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How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

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Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#131

Post by teeray »

crtasm wrote: post #117
dredmorbius wrote: post #76

A few years back, frustrated with increasaed DNS blocking of Sci-Hub, I wrote a quick DNSMasq hack (haq?) to return Sci-Hub IPs for any "sci-hub. " possible. The shins-n-grits factor of surfing "scihub.elsevier.com" were palpable. https://old.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/7m3uin/meta_if_you... As others have mentioned, Sci-Hub also maintains a Tor presence, and you can access the Onion link using the Tor browser (pro…

Unfortunately the .onion is currently timing out. Love the haq!

I’ve never had success with their .onion link. I suspect something may be wrong there.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#132

Post by lowkey »

hyperbovine wrote: post #82
lowkey wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sci-hub is such a great example of a clear and compelling use-case for Bitcoin. Bitcoin is censorship-resistant money that doesn't rely on countries, laws, central bankers or politicians. The US dollar cannot be used for purposes not aligned with the US government. Sometimes ideas that the US Government doesn't agree with can be useful (e.g. Wikileaks, Sci-hub.) When I hear complaints that Bitcoin has no use except f…

It's a censorship resistant technology that also indelibly records, publicly, every transaction you ever participated in. Talk about a double-edged sword...

Agree, it's an interesting trade-off: Completely private if you can use an anonymous address but completely traceable if the address is identified. I wonder if Satoshi intended it that way or if he would have preferred the greater anonymity of Monero.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#133

Post by dredmorbius »

spicybright wrote: post #122
dredmorbius wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What documents (books, scientific articles) benefit from specifically is a number of highly consistent, highly accurate identifiers: DOI (scientific articles), ISBN (published books), and others (OCLC identifier, Library of Congress Catalogue Number, etc.) With the addition of hashsums (even MD5 ad SHA1, though longer and more robust hashsums are preferred), a pretty reliable archive of content can be made. It's a cu…

Why map anything to words for strict identification? Words and language are very error prone vs an id number or hash.

It's a bit of an itch I've been scratching for a few years.

Most especially, given two or more instances of what you suspect to be the same or a substantively similar work, how can you assess this in a robust and format-independent manner, programmatically?

For works with well-formed metadata, this isn't an issue.

For identical duplicate copies of the same file, a hash is effective.

But for the circumstance most often encountered in reality --- different forms and formats derived from different sources but containing substantially the same work --- there is no simple solution of which I'm aware. As examples, say you have a reference document The Reference Document.

How do I determine that:

- An ACSCII-only textfile

- Markdown, HTML, DocBook, and LaTeX sources

- PDF, MS Word (which version), PS, DJVU, ePub, or .mobi files (sling any other formats you care to mention).

- Hardbound and paperback physical copies

- Scans made from the same or different physical books or instances, versions, and/or translations.

- Audiobooks based on a work. By the same or different readers.

- Dramatic performances, films, video series, comic-book adaptations, etc., of a work. (Say: Hamlet or Romeo and Juliet. What is the relationship to "West Side Story" (and which version), or Pyramus and Thisbe?)

- Re-typed or OCRed text

... all refer to the same work?

How do you define "work"?

How do you define "differences between works"?

How do you distinguish intentional, accidental, and incidental differences between instances? (Say: translations, errata, corrections, additions for the one, transcription errors for the second, and scanning or rendering artefacts for the third.)

If you're working in an environment in which instances of works come from different sources with different provenances, these questions arise. At least some of these questions are prominent in library science itself. It's the technical mapping of digitised formats I'm focusing on most closely, so the physical instantiations aren't as critical here, though the presumption is that these could be converted to some machine-readable form.

In bibliographic / library science, the term is "work, expression, manifestation"

https://www.loc.gov/marc/marbi/2011/2011-dp03.html

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#134

Post by Taek »

tmkadamcz wrote: post #10

By the way, Sci-Hub has stopped adding new articles to the database for a few months now (background: https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/mk46x4/scihub_v_els... ). It would be great to develop a truly decentralised solution. Having a database of individual torrent links for each paper might be a start.

You can build something like this on Skynet. Links on Skynet (called skylinks) can point to hashes of data (similar to IPFS)or can point to a pubkey. If the data points to a pubkey, it can be tweaked repeatedly and people with the old links will see the new data.

You can also point to full webapps. So for example you could have a pubkey point to a webapp that then loads the database from a list of moderators who update the data under their pubkeys to point to the latest version of scihub. Then you can even have different moderators curate articles of different subjects, and the webapp can combine everything together.

