From their inception they have used abusive and self-serving business models that do not emphasize user privacy and data portability. Using them for critical files moving forward is not going to continue working. Fortunately, there are alternatives available which are not only privacy respecting but low-cost and free in some cases. In this post I’ll be going over one of the many options for a replacement that is censorship tolerant and distributed.
~ IPFS ~
IPFS (Inter-Planetary File System) is a protocol designed to allow many users to provide access to files over the Internet to each other and/or anyone with the link. If you’re familiar with the BitTorrent Protocol it’s fairly similar but with the added benefit of deduplication of files across the network. The general idea is that you can ‘pin’ a file to IPFS which means that your computer runs a piece of software that talks to other computers that want a copy of the file when they ask for it. The more people who pin the file the more resilient the network becomes. For small files like PDFs it’s a tiny amount of bandwidth for you to participate and even if the file is a large video it’s not that resource intensive especially if other people join in.
So you might be saying “acasper, what you’ve described is just BitTorrent” and you’d basically be correct. Lets talk about another feature that really causes IPFS to standout and assists with resisting censorship. Each file that is uploaded is assigned a CID (’Container ID’) which is a cryptographic hash of the file’s contents. This is a unique identifier for that specific set of bytes that make up the file. If I uploaded a word document, then added a period to that document and re-uploaded it would have a different file hash. The unique file hash is the address of the file on IPFS. This means that I could find a leaked PDF and pin it to IPFS, then someone else, with no knowledge of my actions, could find the same file from a different source and as long as it’s the identical contents of the file both of our pins would be making the same content available. The IPFS protocol handles this automatically and it means that there are effectively no duplicates of identical files making delivery of both rare and common files more efficient.
I know that it seems obtuse, but it’s the future and could really help us keep important information alive and accessible (even possibly doing so at a lower cost that centralized solutions). Take a look at some of the explainers and give it a try using the links below. If you have any questions I’m always happy to help out just leave a comment. Next time I’ll be talking about a local archive creation utility that I’ve been working with!
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PROTONMAIL