I would expect there to be basically none. Most of the journals that people are after their university still pays for access for. Failing that, they email the author and get a copy directly. And if that isn't possible, there are a few people with wider ranging interests or wider ranging technical skills who know about sci-hub and libgen, and they will pass out the new domain name as necessary. Or even convince the department's IT to use a non-French DNS provider as the DHCP setting.
Sci-hub and LibGen are services that those of us outside a university or at something besides rich research universities depend on more.
You still can't compare the ease of an access. It is like Google+click to read the article vs emailing authors for every article you want to read. At least that would decrease reading efficiency of the related research, at most - reduce the coverage of the studied material, just because it would require substantial amount of time, compared to direct click. That, in turn, might reduce the percentage of ideas that came during reading others' articles. Think of Sci-Hub as a hypertext engine for science. You copy DOI, you press the Enter, and you are reading an article.
Recently quite a few countries in the EU (including Germany), along with the University of California, have cancelled their contracts with Elsevier et al. France has not yet joined the rebellion.
Just speculation, but maybe this is a pre-emptive strike? Probably the courts would be less inclined to support the publishers if they sued to block these services only after they entered into conflict (with the universities)?
I think it's even simpler than that: the universities and research facilities don't use the three main commercial ISPs and won't have any kind of block.
I would expect using scihub to be more convenient than any other option except direct google scholar PDF results. I have access to my uni's resources and journal subscriptions, yet I don't know how to use them (and frankly I don't see the point). It's extremely likely that circumventing a DNS block is less of a hassle than the procedure to access paywalled articles in a large majority of institutions.
Probably some negative impact. Sci-hub is the primary and in some case only way to access paywalled papers at master and undergrad level. I’m not sure how PhD students get access to them but if it through libraries this is bad for them as the opening days and hours of such institutions is limited. Even more so which strikes which sometimes close a library for weeks.
You can typically get any paper your university library has a subscription to via the libraries online portal or if you are in the university network already at the undergraduate and masters level. If some journal is not available at the library you can request an interlibrary „loan“ which just means that someone at another library will copy the article and send it to you, typically for free.
As an researcher I typically only encounter a paywall when I‘m not logged into my institutes VPN. In the rare cases I want to read something the university is not subscribed to, Scihub is indeed a good solution. Open access just moves the cost of publishing to research groups and disincentives proper peer review, because the journal’s revernue is tied to how many paper it publishes. See for example the 15+ Frontiers in ... Journals, which are just barely not predatory and basically publish anything with a pulse. A mix of preprint severs like arxiv and (much later) journal publication seem like a good compromise.
Journals don't incentivize proper peer review, open access or otherwise. Peer review is just something that professors and their assistants are expected to do as part of their research. Which means it's usually paid for by the public, ultimately.
I have been registered as a student in 5 French universities and I can tell you that even if I can get "any" paper if I can enter a library (which is a joke in itself), sci-hub is 10 times more convient than the bureaucracy involved. The only time I requested a book from the stock, the librarian didn't even give it to me pretexting it was lost... probably because did like me as I had an unopened sandwich in hand.
Well as I said at least in Germany the universities have a web portal through which you can access pretty much any article you want electronically. The workflow for a student of medicine is something like:
- Search for an article on PubMed in the university library portal
- Get a list of results
- Download the article as pdf from the publishers website
Additionally many journals are accessible just by navigating to the publishers website (science, nature, physics journals, ieee journals) depending on which university vpn you are logged into. This covers most use cases, I am sorry to hear it’s not the same in France.
I'm slightly baffled by the difference, though, as some other laws are not enforced. For instance, the case where directors of a tyre manufacturer were forcibly taken hostage and physically abused by the workers. Normally, you'd send in the police, arrest hostage-takers and give them long imprisonment.
Just like when your employer commits wage theft, you call the police, they drive over, taze your boss, put him in handcuffs, and book him?
After all, that's what I would expect should happen to a regular thief.
Do you also expect that industrial executives, managers, and everyone down to the line workers get booked on terrorism charges, for poisoning our water supplies, if they are caught illegally polluting?
"Do you also expect that industrial executives, managers, and everyone down to the line workers get booked on terrorism charges, for poisoning our water supplies, if they are caught illegally polluting?"
Not the original poster, but Yes, of course. Who doesn't expect that?
People who have any experience with how the real world works.
At best, the company may get a token fine, with the people giving the orders, and carrying them out never getting held accountable.
At worst, much hooing and hawwing is had about how important <the industry> is, and how <the company> pinky swears that it will never do what they did again.
just because reality is ruined at the moment doesn't mean i shouldn't expect the law to work.
plus, we get CEOs sent to jail all the time, so it's not like there's no precedent.
They have very big and powerful unions that could call for a general strike and paralyse the country. So rather than sending SWAT teams to shoot people, they negotiate.
Yes, that was appalling. I guess the directors were expecting the SWAT/GIGN to come, but hours passed and they had to sign documents, and the signature was deemed valid. I don’t even know if the directors were fed or could gonto the bathrooms during that hostage situation.
You don't have to look very hard to find better examples of "torture" than being kept for a whole day within an office (with access to the bathrooms obviously, nobody was forced to pee in their pants).
Then again, when it’s not enforced and when you know how violent union people can be, you don’t know how long you’ll stay there, and if you will get out alive at all. You only know when it’s over.
What I’m furious about is that the signature should have been considered under duress. It was not.
You're implying that the hostage takers where not arrested or given imprisonment, but in the case of the Goodyear employees they were arrested and sentenced to 24 months imprisonment (15 months suspended).
That's what the victim party had asked for too, so I don't understand what problem there is with this judgment?
In Germany they still go after you if you get caught downloading torrents. The French had a three strike rule but I think they've done away with it and went after pirated content providers instead. Which is why we probably have article 17 of the EU Copyright Directive now.
Wasnt the "Mickey Mouse Protection Act" which extended copyright in the US was to harmonize with the copyright extensions in the EU? And "Unlike copyright extension legislation in the European Union, the Sonny Bono Act did not revive copyrights that had already expired."
I know some copyright stuff in Europe has been under influence of American companies. And also when the EU tried to reclaim the name of some cheeses and wines, there was some horse trading with the movie industrie.
The French really love their language, traditional publishers continue to publish in French whereas new-tech is more often in English or other languages.
So I'd argue that the French have a love-affair with traditional publishing, and traditional publishing loves draconian copyright rules.
The whole thing is almost a culture war for the French people's soul by-proxy.
so pride is killing their ability to access information.
In this case I have no pity for them, then. If they want to feel better about themselves by cutting off their own ears because other people are using English then let them.
France has one of the best copyright protection laws that I know, but unfortunately that has to go both ways (no that I agree with the ruling).
Now please don't consider this ruling as one made by the actual researchers, especially the younger ones that had a decent English education and sees no problem using English material.
> The French really love their language, traditional publishers continue to publish in French whereas new-tech is more often in English or other languages.
This sentence is ridiculous and has nothing to do with scihub and libgen. Most french researchers are perfectly happy using these sites, and dislike strongly the draconian schemes of scientific journal publishers (which publish texts mostly in english). Several people are pushing for french university libraries to stop paying subscriptions to journals and give all that money directly to scihub. Yet, these initiatives are always blocked at higher levels.
Yes, few facts to support this claim: the french are big consumers of SciHub content (biggest in the EU [1]) and the CNRS (one of the main french national scientific organization) has boycotted traditional publishers on several occasions (e.g. Springer [2]). The CNRS also supports Hal which is the french equivalent of arXiv.
I think this has more to do with the copyright lobby than anything else.
> This sentence is ridiculous and has nothing to do with scihub and libgen.
But everything to do with the French government's attitude towards traditional publishers and why they work so closely together. This issue doesn't begin and end with research publishing, it is bigger and older than that.
Calling something "ridiculous" simply because you want a black & white answer to a larger complex cultural phenomenon is a little disappointing.
I think it's fair to say in France that something will "strictly forbidden" (formellement interdit) and by and large ignored, except when a real problem arises or an example is to be made.
Most of Western Europe does. With most of our production having moved to other countries, we rely on our ability to produce and own intellectual property.
Without strong copyrights we would have nothing to trade.
I don't think it's specific to France.
UK has random torrent websites banned the same way.
Some regulation comes from EU, which has then been implemented by countries in EU: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Directive
Publishers used the existing laws to get this ban, as they already did in other countries. I wouldn't be surprised they've started some similar actions in other countries and will end up with similar results.
Honestly, almost every country has copyright laws, so allow this kind of lawsuit.
It's a part of the French literary and artistic tradition. In France (and elsewhere on the Continent), authors and artists are considered to have inherent rights to their work that are stronger than normal copyright, including the right to be named as the author and the perpetual right (transmissible to heirs after death) to control how their work is presented and consumed to some extent -- hence the phrase droits d'auteur (authors' rights).
>The court order targets a total of 57 domain names, including various mirror sites. The academic publishers had asked the court for a more flexible blocklist, which they could update whenever new domains would become available, but this was denied. If the publishers want to expand the blocklist, they will have to go back to court. This ensures that there remains judicial oversight over local website blockades. Also, a request for a specific IP-address block was denied.
