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Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

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Re: Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

#121

Post by amiga386 »

hellfish wrote: post #107
amiga386 wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You should read the link, even though it is http. It would correct your understanding: z-library started with all the books from libgen, set up access controls and limits to incentivize uploading new books, garnered millions of new books, and didn't contribute them back. Also, consider your risks more holistically: * Honeypots can and do have valid https certificates, what matters is who controls the site (for exampl…

> Even if you use DNS-over-HTTPS/TLS, you don't know if your DNS provider is in cahoots with the eavesdropper. You have to trust someone but in this case, couldn't you just use an offshore dns provider that's in a jurisdiction that won't cooperate with judicial system? (assuming here adversary is getting sued by copyright holder, not govt agency)

If making requests offshore is a panacea, use a VPN that proxies _all_ your traffic there. Then you needn't care if the website is HTTPS or HTTP

In the case of _this_ site, it has nothing a copyright holder could complain about, so it doesn't matter if you visit it. It says "We don't link to it from here, but just Google for 'Pirate Library Mirror'". Yup, why not tell Google what you're doing? Once you've done that, and visited the (also HTTP only) "Pirate Library Mirror" site, you'll find it doesn't have any .torrent files. But it does have a link to a .onion site available only in Tor Browser. And the onion site _does_ have .torrent files you can download and add it to your Bittorrent client and begin infringing copyrights.

The two HTTP sites involved have nothing that could get you legally into trouble, even if an eavesdropper saw _all_ your traffic. It's certainly good practise to make all sites HTTPS, but for these specific sites, it isn't a downside that they're HTTP-only. The only situation I can think where HTTPS vs HTTP would make a difference is quite unlikely: if an active attacker, able to modify your traffic, substituted a link to a different .onion site, with different .torrent files specifically for you

Re: Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

#122

Post by dale_glass »

curtisblaine wrote: post #116
dale_glass wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worthwhile to be precise when we argue. Saying it's not stealing isn't necessarily saying it's harmless or that it's not illegal. It's just not the same sort of action. Eg, if you steal a book from a shelf, then it's gone. The shop can no longer sell it to anyone else, and needs to obtain a replacement. The customer that really need it may not be able to get it now. But if a 10 year old from a dirt poor…

> I think it's very arguable that there was no scenario in which the authors would have gotten paid Just to be sure: do you think that if people can't afford something that's not physically tangible they should be entitled (or at least permitted) to have it free of charge, because they wouldn't buy it anyway? I wouldn't buy (and probably wouldn't afford) a 30-day stay at the most luxurious spa in my country, should I…

> I wouldn't buy (and probably wouldn't afford) a 30-day stay at the most luxurious spa in my country, should I insist that they let me enter anyway?

That's tangible. You consume space, resources, people time, water, energy, etc. People have to clean after you.

For comparison, take the scenario of a 10 year old from a poor family pirating Solidworks, which costs $5000-ish a license. The family doesn't have $5000 in their bank account.

So there exist two possible outcomes of this situation:

A. Kid pirates Solidworks. Company makes $0.

B. Kid doesn't pirate Solidworks. Company makes $0, because it's impossible for them to buy it.

That's precisely why many such companies have huge educational discounts, and offer software for free to students sometimes, and sometimes ignore piracy in some areas. If you could eliminate piracy by non-engineering companies you wouldn't make much of a difference, because pretty much no hobbyist out there spends $5000 on software they might use just a bit. Rather than buying it, they'll make do with alternatives instead.

Re: Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

#123

Post by nodja »

amiga386 wrote: post #98
hellfish wrote: post #67

Why the hell is this site not https? Note the first blog post was in 2022. No https in 2022? Red flag. This looks like a honeypot to me And for the record, z library gets its books from libgen? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was just a frontend?

You should read the link, even though it is http. It would correct your understanding: z-library started with all the books from libgen, set up access controls and limits to incentivize uploading new books, garnered millions of new books, and didn't contribute them back. Also, consider your risks more holistically: * Honeypots can and do have valid https certificates, what matters is who controls the site (for exampl…

http content can also be modified in flight by your ISP/VPN/Starbucks wifi hotspot spoofer, you could easily change the links on the page to ones where you would end up downloading malware/spyware versions of the products

Re: Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

#124

Post by staringback »

8t88t8tttt8 wrote: post #26
snvzz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to run ipfs behind tor. And I'd argue it is the right way to do so.

Doesn't that saturate Tor? Bittorrent via Tor was always highly discouraged to not overload the network with all the p2p traffic and IPFS is a very similar technique.

