You are viewing a single comment's thread.

view the rest of the comments →

throwaway89209834 ago

Your connection between this and pizzagate is pretty weak. I would say that it is valid because it involves websites that we use and rely on in our investigations.

Anyway...

Archive.org is compromised

So was sli.mg and, even though its in iceland, archive.is is still vulnerable. This is what happens when the corrupt own the institutions that have access to all of this centralized infrastructure or people who know how to break into it.

I kinda stopped trying to collect data after realizing I don't have a good way to ensure it can remain online, secure and not turn into an information silo. I have been playing with IPFS (interplanetary file system) in my lab, which allows a decentralized web meaning that, to take down a website, or any content hosted on the ipfs server, they would have to take down everyone who chose to replicate (pin) the data. It works pretty much the same way as a torrent and all content is hashed using merkleDAG's the same as a cryptocurrency blockchain to ensure that data cannot be manipulated. It essentially allows for a decentralized 'permanent' web.

The neat thing is that there is already an existing project that combines the IA's wayback system on top of IPFS.

https://github.com/oduwsdl/ipwb

Also there is a project for hosting a wiki on top of IPFS.

https://github.com/jamescarlyle/ipfs-wiki

And a project for hosting a pastebin/img dump

https://github.com/rameshvarun/ipfs-share

This means that if enough people would volunteer to host the contents, we could potentially have a way to store information that is much more resistant to manipulation and take down.

The only reason I am not totally on-board with this and going nutty over how cool it is, is because 1.) It is a new protocol, there are sure to be some bugs (same with any software ) and 2.) By design the protocol shares both the users public and private IP. It has to be carefully routed to ensure your IP is not leaked and even then a bug in IPFS or the VPN could cause a leak.

So at this time, it should only be run by more advanced users who are comfortable running something potentially vulnerable on their system (IE they know how to set up a sandbox, monitoring, and lock down potentially dangerous processes) and preferably have a system just for that task and no other personal data is hosted there. Hopefully I will have an example and tutorial for folks in a few weeks if I get the time.

The great thing is that malicious actors can replicate the data but will not be able to manipulate it thanks to the way to stores file cryptographically and uses merkleDAG to verify its contents.

What would be really cool is if I could put together a buy list for parts to put together a raspberry pi and 1TB HDD for storage and anyone who wanted to be involved in replicating the data could buy those, run a setup script, put it on their network and be come another node in the ipfs network.

Something to think about for now, I'll be making a post about it soon.

reasonedandinformed ago

Thank you for your deep thoughts in the post. I see two levels of relevance:

  • They are trying to take down Trump because they fear he will go after PG.

  • We have hard evidence of manipulation at the level of ICANN and archive.org. This is important to document as we know we have run into this before with PG, in addition to the LSM and social media manipulation and censorship.