French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen • Hacker News Board

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#351

Post by xorand » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

andbberger wrote: post #315

School-Cotton wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This requires collective action. An individual can't meaningfully influence the situation.

Certainly they can. What's forcing you to publish in nature? Just like... don't. If someone down the line is judging you based on what journal your work ended up in and not the quality of the work... well you probably don't want to work with them anyway

Academic managers force you. Your older colleagues force you because they are part of the game. However, it is possible to work in academia and not to bend.

Anyway, make your research available, no matter where you choose to publish it. Take a look at DORA http://www.ascb.org/dora/ and popularize this declaration among other researchers. Help your colleagues who don't know how to find an article fast.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#352

Post by AsyncAwait » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 6:49 PM UTC

narag wrote: post #349

AsyncAwait wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#353

Post by Bartweiss » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:44 PM UTC

yardie wrote: post #343

Bartweiss wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 ha…

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.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#354

Post by layoutIfNeeded » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

0815test wrote: post #347

layoutIfNeeded wrote: post #334

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>And then it all was destroyed. We still have communities like that, but you need the right connections to get in.

So, like the warez d00dz of old? That's to be expected I suppose, but not really what parent poster was talking about!

Nah, not the WaReZ scene (which is also very much alive), but the private torrent trackers, like HDBits, redacted, passthepopcorn, etc.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#355

Post by valerij » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 7:52 PM UTC

jacquesm wrote: post #263

valerij wrote: post #121

wonder why SciHub was not already moved to distributed hosting system like https://ipfs.io/ or https://zeronet.io/

Because of the very large amount of data.

could be solved by splitting into several sub sites by topic and further thematic distinctions.

zer0nets youtube pedant solves this by creating a site for each "channel" und just aggregating them

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#356

Post by valerij » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 8:01 PM UTC

larkeith wrote: post #54

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.

ok, so how do we do this?

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#357

Post by derefr » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 8:20 PM UTC

Bartweiss wrote: post #324

derefr wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 in…

> 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.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#358

Post by simias » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 8:22 PM UTC

jimktrains2 wrote: post #293

simias wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-…

> 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.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#359

Post by vanderZwan » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 8:27 PM UTC

Vaskivo wrote: post #298

tapoxi wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I imagine EA doesn't care about sales of FIFA 96, but they sure as shit worry about losing their FIFA license.

Playing devil's advocate, I think some lawyer got nervous about the licensed stuff in those games. The FIFA games usually have licenses to use the teams and player names. and lots of licensed music.

IANAL so I'm genuinely asking: isn't that the responsibility of the licensed teams/player names/musicians and not of EA?

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#360

Post by Mediterraneo10 » Tue, Apr 02, 2019, 8:42 PM UTC

derefr wrote: post #357

Bartweiss wrote: post #324

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 in…

> 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 t…

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.