HACKER Q&A
📣 maremmano

What is the most resilient way to publish content online?


In your opinion, what is the most effective and resilient way to publish content online that can survive attacks from state and other bad actors?

Decentralized technology like IPFS might be the way to go, but I'm curious about other options as well. What is the best approach to keeping content available even if someone is determined to remove it?


  👤 zrn900 Accepted Answer ✓
Despite all those who criticize it; Crypto. Its literally made for this purpose. You put it on the blockchain and it cannot be taken away without compromising the integrity of the chain. And even if it is done, it has to be done by forking, which would mean that the original fork would still have your content. It can be accessed anytime by using the correct client and having a copy of the chain.

👤 austin-cheney
What do you mean by publish? Do you mean transmit without interference, to make public like a billboard or broadcast, to archive, or something else.

My primary concern is transmission between destinations without interception and without interference. In that regard the priorities are integrity, confidentiality, and authority in exactly that order. That instills privacy as a most primitive axiom at cost to anonymity, relays, and multi-party dissemination. I am fine with that. My data, digital products, media and so forth are for me to enjoy first whether for business or entertainment. I should need to share these with another person I would intend to do so confidently of their privacy as I am of my own when transmitting between my personal devices. I am working on a scheme to achieve such using network sockets and streams or messaging. I have not yet found a good solution otherwise as ISPs, governments, and rights holders are quick to reinforce just how centralized their authority should dominate the priorities of our digital communications.


👤 janalsncm
If you’re elected to Congress, you can read it into the official record and it will be preserved in the Library of Congress. That’s how the Pentagon Papers were preserved.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravel_v._United_States


👤 nicbou
That's a fun thought exercise!

I'd opt for saturation. Publish the message in as many places as possible, so that removing it from everywhere will be impossible. Automatically broadcast it to anything that remotely resembles a platform. Share it as podcasts, reddit comments, github repos, Huggingface models, pypi packages, Pinterest photos, Telegram messages, Tiktok videos. Spread it across multiple countries that ignore each other's takedown requests. Make sure it's picked up, cached and rebroadcast by everything from spammy content farms to web crawlers to The Internet Archive. Then spread it across protocols from IPFS to Tor and bittorent and Gemini. Make so many copies that you lose track of them.

Make sure to sign every copy, to prevent the other side from introducing fakes and fighting saturation with saturation.


👤 codethatwerks
Wordpress (or whatever)

The make sure internet archive archives you!

Honestly it has been a godsend for repairing broken Stackoverflow links!

Now I reread about state actors… I am not sure about that. There is a balance between can it be read and can people find it. You can shove it in the blockchain but maybe 3 people will read it but might be a good option for your O(N) algorithm for factoring primes. Or whatever the equivalent attack on Elliptic Curves is! Because it is foundational knowledge that will spread itself.

OTOH if you want to maximize viewership maybe choose a jurisdiction to host and register domain name that is most friendly to your cause.

For some things, just find the right journalist. Panama papers springs to mind.


👤 mikewarot
My current best way would be to put it online in a web site you control... then make sure to have the Internet Archive take a snapshot of it. Tweet it, talk about it in various places, and maybe others will copy it elsewhere.

👤 AK42
I personally like tina.io - keep local (cold storage) repos of anything you publish, in theory you could push to multiple cloud hosts as well?

👤 simne
Most reliable is offline in some reliable jurisdiction, like Switzerland. I think, even blockchain could be demolished if large state will decide.

Other example:

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

Not information exactly, but they store DNA samples, where could also store information:

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

Offline could become invisible online for some time but will reappear later, when heads cool.


👤 bell-cot
Anything more specific about what sort of tactics could be in-scope for the attacks you hope to withstand, and how long you hope to withstand it for?

Especially, is a $5 take-down notice ( https://xkcd.com/538/ ) plausible?


👤 lobito14
btc ordinal?