A very easy one: Firefox > Preferences > General > Network settings > Enable DNS overs HTTPS
This is a good step, but afaik you can still identify and block a website using onyl the TLS traffic, even without the DNS.
How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
171–180 of 196 posts
Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
#172By 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.
Millions of individual torrents is not a great solution. Keeping them all seeded is basically impossible unless they run a seed for each one, at which point they might as well just host the files. Plus you'll never get the economy of scale that makes BitTorrent really shine. When you have a whole lot of tiny files that people will generally only want one or two of there isn't much better than a plain old website. A t…
BitTorrent does allow you to download a single file from a torrent though. You could have torrent for each month, and a client which allows you to search inside these torrents and download only the files you need.
Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
#173The way SciHub is being treated by governments is pretty infuriating. There's a tiny minority of people who have an interest in keeping SciHub off the internet, and they're generally neither the researchers who write the papers, nor those who want to read them. Despite this, the power of the state has been used repeatedly to keep SciHub inaccessible and limit their ability to get funding.
SciHub is just one instance of the broader problem, which is that governments - even ostensibly democratic ones - don't actually operate in the best interests of the governed. Which, I think, shouldn't be surprising when our "representatives" ostensibly speak for hundreds of thousands (and sometimes, millions) of people each. True democracy requires a much shorter and more direct chain of responsibility.
One thing that I think is being missed in this discussion is that governments have a responsibility to enforce the laws that are currently on the books. Perhaps more importantly, they also need to be seen to be enforcing them.
SciHub was allowed to operate freely for several years when it was relatively unknown, but to turn a blind eye to it now that it's received mainstream attention would threaten the credibility of the legal system.
I wholeheartedly support SciHub, but I can't blame governments for enforcing their laws. Ultimately, the changes need to happen at the legislative level to update copyright laws, and this somewhere where lobbying local representatives could have a meaningful impact.
Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, due to allocation of property rights. Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors.
> Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors. Historically academics have felt forced to support this system, because for-profit journals are the high-prestige ones they must publish in in order to get tenure. This has changed for certain fields, but it isn’t as simple as just suggesting that one publish elsewhere.
One can publish online a pre-print for free, which is very close to the final version of the paper.
Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
#175Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ofte…
The general problem here is not solvable with technology if there is no universally agreed definition for “a work” - and there isn’t (this touches on some profound issues of ontology).
And so I suspect the way forward is to maintain human-curated mappings of file hashes to “works”, where “a work” is a matter of the curator’s opinion, and different curations will be valued differently by different consumers of that information. For example, maybe a literary expert would have a great and respected method of organizing the works and derived works of Shakespeare, but that same person might not be sought out for their views on pop songs.
You could probably start with an ML-based curation that gets it 80% right, and fill out the last 20% with gamified crowdsourcing (with multiple competing interpretations of the last 20%).
Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
#176A 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…
scihub22266oqcxt.onion is a v2 onion address which are deprecated for security reasons and no longer supported in Tor. For more information see https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline
Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
#177Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Does it scale well? SciHub is at least 100TB.
Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
#178Wikimedia should start publishing science articles (legally). It has the infrastructure, money and culture to become a non-profit world-scale publisher with decentralized curation.
Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
#179Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Does it scale well? SciHub is at least 100TB.
Skynet already hosts nearly 1,000 TB of data. At 100 TB, SciHub would be material but also comfortable.
Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block
#180Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm growning skeptical of the idea that every science text should be free. As a community that values privacy, it's hypocritical that these widespread leaking is so well accepted. The fact that scihub needs to skip domain names every couple of months and that ISPs start blocking the website, looks to confirm my theory, rather than imply some worldwide conspiracy.
What does this have to do with privacy?
Publishers want to keep the papers relatively private.