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Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

pilimi.org

151–160 of 438 posts

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#151
post #140
post #124

Again, it's just insane to me that we don't even much have a meaningful discussion of: "Hey, wait, literally everyone could have the entire library of Alexandria in their house for a couple hundred bucks per person. Like, all the knowledge ever. Maybe that should be considered the good default of things. At least one in every town that everyone could use, for free, forever, without restriction to ANY of the knowledge…

We've basically already had that for decades thanks to public libraries. In fact, between large collections and inter-library loans most provide 1-2 orders of magnitude more content than the library of Alexandria ever held

My relatively uninformed opinion is that the Library of Alexandria was an amazing resource for its time, but in modern context is tremendously overrated. While it certainly contained a vast amount of knowledge for the time, the amount of valuable, useful, accessible information of a modern mid-size city library I would guess is substantially greater.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#152
post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh, it didn't come up to me to navigate "backwards". Thanks. Actually, their whole FAQ is quite more enlightening than just the linked page. http://pilimi.org/faq.html

I found a book I've been looking for, but it was only an image scan pdf. I OCR'ed it, and I'm slowly fixing the errors and converting to epub. Tedious, but interesting.

Kudos to you, but I would probably be wary of admitting to participate in the illegal book piracy scene unless your pseudonymity is really tight. Thanks a lot for helping out, though.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#153

I see things like this, and I wonder why the following software doesn't exist: I want a piece of software to which I can add a collection of files, say multiple TB. The software will then behave a bit like a BitTorrent tracker, and know which peer has which files. A peer joining this swarm will be able to say "I want to donate X GB of space", and the tracker would tell it "OK, then download and seed these files, whic…

Have always thought this would be a great way for many people to share well organized Plex libraries. Many semi-overlapping libraries basically creating a virtual Netflix, with some way to stream in Plex from the whole library no matter if you actually have the content locally or not

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What kind of fairness can there be in charging for stolen books? I believe in free access to education, but charging for these books they have no rights to is a whole other thing.

Golden rule of piracy: don’t profit from stolen works or it’s not piracy, it’s profiteering.

Revenue != Profit. I really doubt they're doing anything beyond paying to keep the lights on.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#155

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They can't take it down.

so you're telling me there's CSAM on IPFS that feds "can't" take down? Somehow I doubt that.

Somehow? How? Do you know how IPFS works? They can't take down torrents either.

But we were talking about filecoin raking something down from ipfs. They can't do it.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#156
post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you take a moment to check it Google Books search still exists? I'll give you a hint: https://books.google.com/?hl=en > Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books.

> I'll give you a hint: https://books.google.com/?hl=en >> Search the world's most comprehensive index of full-text books. I mean, the domain resolves, but that doesn't mean the product exists. You can run searches, but you're not allowed to see the results.

Why aren't you allowed to see the results?

I search, see the results, and then click on a result to view the applicable contents of a particular book. In the contents that get displayed, the search term I had entered is highlighted.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#157
post #124

Again, it's just insane to me that we don't even much have a meaningful discussion of: "Hey, wait, literally everyone could have the entire library of Alexandria in their house for a couple hundred bucks per person. Like, all the knowledge ever. Maybe that should be considered the good default of things. At least one in every town that everyone could use, for free, forever, without restriction to ANY of the knowledge…

Insane in the abstract, but not exactly unfathomable. Who would make money off of that, and who else makes money off of it's absense?

No one would make money off of it. That is the point. There are innumerable things which are worthwhile which are not profitable.

The idea that we do not do a world library of free digital copies of every book ever written really highlights the problem with the thinking your comment has demonstrated. The idea that individual pursuits must make a profit to be justified leads to us doing terrible things like: not making a free world library of every book.

Though in this particular case this also demonstrates a major problem with intellectual property concepts. Actually hosting the library isn't very expensive. But we have made doing so illegal. Of course, authors deserve to live a decent life just like everyone else. We currently do that by restricting all access to duplications of information they have produced so that they can charge a fee for access, and that fee provides for their survival.

But we suffer an incalculable loss by making all this information restricted. In my view we would be MUCH better off as a society with respect to creativity, innovation, and other popular metrics for progress, if we actually made sure as a society that every person's survival was provided for with no need for them to pay for it. Then authors wouldn't need to get paid, engineers could do what they love to do and post all their work as open source, and we could have a free library for everyone. This extreme openness would in my mind lead to more rapid innovation, and markets would still function as first movers would maintain an advantage for new product releases, though they would have to keep moving as anything they've done that is worthwhile would be copied. But since no one's livelihood would be at stake, this is not a real issue.

This can all be done in a voluntary, libertarian society as long as we have community ownership of the means of production, and promote these ideals of community support in this society. And I think we would be way better off. Doing this would allow us to offer every book ever recorded for free to every person on Earth. A big change, but one with obviously a very big benefit to humanity.

One note though: people who want to own a lot for themselves really mess this up. So people would need to dissuade those people from acting that way. My preferred method of doing so is by starving them of workers and customers, though when it comes to control of land matters get more serious.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ECH looks quite interesting, but isn't it quite easy to do a reverse DNS lookup for most domains?

The answer is no. There was a Cloudflare article on ECH a while back that mentioned the fallibility of using reverse DNS, but I am having trouble locating it. In any event, the people working on ECH have coined a term called the "anonymity set". Below is a Cloudflare article that uses this term. https://blog.cloudflare.com/handshake-encryption-endgame-an-... The "anonymity set" refers to the number of possible domain…

I will bet 10$ that with reverse DNS + DPI to try to suss out page size and caching behaviour you can identify anyone accessing this website and downloading the 7TB database.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#159

I see things like this, and I wonder why the following software doesn't exist: I want a piece of software to which I can add a collection of files, say multiple TB. The software will then behave a bit like a BitTorrent tracker, and know which peer has which files. A peer joining this swarm will be able to say "I want to donate X GB of space", and the tracker would tell it "OK, then download and seed these files, whic…

Donating space is only half of the equation. I think donating bandwidth is a more significant aspect, especially with ISP's like Comcast which provide very little upload bandwidth compared to download. You'd expect that uploads wouldn't impact download speeds, but it's not the case. A saturated upload bandwidth means, ACK packets getting delayed, which means connections would be established way more slower. So, it's not a feasible prospect unless the competition takes over.

Re: Pirate Library Mirror: Preserving 7TB of books (that are not in Libgen)

#160
post #124

Again, it's just insane to me that we don't even much have a meaningful discussion of: "Hey, wait, literally everyone could have the entire library of Alexandria in their house for a couple hundred bucks per person. Like, all the knowledge ever. Maybe that should be considered the good default of things. At least one in every town that everyone could use, for free, forever, without restriction to ANY of the knowledge…

OK, what's the napkin math?

I don't know about "all the knowledge ever", but to give you a baseline, the entire Wikipedia with images but without editing history, as last archived by Kiwix in May, 2022, is 90 Gb.

A web server can run just fine on e.g. Raspberry Pi Zero W ($10), exposing any such content to any smartphone etc able to connect to it via WiFi (Kiwix sells preconfigured SD cards for their content, even). So, assuming that most people already have a phone or a laptop or even something like a Kindle, the only non-negligible cost here is storage. And a 1 Tb SD card can be had for under $150 right now.

So if anything, I think OP is overly conservative, given that their estimate was "$200 per person". Unless that counts the devices used to consume the content, and not just storage and the server.

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