> Doesn't that saturate Tor? No, that's a stupid myth that needs to die. The tor network is nowhere near the advertised bandwidth capacity: https://metrics.torproject.org/bandwidth-flags.html

Re: Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

#125

Post by chmike »

bheadmaster wrote: post #112
chmike wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You steal the author's investment in time and effort to write the book and conceive it's content. How you steal (making a copy) doesn't affect the fact that you prevent the author to get his share or reward from it.

I invested the time and effort to write this comment. I want you to pay me. I'll be expecting a cheque in my mail soon. If you don't pay me, you're stealing from me.

I'm obviously talking about ebooks downloaded from commercial platforms like KDP Amazon, and distributed for free on Z-library without permission from the author.

Comparing this to your comment is whataboutism. Comments on hacker news are free to read. If you want to be payed for your writing, use a platform that support this.

However, you do have an automatic copyright on everything you write and I would need your permission (eventually by paying you a fee) to republish it in a book or somewhere else. Fair use is an exception to that, but the amount of text we can reuse without permission is limited. These are rules.

Re: Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

#126

Post by MayeulC »

imhoguy wrote: post #48
snvzz wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is possible to run ipfs behind tor. And I'd argue it is the right way to do so.

IPFS wont run via Tor, DHT is UDP based and Tor doesn't support UDP by design. Did my research last weekend, anybody more knowledgable, please correct me if I am wrong. Possibly it should run fine via I2P or Yggdrasil.

Yggdrasil is not really anonymous, though.

Re: Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

#127

Post by [deleted] »

pt_PT_guy wrote: post #39

Instructions are not easy. I want a out of the box solution to help without having to deeply dig into the internals. Something like archive team warriors: http://warrior.archiveteam.org/ For example, > Bitswap vs DHT I don't care. I want to help without having to care about these details. > Launch one or multiple IPFS servers (see previous blog post; we currently use 4 servers in Docker). what? how? where? link? no o…

[deleted]

Re: Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

#128

Post by [deleted] »

hellfish wrote: post #67

Why the hell is this site not https? Note the first blog post was in 2022. No https in 2022? Red flag. This looks like a honeypot to me And for the record, z library gets its books from libgen? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was just a frontend?

[deleted]

Re: Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

#129

Post by schoen »

dale_glass wrote: post #76
danwee wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, if the FBI comes to arrest me can I just get away with that? "Sorry guys, I do have an IPFS server but I had no idea it was distributing illegal content to the world. Can I go now?"

Some systems have tried that approach, yes! In Freenet you contribute to a global pool of storage, and end up storing and transmitting whatever the network happens to need. Freenet is intentionally obscure about it. The archive is encrypted, there are no logs, there's no way to list what your node contains, and storage is probabilistic making it hard to determine if something is there because you asked for it, or it…

I want to slightly clarify the case of Tor: while many people historically thought that running an exit node on your own network (that you also actively used) might create ambiguity between your own activity and strangers' activity, this is not really considered correct or advisable. One reason is that a fairly naive local adversary monitoring your connection at only one location can still tell whether particular outbound clearnet connections do or don't correlate with inbound Tor traffic. That allows distinguishing activity by a local user from activity by a Tor user that's proxied through the exit node.

Tor nodes themselves also don't host any data.

Re: Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

#130

Post by curtisblaine »

dale_glass wrote: post #122
curtisblaine wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I think it's very arguable that there was no scenario in which the authors would have gotten paid Just to be sure: do you think that if people can't afford something that's not physically tangible they should be entitled (or at least permitted) to have it free of charge, because they wouldn't buy it anyway? I wouldn't buy (and probably wouldn't afford) a 30-day stay at the most luxurious spa in my country, should I…

> I wouldn't buy (and probably wouldn't afford) a 30-day stay at the most luxurious spa in my country, should I insist that they let me enter anyway? That's tangible. You consume space, resources, people time, water, energy, etc. People have to clean after you. For comparison, take the scenario of a 10 year old from a poor family pirating Solidworks, which costs $5000-ish a license. The family doesn't have $5000 in t…

> Kid doesn't pirate Solidworks. Company makes $0, because it's impossible for them to buy it.

I have this impression that "poor kid" vs "incredibly expensive software" is used as a strawman here, since we're talking of $30 books that anyone who's not incredibly poor can buy just by saving for a couple of months and anyone who's that poor can probably access using a public library anyway, versus the enormous amount of people that could afford those books, but see no incentive paying since they can pirate them for free without even going out of their house.

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