Brave adds IPFS to its browser

[GreyGeek]

Unfortunately for me, I can't get it to work. Note: I used Brave-1.20.1-beta

I've installed IPFS before so I know how to make it work.

After the installations, and after I punched the appropriate hole in the firewall (5001), the Brave initial IPFS page divided down the middle displaying two sections. The left side shows a check mark when the browser is connected to IPFS. It also shows how many peers are supported. My checkmark was there, and my peerage ranged from 36, initially, to 600+ and several values in between. It was never static, as folks randomly attach and detach from IPFS. Also on the left side were three links: Status, Files and Peers. Clicking on any of them produced the same page, which complained that the browser was not attached to IPFS. No option in the IPFS Companion page settings created a connection.


On the right panel of the initial page was normal HTML links to a variety of IPFS related web pages, which worked normally in HTTP space.

I then purged the Brave browser and navigated the ~/.config, ~/.local and other hidden files in order to delete the rest of the Brave detritus. I then checked the Kubuntu Menu to make sure Brave was deleted from it, and it was. However, I noticed an IPFS icon in the Internet section. Checking, I found it was linked to ipfs-desktop-0.13.2-linux-amd64.deb, which Brave apparently downloaded and installed in the background. I clicked on that icon and was presented with a functioning IPFS GUI connection.



Besides showing the peerage it also showed the Internet bandwidth In/Out usage:


The Left Margin shows Status, Files, Explore, Peers and Settings. All of those links worked as expected. So, the problem appears to be that Brave can connect to Status, which it shows in its left panel, but the two other links, Peers and Files, do not work in the browser.

I'm deciding if I want to keep ipfs-desktop-0.13.2-linux-amd64.deb or delete it and install IPFS, ... or ... Freenet. Or don't install either.

[GreyGeek]

Addendum:
I purged Brave and the IPFS Companion and deleted all config and related files.
I also purged ipfs-desktop-0.13.2-linux-amd64.deb.

Since I use Waterfox I decided to see if I could install the ipfs deb file AND the Firefox IPFS Companion extension (ipfs-desktop 0.13.2) in it. I downloaded the deb file from GitHub and installed it. I installed the IPFS Companion extension from the Firefox site. The IPFS button in the browser appeared and I clicked on it. My IPFS connection started immediately and displayed the same GUI page that the deb package displayed. The browser with the IPFS Companion extension and the IPFS Companion deb package can be run at the same time, or independently. The IPFS Companion puts an icon in the system tray and continues to run in the background. It stays in the system tray whether or not the browser is running, until you quit it. So, as long as the IPFS Companion is running in the background you are hosting peers on your system. As I write this I have 894 peers attached to my system.
The Status page shows:

As I write this I don't really see much of a slow down on my system. I guess that running an SSD, having 500Mbps bandwidth and an NVidia powered desktop makes a difference.

[GreyGeek]

I left the IPFS desktop running in my system tray for the last 14 hours and here is what I found.
My peerage was at around a 1,000 give or take a couple hundred ... that's how fast it fluctuates.
My perrage disk usage is 1.1GB in 27,000+ files, as shown by Filelight.
Here are two graphics which illustrate the situation:


The big blue spike on the left side of the graph is the incoming data when I first made the connection.
As you can see, over the last 14 hours the activity has a low, consistent level. In my use of this laptop I never noticed any lag or delay, either on my laptop or with my Internet browsing.


My WIFI router tracks bandwidth usage over the last 30 days. The last two pairs (Jan 20th and 21st) have a larger outgoing data spike than previous days, but the incoming spikes for those two days is about average. The largest incoming spike is 13.5GB on Jan 9th, which is when I DL's several distros and tried them out over the next few days. The outgoing spikes of the last two days was when I dropped several of my files into my IPFS Files folder. While doing that I noticed no change in the performance of my system. Basically, the i7 3.7GHz CPU with 16GB of RAM, NVidia GT650M GPU and my 500GB SSD, of which only 26% is in use, and my 500Mbps fiber optic connection are more than enough to make the effects of IPFS on my 9 year old Acer Aspire V3-771G system trivial.

