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French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen

torrentfreak.com

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

#181
post #49
post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its always DNS first and everyone says "lol, just change your DNS" and then they start doing real blocks. Optus in Australia did an IP level block of 4chan recently.

How? 4chan use Cloudflare. They don't have a dedicated IP, do they? I would be surprised if Optus actually managed to do SNI filtering for the entire country without screwing it up. Edit: Huh, seems like they do have a dedicated IP. At least both Robtex and Securitytrails report them as the only tenant on their IP. But you can /etc/hosts 4chan.org to a different Cloudflare IP, and CF will still SNI-route it to the re…

If I remember correctly, Cloudflare assigns different IPs to different sites, so you can use blocking by IP, but of course in this case you will also block other sites using the same Cloudflare server.

I have also written how the site can try to bypass the blocking: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19552689

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

#182
I don't understand why many people here seems to agree blocking is a bad thing. If some content is illegal in the country, isn't it normal that the state is enforcing the law? I'm mean that's one of the things it is supposed to do I believe

On the other hand, I understand disagreements with the law exist, but that's a normal thing and we (in France) are still able to vote for some parties with different point of view on copyright, so I'm not sure why some people are speaking of "authoritarian" or "censorship"

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

#183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

There's a huge irony here in that major news outlets in Australia including Rupert Murdochs SkyNews all showed uncensored footage, some of it autoplaying and profited from doing so. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2019/mar/15/australian-med...

Were their sites blocked?

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

#184
post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

The concept of Natural Law was an important part of enlightenment legal thinking. When the Declaration of Independence invokes the 'Laws of Nature', it's authors would certainly have been aware of and intentionally referencing contemporary thinking on the subject to justify the declaration.

In fact we know from some legal decisions of the time that Natural Law was explicitly used as justification for various legal decisions, in the absence of explicit written laws on the subject.

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

#185
post #117

Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down. Yes, for now governments only caught up to DNS level blocking, but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses.

What if we look at the sitiuation from publishers' point of view? Yesterday those weird scientints gave to you the rights to their works, and the next day they demand that you allow them to read their works for free.

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

#186

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.

I begrudgingly bought an ebook from google once. I knew there was DRM, but the store page said I could read it in my browser.

google-chrome != browser

grrrrr

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

#187
post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(...) but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses. The EU just passed the directive for the new copyright package which further cements the status quo (the two often mentioned articles are just the worst of it), so don't expect any progress if people don't start to elect more progressive politicians. The projections for the EU election sh…

I don't know about other countries, but in Spain the left wing is the best friend of the copyright lobby.

Are they "left-wing" or socially left neoliberals.

There is a difference between "left-wing" as in economic AND social leftism vs the sort of neoliberal, "Third Way" politics, which equal socially left-wing, but economically center-right.

Most of the "social democratic" parties in Europe are that way these days. They don't really champion economic populism, wealth redistribution etc.

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

#188
post #117

Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down. Yes, for now governments only caught up to DNS level blocking, but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses.

> Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down. This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours wo…

More like hundreds of man-years, when you factor in all the editions, bootlegs etc that are now forever lost to time.

This should be a golden age for information preservation. Instead it's a dark age. I personally know several eye-wateringly good bands whose catalogs are not available anywhere, at all.

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

#189

Western countries are becoming increasingly like China and Russia. UK, Australia, Germany, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand... So far, only the US still holds some resemblance to “protecting the freedom of speech” — sure, copyright violators are pursued, but at least nobody is trying to censor the Internet... yet.

US doesn't need to block sites because many major IT companies are under their jurisdiction and they (their courts) can just order to remove the content or stop serving the domain name. For example, they seize casino's domain names and order the banks not to allow payment to them. What's wrong with online casinos? Should't people have the right to decide how to spend their money?

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

#190
post #107

Western countries are becoming increasingly like China and Russia. UK, Australia, Germany, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand... So far, only the US still holds some resemblance to “protecting the freedom of speech” — sure, copyright violators are pursued, but at least nobody is trying to censor the Internet... yet.

the US? COPPA brought down a whole piece of the Internet. the US is no better than any other country.

> COPPA brought down a whole piece of the Internet.

You mean FOSTA/SESTA?

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