So a DNS level block... This should help to educate some French users on what a DNS is, and steer some of them away from using their ISP provided DNS servers.
They would definitely obey yes, they have offices in Paris.
In France they regularly have to filter some results too since companies don't hesitate to sue for libel against negative results on first page.
yeah people keep touting "internet routes around censorship" and other platitudes with no grounding in reality, meanwhile European are already under illiberal regimes where the information if thoroughly controlled by the wealthy and the powerful.
we are literally at the point where European citizens need to engage in doublespeak on certain topics for the fear of harassment from people abusing the legal system, and it's getting words faster by the day
You mispelt give up the entire internet. If every country dictates how every server in every other country is supposed to function then it will be pretty much impossible for anyone to operate.
Any filtering gets to happen inbound to that country unless you want to only view content that is legal in turkey, Israel, Pakistan,Uzbekistan, south africa, Russia, the US and insert another 60 names here.
We already have a way to handle different DNS results for different sub sections of the populace. They can run their own DNS servers and mandate that their users use them blocking alternatives if they so desire.
Returning different query results bases on the IP of the query sender is not magic. Couple that with location bases routing to thw nearest instance of a DNS server responding at 1.1.1.1 or 8.8.8.8 and you have nice and reasonably reliable segmentation based on the user's location. Nothing about that tech is magic and most of it is likely already implemented. So your doomsday scenario does not hold.
The court order is aimed at ISPs and it's trivial for the latter to proxy all DNS traffic on their edge and NXDOMAIN court-ordered domains regardless of the resolver used.
Its always DNS first and everyone says "lol, just change your DNS" and then they start doing real blocks. Optus in Australia did an IP level block of 4chan recently.
How? 4chan use Cloudflare. They don't have a dedicated IP, do they?
I would be surprised if Optus actually managed to do SNI filtering for the entire country without screwing it up.
Edit: Huh, seems like they do have a dedicated IP. At least both Robtex and Securitytrails report them as the only tenant on their IP. But you can /etc/hosts 4chan.org to a different Cloudflare IP, and CF will still SNI-route it to the real site. That would defeat any IP address-based block.
If I remember correctly, Cloudflare assigns different IPs to different sites, so you can use blocking by IP, but of course in this case you will also block other sites using the same Cloudflare server.
4chan is a relatively popular anonymous image board, based on a Japanese language image board (2ch) but with mostly English language users. It's administration are known to be quite lax with content; if it's not outright illegal to host they'll generally let it slide in their NSFW boards. To use a recent example, their Adult GIF board right now, while flooded mostly with pornography, is currently housing uncensored footage from the recent mass shooting.
Thanks to the lack of user accounts needed to use the site, pretty much everyone checks their social filter at the door, and it's earned some unfavorable comparisons. Given its reputation I'm not surprised to hear it's the subject of censorship.
There's a huge irony here in that major news outlets in Australia including Rupert Murdochs SkyNews all showed uncensored footage, some of it autoplaying and profited from doing so.
Blocking materials is the incorrect way to deradicalize people. I would further argue that by blocking it, the material is made to seem more scarce, and even more desirable for those who would otherwise not have been interested if it hadn't been blocked!
Outreach from social workers and societal safety net is the best way to prevent radicalization. I see legalization of drugs as an example.
I think there are many good reasons to block that video that have nothing to do with radicalisation. For a start this is footage of the deaths of dozens of people who, along with their families, have a right to privacy.
There is no such right. It was not a private death among family in a hospital. It was a public act of evil. You've no more right to censor it on behalf of some of the victims than you have to censor a car or plane crash, a chemical plant explosion, or a tsunami.
What happened was a crime not only against the direct victims, but against all of New Zealand and all of humanity. It affects all people, as it damages the social fabric everywhere. It's vitally important that all people can avail themselves of the knowledge of what happened so that all people can help to stop it from happening again.
By your logic, photos of Auschwitz and the Killing Fields and Tiananmen Square ought to be destroyed. No, we must face evil head-on, recognize it for what it is and how it works, so we may be prepared to stop it.
What you propose only aids the perpetrators by obscuring their evil deeds and minimizing the murders they committed. Shame on you.
New Zealand and Australia recently went on a "do something" tear regarding the mosque shooting. Sites where the video or manifesto was posted got blocked, including 4chan. And yes, you read that right, New Zealand made it a crime to distribute a specific piece of text data.
The "this is what they wanted" argument is always something that rings alarm bells in my head; it sounds like the "it's a slippery slope" wolf in sheep's clothing.
Why are you taking his word at face value? What he really wants is to spread his propaganda. He is just trying to use reverse psychology to make you do just that.
Who cares about what that guy wanted or didn't want. The question is whether we should let people distribute his manifesto for the sake of freedom of expression or if we consider it to be dangerous and worthy of a ban. The opinion of the guy who committed this heinous crime is frankly irrelevant IMO.
If I was to commit some atrocities tomorrow and write a pamphlet outlining my motive and calling for others to do the same thing while adding a note saying "look, they'll try to censor this!" will you, out of principle, argue that my manifesto shouldn't be censured because that's what I would've wanted? If so, why?
You're giving a lot of credit to a meme-spouting serial killer. It's not like as if it was step 34 of his master plan, he merely got a gun and started shooting at innocent people. I'll take my chances and keep ignoring him and not giving him a platform.
In my opinion his main objective was to get attention and put his nauseous ideology in the spotlight. I don't know if banning it is the right solution but frankly I won't waste my time playing devil's advocate for a mass murderer.
"First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
> I'll take my chances and keep ignoring him and not giving him a platform.
Hopefully society will not do that.
The content might be repulsive but we are better off knowing how they think than allowing only them to know the contents.
Crazy manifestos are probably just like weapons in this regard, ordinary people won't care to get one if they are illegal, bad guys will.
As a kid I got a good explanation of how badly certain ideologies failed even if they looked reasonable.
I also got an intro to safe handling of guns, especially the part about never ever pointing a gun at anyone, loaded or not, except in wartime. I was quite young then but it sticks, like a whole lot of other stuff from my childhood.
I'll try to give that to the next generation together, together with an explanation of how insanely stupid such manifestos are - and a crash course in unarmed fighting (disable or confuse opponent, get away).
Young people should know what exists or it will take them by surprise.
> "First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
Definitions of "terrorist" differs and while I and you can agree on this and many others I really really don't want to have more power than necessary in the hands of any government.
Read history and you'll see that most cruelties in the last few hundred years were commited by states against their own citizens, not by random blokes with weapons.
> The question is whether we should let people distribute his manifesto for the sake of freedom of expression or if we consider it to be dangerous and worthy of a ban.
Speaking as a us citizen, that is crazy talk. Why should the government be let to decide what is "too dangerous" for me to read? It seems incredible that first world democracies still engage in that kind of censorship.
Just because something is not illegal does not mean that society need to be tolerant of it. E.g. I she'd no tears for the neonazis who lost their jobs after being outed in Charlottesville [1] (though I don't support through name and shame that brought it about). However, I don't think it's correct for the government to censor their writings.
Another instance, I think fox and Breitbart are scourges for their disinformation campaign (not that they're "conservative" or have an "agenda", the wsj is also conservative and has an agenda), but making them illegal is a line too far. It provides too much power to a government who already has too much.
What you describe is the USA way, but it's not how it's done in many (most?) places around the world. There are plenty of things you could say in the USA that would be illegal hate speech in most of Europe. Conversely showing a female nipple is taboo in the Land of the Free, while it's mostly not a big deal in western Europe. This is actually the source of many problems with the governance of the web since most high-profile websites tend to conform to American codes (which means that you can't post "the origin of the world" by Gustave Courbet on Facebook, but you can post racist comments all day long).
Obviously the risk is not that reasonably educated HN readers could stumble upon this manifesto and start a massacre, the risk is that the material could be used as propaganda to brainwash more easily-influenced people. People become radicalized on the web, actually the shooter himself kept spouting "memes" straight from /pol/ and other alt-right websites. Similarly many Islamist terrorists who carried attacks in recent years also radicalized online, feeding on propaganda websites and fake news.
Does banning 4chan or the manifesto achieve anything? I'm not sure. But dismissing any attempt to curb this very real problem as "crazy talk" is not really constructive criticism.
> the risk is that the material could be used as propaganda to brainwash more easily-influenced people.
You can literally make the same argument against fox or Breitbart. Or cnn, nyt, wapo as the president continuously tries to. He should remind you why the government should have limited powers.
And yes, the general fear of sex and sexual is maddening and counter productive.
I have no issue at all drawing a line between Breitbart and a mass murderer manifesto. I find this "slippery slope" rhetoric rather disingenuous and non-constructive. With this type of argument you can shoot down any law, any power given to the government. "First they force you to wear seat-belts and the next thing you know you live in communist dystopia".
I guess it makes sense if you're a libertarian/anarchist or something in this vicinity but if that's the case this discussion has been rehashed millions of times before and I don't think we'll find a common ground here.
I would rather live in a country where fifty people are shot by a madman every year than one in which 3,395 people are arrested every year for "offensive" online comments, which was the UK in 2018. If these restrictions were being imposed by an outside power we would gladly spend fifty lives a day in a war to prevent it. Principles are more important than comfort. Praise Talos.
