There are probably other private parts of the crates website, like the pages for developers who are uploading crates. It makes sense to just give the same error for everything, from the same logic all in one easily auditable spot.

And of course, just because all crates on the site are public now, doesn’t preclude the possibility of private crates im the future.

Only possible to authenticate with Github

They seem to be working on it

If you go to a page which doesn’t exist, one would expect to get the 404 HTTP code (not found). So let’s try when we query a crate which doesn’t exist:

This is the only one I somewhat disagree with. If you give a 403 error whenever you don’t have permissions to access a page, and a 404 whenever you access a page, it becomes possible to discover parts of the website that exist but you can’t access.

It’s because of this, that both Github and Forgejo just return 404 errors when you access a repo that doens’t exist OR it’s a private repo. A quick test with Codeberg against a repo that probably doesn’t exist gives me an error 404 and the message:

The page you are trying to reach either does not exist, has been removed or you are not authorized to view it.

(emphasis mine)

Now, I would rather see 404 errors everywhere instead of 403’s. It’s way more likely that you are encountering a repo or website path that doesn’t exist, than you lacking privileges/auth. But, 403’s everywhere is an approach I’ve seen done before and it makes sense when you understand why.

No, I mean that the article appears to be AI slop. The “This was not X but Y” pattern is super common, and super annoying due to it’s lack of brevity.

This was not a simple configuration change but a manual, labor-intensive purge.

AI slop pattern.

Also the article appears to be completely unsourced. Here are what I believe to be the main sources:

https://joeyh.name/blog/entry/no_LLM_code_in_dependencies/

https://git-annex.branchable.com/no_llm_code/

i2p is based on freenet (back when it was known at freenet).

I don’t think it supports storage though, just routing.

It’s tough. The problem is that, on the tech side, technically, torrents don’t have to seed. People have made fake torrent clients that only pretend to seed, but actually only download. The IP’s are detected and then banned, but it’s a cat and mouse game.

Enforcing it with backups is a similar struggle. There exist paid solutions, that use crypto to pay for decentralized storage. You “rent” out some of your storage, or by some using crypto. Filecoin, sia, storj, and so on.

But these have flaws too. Often, there level of decentralization is questionable, and the maker of the crypto takes a cut, plus there are issues with using a custom crypto coin as well. The coin’s value can fluctuate — there are challenges with it simultaneously be an investment, AND a currency, but that’s what often happens.

A better solution, is just to trade hard drives with your friends, who you know in person. Or maybe trust online, at least. Just give them an encrypted backup. And then they give you an encrypted backup.

In my opinion “encrypted, decentralized backups”, is the kind of problem that is extremely difficult to solve technically, but is trivially solved via touching grass. I don’t really like the technical solutions people have presented to this problem, and a local community is a much simpler way to solve these challenges.