Bonum Certa Men Certa

Help Make Techrights (and Other Technology-Centric Sites) More Robust to Censorship by Setting Up More IPFS Nodes

IPFS large logo



Summary: We're trying to improve the site's availability (ensuring it can never be offline) and make it more censorship-resistant; people who adopt IPFS can make that happen while tackling the "bloated Web" and "centralised Internet" issues -- all at the same time

JUST over a month ago we hooked up with data-centric security folks who had offered help with Techrights. Having faced legal threats over the years (for exposing corruption), we're always looking for ways to avert or discourage such attempts (ideally, even if we're forced to go offline or remove something, we want that to be outside our control, i.e. inability to comply, even if there's a will to comply). We don't typically just repeat what other sites say, we have many exclusive stories and we publish leaks (unseen beforehand).



Now, less than a month later, we have a pipeline for publishing the site both as text and over distributed protocols. The Techrights IPFS node over here (at home) now exceeds 50GB in traffic, just 3 weeks down the line (after introducing people to it, i.e. 'going public'). Not bad considering how young it is. It's always active, offering full site access. There's no single point of failure, no HTTP, no WWW, no HTML. It's very text-centric and thus compact, portable and so on. No bloat associated with exporting/importing images, fonts, JavaScript and so on.

Earlier today we published many pages of internal EPO material; we need to get those sorts of things backed up, as EPO management can be litigious and threatening (they tried it on us several times). Techrights is home to many other important bits of material; months ago we published old debian-private archives (1990s only); those were accessed nearly 30,000 times in this past week alone. Giving Debian better transparency 2.5 decades later can't be a bad thing. In fact, nobody contacted us regarding removal or redaction. Those mailing lists are pretty harmless and barely even embarrassing. Due to their age, they don't present/pose a threat to anybody's career.

"In other words, the more people participate in this network, the more robust and censorship-resistant it'll become. This, in turn, can attract more high-profile whistleblowers with high-profile leaks."Now, on to the 'beef' of this post...

This past autumn we spent time coding and testing a bunch of stuff (at the back end for the most part). First we made everything in the site accessible in/as text. Plain text. Nice and simple. Then, we explored a number of distribution systems. At the end we went ahead of IPFS, seeing that it is decentralised and Web-agnostic (its protocols aren't connected to the Web, unless a gateway is set up). We already have a number of devices pinning and serving the site's pages (or objects) upon request by CID.

Share large logoHow can readers help? They can become nodes. The material itself isn't sensitive (everything in it is public anyway), but it's precarious in the sense that takedown requests can be attempted against our main servers; we want to make it very clear upfront that it's an exercise in futility because many copies of the articles are already 'out there', being distributed by peer, not from a single point (of potential failure).

In other words, the more people participate in this network, the more robust and censorship-resistant it'll become. This, in turn, can attract more high-profile whistleblowers with high-profile leaks.

An informal manual was typed up by one of us as a sort of primer for those wishing to set up their own node. It ought not be hard to achieve (by just following the series of steps). Those instructions were written for a Raspberry Pi with Debian, but the hardware and the distro ought not matter much because we use the binaries rather than repos.

"I'm going to outline a pragmatic setup that you can use to get going with IPFS on any host," said the manual's author. Here's the recipe:




SUMMARY



Make user + group for IPFS. All further steps are to be performed under IPFS user's "~/" (home directory).

Download and extract latest Go binaries available from official tarball.

Symbolic link Go binary executables, from tarball, into "~/bin".

Download and extract latest IPFS binary available from official tarball.

Symbolic link IPFS binary executable, from tarball, into "~/bin".

BEGIN IPFS BASIC USE GUIDE SUMMARY



What's covered:

IPFS conceptual overview.

Help from the `ipfs` command itself.

Initialise ipfs for your IPFS user.

List pinned IPFS objects.

Add/pin IPFS objects.

Remove pinned IPFS objects.

Run garbage collector for IPFS objects.

Check IPFS stats.

Check a file's CID without adding/pinning to IPFS.

SETUP DETAILS



Make a dedicated user and group for IPFS on your machine. This will keep things manageable, down the line. Everything should be done under the IPFS user's home directory "~/".

Grab the latest Go binary you can find. Set it up in the home directory of your IPFS user. You can find the latest Go binary here. There are builds for a wide array of operating systems and CPU architectures.

Extract the tarball; look in "/bin" in the tarball for the binary executables. Right now there are two binaries, "go" and "gofmt".

Create a symbolic link in "~/bin" for the binary executables you find in the Go tarball. You should be able to run `$ source ~/.profile` to make sure "~/bin" is in PATH, for the IPFS user.

This completes the Go setup.

Next, we tackle the IPFS setup.

Download the latest binary you can get for go-ipfs from here. This binary should be packed in a tarball.