As a French citizen, this is nothing new in principle: we already had law that forbid negationist material and so on. That makes nothing for social peace of course, it only brings more weight to the "see how they try to hide you the truth" bullshit.
But this seems to clearly intensify. We now have laws passed "to regulate things against Fake News during election period"[1], in a climate of already large distrust of population against politics.
It's really unclear how this plain censorship is not replaced with a mandatory warning, which would give the opportunity to let people judge by themselves (or at least decide to trust the authority that the material doesn't worth their attention).
They wanted to block the diffusion of the video showing the Mosque shooting and the distribution of the killer's manifesto. Since it was being spammed on 4chan rather relentlessly they decided to pull the plug on the website basically.
I guess this is the point where you leave the general public behind. Lucky you.
Which fits fantastically in the discussion over at the San Diego Streetlight surveillance and the "Software engineers social responsibility"[1] vs. the fact that it will get worse if you make it mainstream.
Hopefully projects like Streisand [1] continue to be worked on - they automate a lot of the hassle of setting up services like this. Ideally they will eventually be easy enough for your grandpa to use.
Unfortunately the minor ISPs are almost 3-fold slower in most places, while being just as expensive. My options are between Virgin, which has speeds of up to 362mB fibre for £42/month, and the next best BT, which is 67mB for £39.99/ month. At uni, unless I wanted 30mB for a 7 person household, my only option was again Virgin.
It's difficult not to be on a major ISP when the minor ISPs can't contest on speed and value for money.
I spent years with 5 people on 12mbit ADSL2. I'd rather have that than virgin and blocking any day. I suffered Virgin for a couple of years and it was hell.
Now I'm on ~64mbit VDSL with no blocking at all on Zen. We pull 500G+ a month through it. Costs £37.49 a month.
They just rolled out 300mbit fibre as well so that's going in next month.
Speed isn't everything for me. I can QoS those problems away pretty well.
We switched service providers 3 times during that year. We started with a 30mbit connection through PlusNet, then 60 with EE, then 300 Virgin. The only one that was usable was Virgin Media. I wish that wasn't that case, but it simply was. Internet was a contentious topic in our house, but having 7 people either playing games, watching HD movies, or streaming simultaneously knocked most ISPs down swiftly.
To be annoying - milli Bels of speed? I've never seen anyone write it like this before, it's MB for megabytes, and Mb for megabits, mB is a different unit altogether.
I'm with Uno Broadband who sell BT fibre lines (so upto 70 down/20 up) for around £40 a month with no blocks or restrictions and a static IP. No download limits to speak of either as I can easily hit 2TB download a month.
What ISP are you on? BT blocks libgen but NordVPN seems to work just fine.
Of course if they block the whole VPN list you can just rent a tiny instance in a cloud somewhere, though that seems like enough work to bother most non techies.
This is what Merkel meant with "Neuland"(engl. uncharted territory) in 2013.
In Germany she is heavily mocked for not understanding the Internet. Of course, it's the bright populace of high class forums such as Facebook and r/de who know better than the Physicist Chancellor of a G7 nation...
In reality, she meant it is legal Neuland. That authorities and courts had little established ways of enforcing laws online, that even heavily illegal acts were difficult to process and prosecute.
Now we are getting there. The law catches up with the Internet. If we want a free Sci-Hub and free content sharing, then it's the law that we have to adapt. Because governments already adapt their procedures - the online Wild West is over.
Kind of feels like "civilization" creeping into the Old West.
Isn't this what the "dark web" is for? True, some sites have been taken down but as I understand that was more due to poor opsec than a flaw with the technology itself.
I for one have no faith in educating the government as long as companies with multi-million-dollar lobbying budgets are free to sway politicians to legislate in their favor. Happy to be convinced otherwise, though.
not really. as a citizen of somewhere you'll always be subject to laws. dark web could help people evade the law a little longer but won't make it legal, as such law abiding citizen will not want to have themselves associated with it for the fear of repercussions down the road.
the only long term solution is to change the laws, not to work around them, but we don't have the economic power to balance the lobbies anymore.
Thing is, it's the fact that is a legal "Neuland" that it's a great place.
What if you use your phone line to organize a crime? Is that a problem? Should we add word recognition to phone line to make sure this doesn't happen? Should we limit it to a series of specific words?
This would break phone usage.
The same apply to internet, except that it can do even more. The only ways to make sure theses criminal activities doesn't happen would be to limit how it can be used which break everything.
> What if you use your phone line to organize a crime? Is that a problem? Should we add word recognition to phone line to make sure this doesn't happen? Should we limit it to a series of specific words?
Somewhere out there someone read this and thought "wow that's a great idea"
I wonder if they'd also block, say, Wikipedia for linking to working IP addresses, or sites like https://whereisscihub.now.sh/go that automatically redirect you to them.
Does the link have to be directly to the illegal content, or just to a domain that supplies illegal content somewhere on the domain? The SciHub homepage is not itself illegal content.
DNS is hard coded on my Orange Livebox. This is new.
And changing the DNS under my Ubuntu box was far from trivial. It is only possible to change the secondary DNS in the connection UI. I had to use a reduced version of DHCP (IP address only) and change /etc/resolv.conf.
These paywall bypassers are revealing a problem and offering a temporary solution. However this situation wherein scientists are both providers and consumers of editors, and forced to go to pirate websites in order to work is not sustainable. I feel like a permanent solution needs to be found.
I'm not a scientist myself, and would be happy to hear anyone else's opinion, but alternatives like peercommunityin.org look more promising.
All in all, this ban can be easily be circumvented (it's just a DNS block), so I'm not really sure it will help editors. It may cause an opposite effect, helping people to move to different solutions. But maybe I'm over optimistic.
And with this news, millions of French now become aware of these tempting sites they wouldn't otherwise even know about. (And Google methods of alternative access.) #streisandeffect
Could be, yes. Although I'm always struck how the French are just unknowledgeable of huge swathes of the english-speaking internet (me included, sometimes). Because it is english-speaking, for that matter.
To provide a much tighter bound, you reach "atoms in the universe" levels of collision once your hash inputs are 260-270 bits bigger than the hash output. No need for even a single kilobyte.
Almost a "Graham's number" level of understatement.
Imagine something like finding the seed for a pseudorandom number generator where the numbers generated form the byte pattern for libgen.
That's similar to the cryptominer hashing where people just have rigs enumerating through possible values to generate a hash with the appropriate number of leading zeros. It's just that libgen would be little bit longer than a hash and also have some ones interspersed with the zeros.
There is no way of traversing hash collisions. It would be the hash of some string of cryptocurrency jarble that also happens to be the hash of some encoding of the libgen database and you would have no way of knowing this unless you specifically hashed all of libgen. In this case you know all of libgen already anyway, unless you forgot the information that you hashed.
How difficult would it be to host one or more IPFS nodes with the files on Sci-Hub (and a directory thereof)? My understanding is that would be infeasible to block, and quite probably cheaper to host, as oft-requested papers would get mirrored.
I've been seeding libgen torrents for quite a while from home without problem while many I know get desist letters from their ISP for downloading a single Disney movie.
I was just thinking about a solution for this. What if two users share files A and B, where both A and B look like noise, but when XOR-ed, they form the copyrighted work? Both users can claim plausible deniability. Especially if A XOR-ed with another file C results in a copyright-free work (and similarly for B and another file D).
If you have access to a cloud service/servers, you don’t even need to do that. Your server is on the other side of these blocks, just rent a VM for a few minutes, RDP/VNC into it and surf the web without any ISP constraint.
I look forward to seeing this kind of use case on ethereum swarm when it is ready. It has built in anonymity for the person hosting and downloading any content. It also has incentive structure to continue hosting content built in as well. Otherwise very similar to IPFS.
AIUI, ipfs is not "infeasible" to block - so it's nowhere close to an actual "solution". You'd also get the same sort of copyright trolling that you have with Bittorrent downloads today - the technologies are quite comparable.
Western countries are becoming increasingly like China and Russia. UK, Australia, Germany, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand... So far, only the US still holds some resemblance to “protecting the freedom of speech” — sure, copyright violators are pursued, but at least nobody is trying to censor the Internet... yet.
Enforcement of copyright seems more like the opposite of China, to be honest. I don’t believe the US allows freedom of intellectual property either, the US government have been shutting down torrent sites for years.
On the other hand, large corporations (i.e. Elsevier) profiting from others' creation of intellectual property seems very inline with China's model in certain sectors...
Though I would agree that the comparison is weak. While I'm always against censorship in all its forms, relating it to China seems... stretched.
In the West, the surveillance is usually done by the private corporations instead of the government. Like Google, Facebook etc. For the end user there is no big difference.
I think NSA is major agent in surveillance. I am frankly more wary about governments and shady national security agencies doing surveillance on citizens than private companies doing it for commercial gains.
Upholding copyrights in court seems the basis of the rule of Law, and quite far from the situation in China and Russia.
Living in a 'free' country' does not mean being able to flaunt the law, especially in this case what those sites do is hardly defensible.
> the French court ruled that the two sites “clearly claim to be pirate platforms rejecting the principle of copyright and bypassing publishers’ subscription access portals.