This is a far cry from my first Experience with IPFS and Freenet in August and Sept of 2017.
The IPFS connection had 500+ peers.



The FreeNet connection had, IIRC, 600+ peers


I was running on this laptop, but I was running the Nvidia driver on the desktop and I was using a spinner. I had only 8GB of RAM and my Internet connection was 40Mbps.

Four years ago my system ran like a molasses. I haven't tried Freenet again, yet, but with IPFS it is a whole new story.

[GreyGeek]

An update:
I decided to see what my IPFS connection sphere looked like so I installed Etherape and gave it a run.

Here is what my connections looked like graphically. There are about 600+ of them

Here is how the protocols looked like, sorted by the amount of data being transferred.


And, believe it or not, my IPFS node had an unusual visitor:

The UK Ministry of defense, no less. It caught my attention because it was pushing the largest amount of data. Hi Mathew! How's the weather in London today?

:~$ whois 25.109.185.123

#
# ARIN WHOIS data and services
...

NetRange: 25.0.0.0 - 25.255.255.255
CIDR: 25.0.0.0/8
NetName: RIPE-ERX-25
NetHandle: NET-25-0-0-0-1
Parent: ()
NetType: Early Registrations, Maintained by RIPE NCC
OriginAS:
Organization: RIPE Network Coordination Centre (RIPE)
RegDate: 1985-01-28
Updated: 2013-01-14
.....
ResourceLink: https://apps.db.ripe.net/search/query.html
ResourceLink: whois.ripe.net
..
Found a referral to whois.ripe.net.
......

% Abuse contact for '25.0.0.0 - 25.255.255.255' is 'hostmaster@mod.gov.uk'

inetnum: 25.0.0.0 - 25.255.255.255
netname: UK-MOD-19850128
country: GB
org: ORG-DMoD1-RIPE
admin-c: MN1891-RIPE
tech-c: MN1891-RIPE
status: LEGACY
mnt-by: UK-MOD-MNT
mnt-domains: UK-MOD-MNT
mnt-routes: UK-MOD-MNT
mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-LEGACY-MNT
created: 2005-08-23T10:27:23Z
last-modified: 2016-04-14T09:56:26Z
source: RIPE # Filtered

organisation: ORG-DMoD1-RIPE
org-name: UK Ministry of Defence
country: GB
org-type: LIR
address: Not Published
address: Not Published
address: Not Published
address: UNITED KINGDOM
phone: +44(0)3067700816
admin-c: MN1891-RIPE
abuse-c: MH12763-RIPE
mnt-ref: RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT
mnt-ref: UK-MOD-MNT
mnt-by: RIPE-NCC-HM-MNT
mnt-by: UK-MOD-MNT
created: 2004-04-17T12:18:23Z
last-modified: 2020-12-16T13:24:59Z
source: RIPE # Filtered

person: Mathew Newton
address: ISS Design Directorate, Joint Forces Command
address: UK Ministry of Defence
phone: +44 (0)30 677 00816
nic-hdl: MN1891-RIPE
created: 2005-03-18T10:42:04Z
last-modified: 2017-10-30T21:46:39Z
source: RIPE # Filtered
mnt-by: UK-MOD-MNT

% This query was served by the RIPE Database Query Service version 1.99 (HEREFORD)
:~$

I'm wondering about the real secrecy and security of IPFS. Notice that most of my listings included the IP address (either or both IPv4 or IPv6). With that information a gov agency can put a monitor on your ISP's modem. The blockchain-like hashing is supposed to keep your identity and info secret. Do you trust it?

I'm also wondering what defence secrets or information the UK Ministry of Defence had which they felt saving it on my IPFS node would be a good and safe idea? My guess? None. The UK link is probably a spy bot.