All the data is stored on Sia, which is a decentralized cloud storage platform. Skynet allows anyone to upload or download data from Sia directly from the web, no need for extensions or custom software. The Sia network handles what IPFS calls "seeding", so contributors don't need to worry about leaving their machines on.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#135

Post by Taek »

miloignis wrote: post #102
Natsu wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I sort of feel like there should be some way to use some kind of construct to get people to seed things so that others seed things for them, but I haven't seen that invented yet.

Been a while since I've looked at them, but IPFS with FileCoin and Ethereum Swarm had that kind of goal. It might be beneficial to create something like what you describe without any cryptocurrency association though, and I've been mulling over possibilities for distributed systems that are inherently currency-less to avoid all of the scams that cryptocurrency attracts.

The leader in that space is Skynet, which basically is like IPFS + Filecoin but also has dynamic elements to it, and a lot better performance + reliability.

Cryptocurrency is helpful because it allows you to incentivize people to hold the data. If you don't have cryptocurrency, you're basically dependent on altruism to keep data alive (like bittorrent, or ipfs without filecoin). Popular files do okay for a while, but even popular files struggle to provide good uptime and reliability after a few years.

On an incentivized network like Sia or Filecoin, you can have high performance and reliability without ever needing any users to keep their machines online and seeding.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#137

Post by o8r3oFTZPE »

o8r3oFTZPE wrote: post #67
contravariant wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was that project some guy posted a while back that used a combination of sqlite and partial downloads to enable searches on a database before it was downloaded all the way. If you can fit PDFs somewhere into that you'd be golden. Or just use IPFS I suppose.

"There was that project some guy posted a while back that used a combination of sqlite and partial downloads to enable searches on a database before it was downloaded all the way." https://github.com/bittorrent/sqltorrent

This is the original. Then came https://github.com/lmatteis/net-torrent and later one written in Javascript, inspired by net-torrent.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#138

Post by brunoqc »

andyxor wrote: post #28
tmkadamcz wrote: post #10

By the way, Sci-Hub has stopped adding new articles to the database for a few months now (background: https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/mk46x4/scihub_v_els... ). It would be great to develop a truly decentralised solution. Having a database of individual torrent links for each paper might be a start.

IPFS seems like a perfect fit for this and some of the scihub torrents are already in IPFS, but it's not an anonymous network. IPFS via the DHT tells the network of your whole network topology, including internal address you may have, and VPN endpoints too. It's all public by design as they don't want to associate IPFS with piracy per one of their developers. this thread has some discussions on the alternatives https…

If 2 people add the same file in ipfs independently on their side. Will the ipfs hash be the same?

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#139

Post by jpeloquin »

munk-a wrote: post #47
einpoklum wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the sane price is an optional "Donate to keep this site going" link, then ok. But only free access, without authentication or payment, to scientific papers, is sane. IMHO.

Might this be a case where the best resolution would be to have the government (which is at least partially funding nearly all of these papers) step in and add a ledger of papers as a proof of investment? The cost of maintaining a free and open DB of scientific advances and publications would be so incredibly insignificant compared to both the value and the continued investment in those advancements.

> Might this be a case where the best resolution would be to have the government (which is at least partially funding nearly all of these papers) step in and add a ledger of papers as a proof of investment?

I feel that we're halfway there already and are gaining ground. Does Pubmed Central [0] (a government-hosted open access repository for NIH-funded work) count as a "ledger" like you're referring to? The NSF's site does a good job of explaining current US open access policy [1]. There are occasional attempts to expand the open access mandate by legislation, such as FASTR [2]. A hypothetical expansion of the open access mandate to apply to all works from /institutions/ that receive indirect costs, not just individual projects that receive direct costs, would open things up even more.

[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/

[1] https://www.nsf.gov/pubs/2016/nsf16009/nsf16009.jsp#q1

[2] https://sparcopen.org/our-work/fastr/

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#140

Post by a_bonobo »

ta988 wrote: post #127
divbzero wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s up to not only academics who publish articles, but also organizations that issue grants and tenure. Public policies to adjust their definitions of “prestige” or “quality” would help.

And these are mostly run by people that have not even heard of scihub, openaccess etc

Case in point: The ARC, the biggest Australian Research funding body, recently explicitly banned the mention of preprints in grants. You can't include your own arxiv/biorxiv/etc. preprints in your grants to show your work! To the ARC, that's unpublished work. I know a few mathematicians who exclusively publish on arxiv who were bitten by this change, the whole grant got rejected.
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