The difference is the ability of the government to pass arbitrary laws. There are (currently, in the West) two opposing views: natural law (laws are the refinement of what already is a natural part of human aspirations), and consensus law (law is what social consensus agrees upon). There’s also authoritarian law, but that is dictatorship.
Of these possibilities, only natural law can command respect. Society can be irrational and pass arbitrary laws for longer than you can stay sane, and dictatorship is, well, dictatorship.
The US constitution and the bill of rights are explicitly based on the idea of natural law.
The concept of Natural Law was an important part of enlightenment legal thinking. When the Declaration of Independence invokes the 'Laws of Nature', it's authors would certainly have been aware of and intentionally referencing contemporary thinking on the subject to justify the declaration.
In fact we know from some legal decisions of the time that Natural Law was explicitly used as justification for various legal decisions, in the absence of explicit written laws on the subject.
Although they do allow ISPs to censor it, and have been shown to employ massive surveillance methods. I wouldn't hold the US as the bastion of free speech on the internet.
> Western countries are becoming increasingly (...)
Authoritarian is the word, I believe. Thing is, along with that, there is this dangerous corporations embracing over own citizens. A weird and toxic relationship.
For your information, the one country that is pushing forward for more restrictions on Internet on the world is called "The United States of America".
All the copyright laws in Germany, France, Canada, New Zealand, UK and Australia, come after the US demands the change in law or else they will apply economic sanctions in commerce.
You probably live in the US and are under the influence of propaganda(like pronouncing constantly void phrases like "land of the freedom"). You should get out and live in another country for a while to get perspective.
US doesn't need to block sites because many major IT companies are under their jurisdiction and they (their courts) can just order to remove the content or stop serving the domain name. For example, they seize casino's domain names and order the banks not to allow payment to them. What's wrong with online casinos? Should't people have the right to decide how to spend their money?
I am not saying that the US are perfect in every regard. I only admire their anti-censorship stance, which is increasingly rare. There are still many problems, e.g. with arbitrariness of law application, and the popularity of surveillance state.
However, there is subtle, but important (at least to me) distinction between “this site violates the law — let’s pursuit its owners legally” and “this site violates the law — let’s block it for everyone and censor communications to implement that”.
As a Russian (and not a really fond of Putin's regime one) living in Germany, I can tell you that Russia's copyright policy is nowhere as strict as one of Germany. A lot of copyrighted content can be found on Russian websites, and what's missing from there is on Chinese ones.
You still need VPN if you want to get to some content forbidden for political reasons, but for most people the ability to get a movie/album/book they want matters more.
I already explained — there is a difference between legal pursuits and state-sponsored censorship. Also in Russia you basically need VPNs for everything — LinkedIn, Telegram etc.
Here in Switzerland, obtaining copyrighted content for own use is basically decriminalized (its illegal distribution, however, is not).
Note that French universities use the public RENATER provider, which do not block, for now.
More great technical details in a blog post by Rémy Grünblatt [1]. He use the RIPE Atlas network to probe.
France is an internet censorship champion. When they blocked the french dailystormer without a trial, everybody was laughing.
"hate speech" and "protect the children" are false flags to spread censorship from big corporations & governments.
Bought a book on GooglePlay once. Wanted to download it as an ePub. ePub wasn't available due to a technical error on Google's side (apparently affecting all epubs). Had to use Adobe Digital Editions to "download" it only to figure out the download wasn't available. + DRMs (i.e. can't read the ebook on a smartphone).
Went to libgen instead, will never buy a book on GooglePlay again.
Seems like it is gone now (you still have to juggle with DRMs though). However when it happened I searched for the error code and found some posts on Google forums. They were 6 months to 1 year old, with no provided solution.
Here we are in the "age of information" and there is still no way to distinguish between the shill and/or troll and the genuine information provider. Glorious.
This age of electronics and logic and AI should have been able to provide a reasonable benefit to consumers at the very bottom. Instead, corporations have found new ways to rig things, impersonate people, and generally be dishonest about the quality and effectiveness of their offerings.
Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria".
I hope they don't manage to burn in down.
Yes, for now governments only caught up to DNS level blocking, but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses.
> Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down.
This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours worth of work by people who simply love music and wanted to share that love with other enthusiasts, creating some of the richest catalogues of music and music metadata the world has ever seen. And then it all was destroyed.
And this was true for many other topics of interest too.
We have burned many digital libraries in the last few decades, and we will probably continue to do so for a while longer.
You're trying to make a snarky comment, but this is exactly what patents are supposed to do...
Reveal how inventions and large companies work, as opposed to the old cloak-and-dagger method of 'secret formulas' and such. Then allowing anybody to see the method and licence it from the company, or be liable for a lawsuit.
What we used to have is if somebody somehow stole the secret to an invention it became fair game. Nowadays though companies try to game the system by having intentionally labrinthian patchworks of patents that do their best to not reveal anything about how the invention works while still being able to be used to sue people.
> I'm sure that "library of Alexandria" would be burned quite quickly.
Rightly so-- and nothing of value would be lost. SV companies don't have much in the way of "secret sauce", they just have $$$ to burn (from VC weenies buying equity stakes) for hosting costs and for developing increasingly-crappy web frontends.
More like hundreds of man-years, when you factor in all the editions, bootlegs etc that are now forever lost to time.
This should be a golden age for information preservation. Instead it's a dark age. I personally know several eye-wateringly good bands whose catalogs are not available anywhere, at all.
Sure. Mooi were formed in 1999, split in 2006, made a bunch of great music in between, and all that remains is this one song on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF5cP8S0zOk
The masters still exist, I'm told, but that's no good to anyone - they won't be re-released because it would require too much intellectual property wrangling and nobody cares enough to bother, and sooner or later that hard drive will die and that will be that.
"Formed in 1999, Mooi are duo Rachel Lloyd and Laura Dickinson. The pair write heartfelt and intimate songs, with both members playing guitars and singing."
Did they ever release their music on CDs? If so, surely some of those CDs are still out there somewhere and could be ripped, if only they could be tracked down. I guess that just hasn't happened yet though.
what.cd. I only used it sparingly, but apparently they had a lot of rare releases that existed nowhere else. Vanished overnight with the feds taking it down.
Actually it was a reverse proxy that was taken down, and they didn’t even target what.cd, it was collateral damage. The admins got scared nevertheless and pulled the plug.
As a non-music example (and please somebody prove me wrong), I cannot find the 1954 movie "So This is Paris", starring Tony Curtis. No copies available anywhere on amazon, ebay, or searching through internet sites. There was a short clip of one of the songs on Youtube a few years ago, but it was taken down for copyright infringement. I simply cannot find it anywhere.
What.cd hosted, among other things, three unpublished Salinger stories. They were swiftly taken down by the site hosts over demands from his estate, but narrowly made it onto BitTorrent and other sites, and are still available today.
Meanwhile, a lot of unique live-concert recordings (often made with the band's permission, unlike the Salinger tapes) vanished with the demise of What.CD. Presumably some people still have them, if bit rot hasn't caught up, but they simply ceased to be available.
I'm not sure these ever landed on torrent sites, but the first album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor is considered lost, and Eminem's debut EP was unavailable for more than a decade. Both are (early-)digital-era works, which raises interesting questions about the fragility of even modern content. The archive-less disappearance of quite a few online short stories, flash games, and Soundcloud tracks makes me suspect that in a few decades, quite a few more "first works" of notable creators will be unavailable.
I still have a 56kbps MP3 copy of Eminem’s first EP sent to me, pre-Napster, over AIM. I didn’t even realize it wasn’t unavailable until this post. And my son loves Eminem.
It looks like some copies hit the open internet around 2009, and a few of the songs has been remastered as promotional gimmicks. But yeah, I remember looking a bunch of years ago and finding that the title and one other song (Open Mic, maybe?) were the only things in circulation.
It's sort of funny to see that even something released post-internet can float in and out of availability like that. I generally class recent content as "lost" or "available", but obviously there's still a third category.
This is the negative of private invite-only trackers like what.cd. If they end up closing a lot of data gets dies with them. In contrast to that piratebay and nyaa.pantsu regularly upload their databases and there are even offline database readers for them.
Years ago, I was on a university private tracker. It was used more to share hard-to-find resources than for any actual piracy, much less piracy of anything new or policed. (I'm sure people stole plenty of 50-year-old textbook PDFs.) But when the hoster shut it down abruptly, everything simply vanished, including all kinds of hand-scanned and annotated stuff which may be literally irreplaceable.
Meanwhile, something like Kickass Torrents can be shut down and abandoned by the owners, but the content all reappears almost immediately. The private-tracker model has lots of advantages for community building, but as far as robustness it undermines the entire concept of P2P sharing.
Given that those were torrent sites, they weren’t hosting the content. The individuals seeding the content still likely have copies of it. They just have no easy, obvious place to share it where they won’t get in trouble for doing so... for now. But if such a technology shows up later, the (already ripped and preserved) content might just show back up along with it.
The /r/datahoarder subreddit is full of people like this. I'm happy they exist, if nothing else so at least there may be a digital record of our civilization if it's destroyed.
"Data hoarding" along these lines is, IMO, an admirable use of time and money, and I wish that I had more of both so I could participate. One day I hope to.
