How to build a website/shop that cannot be shut down by Law enforcement
ipfs.filebase.io
ipfs.filebase.io
I’m very interested in decentralised and censorship resistant hosting but it really feels like very little progress has been made here. It still seems like the best setup is a tor hidden service. It’s not decentralised but it’s a whole lot more practical and private from what I can see.
I assume IPFS is using some kind of torrent like DHT where it’s trivial to see what files people are accessing.
From my perspective, completely decentralised hosting is not actually very important. A website typically has a central owner who adds content and maintains it, they can often also host some software on a computer somewhere. The hard part is the transport between the owner and the user.
As we have seen, networking infrastructure is widely weaponised for censorship. Tor services avoid this but the accessibility massively drops so you won’t have much of a user base if you rely on tor.
BTW. Onion sites are not private. Law enforcement can access the onion sites in the same way as others. It just appears private. A cop in undercover can appear like an ordinary citizen and purchase dope from a dealer.
DDoS resistance is an issue on Tor but it has been shown that you can mitigate it. That’s one thing IPFS should win by default.
And for privacy, Tor is pretty much the best you can get. It’s not bullet proof but it is the safest tech in existence. For DHT based technologies you can literally query the DHT and get the ip address of every single person who has a copy of the files. This is way way less private than tor, it’s less private than a standard clearnet website.
You can access the website directly via its CID (ipfs://CID), or via its decentralized domain (domain.eth, domain.x). But of course, you will need a browser with native support for IPFS (Opera, Brave). Currently for other browsers you need an extension called ipfs companion.
Only via a centralized relay, giving up the other nice properties.
> TOR is sensitive to DDoS attack, IPFS; it is not.
To DDoS a ToR website you'd need to overload the server(s) the website owner set up. To DDoS IPFS you'd need to overload the whole network. Harder, but not impossible. See [1].
> Ipfs is permanent web.
Sort of, but you have to address pinning.
> Law enforcement can access the onion sites in the same way as others ... A cop in undercover can appear like an ordinary citizen and purchase dope from a dealer
Yes. Solving this would require implementing an evil bit[2]. I don't think IPFS has solved that problem?
[1]: https://github.com/ipfs-inactive/faq/issues/171#issuecomment...
Not sure what I'd recommend as an alternative though, .html?
Please feel free to share it so maybe somebody finds it interesting.
China banned trading and mining of all public blockchains (except those it controls) in 2021.
Biden just passed the CHIP act. It's just banned speech and math towards China.
It is hosting company that is operated from U.S. jurisdiction under sauce of Decentralized Storage, and it is laughable in context that presumably it can not be shut down by Law enforcement.
> Everything you upload is public and it is online forever!
It is 'forever' only until people operating these services interested in making money, it is gone after that.
This happens: If someone requests a file or a webpage, a copy of the file is cached on their node. As more and more people request that data, more and more cached copies will exist. Subsequent requests for that file can be fulfilled by any node —or combination of nodes—that has the file on it. The burden of delivering the data and fulfilling the request is gradually shared out among many nodes.
Also, I'm pretty sure most ipfs gateways that expose ipfs to http requests do comply with DMCA and other takedown notices. The content might be in the ipfs, but it won't be accessible on every gateway (which might break your url)
Correct. 1. there is a lot of IPFS gateways outsite of USA 2. you can access the website directly "ipfs://CID" from Opera, Brave browser
This way it is fully decentralized. IPFS gateways are centralized.
Woe to him or her who is harassed by such a web site.
What am I missing?
A CDN provider can decrypt a large portion of Internet traffic, connect to real IP of most services, cached most of the web's content.