Autonomía digital y tecnológica

Código e ideas para una internet distribuida

Linkoteca. IPFS

I don’t trust Cloudflare’s 1.1.1.1 App and Warp VPN

Imago voragine.net
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Cloudflare announced their new VPN product called Warp, which is based on their own implementation of WireGuard. This product seems to fit into their general strategy of wanting to man-in-the-middle (MITM) themselves into most of the traffic on the Internet, like I discussed in a previous post. As I explained there, they did the same thing with IPFS as well.

Knowing their willingness to deplatform people and block content, it would be stupid to trust them with your Internet traffic. The fact that they also refused to work with Jason Donenfeld (at least so far), the creator of WireGuard, seems highly suspicious in light of their history.

WARP is not designed to allow you to access geo-restricted content when you’re traveling. It will not hide your IP address from the websites you visit. If you’re looking for that kind of high-security protection then a traditional VPN or a service like Tor are likely better choices for you.

What is IPFS?

Imago voragine.net
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IPFS is a distributed system for storing and accessing files, websites, applications, and data.

What does that mean, exactly? Let’s say you’re doing some research on Aardvarks. (Just roll with it; Aardvarks are cool! Did you know they can tunnel 3 feet in only 5 minutes?) You might start by visiting the wikipedia page on Aardvarks at:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aardvark

When you put that URL in your browser’s address bar, your computer asks one of Wikipedia’s computers, which might be somewhere on the other side of the country — or even the planet — for the Aardvark page. However, if you use IPFS to get that page from:

/ipfs/QmXoypizjW3WknFiJnKLwHCnL72vedxjQkDDP1mXWo6uco/wiki/Aardvark.html

Your computer might have gotten it from someone else’s computer across town, or maybe even your neighbor’s computer across the street. When you use IPFS, you don’t only download a file from someone else, but your computer can help distribute it, too — when your friend a few blocks away needs the same Wikipedia page, they might be as likely to get it from you as your neighbor.

IPFS makes this possible for web pages, but also for any kind of file a computer might store, whether it’s an MS Word document, an e-mail, an MP3 file, or even a database record.