Well, I am going to purge this IPFS stuff and all of its config files. Then I'm going to play with Freenet to see if it is any better.

[oshunluvr]

I read about an exploit through IPFS. Not sure if it was current, but I was concerned enough not to try it out.

[GreyGeek]

Well, Snowhog, you triggered me to go searching for IPFS exploits.

https://www.cvedetails.com/cve/CVE-2016-10563/

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1905.11880.pdf

Interestingly, the first page of that article, explaining multiple domain generation by botmasters, also explains how Google, Facebook, Twitter and the rest of the oligarchy work.

https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvenam...CVE-2020-10937

IPFS has had, since 2018, only one exploit in the wild. Freenet appears to have the same record:

https://www.cvedetails.com/vulnerabi...t-Freenet.html

Freenet has one feature that IPFS does not have: the ability to connect exclusively to one or more "friends" with an end-to-end tunnel..

Freenet is a distributed datastore, so once content is uploaded to Freenet, it will remain on Freenet forever, as long as it remains popular, without fear of censorship or denial of service attacks, and without needing to run your own web server and keep it online constantly.

The other big difference is that Freenet has the "darknet" or Friend to Friend mode, where your Freenet node (software on your computer) only connects to the Freenet nodes run by your friends, i.e. people you know (and maybe to their friends, to speed things up). This makes blocking Freenet, e.g. on a national firewall, extremely difficult.

However, in a totalitarian state run by "Social Credit" software, like that which Google wrote for China and wants to deploy here, it will not be possible to get an Internet connection without some form of ID which the user cannot change.

Remember the NSA and Clinton pushing for the adoption of the Clipper Chip back in the 90's? And who can forget Intel's Management Engine (ME)? The NSA and other spooks enjoyed that backdoor for years. Five months ago, in August of last year, a data breach exposed a lot of Intel's code. Who knows what will be revealed in that and how many exploits will arise from it?

When a gov agency, with the resources and power of the State behind it, wants to stick its nose into your business there is little you can do to stop it except go live like a hermit in a cave, and I'm not sure that would work either.

[GreyGeek]

Final addendum:
I decided to play with the most recent copy of Freenet, so I DL's the java version.
Rather than install it on my main installation I created a qemu-kvm installation of MXmintKDE.
That was easy and the KDE version of MX Minit is very nice. I installed Freenet on it and in reading about the three installation modes it became apparent that the only trustworthy mode was "Darknet", in which you connect directly to one or more "friends" and not to the general public. I don't know of any of my friends who have a Freenet node so I can't test it. I'll probably play with the public node for a while to get a sense of how it has improved, if any, over the last four years. Then I'll delete the VM.

Final, final addendum: (Honest, really!)
Freenet is MUCH slower than the documentation implies. Despite a somewhat recent compile date for the java version, all the links on the "homepage" (127.0.0.1:8888) were mostly from 2016. In browsing those links I didn't find any link younger than 2017. If you saw my etherape capture of the IPFS connections then you can compare it to Freenet's connections:

and later,

Sparse is an understatement. I had allowed for 79 connections and the greatest bandwidth it allowed, 2Mbps. I saw speeds of 6-10Mbps on my router.

That's after letting Freenet run on my system for hours. At no time did the Freenet status report any connections. It always said "announcing". I clicked on some links that weren't "indexes" but actual sites. For hours it showed no activity on the browser pages. Everything stayed at 0 bytes downloaded. IF it wasn't for etherape (or netstat) I wouldn't even know if anything came down the pipe or not. At least the UK Ministry of Defence didn't think my Freenet portal was significant enough to plant a spy bot.

After more than a day of playing around with Freenet I closed my MX Mint KDE vm and deleted it from virt-manager.

As an aside, I was also totally unimpressed with the KDE version of MX Mint. I don't understand its high ranking on Distrowatch.