Is there any technical reason we can't make a distributed tracker/community like what.cd, given that torrents are already distributed and ZeroNet et al exist? All we'd need is the forums and ratio bookkeeping.
This is a good point; it's amazing what's still out there. Bitrot does set in over time, though, and the less distributed a work is the worse its odds of living through each new tech transition. I've known people who still have cassette recordings of concerts that are publicly considered "lost". Hopefully they digitize and back up, but not all of them will.
Even the brief bloom of the torrent and sharing scene was incredible, though. Scarce works that circulate manually are in near-constant jeopardy, because every new copy takes new effort. But a whole lot of unique content, from jam-band tapes to obscure translated books, just showed up on torrent sites and got shared widely. Even if it's inaccessible at the moment, that stretch may have spawned enough copies to endure across the next few transitions.
> Bitrot does set in over time, though, and the less distributed a work is the worse its odds of living through each new tech transition.
Eh, I feel like we've almost fully gotten away from bit-rot. Bit-rot was a problem because individuals don't bother to go to the effort of constant IT administration, and don't have the economies of scale required to afford good data redundancy.
But individuals don't have to back things up "personally" any more. With one command, I can send three copies of any file to three object-storage providers. Each one (according to the Dynamo architecture, which they mostly all implement) is holding 17 copies of the data on 17 shards, and replaces copies from the good ones whenever they go bad. Each provider's copies only exist in one region, but the region is different for each provider selected. As individual object-storage providers die, I can find new ones and sync my data over from the surviving ones. As long as "cloud [redundant] object storage" as a concept exists, I won't have to do much at all to ensure continued integrity of my data. All the details—including porting my data to new physical substrates when old formats die—are being handled under the abstraction, and converted into (tiny!) monthly fees that are lower than what even a zero-redundancy tape library would cost me.
And, of course, the data I'm sending is encrypted, and not even with a symmetric key, but rather a PKI key where the decryption half of the key is held in cold storage (i.e. in hardcopy base64 in a safety deposit box at a bank; and a few other places.) If I'm uploading rips of something copyrighted, nobody will ever know that but me. I'll be able to get the data back out when the time comes to dust it off and share it.
In the HD movie torrent community – people sharing full Blu-ray images – a person’s collection can run into the many terabytes. My own collection amounts to 8TB and is only content I have watched personally and am interested in, while torrent communities greatly benefit from obsessive hoarders who download and seed content beyond their personal interests. There is no economical solution to back up that much data on the cloud, and bitrot does set in.
If you're not spending at least as much money (+ labor opportunity-cost) on your own data-storage solution as it costs to back the data up to the cloud, your data isn't safe.
Well, they weren't torrent sites in the late 90s and probably not the early 2000s either. The Bittorrent protocol wasn't released until July 2001 and it took a few years to get popular.
Back then, they were just servers you downloaded stuff from.
Napster started in 1999. Search was centralised, but downloads were p2p.
Edit: it shut down in 2001, and everyone I knew at the time was using it. vanderZwan might have misused the word torrent, but the rest of his post is spot on.
I remember a torrent site for old games.
You had tremendous community efforts documenting and cataloging games. Gathering every thing from the different releases, patches, music, art, etc.
It was a gaming historian's wet dream. They were even beginning to record the releases from different warez scene groups.
But everything went away because, form what I gathered, someone in EA noticed you could download FIFA 96 for the Mega Drive/Genesis.
Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the site. RIP
It was Underground Gamer. The quality of the collection was astonishing, many games were impossible to get or purchase anywhere else due to abandonment. And everything just disappeared overnight.
People still have all this on their drives. I'm sure the community can be revived someday.
>(...) but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses.
The EU just passed the directive for the new copyright package which further cements the status quo (the two often mentioned articles are just the worst of it), so don't expect any progress if people don't start to elect more progressive politicians.
The projections for the EU election show that the shares of the fractions won't change much, beside a slight shift to the right. The composition of the Conservative wing, however, will become more Euroskeptic and nationalistic.
And from an economic perspective, I don't see any big shift towards more consumer-oriented party programs, while the right-wing generally tends to be liberal(classical), or neoliberal even, anyway.
P.S.: To avoid DNS blocking, use a DNS server from a private party; and since in some countries such data streams are manipulated, use encrypted DNS to ensure integrity. https://dnscrypt.info/faq
Are they "left-wing" or socially left neoliberals.
There is a difference between "left-wing" as in economic AND social leftism vs the sort of neoliberal, "Third Way" politics, which equal socially left-wing, but economically center-right.
Most of the "social democratic" parties in Europe are that way these days. They don't really champion economic populism, wealth redistribution etc.
I'm not sure what you mean with "socially left-wing". Is that something that doesn't cost money?
And IMO there are no (neo)liberals in Spain, if you listen to facts instead of words.
Every party currently in Parliament is big-state. PP raised taxes over Zapatero levels and public expenses even more, systematically breaking expense limits every single year they were in government.
> I'm not sure what you mean with "socially left-wing".
They're pro choice, pro LGBTQ etc. but also very much pro things like privatization.
As for "Is that something that doesn't cost money?" - that's a childish question that is almost not worth answering. Maintaining a functioning society always costs money, there's infrastructure & services to maintain.
Taxes are going to get collected, so for me the only real question is if they're going to be spent on moving the country forward, supporting those in need of support and improving services, (healthcare etc.) & infrastructure, (bridges, roads...), making sure publicly funded research stays public, going after corporate tax evasion and so on... or if they're going to be spent on bloated military contracts etc.
Sadly, the supposed left-wing in most of Europe today is not focusing on healthcare, infrastructure etc. in a major way and thus the distinction between them and the right seems rather thin. They're both fairly pro-corporate, thus the main distinction is the social politics, which rarely address people's economic concerns.
As for big state, I don't know, Mariano Rajoy, a right-winger was willing to send "the State" to violently suppress an independence referendum. Not sure how that squares with you.
You do you, I just wish you were more honest in also quoting what was this reaction to & my reasoning for saying that. On the other hand, that may lead you to stop saying nonsense like that in the first place.
It is clear reading your comment that you do this transformation in your head automatically:
Progressive = Left = Good
Right = Bad
I don't believe that the access to what public funding pays (public research) is intrinsically linked to the left, quite the opposite.
In the past for example while the US published a lot of information in public journals, Soviet Russia was very secretive about theirs(while benefiting from the West). US was not leftist than Soviet Russia.
While the left wants to link themselves to the idea of "progress", hence the auto denominated name "progressive", I don't see the progress anywhere after watching the process take action in Europe multiple times(North Americans have not experienced real left in power), quite the opposite.
The left wants to create a monster State. Once in place individuals have no power at all. Everything is controlled top down and as there is only one entity, there is no competition.
There is way more risk of "regulatory capture" when there is only one entity than when competition exist. Journals ownership of what public funding pays is a case of regulatory capture.
Scientists should demand their work to be in the open, or it will not really be science.
> The left wants to create a monster State. Once in place individuals have no power at all. Everything is controlled top down and as there is only one entity, there is no competition
You started by criticizing a simplistic analysis of Left == good, Right == bad, but you just flipped Right == good, Left == bad and offered such a juvenile, simplistic analysis, it's honestly laughable.
When it comes to the left, you'd have to distinguish between neoliberals, (socially left, economically centre-right), which is who's been in power in Europe when it comes to the left. You fail to realize that there is a thing called "left-wing libertarianism", in fact libertarianism originated with the left and most people, apart from Americans, understood libertarianism to be left-wing.
There's no "monster State" advocated there. It's more about ensuring equality of opportunity, (not outcome(!)), promoting cooperatives etc. In reality, these would be beneficial for competition, because it promotes more people being able to take the risk of having a business, since there's a social safety net.
AsyncAwait have a point here, the comment start with a "don't fall into simplistic extreme dualism.
Neither brightest human achievements nor genocide happen only under a single political orientation flag.
There are people that are admirably altruist and awesomely creative regardless of the main political forces going on where they live. And there are people seeking to concentrate always more power for themselves regardless of socioeconomic consequences for others under any flag of the day which would serve this purpose.
>In 2018, support [for the copyright directive] in the European Parliament was led by the European People's Party group and the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, the parliament's two largest groups
>Opposition in the European Parliament is led by populist parties including Poland's ruling Law and Justice party, Italy's ruling Five Star Movement/Lega Nord coalition, and the UK Independence Party. Other opponents include a large number of smaller parties at either end of the political spectrum.[66][72] Notable among these is the Pirate Party Germany, whose sole MEP Julia Reda has been an outspoken opponent of the proposal.[73]
Your political position is evaluated based on your actual opinion and decisions, not just what you announce yourself to be.
I did not orientate my statement based on party names and official affiliations, but the overall political and economical nature and priorities of the copyright directive and actual policies the EP fractions vote for.
What if we look at the sitiuation from publishers' point of view? Yesterday those weird scientints gave to you the rights to their works, and the next day they demand that you allow them to read their works for free.
> Yesterday those weird scientints gave to you the rights to their works.
Yesterday there weren't any, let alone good, alternatives. Even today with good alternatives, the way publishing in "high impact" journals is tied to pay can make the issue not really have other options.
Free access to knowledge is fairly foundational to science and something that's has been talked about for a while. This isn't a new problem. It comes as a surprise to no one.
