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by marshmellowtest 2310 days ago
Saving Netflix's bandwith costs by sacrificing your privacy.

IPFS and bittorrent don't do anything to protect the data you are uploading and your IP address.

Case in point: https://iknowwhatyoudownload.com/en/peer/

Now every website you visit, any ad/tracker, any homecalling phone app can tell what movies and contents you watch and when you are at home. For years.

7 comments

> Saving Netflix's bandwith costs by sacrificing your privacy.

> IPFS and bittorrent don't do anything to protect the data you are uploading and your IP address.

And Netflix are using it across AWS for distributing container images, not touching client devices, unless you know something more than what the article says.

This doesn't have anything to do with customer's privacy.

IPFS/libp2p is meant to be modular in this regard. It's certainly possible to use Tor with IPFS to protect your IP address but this is WIP. https://github.com/hashmatter/libp2p-onion-routing Openbazaar, which uses IPFS can run as a hidden service https://github.com/OpenBazaar/openbazaar-go/blob/master/docs...
Do not visit this site. If you visit it once and then visit it after a while they will fill it with crap that you did not download in order to blackmail you or something I presume. Alternatively they might start tracking you only once you visit it. Even if they are honest it is extremely inaccurate (it had 8.8.8.8 torrenting anime a while ago for example)
Bogus results can simply be the result of ISP IP address recycling which, in my case, is pretty obvious. Besides, why would they wait on an IP address visit to fill it with blackmail material? The suspicion doesn't make much sense to me.
Well, I am on 4G and they list my IP downloading whole movies and games through torrents. Doesn’t make much sense.
How does Netflix using IPFS between their servers sacrifice my privacy?
They're using it internally, not for streaming to customers.
I thought that ipfs is about high availability, fault tolerance, including some resistance against addressed censorship.

It never looked like an anonymizing tool to me; did anybody advertise it as such?

"resistance against addressed censorship" does not work at all when all your traffic is made public.

People can be prosecuted or otherwise harassed for sharing contents on a P2P system.

> It never looked like an anonymizing tool to me; did anybody advertise it as such?

You are confusing "anonymizing" with "leaking a lot of information to the whole world".

They constantly "forget" to tell people about the huge security impact.

Ipfs helps you distribute content which may get taken down. It does not help you evade local police.

For the second scenario, you want another layer which maintains secrecy. (Like the tor transport https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmYKQvBsbYrRhdaGvQXcEoSam7s5gKVYULfRgNP...)

Well to be fair it would be quite imprudent to have a file system where everyone can see what everyone is doing.

In particular it's pointless to be able to circumvent censorship if you can't do so anonymously.

Circumventing censorship without strong anonymity is not necessarily pointless: you can publish something sensitive from a place where you'd not be prosecuted (e.g. from abroad). The point is to bring the message to those who are denied information.
I guess you mean "Making Netflix save bandwidth". You will get the same amount of data to watch the ninja turtles regardless if you use IPFS or not.
Yes. Edited to clarify.