The new architecture of pirate sites, what I call the Hydra architecture, seems pretty interesting to me. There isn't a single site hosting the content, but a group of mirrors freely exchanging data between one another. In case some of them go down, the other ones still remain and new ones can appear, copying data from the remaining mirrors. This is like a hydra that grows two heads every time you chop one off. It's…
Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down
181–190 of 270 posts
Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
You can buy 48TB (4x12TB) for €1000. Store some index on an SSD, and you have another full node.
If you don't care about warranty, 8 and 12TB drives routinely go for $15/TB on sale inside WD Elements. I picked up 32TB for just under $500 with discount over the holiday that way.
Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down
#183I don't see anyone having mentioned the possibility of posting this data to Usenet at all - at minimum for archival purposes which should be good for ~8-9 years. That way at least the data isn't lost. With so many of those torrents have 0 or 1 seed, this is a serious risk I think, despite the comments elsewhere about people rotating what they seed. I realize that doesn't solve the access problem for most people as mo…
Two thoughts on that. Encoding it to a text format with CRC data for posting to usenet is highly inefficient in terms of data storage. And 33TB of stuff is not going to be retained for 8-9 years, the last I checked due to the huge volume of binaries traffic, the major commercial usenet feed providers have at most 6-9 months of retention for the major binary groups. Beyond that it becomes cost prohibitive for them in…
Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down
#184Libgen is one of the greatest contributors to scientific productivity worldwide, possibly beaten only by Sci-Hub. Just about everybody in academia knows about it. If it ever vanished, some of us could probably still get by trading files from person to person, but nothing could be as perfect as what we got now.
Just about everybody in academia uses it, too, especially in the case of Scihub. I can't imagine taking the time to actually check whether I have access to some journal when I want to read a paper, let alone jump through all the hoops before you can get a PDF. The first thing we did when my partner's paper was recently published was check to see if it was on Scihub yet. (It was!)
Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down
#185Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you don't care about warranty, 8 and 12TB drives routinely go for $15/TB on sale inside WD Elements. I picked up 32TB for just under $500 with discount over the holiday that way.
Can you elaborate? What's the catch?
The theory is that this is a form of market segmentation, where enthusiasts/companies are willing to pay more for a bare drive regular consumers.
Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down
#186The new architecture of pirate sites, what I call the Hydra architecture, seems pretty interesting to me. There isn't a single site hosting the content, but a group of mirrors freely exchanging data between one another. In case some of them go down, the other ones still remain and new ones can appear, copying data from the remaining mirrors. This is like a hydra that grows two heads every time you chop one off. It's…
> It's absolutely unkillable Just like any other distributed system, this is vulnerable to organized take downs and scare tactics. There was a whole bunch of mirrors of Pirate Bay, yet once most of Europe's legal systems adopted the "sharing is theft" mindset, it became pretty much impossible to find one.
Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down
#187Earlier quoted context omitted.
Clay is the plastic of the ancient world. Let's say the probability that: a single copy of a physical book survives 1,000 years, is found and is understood by an archaeologist , is pB and the probability that a single copy of a book on an SSD survives 1,000 years is found and understood by an archaeologist is pD. Even if pB is far larger than pD it could be the case that there might be so many more copies of single b…
Would an SSD even function after 1000 years? Unless sealed, I imagine ambient moisture would do a number inside the drive. The same is true for books of course, but we still have 1000 year old books that have lasted by sitting on a shelf in churches and temples, etc., without any specific care until recent history. The nice part of a book in an apocalyptic scenario is that you can copy it even if you don't know the l…
Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
Two thoughts on that. Encoding it to a text format with CRC data for posting to usenet is highly inefficient in terms of data storage. And 33TB of stuff is not going to be retained for 8-9 years, the last I checked due to the huge volume of binaries traffic, the major commercial usenet feed providers have at most 6-9 months of retention for the major binary groups. Beyond that it becomes cost prohibitive for them in…
yEnc overhead is about 2% and there are plenty of providers with ~10 year retention.
Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down
#189The new architecture of pirate sites, what I call the Hydra architecture, seems pretty interesting to me. There isn't a single site hosting the content, but a group of mirrors freely exchanging data between one another. In case some of them go down, the other ones still remain and new ones can appear, copying data from the remaining mirrors. This is like a hydra that grows two heads every time you chop one off. It's…
I worry that if this system becames permanent, one in which it is practically impossible to stop piracy, followed by the loss of traditional incentives we might find ourselves in a place where no motivated investor will break even when producing quality and innocuous content.
Re: Archivists Are Trying to Make Sure LibGen Never Goes Down
#190This is an extremely important effort. The LibGen archive contains around 32 TBs of books (by far the most common being scientific books and textbooks, with a healthy dose of non-STEM). The SciMag archive, backing up Sci-Hub, clocks in at around 67 TBs [0]. This is invaluable data that should not be lost. If you want to contribute, here's a few ways to do so. If you wish to donate bandwidth or storage, I personally k…
> Lastly, you can always contribute books. If you buy a textbook or book, consider uploading it (and scanning it, should it be a physical book) in case it isn't already present in the database. There's no easy solution for scanning physical books, is there?