This is doubly true given the amount of government money spent on this research that is then being kept from the public.
But today, even with alternatives present, scientists still give away or sell their rights to the journals.
The scientists are often paid be the government. So it is the government that creates this situation and makes "high impact" journals what they are. It is the government that doesn't mandate free access to the knowledge.
In the UK all research councils and the National Institute for Health Research awards carry restrictions that everything is made open access. It is a step in the right direction but it also means that more government funding is just going to journals via paying article processing charges
OK, since it looks like these libraries are going down after all, can we systematically download the content in them that's verifiably in the public domain, and upload it to the Internet Archive so that it becomes legitimately available and findable? There's a lot of such stuff that gets entirely fraudulent copyright claims tacked on to it, or claims that might apply only to supplemental matter (especially prefaces) that can be stripped out of a (DRM-free!) PDF file. And if something was first published before the late 19th century, it's quite obviously PD even in "life+X" countries where it might be hard to find info about all the people who could've had a hand in it back then.
My issue with this is that in a way it gives strength to their argument - i.e. segregation reinforces the concept of there being a fundamental difference between the two groups.
Well, practically, there absolutely is a difference. You can host above-board content any way you like, even on things like IPFS, and tell anyone who makes fraudulent copyright claims about it to sod off-- but if you're not being totally above-board, you won't get that luxury. It's a very different trade-off compared to the likes of SH and LG, and one that's quite valuable.
You could argue that the internet itself is the greatest library we've ever had and over the past decade, the internet has been slowly destroyed. The saddest part is that it isn't the luddites or religious fundamentalists behind the destruction of knowledge and the internet. It's politicians, journalists and CEOs behind the incredible push to "clean up" the internet. The internet went from an anonymous information sharing space to a pathetic censored version of facebook/twitter/google.
I hope these are archived as they accrete content. Assembling and torrenting sub-petabyte archives can't be easy, but it beats stirring the ashes of a digital Alexandria to find snippets of knowledge.
I hope the Indian govt. doesn't follow suit. Libgen and Scihub serve a very great resource in a country that can't afford the absurd rates to go through the paywall; rare books that are not popular, and thus not part of the South-Asia-only reprints, are absurdly expensive.
Sadly, the current idiots in power think following the diktats of any and every passing foreign bureaucrat is an order from the Devas themselves. I don't think anyone who'll be coming in May will be any good either (if not worse).
Indian govt doesn't have to - Reliance Jio is proactively censoring all sorts of "problematic" sites without any government mandate. they took down reddit for some states already
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[ 0.14 ms ] story [ 766 ms ] threadSci-hub and LibGen are services that those of us outside a university or at something besides rich research universities depend on more.
Just speculation, but maybe this is a pre-emptive strike? Probably the courts would be less inclined to support the publishers if they sued to block these services only after they entered into conflict (with the universities)?
(I have never heard anyone in research who thinks that pay walled journals is a good thing.)
- Search for an article on PubMed in the university library portal
- Get a list of results
- Download the article as pdf from the publishers website
Additionally many journals are accessible just by navigating to the publishers website (science, nature, physics journals, ieee journals) depending on which university vpn you are logged into. This covers most use cases, I am sorry to hear it’s not the same in France.
After all, that's what I would expect should happen to a regular thief.
Do you also expect that industrial executives, managers, and everyone down to the line workers get booked on terrorism charges, for poisoning our water supplies, if they are caught illegally polluting?
Not the original poster, but Yes, of course. Who doesn't expect that?
People who have any experience with how the real world works.
At best, the company may get a token fine, with the people giving the orders, and carrying them out never getting held accountable.
At worst, much hooing and hawwing is had about how important <the industry> is, and how <the company> pinky swears that it will never do what they did again.
Torture at its best.
Then again, when it’s not enforced and when you know how violent union people can be, you don’t know how long you’ll stay there, and if you will get out alive at all. You only know when it’s over.
What I’m furious about is that the signature should have been considered under duress. It was not.
That's what the victim party had asked for too, so I don't understand what problem there is with this judgment?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_Term_Extension_Act
So I'd argue that the French have a love-affair with traditional publishing, and traditional publishing loves draconian copyright rules.
The whole thing is almost a culture war for the French people's soul by-proxy.
In this case I have no pity for them, then. If they want to feel better about themselves by cutting off their own ears because other people are using English then let them.
Now please don't consider this ruling as one made by the actual researchers, especially the younger ones that had a decent English education and sees no problem using English material.
This sentence is ridiculous and has nothing to do with scihub and libgen. Most french researchers are perfectly happy using these sites, and dislike strongly the draconian schemes of scientific journal publishers (which publish texts mostly in english). Several people are pushing for french university libraries to stop paying subscriptions to journals and give all that money directly to scihub. Yet, these initiatives are always blocked at higher levels.
I think this has more to do with the copyright lobby than anything else.
[1] https://www.lemonde.fr/sciences/visuel/2016/05/10/edition-sc... (in french)
[2] https://www.the-scientist.com/daily-news/french-universities...
[3] https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/
But everything to do with the French government's attitude towards traditional publishers and why they work so closely together. This issue doesn't begin and end with research publishing, it is bigger and older than that.
Calling something "ridiculous" simply because you want a black & white answer to a larger complex cultural phenomenon is a little disappointing.
Well, someone has to.
Without strong copyrights we would have nothing to trade.
Publishers used the existing laws to get this ban, as they already did in other countries. I wouldn't be surprised they've started some similar actions in other countries and will end up with similar results.
Honestly, almost every country has copyright laws, so allow this kind of lawsuit.
So a DNS level block... This should help to educate some French users on what a DNS is, and steer some of them away from using their ISP provided DNS servers.
I even get better access (but my ISP is often shitty). I woould not have tried Tor, but for this block.
Much more convenient than the web interface, if you ask me. And without the problem of remembering the right URL.
that would be the end result, put the onus on the DNS providers. who needs to China to disrupt the net when the West is just fine doing it on its own.
we are literally at the point where European citizens need to engage in doublespeak on certain topics for the fear of harassment from people abusing the legal system, and it's getting words faster by the day
Any filtering gets to happen inbound to that country unless you want to only view content that is legal in turkey, Israel, Pakistan,Uzbekistan, south africa, Russia, the US and insert another 60 names here.
We already have a way to handle different DNS results for different sub sections of the populace. They can run their own DNS servers and mandate that their users use them blocking alternatives if they so desire.
I would be surprised if Optus actually managed to do SNI filtering for the entire country without screwing it up.
Edit: Huh, seems like they do have a dedicated IP. At least both Robtex and Securitytrails report them as the only tenant on their IP. But you can /etc/hosts 4chan.org to a different Cloudflare IP, and CF will still SNI-route it to the real site. That would defeat any IP address-based block.
I have also written how the site can try to bypass the blocking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19552689
Thanks to the lack of user accounts needed to use the site, pretty much everyone checks their social filter at the door, and it's earned some unfavorable comparisons. Given its reputation I'm not surprised to hear it's the subject of censorship.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/australian-med...
Outreach from social workers and societal safety net is the best way to prevent radicalization. I see legalization of drugs as an example.
What happened was a crime not only against the direct victims, but against all of New Zealand and all of humanity. It affects all people, as it damages the social fabric everywhere. It's vitally important that all people can avail themselves of the knowledge of what happened so that all people can help to stop it from happening again.
By your logic, photos of Auschwitz and the Killing Fields and Tiananmen Square ought to be destroyed. No, we must face evil head-on, recognize it for what it is and how it works, so we may be prepared to stop it.
What you propose only aids the perpetrators by obscuring their evil deeds and minimizing the murders they committed. Shame on you.
If I was to commit some atrocities tomorrow and write a pamphlet outlining my motive and calling for others to do the same thing while adding a note saying "look, they'll try to censor this!" will you, out of principle, argue that my manifesto shouldn't be censured because that's what I would've wanted? If so, why?
In my opinion his main objective was to get attention and put his nauseous ideology in the spotlight. I don't know if banning it is the right solution but frankly I won't waste my time playing devil's advocate for a mass murderer.
"First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
Hopefully society will not do that.
The content might be repulsive but we are better off knowing how they think than allowing only them to know the contents.
Crazy manifestos are probably just like weapons in this regard, ordinary people won't care to get one if they are illegal, bad guys will.
As a kid I got a good explanation of how badly certain ideologies failed even if they looked reasonable.
I also got an intro to safe handling of guns, especially the part about never ever pointing a gun at anyone, loaded or not, except in wartime. I was quite young then but it sticks, like a whole lot of other stuff from my childhood.
I'll try to give that to the next generation together, together with an explanation of how insanely stupid such manifestos are - and a crash course in unarmed fighting (disable or confuse opponent, get away).
Young people should know what exists or it will take them by surprise.
> "First they came for the terrorists and I did nothing because I wasn't a terrorist... And nothing of value was lost".
Definitions of "terrorist" differs and while I and you can agree on this and many others I really really don't want to have more power than necessary in the hands of any government.
Read history and you'll see that most cruelties in the last few hundred years were commited by states against their own citizens, not by random blokes with weapons.
Speaking as a us citizen, that is crazy talk. Why should the government be let to decide what is "too dangerous" for me to read? It seems incredible that first world democracies still engage in that kind of censorship.
