github.io/book/ch01-02-merkle-tree.html)

~~~
imhoguy
Yep, my last sentence covered also Markle tree.

------
_threads
Awesome ! But Wouldn’t ZeroNet be a better fit for this case ? Changes
propagation is built-in

------
jedieaston
How long does it take to propagate an edit with this? The previous PoC I saw
(2+ years ago) worked from a static dump from the Kiwix project.

~~~
sthottingal
Author of this new PoC here. IPNS propagation is slow in the current
implementation and it is a blocker for instant propagation irrespective of
number of peers. In my discussion with IPFS developers, I was told that they
are going to look into this issue in next versions.

------
andsens
Oh damn. For a second there I confused IPFS with pingfs:
[https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs](https://github.com/yarrick/pingfs)

Not the same thing, not the same thing at all...

