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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Never trusted that shit. Today I am congratulating myself. Fuck big tech. Haven't touched Google in a months
I've begun to research how to have my own server for all of my data. Amazon photos was great so my wife could take pics and vids of the kids and my mom could watch them almost real time or we could easily share them with other family members. But after this last year I'm working on multiple back ups and then my own server so I'm ultimately responsible for my family data/pics online and offline and not Amazon's cow.
Definitely do it. You'll feel a lot better and more secure, and your data won't be used for algorithms designed to exploit you.
NextCloud is a suite that I’ve deployed for some clients and they seem to like it. Has many of those features integrated and its stable.
I maintain a big list of alternatives for many of the main services across a bunch of categories. What are some that you’ve been using?
What stories are there of the major cloud services censoring content?
I've personally had files pulled by Google due to a conflict with their ToS for copyrighted materials. This was diagnostic software, not CP or some other obviously objectionable file. iCloud Drive has done some shady stuff with PDFs and EBUPs stored generically by importing them to Books and remembering that you had a non-purchased copy. Dropbox I haven't personally run into issues with, but they're running almost all of their infrastructure on AWS so they'll fall in line with whatever policies Amazon wants to push.
I was wondering more about political content.
But yeah, it is clear they can do it. And it is smart to plan ahead.
ah, so "none" then
Please explain to me why YouTube’s behavior with videos would not be ported over to other Alphabet services?
You're the person making the claims.
"why wouldn't they" is not evidence
for the record, I think your advice is sound, regardless of what google does
Fair. I can’t cite an instance at the moment and am not sure that they’ve taken actions to remove political material. I’ll look into it.
They can censor politics they don’t agree with but can’t get CP or keep regular porn away from children.
If I'm not mistaken Google was deleting the movie Plandemic from user cloud storage.
I haven't seen it in use and I have not experimented with it. Sounds as if it could be helpful. There are other P2P technologies for browsers which are anonymous for hosting, but slower.
Agreed, I think that decentralized/distributed storage is one of the more foundational components that can support those services and prevent centralized interests from leveraging their assets to silence subversive perspectives.
I always wondered why the Bittorrent tech wasn't being used everywhere. This is a great usage for it.
Just be sure to encrypt your ipfs data, for stuff you want stored, but not shared. There are also useful tools like "steghide" which will encrypt your data and hide it in something like the static of a regular picture file, or "gpg" for just regular encryption, lots of other ones too. There are also useful services, like ipfs pinning services that will pin your files for a small fee if you need something to keep them pinned in case your servers go offline.
I was wondering about this. So this took doesn't have encryption built in? I mean, are files public by default so long as you know the CID?
Yes, ipfs is designed as a universal file access protocol, but has no built in encryption capabilities. The people who built it were more thinking youtube, or bittorrent than privacy or secure communication. If you want to share private data, or access your private data from multiple places, you need to put the encryption layer on top of it.
Got it thanks
Synology is the way
I use them at work (cameras and backup storage) and I highly recommend for the purpose shared in this post. I will be buying my own soon. I'm concerned that since day I'll say something Google doesn't like and they'll lock me out from my years of pictures and emails and whatever.
If you know how to set up a VPN it’s privately accessible from anywhere in the world. If not you can make a Synology account to access remotely.
Those synology boxes can also be a network time server, chat server, DNS server, and other such functions. Really cool
Yeah. They are very cool.
Supposedly they can sync your photos from the major services too.
The old ones are slow as balls but the new amd ones look promising. Saving for a 12 bay over here.
Synology is a Taiwanese company if I’m not mistaken
Yes that's right.
Another great post. It’s just sad that we’re having to plan to use Chinese dissident anti-censorship tactics in the US where this sort of thing isn’t supposed to happen.
Thanks! This specific piece of tech was inevitable I think, but yeah, I don’t want there a reason for one personal
PROTONMAIL
DO people pin' viruses and malware?
People definitely could use IPFS for that yes.
Technologies change very quickly - and those of us who made the jump from 8track players to CD's - are still behind on most of the TECH that is available today.
IPFS sounds really good... and yet - how do I trust the other sources not to vandalize my laptop?
Is there a version for a 2nd grader? That is what I would need.
Have a file you want to share?
Now your uploaded file is available on the internet.
If the file is being censored or IPFS gateways like ipfs.io are blocked on your network share the file CID instead of a link. Paste the CID in the bar at the top of the desktop client and it will retrieve the file for you bypassing gateways.
Play around with it if you have some time. Even if you don’t use it remember that things like this exist as they may be necessary in the future. You may run into someone who CAN use it now.
Just encrypt anything you store offsite or better yet, don't use their services at all.
Problem solved.
Ok, so I have the desktop version running, how do I support people by hosting files that otherwise get taken down? Is there a place to go to pick a set of files to download and then host locally? Like the pillow guys videos and such?
another +1 for ipfs. great post. upvote this everyone! ipfs is the future of the post-apocalyptic internet!
brave supports ipfs natively also