Naive question: if data on IPFS is permanent, meaning it's hard or impossible to remove things from it, what mechanisms, if any, exists to prevent unlawful content from being uploaded to it?
As far as I understand it, proxying it is dangerous because IPFS will announce all your IPs so that the shortest routes can be established. You probably need to run it in a VM/container that only has access to Tor and no other network adapter.
Thanks! We're hard at work making everything better, especially the documentation and examples bit, but lots of work on the APIs as well.
If you have anything concrete to suggest or help out with, please open up a issue in the relevant repository, this would be the entrypoint to find your way around in our Github organization: https://github.com/ipfs/ipfs
You don't really upload things to IPFS, since it works like Bittorrent: you make files available by adding them, but that doesn't copy those files anywhere. They're only transferred via the network to clients that specifically request them, which makes this a non-issue.
Could you elaborate on why Filecoin is a different issue? Is it because I have to specifically download (or allow others to upload to me) the files so I can host them?
With FileCoin (the IPFS-related ICO with no implementation), the idea is that you're offering your storage space to others in exchange for a fee. So somebody could use your system to store, say, child porn.
With plain IPFS that cannot happen, because you're only downloading what you're interested in. That's what I meant when I wrote that IPFS is like Bittorrent.
I would hope that safe harbor laws would protect you in a case like that, similar to how Amazon doesn't get busted if one of their customers uses AWS to store illegal material.