Another instance, I think fox and Breitbart are scourges for their disinformation campaign (not that they're "conservative" or have an "agenda", the wsj is also conservative and has an agenda), but making them illegal is a line too far. It provides too much power to a government who already has too much.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/food/wp/2017/08/14/charl...
Obviously the risk is not that reasonably educated HN readers could stumble upon this manifesto and start a massacre, the risk is that the material could be used as propaganda to brainwash more easily-influenced people. People become radicalized on the web, actually the shooter himself kept spouting "memes" straight from /pol/ and other alt-right websites. Similarly many Islamist terrorists who carried attacks in recent years also radicalized online, feeding on propaganda websites and fake news.
Does banning 4chan or the manifesto achieve anything? I'm not sure. But dismissing any attempt to curb this very real problem as "crazy talk" is not really constructive criticism.
You can literally make the same argument against fox or Breitbart. Or cnn, nyt, wapo as the president continuously tries to. He should remind you why the government should have limited powers.
And yes, the general fear of sex and sexual is maddening and counter productive.
I guess it makes sense if you're a libertarian/anarchist or something in this vicinity but if that's the case this discussion has been rehashed millions of times before and I don't think we'll find a common ground here.
But this seems to clearly intensify. We now have laws passed "to regulate things against Fake News during election period"[1], in a climate of already large distrust of population against politics.
It's really unclear how this plain censorship is not replaced with a mandatory warning, which would give the opportunity to let people judge by themselves (or at least decide to trust the authority that the material doesn't worth their attention).
[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikim%C3%A9dia_France/Fausse...
My VPN was blocked recently and I had to go to my network provider with my ID to prove my age(?!) so I could access my VPN again. I was not impressed.
Which fits fantastically in the discussion over at the San Diego Streetlight surveillance and the "Software engineers social responsibility"[1] vs. the fact that it will get worse if you make it mainstream.
Interesting times.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19545668
[1] https://github.com/StreisandEffect/streisand
It's difficult not to be on a major ISP when the minor ISPs can't contest on speed and value for money.
Now I'm on ~64mbit VDSL with no blocking at all on Zen. We pull 500G+ a month through it. Costs £37.49 a month.
They just rolled out 300mbit fibre as well so that's going in next month.
Speed isn't everything for me. I can QoS those problems away pretty well.
Try doing that today with 5 people all trying to watch Netflix. That wasn't a thing back in 2002.
In 2002, I had 1mbit.
Apart from their mobile offering - plenty of bad things to say about that!
They fix stuff quickly too, I'd recommend em.
Of course if they block the whole VPN list you can just rent a tiny instance in a cloud somewhere, though that seems like enough work to bother most non techies.
In Germany she is heavily mocked for not understanding the Internet. Of course, it's the bright populace of high class forums such as Facebook and r/de who know better than the Physicist Chancellor of a G7 nation...
In reality, she meant it is legal Neuland. That authorities and courts had little established ways of enforcing laws online, that even heavily illegal acts were difficult to process and prosecute.
Now we are getting there. The law catches up with the Internet. If we want a free Sci-Hub and free content sharing, then it's the law that we have to adapt. Because governments already adapt their procedures - the online Wild West is over.
Kind of feels like "civilization" creeping into the Old West.
I for one have no faith in educating the government as long as companies with multi-million-dollar lobbying budgets are free to sway politicians to legislate in their favor. Happy to be convinced otherwise, though.
the only long term solution is to change the laws, not to work around them, but we don't have the economic power to balance the lobbies anymore.
What if you use your phone line to organize a crime? Is that a problem? Should we add word recognition to phone line to make sure this doesn't happen? Should we limit it to a series of specific words?
This would break phone usage.
The same apply to internet, except that it can do even more. The only ways to make sure theses criminal activities doesn't happen would be to limit how it can be used which break everything.
Somewhere out there someone read this and thought "wow that's a great idea"
That sounds like DPI and rewriting upstream DNS responses is not excluded though. If that gets implemented, it doesn't matter which server you choose.
And changing the DNS under my Ubuntu box was far from trivial. It is only possible to change the secondary DNS in the connection UI. I had to use a reduced version of DHCP (IP address only) and change /etc/resolv.conf.
[0]: https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf
I'm not a scientist myself, and would be happy to hear anyone else's opinion, but alternatives like peercommunityin.org look more promising.
All in all, this ban can be easily be circumvented (it's just a DNS block), so I'm not really sure it will help editors. It may cause an opposite effect, helping people to move to different solutions. But maybe I'm over optimistic.
https://gatesopenresearch.org/
[0]: https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf
Thanks Elsevier & Springer!
That might be an easier solution than trying to achieve minimally sane copyright reform.
Could you not simply hash the content of libgen to find said key?
For something of the size of half life 3 (about 2GB? no idea), the number of collissions would be far more than the number of atoms in the universe.
Almost a "Graham's number" level of understatement.
Imagine something like finding the seed for a pseudorandom number generator where the numbers generated form the byte pattern for libgen.
That's similar to the cryptominer hashing where people just have rigs enumerating through possible values to generate a hash with the appropriate number of leading zeros. It's just that libgen would be little bit longer than a hash and also have some ones interspersed with the zeros.
There is no way of traversing hash collisions. It would be the hash of some string of cryptocurrency jarble that also happens to be the hash of some encoding of the libgen database and you would have no way of knowing this unless you specifically hashed all of libgen. In this case you know all of libgen already anyway, unless you forgot the information that you hashed.
[0] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
Though I would agree that the comparison is weak. While I'm always against censorship in all its forms, relating it to China seems... stretched.
Living in a 'free' country' does not mean being able to flaunt the law, especially in this case what those sites do is hardly defensible.
> the French court ruled that the two sites “clearly claim to be pirate platforms rejecting the principle of copyright and bypassing publishers’ subscription access portals.
Of these possibilities, only natural law can command respect. Society can be irrational and pass arbitrary laws for longer than you can stay sane, and dictatorship is, well, dictatorship.
The US constitution and the bill of rights are explicitly based on the idea of natural law.
As homo sapiens sapiens is a social animal, it's difficult to make the distinction between what it "natural aspirations" and "social consensus".
In fact we know from some legal decisions of the time that Natural Law was explicitly used as justification for various legal decisions, in the absence of explicit written laws on the subject.
You mean FOSTA/SESTA?
Authoritarian is the word, I believe. Thing is, along with that, there is this dangerous corporations embracing over own citizens. A weird and toxic relationship.
All the copyright laws in Germany, France, Canada, New Zealand, UK and Australia, come after the US demands the change in law or else they will apply economic sanctions in commerce.
You probably live in the US and are under the influence of propaganda(like pronouncing constantly void phrases like "land of the freedom"). You should get out and live in another country for a while to get perspective.
However, there is subtle, but important (at least to me) distinction between “this site violates the law — let’s pursuit its owners legally” and “this site violates the law — let’s block it for everyone and censor communications to implement that”.
You still need VPN if you want to get to some content forbidden for political reasons, but for most people the ability to get a movie/album/book they want matters more.
Here in Switzerland, obtaining copyrighted content for own use is basically decriminalized (its illegal distribution, however, is not).
[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3...
Went to libgen instead, will never buy a book on GooglePlay again.
This age of electronics and logic and AI should have been able to provide a reasonable benefit to consumers at the very bottom. Instead, corporations have found new ways to rig things, impersonate people, and generally be dishonest about the quality and effectiveness of their offerings.
google-chrome != browser
grrrrr
Yes, for now governments only caught up to DNS level blocking, but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses.
This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours worth of work by people who simply love music and wanted to share that love with other enthusiasts, creating some of the richest catalogues of music and music metadata the world has ever seen. And then it all was destroyed.
And this was true for many other topics of interest too.
We have burned many digital libraries in the last few decades, and we will probably continue to do so for a while longer.
I'm sure that "library of Alexandria" would be burned quite quickly.
Reveal how inventions and large companies work, as opposed to the old cloak-and-dagger method of 'secret formulas' and such. Then allowing anybody to see the method and licence it from the company, or be liable for a lawsuit.
What we used to have is if somebody somehow stole the secret to an invention it became fair game. Nowadays though companies try to game the system by having intentionally labrinthian patchworks of patents that do their best to not reveal anything about how the invention works while still being able to be used to sue people.
Rightly so-- and nothing of value would be lost. SV companies don't have much in the way of "secret sauce", they just have $$$ to burn (from VC weenies buying equity stakes) for hosting costs and for developing increasingly-crappy web frontends.
A lot of it was about album collecting which frankly is not working the same anymore
Personally I am sad iOS poorly supports listening mixes plus Soundcloud slowly destroying itself...
This should be a golden age for information preservation. Instead it's a dark age. I personally know several eye-wateringly good bands whose catalogs are not available anywhere, at all.
The masters still exist, I'm told, but that's no good to anyone - they won't be re-released because it would require too much intellectual property wrangling and nobody cares enough to bother, and sooner or later that hard drive will die and that will be that.
Someday humanity will look back on this as a dark, barbaric age, thinking that ideas and sounds can be owned.
Edit: Wait. Am I part of the problem?
If you want more, look either of them up.
