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A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network

zlib.zu1k.com

181–190 of 215 posts

Re: A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network

#181

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think Consensys/IPFS/Libp2p is just some corporatized way to derail real P2P and decentralization. Their libraries are total garbage. Lots of complicated code that simply doesn't work. No documentation. I mean look how much IPFS and Libp2p is pumped but IT DOESN'T WORK. IPNS is a joke. All way overengineered crap that does everything but actually nothing. Look at the $$$ and pedigree behind Consensys it's…

Peer-to-peer is too general and too useful to be spoilt by "blockchain". But there is so much money behind this crap it is a formidable virus that can infect any project. ConsenSys is a company formed by Ethereum co-founder. He has sold out to the big banks, in the opinion of some Consensys shareholders. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/consensys-shareholders-readyi... "Falls says he believes both MetaMask and Infura -…

Above I stated, "IPFS now uses base58btc exclusively." A more precise statement would have been something like, "IPFS CIDs originally used base58btc exclusively." It looks like IPFS is moving to a new CID protocol that allows use of non-BTC hashes. That's a step in the right direction, IMHO.

"In CIDv0, hashes are always encoded with base58btc. Always."

https://web.archive.org/web/20200810110206/https://proto.sch...

"Converting CID versions

You can convert any CIDv0 to CIDv1, because the implicit prefixes from v0 become explicit in v1. However, because CIDv1 supports multiple codecs and multiple bases and CIDv0 does not, not all CIDv1 can be converted to CIDv0. In fact, only CIDv1 that have the following properties can be converted to CIDv0:

multibase = base58btc multicodec = dag-pb multihash-algorithm = sha2-256 multihash-length = 32 (32 bytes, equivalent to 256 bits)"

https://proto.school/anatomy-of-a-cid/06/

Thank you @2color for the correction.

Re: A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network

#182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly I think Consensys/IPFS/Libp2p is just some corporatized way to derail real P2P and decentralization. Their libraries are total garbage. Lots of complicated code that simply doesn't work. No documentation. I mean look how much IPFS and Libp2p is pumped but IT DOESN'T WORK. IPNS is a joke. All way overengineered crap that does everything but actually nothing. Look at the $$$ and pedigree behind Consensys it's…

Peer-to-peer is too general and too useful to be spoilt by "blockchain". But there is so much money behind this crap it is a formidable virus that can infect any project. ConsenSys is a company formed by Ethereum co-founder. He has sold out to the big banks, in the opinion of some Consensys shareholders. https://finance.yahoo.com/news/consensys-shareholders-readyi... "Falls says he believes both MetaMask and Infura -…

More on financial relationship between IPFS (Protocol Labs) and Consensys (Ethereum co-founder):

https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/consensys-raises-65...

https://www.reuters.com/technology/blockchain-firm-consensys...

https://consensys.net/blog/press-release/protocol-labs-colla...

Re: A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network

#183
post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Except that making a living as an author or via another creative pursuit is a luxury and privilege premised upon the hard labor performed by countless others which actually reproduces our society. It’s also not really a matter of entitlement. It’s just an objective fact that trying to gatekeep knowledge behind IP toll bridges is a losing battle which only serves to hinder the development of many realms of human endea…

You want to kill the goose so you can consume the eggs. You want to steal their products but condemn the creators. You must not know creative types and how much most of them sacrifice to try and create from the passion inside them.

Actually I do. Their passion doesn’t entitle them to anything, and their sacrifices pale in comparison to those made by people who do hard labor for a living.

IP laws don’t protect small creators anyway, most of whom will fail regardless. They protect the big conglomerates from multitudes of potential creators who might otherwise find education and success outside of the established institutions.

Re: A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network

#184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're confusing ConsenSys and Protocol Labs. ConsenSys was founded by Joe Lubin, and is the corporate entity behind MetaMask, Infura, etc. It counts MasterCard and JP Morgan as investors. Protocol Labs was founded by Juan Benet and is the primary sponsor of IPFS and the dev team behind Filecoin. They're funded primarily from the private token sales of FIL. Agree with the sibling comment that the focus on modularity…

ConsenSys is to IPFS as Blockstream is to BTC

No, Protocol Labs it to IPFS as Blockstream is to BTC.

ConsenSys is an entirely different company focused on Ethereum, and neither invented nor maintain IPFS. That's Protocol Labs.

Protocol Labs didn't start out of ConsenSys either — in fact, I don't believe they have too much beneficial ownership in common at all. In addition to the separate founding stories already mentioned, you can read about how Protocol Labs was initially funded by Union Square.

Re: A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network

#185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That should probably read "doesn't scale without centralization". The full answer to that question is way, way, way beyond the appropriate length for an HN comment. DHTs need to accept requests from any random IP address, anywhere on the Internet. If you allocate state, you have to deal with resource exhaustion attacks. Dealing with them turns out to be way harder than anybody thinks when they first start down this p…

You can restrict DHTs to accept well-formed requests and further restrict them using a web of trust. With a large enough network and an on onboarding path using nodes that have higher bandwidth, it can work to mitigate that vector I’d think. It would be really hard to launch that attack with a DHT that implements appropriate pruning, drop, and block rules for bad behavior. All that can feed into a personal (& autonom…

> an on onboarding path using nodes that have higher bandwidth

i.e. Cloudflare. It works great. It is centralized.