Extract the tarball.

"go-ipfs" is the name of the binary executable. Create a symbolic link for this binary in "~/bin". You don't need to use the setup script provided. It'll just mess with things that don't need messing.

IPFS BASIC USE GUIDE



Think of IPFS as a filesystem that lives on the Internet. Each file is an IPFS object denoted by a hash called the CID (content identifier).

`ipfs --help` includes help for commands and subcommands. Always double-check with this to make sure that anything you read on the Internet about IPFS matches up to the binary you actually are using on your system.

Before you do anything with ipfs, make sure to run `ipfs init`. This will populate "~/.ipfs" for you. That's all you need to do for initial setup.

You can "deploy" ipfs locally with `ipfs daemon`; this process will be running in the foreground and print to the terminal (probably stdout). You can just put it in the background and redirect stdout and stderr to a log file to manually monitor what it's doing. Killing this daemon will mean your IPFS node is no longer online. Feel free to control this daemon in whichever method you choose. This guide is kept as abstract as possible to enable deployment in maximum number of environments.

Files from your host can be added to IPFS as something called IPFS objects. The ipfs command for this is, unsurprisingly, called `ipfs add`. `ipfs add path` will add the specified file or directory to IPFS.

By default, `ipfs add` "pins" objects in your local IPFS datastore. What is a "pinned object"? A pinned object is an IPFS object in your local IPFS datastore that doesn't get garbage-collected.

`ipfs pin ls` is a good way to view your pins. `ipfs pin rm` can be used to remove pins; if you try to remove the wrong type of pin, IPFS will get mad and yell at you because it's probably a recursive pin (you'll see what kind of pin an IPFS object is in the output for `ipfs pin ls`); a top-level pin will probably be of type "recursive" (so you'll need to remove that to get rid of all the pinned objects that are associated).

You can check bandwidth status with `ipfs stats bw`. Good way to keep track of your precious bandwidth. ipfs comes with some default pins. You might want to get rid of those with `ipfs pin rm` to save on bandwidth. Those pins are documentation, however, so it's up to you if you want to keep them around or not.

Just removing a pin is not enough to ensure pin(s) are no longer is eating up your local IPFS datastore space. `ipfs repo gc` will run the garbage collector to get rid of all the unpinned IPFS objects.

The default IPFS configuration is pretty sane. You can find the default config file for IPFS in "~/.ipfs/config"; the config file is formatted in JSON. See `ipfs config --help` for further details.

Remember: always check `ipfs <command> <subcommand> --help` for definitive guidance on your binary's implementation. `ipfs --help` should be skimmed, in full, before you do anything with IPFS; you will likely find commands to help you with what you want to do. Don't forget that `ipfs <command> --help` and `ipfs <command> <subcommand> --help` are always available for you as well.

Consuming IPFS objects is straightforward. Just look at `ipfs get --help` and `ipfs cat --help` for instructions.

To check what a file's CID is, without adding/pinning to ipfs, just run `ipfs add -n /path/to/file`; see `ipfs add --help` for details. This is going to be a very important operation if you want to do any automation. It helps knowing what a file's CID will be before doing any operations live IPFS operations on it.

You should now be able to independently navigate the Internet for further information on IPFS. Official, online, documentation available here. Remember to always cross-check `ipfs version` and `ipfs <command> <subcommand> --help` to ensure what you read on the Internet is applicable to the IPFS binary executable on your system.

Image attributions: Font Awesome (Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International) and IPFS project (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported)

Recent Techrights' Posts

Debian GNU/Linux and Free Software Developer Daniel Pocock in Irish Elections This Month (Dublin Bay South)
Polling day in 15 days
Layoffs as Happy Stories in the Corporate Media
It's based on a longstanding pattern
In Switzerland, GNU/Linux Reaches Record Highs, But What About the Corruption?
Pocock is a disappointed citizen of Switzerland
 
