Live data from Hacker News

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

torrentfreak.com

91–100 of 143 posts

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

#91

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…

> Online publishers, meanwhile, demand extortionate per-paper fees for access

I just don’t understand how they can be so shameless about it. For instance, one single paper on Phys. Rev. