What is a resilient content ecosystem? Quick Comment Matters suffers DDOS attack

Matters is a blog service that focuses on a decentralized writing community and content ecology. Its users mainly write in Chinese. According to co-founder Liu Guo and the official article, Matters was hit by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack from 7/28 to 8/5. The website service is still available through the team's efforts to maintain it.

On 8/3, President Pelosi of the US House of Representatives visited Taiwan. There were a large number of coordinated post attacks on major social platforms, government websites suffered DDoS attacks, and even electronic signboards in Taiwan's public places were hacked. /5 published "The Internet Army Appears - Pelosi Comes to Taiwan to Unveil the Prelude of the Taiwan Strait Cyber War, How Will "Hybrid War" Happen? How do civilians and businesses respond? 》

How does this relate to Matters? Matters has attracted many sensitive remarks to publish articles due to its decentralized storage feature. The most popular article recently is "Objective Evaluation of Xi Jinping (40,000 words, read carefully)" , which was published in January under the pseudonym "Ark and China", and the total reading time has exceeded 1,000 hours. Generally, articles that can be read for more than 1 hour are already popular, and 1,000 hours are among the best in the history of the platform.

It's hard not to associate geopolitics with hacking. According to Liu Guo's article, the DDoS attack IPs come from all over the world and are evenly distributed. Liu Guo said: "Although Matters.News has encountered DDoS several times in the history, this time has the longest time and the largest traffic. It lasted for 9 hours before and after, and the peak reached 50 million requests every five minutes."

Shen Boyang of Black Bear College and Taiwan Democracy Lab recently posted on Facebook : "Hacking attacks rarely become the 'end point' of information attacks, and most of them are the starting point of war, even 3-4 months before the outbreak of war. things.” Why does an invisible political force have to attack content creation at this time? This is an important topic, but I am incapable of discussing it. Today, when the hacking attacks have stopped for a while, I want to discuss what a resilient content ecosystem is. The case of Matters is like a daily prelude to what the digital island of Taiwan will face next.

Matters currently uses two decentralized services, one is IPFS (Interplanetary File Storage System, behind Protocol Lab, and has FileCoin token economy), the other is LikeCoin blockchain. The official article states that "IPFS's decentralized content storage and distribution system enables creation not to be controlled by any platform, and independence is guaranteed", while "LikeCoin is a cryptocurrency measured by a writer's creativity, in the form of income. Give back to the author."

Previously, most users came because of the LikeCoin reward, because the price of LikeCoin left due to the collapse of the Cosmos ecosystem. It is undeniable that LikeCoin and Matters, the largest application above, hold high the banner of "creation is valuable", attracting many "digital new immigrants" to understand the original spirit of web3. Therefore, I have devoted myself to using web3 emerging technology to practice in the digital public field.

In the past year, I jumped from Medium to Matters and wrote 140,000 words. The main reason for choosing Matters over other blogs is not the LikeCoin incentives, but the IPFS storage service behind Matters. This DDoS attack is a testament to the resilience of decentralized storage.

The target of the hacker (or cyber army) DDoS cannot be the distributed storage node, which is too expensive, so it can only attack the front-end service of Matters. In this situation, users do not have to worry about their articles disappearing, as long as you have stored fingerprints, you can go back to IPFS to find your articles at any time; and recently Matters integrated the ISCN service of LikeCoin, in theory, we can easily search for articles by searching . If you don't understand ISCN, you can regard IPFS articles as "books", ISCN as "ISBN International Book Code", and as the book metadata (Metadata) of the Metaverse.

LikeCoin and FileCoin (IPFS) have different decentralized maintenance mechanisms, which will not be described in detail here. Matters uses multi-chain diversity horizontally to create a multiverse (Purality) feature, making the entire text access technical system extremely resilient, and the cost of malicious hijacking is greatly increased.

In the post-Anthropocene, I believe that community culture is greatly influenced by its underlying technology. Matters' centralized writing community and content ecology are being shaped by these underlying technologies and "events", and hackers have pushed the ecology. This is just an "information security exercise" for Matters users on the long road ahead.

Since decentralized text cannot be attacked, hackers have to attack Matters' "centralized" front-end services. Because Matters is a new start-up company, it cannot maintain the multi-server maintenance status of large enterprises, so it is easy to be slow due to deliberate targeting. This is exactly what Liu Guo wanted to emphasize in his article "Thinking About DDoS and Decentralization" . If even the front-end interface can be decentralized, it will be difficult for hackers to succeed, but users do not. Short-term incentives to pay for use, this is not a commercial requirement.

Matters has tried central front-end services in the past, such as Hypha Desktop. Now there are also IPFS Desktop (user/local) or Planet (which can be regarded as a P2P RSS service) that can be accessed. Although it is already a graphical interface, it is not friendly at the moment. A state that can be easily used by general users.

For a similar case, you can refer to the Hic Et Nunc (HEN) shutdown event of the NFT platform on the Tezos blockchain at the end of last year, which is a good example of resilience governance.

HEN was not shut down by a hacker attack, but the principal closed down without warning. Fortunately, the front end of HEN is also open source content, the data is stored by IPFS, and the metadata is stored by the Tezos blockchain. Therefore, with the efforts of volunteers, the mirror website has been It was back online in less than a day. At present, these mirror websites have also given birth to a new and stronger TEIA community due to the shutdown incident. And Tezos' NFT transaction volume has long surpassed the scale at that time.

To sum up, open and open source content, multiple governance models, and decentralized nodes are effective forms of creating resilience, but who will motivate the above implementation, capital market, government subsidies, or private third-party sponsorship?

From the perspective of technological/social evolution, the decentralization of data storage and retrieval has matured, the decentralization of exchange/transaction has been developing on a large scale, and the decentralization needs of display and front-end are still being experienced and verified. Internet users of the future will have to adapt to paying for data, as stated in the data as labor chapter of Radical Markets. This is not to ask you to become a shrewd marketer and write articles to advertise; it is to put your production content under the sinister online ecology, and measure the value of the content in multiple ways. How much you (or others) are willing to pay for "content" to maintain its existence.

As Liu Guo said, in most cases, users do not care about decentralization, and only in such extreme cases can the decentralized/decentralized spirit show its advantages. And the threat situation Taiwan is facing at the moment is putting you at the "extreme" at any time without realizing it. Glen Weyl's article "Why I'm a Multiverse Man" uses Taiwan and web3 as examples to analyze where resilience comes from. This is because Taiwan and web3 are always in turmoil and too often face governance attacks. In this article, I use Matters as an example to discuss what is meant by a resilient content ecology, and it happens that Matters has a little bit of it on both sides.

Finally, I would like to quote the lyrics of the Taiwanese campus folk song "Little Grass" as the conclusion.

When the wind blows, shake your head,
The wind stopped, and he straightened up again.

When the rain comes, bend your back and let it rain,
The rain stopped, raised his head and stood up straight.

Not afraid of the wind, not afraid of the rain,
Determined to find high,
The grass, it is, is not small.

Resilient content ecology, isn't that the case with resilient Taiwan?

Ref:

1. Matters' official announcement on emergency maintenance
2. Thoughts on DDoS and Decentralization
3. The Internet Army Appears - Pelosi Comes to Taiwan to Unveil the Prelude of the Taiwan Strait Cyber War, How Will "Hybrid War" Happen? How do civilians and businesses respond?
4. Shen Boyang's Facebook article on hacking
5. "Why I'm a Multiverse Man" by Glen Well