Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline • Hacker News Board

Re: Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline

#41

Post by gruez » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:03 PM UTC

breck wrote: post #38

Dalewyn wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Copyrights and patents are very reasonable and necessary frameworks for encouraging and protecting inventors and creators to keep on making things. The problem, which there is, lies in the execution. Copyright shouldn't last multiple centuries, and patent trolls are a flagrant abuse of the patent system.

> Copyrights and patents are very reasonable and necessary frameworks No, they are not. They are moronic. Everything they touch gets worse. (C)opywrongs and Patents gave us the Opioid Crisis and worse than useless mRNA vaccines. Public domain has given us 99% of life saving medicines and numbers and binary notation and the theory of relativity and the World Wide Web and SQLite.

>(C)opywrongs and Patents gave us the Opioid Crisis

copyrights isn't even a factor when it comes to drugs, it's primarily patents and regulatory approval. The fact that you casually lump them together suggests that you don't understand what you're even arguing against.

>and worse than useless mRNA vaccines.

Alright I'll bite. Can you elaborate on how they're "worse than useless"? The clinical trials at least show they're pretty effective.

>Public domain has given us 99% of life saving medicines

And how many of those were patented at one point?

>numbers and binary notation and the theory of relativity

not patentable. From wikipedia:

"To be patent eligible subject matter, an invention must meet two criteria. First, it must fall within one of the four statutory categories of acceptable subject matter: process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter. Second, it must not be directed to subject matter encompassing a judicially recognized exception: laws of nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas. "

Re: Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline

#42

Post by gruez » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:05 PM UTC

zozbot234 wrote: post #16

teddyh wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The “rent-seeking certificate infrastructure” could be solved if web browsers used the DNS (and DNSSEC) to validate certificates. The DNS, on the other hand, is more tricky. If you want human-readable and globally distinct (and stable) names, you have to have a centralized structure to keep track of who has what name. The best we could come up with was the DNS, which is at least hierarchical instead of completely mon…

Human-readable names can potentially be pseudo-random, and thus securely generated. What's hard (indeed, considered largely infeasible) is meaningful , decentralized, secure names.

>Human-readable names can potentially be pseudo-random

No matter how you dice it, getting humans to remember 128 bits of entropy is going to be a non-starter. Encoding those 128 bits using words doesn't really solve the problem.

Re: Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline

#43

Post by idlewords » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:07 PM UTC

breck wrote: post #25

[dead]

You don't need to amend the constitution to change or abolish copyright law.

Re: Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline

#44

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:09 PM UTC

jeroenhd wrote: post #37

detrites wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's a simple solution for that: to buy a domain on-chain that has an equivalent off-chain, the existing owner first needs to prove ownership of that equivalent domain. After, it can be sold freely (as uniques could already). The on-chain contract could be written such that a buyer generates a token, supplied to an on-chain verification oracle that checks token.owned-domain.TLD exists, and if it does grants issuan…

What happens to these domains when the "legacy" domain expires and gets re-bought? Do you lose access when you stop paying? What if someone managed to hack your DNS, does it and its integration with TLS then break the supposed security guarantees? This system just seems to be traditional DNS with extra steps and a lack of manual recourse against bad actors, to be honest.

[deleted]

Re: Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline

#45

Post by idlewords » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:12 PM UTC

I just wanted to take a moment to say what a lifechanging tool sci-hub has been for research. In doing research for a big writing project on Mars I ended up with a folder of maybe 800 scientific and technical papers, some of them dating back to 1910. This is material it would have been hard to collect even with access to a major university library. Online publishers, meanwhile, demand extortionate per-paper fees for access, including to papers that started in the public domain, or are long out of copyright. On sci-hub you can just find nearly all this stuff without any fuss—there were maybe 5 or 10 papers total that I had to find through other channels. Alexandra Elbakyan is an absolute legend for creating this tool, which is on a par with Wikipedia for usefulness and public benefit.

Re: Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline

#46

Post by politician » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:17 PM UTC

teddyh wrote: post #13

politician wrote: post #9

If there’s an area where a decentralized blockchain has application, it is surely DNS and the rent-seeking certificate infrastructure.

The “rent-seeking certificate infrastructure” could be solved if web browsers used the DNS (and DNSSEC) to validate certificates. The DNS, on the other hand, is more tricky. If you want human-readable and globally distinct (and stable) names, you have to have a centralized structure to keep track of who has what name. The best we could come up with was the DNS, which is at least hierarchical instead of completely mon…

I think something that is overlooked in this discussion is the idea that names must be unique. If we relax this constraint, the solution space opens up significantly. I don’t believe uniqueness is a fundamental requirement of a name service because I don’t believe that a human-readable string itself carries sufficient information to be trustworthy in and of itself.

(Sorry for the delayed reply, my account is heavily rate limited, so I don’t get to post more than 5 times per hour and less when someone with high karma like downvotes a post and leaves a comment.)

Re: Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline

#47

Post by disadvantage » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:19 PM UTC

A domain is just a pointer to a resource, it is not the 'thing' in itself. If they want to take the actual resource offline, they need to find the VPS in question and confiscate that, not the domains.

Another thing, SH used to be accessible as a Tor hidden service, located here[0], which needs a v3 address since the older short .onions are now obsolete. Tor should have been the rightful home of SH since its inception. .Onions/hidden services are more resistant to censorship.

And since the admin has been doxxed, it's too late, unless the project is forked to new (anonymous) owners with good opsec and starts its new home in the dark web, unless it has new owners. I don't know, I don't follow all the latest news on SH.

[0] http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/

Re: Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline

#48

Post by zzo38computer » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:24 PM UTC

breck wrote: post #25

[dead]

I agree that copyright and patents are bad. However, I live in Canada, not in United States.

> I am not positive that if we abolished copyright and patent systems the world would be a better place.

It doesn't, but it would be a good start to abolish copyright/patent laws, I think.

> Just as I'm not positive that if we switch to clean energy the world would be a better place.

Again, it doesn't, but it would be a good start to use clean energy, too. (However, you should still need to not need to use too much energy on things, etc.)

> Section 2. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of the people to publish or peaceably implement ideas.

It look like good to me, but I do not know enough about the U.S. Constitution to judge it properly.

Re: Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline

#49

Post by verdverm » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:34 PM UTC

NetOpWibby wrote: post #21

Handshake solves this. https://blog.neuenet.com/post/why-get-a-tld

They decided they did not want to work with the existing system and the only option was a complete replacement, rather than a dual system. They shot themselves in the foot. On top of that, they guy who ruined freenode took over Handshake and ruined that too. They lost several core developers along the way

Re: Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline

#50

Post by verdverm » Sat, Jan 28, 2023, 9:37 PM UTC

px43 wrote: post #31

zozbot234 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Human-readable names can potentially be pseudo-random, and thus securely generated. What's hard (indeed, considered largely infeasible) is meaningful , decentralized, secure names.

What part of ENS doesn't meet your expectations? It wasn't designed to replace DNS, but there are an increasing number of people using it for that.

It is not always about what something is not doing, but rather the unintended (often malicious) use cases it enables without any way to prevent or mitigate.