> Any references for me to read more about this?

https://www.bittorrent.org/beps/bep_0000.html

https://zetok.github.io/tox-spec/

Re: A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network

#186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think that really depends on the type of book. I've found the large PDFs to be by far the most reliable for books printed before the 20th century because - save for Google Books - no one's OCR is tuned for the kind of printing errors, age related wear and tear, and fonts used over the centuries. Manuscripts (which are admittedly very niche) often have to be high resolution scans or photographs just to be readable,…

Surely books published before the 20th century are in the public domain by now, though?

They are but someone has to be in possession of the book and go through the trouble of digitizing it. Usually it’s museums, libraries, and private collections and a variety of enthusiasts eventually upload from those sources to Zlib/libgen. Since no one cares about copyright there anyway it can be more complete in some genres than other central databases.

Re: A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network

#187
post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A wealth-indexed fee averaging about $5/mo per household in the US and collected through broadband providers could provide access to every work ever published, pay authors, and eliminate both the need and practice of piracy. The publishing industry prefers, however, to hoard its Smaug-gold, make criminals of the curious, deny access both to the vast majority of the population and to the vast majority of works, all to…

I am opposed to copyright in its current form, but this is a very naïve suggestion. How exactly do you distribute the fee among authors? Who collects it? How does dispute resolution work, if I don't feel like I'm being compensated fairly? Can I opt out if I don't read books? What if everyone opts out and just continues pirating? Let's say I just published one hundred books of semi-AI generated bad fiction. When can I…

Q: How exactly do you distribute the fee among authors?

The model of mechanical royalties already exists in the music industry. That provides a useful model for other copyrighted works. Effectively this creates a regulated, universal, legally-defined market. I can see some variations in rates based on content types, discussed in previous HN discussions.

See:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royalty_payment#Mechanical_roy...>

https://www.royaltyexchange.com/blog/mechanical-royalties>

https://www.bmi.com/news/entry/Understanding_Mechanical_Roya...>

Please note that this is discussed at length in the previously-linked thread here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33698018>

Q: Who collects [payments]?

A "~$5/mo per household in the US and collected through broadband providers", as stated in my parent comment.

Q: How does dispute resolution work?

Ownership disputes are adjudicated as they are today.

Auditing disputes are adjudicated as they are today, modulo restrictions against binding arbitration and other conditions as discussed by Cory Doctorow and Rebecca Giblin in Chokepoint Capitalism: https://bookshop.org/p/books/chokepoint-capitalism-how-big-t...>

Payment rate disputes are addressed through a regulator, genre / content-tier basis, and the legislative / political process reflecting interests of the public, creators, publishers, and other stakeholders.

Q: Can I opt out if I don't read books?

No.

On the basis that the common wealth created by others having access to information is a public good and benefit, much as police, fire, health, sewerage, and defence services are. Note that the cost is indexed to wealth/income, such that those of limited means pay little or nothing. Keep in mind that you are already paying roughly $800/year per head for content access through advertising. This isn't an additional fee, it's a restructuring of an existing financing model with many perverse outcomes in terms of manipulation, the type(s) of content incentivised, a pervasive surveillance model, and frauds against both advertising targets and advertisers.

Q: What if everyone opts out?

See above.

Q: What about AI-generated crud?

This is where I see a graduated compensation model with a number of tiers. AI-based glurge would see rates based on the costs of production, as would investigative journalism. The former would result in very low compensation rates, the latter should see higher. Quality-determination by various means might well be an element. Whilst individual negotiation by bidders isn't something I see as part of the model, a collective bidding based on sectors, guilds, and/or major aggregated publishers could be.

Discussed earlier: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26893033> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10077674> https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/1uotb3/a_modes...>

This HN comment search on "content syndication by:dredmorbius" should address numerous other concerns: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...>

Re: A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network

#189
post #61

I hope every project you work on has it's source code stolen resulting in failure. And this is coming from a pretty crappy person, but this website sure does love stealing from authors (so that it can enjoy the fruits of their labor).

No one is entitled to a particular form of revenue. We live in an attention-based economy. Talented and savvy authors can find any number of ways to derive revenue from the attention their work attracts apart from charging IP tolls. If not, they can always get a job where they have no ownership stake in the fruits of their labor, like almost every other job and 99.9% of people writing code for money.

Whilst I've some sympathies with this argument, it dismisses the larger question of how to provide societal benefits of information and entertainment creation.

It's quite possible that the size of such sectors today is excessive, though there's a strong argument that information is under-incentivised whilst entertainment is excessively incentivised, to say nothing of various forms of manipulation and propaganda, or the negative impacts of surveillance and fraud that are intrinsic to the adtech field.

So the question of incentives, compensation, financing, and revenue collection do deserve addressing.

I do agree that the present model is addressing those specific elements quite poorly.

Re: A search engine for searching books in the Z-Library index on the IPFS network

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

ConsenSys is to IPFS as Blockstream is to BTC

No, Protocol Labs it to IPFS as Blockstream is to BTC. ConsenSys is an entirely different company focused on Ethereum, and neither invented nor maintain IPFS. That's Protocol Labs. Protocol Labs didn't start out of ConsenSys either — in fact, I don't believe they have too much beneficial ownership in common at all. In addition to the separate founding stories already mentioned, you can read about how Protocol Labs wa…

ConsenSys is to Blockstream as MetaMask, Infura, MasterCard and JP Morgan are to AXA

Protocol Labs, as you correctly identified, is not a stooge of global corporate interests.

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