On 13.08.2022 18:29, Michael Niedermayer wrote:
I fully support better IPFS support
what iam a bit "upset" about is that running a IPFS node is presented as
if that was more private than using a gateway.

That's not what people are suggesting.
The primary upset is about FFmpeg having hardcoded in a public gateway run by some company.
That is unprecedented for FFmpeg.
You have to keep in mind that that code will make it into a ton of distros, installed applications and who knows what else, for a very long time to come.

What if in 5 years that company goes under, and the domain is sold?
Or it just decides to "become evil"? What if it already is? I don't know that company, or how they earn their money with running a public service like that. There are so many issues with hardcoding a domain like that into FFmpeg, that I'm surprised really anyone is defending it.


If you use a gateway there are 2 options
A. the gateway is honest then you have decent privacy
B. the gateway logs you, in which case you have no privacy

OTOH if you run a node
You have no privacy either way

If you run a node, you have put enough effort in, that you at least understand what is happening. People understand torrents, which have the same issue, and manage to use them.

Consider this:
If i want to know who downloads assetXYZ i can simple create 1000 nodes each
sharing assetXYZ. (this can in reality be 1 node pretending to be 1000)
If you now request assetXYZ from IPFS then the node you use will likely
download it straight from one of my 1000 nodes, i get your IP, yes we
have a encrypted connection but that goes straight to my attack nodes
you notice nothing of this, i log your IP and time.

If you used some public gateway, i would just log the time and IP of that
public gateway

If you want really private IPFS with you need TOR or something
equivalent.
If someone posts a patch to add native TOR support i surely wont be unhappy
I also would very welcome more native IPFS support but that alone does not
fix the privacy / logging issue

Also i would be VERY happy if iam wrong and running a IPFS node can be made
100% secure and private

I don't really understand how that is at all relevant to the issue at hand:
We have hardcoded a companies server into our main codebase. Thus we endorse that company and basically say that we trust it.
Which I for one do not. I don't know it at all.
If it turns out that company is acting badly, it will also reflect badly on the project. We, as a project, simply cannot do that.

It's easy to say that "a user will just pick the first gateway found on google anyway", but we cannot safe users from their own responsibility there. It's our responsibility to be trustworthy. Hardcoding servers like this does not instill trust.

Specially if the IPFS project then publishes a big blog post about ffmpeg having gained "native" support, which makes the whole effort appear even more dubious, since the support that was added is very much not native.

independant of this, i would very much welcome the current gateway code to
be extended to verify the content so the gateway cannot modify it!
And this should be enabled for non local gateways by default i think

Seems like a good idea in any case. No idea how ipfs works, but does the url not work as hash for the contents it points to?
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