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French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

torrentfreak.com

131–140 of 386 posts

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#131
I hope the Indian govt. doesn't follow suit. Libgen and Scihub serve a very great resource in a country that can't afford the absurd rates to go through the paywall; rare books that are not popular, and thus not part of the South-Asia-only reprints, are absurdly expensive.

Sadly, the current idiots in power think following the diktats of any and every passing foreign bureaucrat is an order from the Devas themselves. I don't think anyone who'll be coming in May will be any good either (if not worse).

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#132
post #39
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think theyre suggesting hashing all of libgen and distributing and working backwards from that hash, as a joke

It's not totally ridiculous, just wildly impractical. There is a hash out there that if brute-forced would yield a Windows 10 version of Half-Life 3.

There are an infinite amount of things that hash to a given hash.

For something of the size of half life 3 (about 2GB? no idea), the number of collissions would be far more than the number of atoms in the universe.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#133
post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You’re probably on a major ISP. Only the major ones in the UK are blocked and regulated. The smaller ones aren’t deemed as important.

Unfortunately the minor ISPs are almost 3-fold slower in most places, while being just as expensive. My options are between Virgin, which has speeds of up to 362mB fibre for £42/month, and the next best BT, which is 67mB for £39.99/ month. At uni, unless I wanted 30mB for a 7 person household, my only option was again Virgin. It's difficult not to be on a major ISP when the minor ISPs can't contest on speed and value…

To be annoying - milli Bels of speed? I've never seen anyone write it like this before, it's MB for megabytes, and Mb for megabits, mB is a different unit altogether.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately the minor ISPs are almost 3-fold slower in most places, while being just as expensive. My options are between Virgin, which has speeds of up to 362mB fibre for £42/month, and the next best BT, which is 67mB for £39.99/ month. At uni, unless I wanted 30mB for a 7 person household, my only option was again Virgin. It's difficult not to be on a major ISP when the minor ISPs can't contest on speed and value…

To be annoying - milli Bels of speed? I've never seen anyone write it like this before, it's MB for megabytes, and Mb for megabits, mB is a different unit altogether.

Perhaps the poster has a new MacBook Air with butterfly keyboard? :)

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#135
post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Upholding copyrights in court seems the basis of the rule of Law, and quite far from the situation in China and Russia. Living in a 'free' country' does not mean being able to flaunt the law, especially in this case what those sites do is hardly defensible. > the French court ruled that the two sites “clearly claim to be pirate platforms rejecting the principle of copyright and bypassing publishers’ subscription acce…

The difference is the ability of the government to pass arbitrary laws. There are (currently, in the West) two opposing views: natural law (laws are the refinement of what already is a natural part of human aspirations), and consensus law (law is what social consensus agrees upon). There’s also authoritarian law, but that is dictatorship. Of these possibilities, only natural law can command respect. Society can be ir…

US constitution is based on enlightenment philosophy. Even if I tend to like this more than alternatives, I would not call it natural.

As homo sapiens sapiens is a social animal, it's difficult to make the distinction between what it "natural aspirations" and "social consensus".

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if this sounds stupid, but I don't know much about 4chan - why block 4chan?

New Zealand and Australia recently went on a "do something" tear regarding the mosque shooting. Sites where the video or manifesto was posted got blocked, including 4chan. And yes, you read that right, New Zealand made it a crime to distribute a specific piece of text data.

They also blocked Dissenter, a comments system which doesn’t host anything or even allow image uploads.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#137
post #10

>The court order targets a total of 57 domain names, including various mirror sites. The academic publishers had asked the court for a more flexible blocklist, which they could update whenever new domains would become available, but this was denied. If the publishers want to expand the blocklist, they will have to go back to court. This ensures that there remains judicial oversight over local website blockades. Also,…

Good luck trying to make Cloudflare (1.1.1.1), Google (8.8.8.8) or Quad9 (9.9.9.9) to make exceptions for a single geographical area. =)

The court order is aimed at ISPs and it's trivial for the latter to proxy all DNS traffic on their edge and NXDOMAIN court-ordered domains regardless of the resolver used.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#138

Bought a book on GooglePlay once. Wanted to download it as an ePub. ePub wasn't available due to a technical error on Google's side (apparently affecting all epubs). Had to use Adobe Digital Editions to "download" it only to figure out the download wasn't available. + DRMs (i.e. can't read the ebook on a smartphone). Went to libgen instead, will never buy a book on GooglePlay again.

How long did the ePub error last?

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#139

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if this sounds stupid, but I don't know much about 4chan - why block 4chan?

4chan is a relatively popular anonymous image board, based on a Japanese language image board (2ch) but with mostly English language users. It's administration are known to be quite lax with content; if it's not outright illegal to host they'll generally let it slide in their NSFW boards. To use a recent example, their Adult GIF board right now, while flooded mostly with pornography, is currently housing uncensored f…

Blocking materials is the incorrect way to deradicalize people. I would further argue that by blocking it, the material is made to seem more scarce, and even more desirable for those who would otherwise not have been interested if it hadn't been blocked!

Outreach from social workers and societal safety net is the best way to prevent radicalization. I see legalization of drugs as an example.

Re: French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

#140
post #108
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just like when your employer commits wage theft, you call the police, they drive over, taze your boss, put him in handcuffs, and book him? After all, that's what I would expect should happen to a regular thief. Do you also expect that industrial executives, managers, and everyone down to the line workers get booked on terrorism charges, for poisoning our water supplies, if they are caught illegally polluting?

"Do you also expect that industrial executives, managers, and everyone down to the line workers get booked on terrorism charges, for poisoning our water supplies, if they are caught illegally polluting?" Not the original poster, but Yes, of course. Who doesn't expect that?

> Who doesn't expect that?

People who have any experience with how the real world works.

At best, the company may get a token fine, with the people giving the orders, and carrying them out never getting held accountable.

At worst, much hooing and hawwing is had about how important is, and how pinky swears that it will never do what they did again.

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