Cloudflare helps to provide access to millions of websites on the regular web. The company also offers an IPFS gateway, making it easier to access

Cloudflare Disables Access to ‘Pirated’ Content on its IPFS Gateway

submited by

Style Pass

2023-03-25 07:30:05

Cloudflare helps to provide access to millions of websites on the regular web. The company also offers an IPFS gateway, making it easier to access content on the censorship-resistant storage network. Unlike its CDN and DNS services, Cloudflare reports that it disables IPFS access in response to copyright abuse complaints.

While the name may sound a little alien to the public at large, the peer-to-peer file storage network has a growing user base among the tech-savvy.

In short, IPFS is a decentralized network where users make files available to each other. A website using IPFS is served by a “swarm” of users in much the same way BitTorrent users share content with each other.

The advantage of this system is that websites can become completely decentralized. If a website or other resource is hosted on IPFS, it remains accessible as long as the computer of one user who “pinned” it remains online.

The advantages of IPFS are clear. It allows archivists, content creators, researchers, and many others to distribute large volumes of data over the Internet. It’s censorship resistant and not vulnerable to regular hosting outages.