Meanwhile, a lot of unique live-concert recordings (often made with the band's permission, unlike the Salinger tapes) vanished with the demise of What.CD. Presumably some people still have them, if bit rot hasn't caught up, but they simply ceased to be available.
I'm not sure these ever landed on torrent sites, but the first album from Godspeed You! Black Emperor is considered lost, and Eminem's debut EP was unavailable for more than a decade. Both are (early-)digital-era works, which raises interesting questions about the fragility of even modern content. The archive-less disappearance of quite a few online short stories, flash games, and Soundcloud tracks makes me suspect that in a few decades, quite a few more "first works" of notable creators will be unavailable.
It's sort of funny to see that even something released post-internet can float in and out of availability like that. I generally class recent content as "lost" or "available", but obviously there's still a third category.
Years ago, I was on a university private tracker. It was used more to share hard-to-find resources than for any actual piracy, much less piracy of anything new or policed. (I'm sure people stole plenty of 50-year-old textbook PDFs.) But when the hoster shut it down abruptly, everything simply vanished, including all kinds of hand-scanned and annotated stuff which may be literally irreplaceable.
Meanwhile, something like Kickass Torrents can be shut down and abandoned by the owners, but the content all reappears almost immediately. The private-tracker model has lots of advantages for community building, but as far as robustness it undermines the entire concept of P2P sharing.
Even the brief bloom of the torrent and sharing scene was incredible, though. Scarce works that circulate manually are in near-constant jeopardy, because every new copy takes new effort. But a whole lot of unique content, from jam-band tapes to obscure translated books, just showed up on torrent sites and got shared widely. Even if it's inaccessible at the moment, that stretch may have spawned enough copies to endure across the next few transitions.
Eh, I feel like we've almost fully gotten away from bit-rot. Bit-rot was a problem because individuals don't bother to go to the effort of constant IT administration, and don't have the economies of scale required to afford good data redundancy.
But individuals don't have to back things up "personally" any more. With one command, I can send three copies of any file to three object-storage providers. Each one (according to the Dynamo architecture, which they mostly all implement) is holding 17 copies of the data on 17 shards, and replaces copies from the good ones whenever they go bad. Each provider's copies only exist in one region, but the region is different for each provider selected. As individual object-storage providers die, I can find new ones and sync my data over from the surviving ones. As long as "cloud [redundant] object storage" as a concept exists, I won't have to do much at all to ensure continued integrity of my data. All the details—including porting my data to new physical substrates when old formats die—are being handled under the abstraction, and converted into (tiny!) monthly fees that are lower than what even a zero-redundancy tape library would cost me.
And, of course, the data I'm sending is encrypted, and not even with a symmetric key, but rather a PKI key where the decryption half of the key is held in cold storage (i.e. in hardcopy base64 in a safety deposit box at a bank; and a few other places.) If I'm uploading rips of something copyrighted, nobody will ever know that but me. I'll be able to get the data back out when the time comes to dust it off and share it.
Yes, I just noticed I accidentally dropped the "of thousands" part while writing my comments.
Back then, they were just servers you downloaded stuff from.
Edit: it shut down in 2001, and everyone I knew at the time was using it. vanderZwan might have misused the word torrent, but the rest of his post is spot on.
It was a gaming historian's wet dream. They were even beginning to record the releases from different warez scene groups.
But everything went away because, form what I gathered, someone in EA noticed you could download FIFA 96 for the Mega Drive/Genesis.
Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the site. RIP
People still have all this on their drives. I'm sure the community can be revived someday.
I sure hope the community can be revived.
There's a lot more bandwidth and cheap storage today than 10 years ago. I'd love to be able to contribute and share to it.
I so dearly hope this is true for other sites like What.CD
The FIFA games usually have licenses to use the teams and player names. and lots of licensed music.
We still have communities like that, but you need the right connections to get in.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive
The EU just passed the directive for the new copyright package which further cements the status quo (the two often mentioned articles are just the worst of it), so don't expect any progress if people don't start to elect more progressive politicians.
The projections for the EU election show that the shares of the fractions won't change much, beside a slight shift to the right. The composition of the Conservative wing, however, will become more Euroskeptic and nationalistic.
And from an economic perspective, I don't see any big shift towards more consumer-oriented party programs, while the right-wing generally tends to be liberal(classical), or neoliberal even, anyway.
P.S.: To avoid DNS blocking, use a DNS server from a private party; and since in some countries such data streams are manipulated, use encrypted DNS to ensure integrity. https://dnscrypt.info/faq
There is a difference between "left-wing" as in economic AND social leftism vs the sort of neoliberal, "Third Way" politics, which equal socially left-wing, but economically center-right.
Most of the "social democratic" parties in Europe are that way these days. They don't really champion economic populism, wealth redistribution etc.
And IMO there are no (neo)liberals in Spain, if you listen to facts instead of words.
Every party currently in Parliament is big-state. PP raised taxes over Zapatero levels and public expenses even more, systematically breaking expense limits every single year they were in government.
They're pro choice, pro LGBTQ etc. but also very much pro things like privatization.
As for "Is that something that doesn't cost money?" - that's a childish question that is almost not worth answering. Maintaining a functioning society always costs money, there's infrastructure & services to maintain.
Taxes are going to get collected, so for me the only real question is if they're going to be spent on moving the country forward, supporting those in need of support and improving services, (healthcare etc.) & infrastructure, (bridges, roads...), making sure publicly funded research stays public, going after corporate tax evasion and so on... or if they're going to be spent on bloated military contracts etc.
Sadly, the supposed left-wing in most of Europe today is not focusing on healthcare, infrastructure etc. in a major way and thus the distinction between them and the right seems rather thin. They're both fairly pro-corporate, thus the main distinction is the social politics, which rarely address people's economic concerns.
As for big state, I don't know, Mariano Rajoy, a right-winger was willing to send "the State" to violently suppress an independence referendum. Not sure how that squares with you.
Wow, thank you. That actually saves me time. Once somebody answers like that, it's clear that any effort to reason would be a waste.
Progressive = Left = Good
Right = Bad
I don't believe that the access to what public funding pays (public research) is intrinsically linked to the left, quite the opposite.
In the past for example while the US published a lot of information in public journals, Soviet Russia was very secretive about theirs(while benefiting from the West). US was not leftist than Soviet Russia.
While the left wants to link themselves to the idea of "progress", hence the auto denominated name "progressive", I don't see the progress anywhere after watching the process take action in Europe multiple times(North Americans have not experienced real left in power), quite the opposite.
The left wants to create a monster State. Once in place individuals have no power at all. Everything is controlled top down and as there is only one entity, there is no competition.
There is way more risk of "regulatory capture" when there is only one entity than when competition exist. Journals ownership of what public funding pays is a case of regulatory capture.
Scientists should demand their work to be in the open, or it will not really be science.
You started by criticizing a simplistic analysis of Left == good, Right == bad, but you just flipped Right == good, Left == bad and offered such a juvenile, simplistic analysis, it's honestly laughable.
When it comes to the left, you'd have to distinguish between neoliberals, (socially left, economically centre-right), which is who's been in power in Europe when it comes to the left. You fail to realize that there is a thing called "left-wing libertarianism", in fact libertarianism originated with the left and most people, apart from Americans, understood libertarianism to be left-wing.
There's no "monster State" advocated there. It's more about ensuring equality of opportunity, (not outcome(!)), promoting cooperatives etc. In reality, these would be beneficial for competition, because it promotes more people being able to take the risk of having a business, since there's a social safety net.
Neither brightest human achievements nor genocide happen only under a single political orientation flag.
There are people that are admirably altruist and awesomely creative regardless of the main political forces going on where they live. And there are people seeking to concentrate always more power for themselves regardless of socioeconomic consequences for others under any flag of the day which would serve this purpose.
>Opposition in the European Parliament is led by populist parties including Poland's ruling Law and Justice party, Italy's ruling Five Star Movement/Lega Nord coalition, and the UK Independence Party. Other opponents include a large number of smaller parties at either end of the political spectrum.[66][72] Notable among these is the Pirate Party Germany, whose sole MEP Julia Reda has been an outspoken opponent of the proposal.[73]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Directive_on_Copyright_in_the_...
I did not orientate my statement based on party names and official affiliations, but the overall political and economical nature and priorities of the copyright directive and actual policies the EP fractions vote for.
Yesterday there weren't any, let alone good, alternatives. Even today with good alternatives, the way publishing in "high impact" journals is tied to pay can make the issue not really have other options.
Free access to knowledge is fairly foundational to science and something that's has been talked about for a while. This isn't a new problem. It comes as a surprise to no one.
This is doubly true given the amount of government money spent on this research that is then being kept from the public.
The scientists are often paid be the government. So it is the government that creates this situation and makes "high impact" journals what they are. It is the government that doesn't mandate free access to the knowledge.
I agree, however, that receiving government funding should require open access publishing.
My case, by the way.
Just until the people with guns come.
Donating to Sci-Hub today.
zer0nets youtube pedant solves this by creating a site for each "channel" und just aggregating them
Sadly, the current idiots in power think following the diktats of any and every passing foreign bureaucrat is an order from the Devas themselves. I don't think anyone who'll be coming in May will be any good either (if not worse).
https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/370246-sci-hub-button