Links 14/11/2024: Politics, Climate, and Instability
Links for the day
Links 14/11/2024: EmacsConf and Flounder
Links for the day
Links 14/11/2024: Science and the Demise of Microsoft-Connected USPTO Director
Links for the day
For "X" to Die the Media and Politicians Will Need to Quit (Then, Advertisers Will Lose Interest, Even for Political Ads)
Fewer people are still there anyway
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 13, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, November 13, 2024
Bob Should Tell Alice About What GitHub (Which Linux Foundation Outsources Code to) Does to Entire Nations, Following Donald Trump's Policies
"What's next, preventing access to Linux from non-NATO countries? Putting NSA backdoors in the kernel?"
It Took The Guardian More Than 2 Years of Musk to Realise What Twitter Was and It Took Twitter 4 Years of a President Trump to Realise What Trump Was
Trump was deplatformed only a fortnight before Biden became president anyway
[Meme] Google 80%, Windows 2%
"I'm going to f---ing bury that guy, I have done it before, and I will do it again. I'm going to f---ing kill Google."
Microsoft's Market Share Falls to 2% in Haiti
Throw in Android (now 80% of "the market") and Windows is down to 2%
Gemini Links 13/11/2024: Magic of Walking and Lest We Forget
Links for the day
Links 13/11/2024: USPTO Director Kathi Vidal ('Former' Microsoft Rep) Resigning, Censorship After Car Ramming Attack in China
Links for the day
Microsoft: Layoffs, Outsourcing, and R.T.O. as Cover for Mass Layoffs Without Severance Pay
Microsoft had mass layoffs pretty much every month this year
[Meme] The Addicted Lolicon Throwing Stones
"They've found my RMS attack site"
Jonathan Carter & Debian betrayed Joel Espy Klecker
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 13/11/2024: Red Tape War and Programming Experiences
Links for the day
Links 13/11/2024: "Make Your Laptop Last FOREVER" With GNU/Linux, 23andMe Mass Layoffs, Intel 'Resignations' Layoffs Loophole
Links for the day
More Than 3 Years After Vista 11's Release More Chinese Computer Users Still Use Vista 7 (Than "11")
it was "officially" released October 5, 2021
At BetaNews, "Most Commented Story" Is Not a Story But LLM Slop! (Readers Talking to Bots)
They make fake stories with provocative headlines and then boast that these get many comments
[Meme] Swiss Lawyers/Attorneys Who Fake Qualifications and Rob People
Switzerland mostly guards its reputation by censorship of media
Just How Slow Has the News Industry Become?
We're drowning in garbage from fake publishers
Things That Still Work OK (But We're Being Shamed for Using)
Using old stuff is nothing to be shamed of (or afraid to do)
Free Software is About Collaboration
WordPress limits it
Even the Managing Editor of BetaNews is Doing Slop and Spam
A Fish Rots From The Head Down
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 12, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, November 12, 2024
PERA Bill in US Senate Strives to Crush Caselaw, Making Patents on Mathematics and Algorithms 'Great Again'
Follow the money
BetaNews is Beta-Testing the Site as LLM Slop With Microsoft Propaganda Thrown In
Many of the people there are Microsoft boosters and they use slop as "filler" (for marketing)
Evolution of euthanasia & WIPO UDRP similarities exposed by W. Scott Blackmer
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 13/11/2024: Phasing Out 3G, Brian Kernighan Books, Tcl/Tk, Time to Ditch x86
Links for the day
Links 12/11/2024: A Lot of Censorship and SWNS at 50
Links for the day
BetaNews, Inc. Became a Spam Operation/Web Site, LLM Spew (Slop) for SEO Disguised as "Articles"
Published 5 minutes ago by Brian Fagioli...
Gemini Links 12/11/2024: Invidious Down and YouTube Addiction
Links for the day
Links 12/11/2024: Hey Hi (AI) Failures and COP29 Fakers
Links for the day
Latest Rumours of Red Hat Layoffs
Rumours or gossip is how almost everything starts
WordPress is for the 'Old Web'; the New Web Necessitates Static Pages
There are purely practical reasons to move away from WordPress and the likes of it
Biggest Debt Leap in Years, More Than Half a Trillion Dollars in Just One Month
We remind people (almost every year) that it's also "buynothingday"
Windows Falling to All-Time Lows and Microsoft Has Nothing to Replace It With
It's mostly Android (Linux) replacing Windows
Cybershow Has a New 81-Minute Episode on Digital Sovereignty and International Cyber-Relations
it is a high-quality show
Activism in the Digital Realm Can Never (and Must Never) Rely on GAFAM
This simply means that tech activists must completely abandon any hopes of finding allies in Google or IBM or whatever...
Golden Dawn(ald) and What GAFAM Means to Liberal Techies
In one single screenshot
IBM CEO Says Donald Trump as President-Elect is Good for IBM in New Interview With CNBC
most unprincipled CEO ever?
GNU/Linux Up to 6.1% in Finland (Almost 9% If One Counts ChromeOS Too)
Home of Linux (the kernel)
BetaNews Has Become a SPAM/Slop Factory, Brian Fagioli Publishes Fake 'Articles'
everything is now suspect in BetaNews
It's Morbid to Talk About Living People as If They're Dead
What happens to LLM slop when Brian Fagioli dies?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 11, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, November 11, 2024
Free Software and Love of Nature
It's not a coincidence that many Free software activists are also lovers of nature
Silicon Valley and GAFAM Were Never Liberal
spineless CEOs and founders aren't against Trump
Windows and 'The Desktop' Floundering
Microsoft should be extremely worried
WordPress is Bad for the Planet (Even If Many Still Use It)
the costs nobody wishes to talk about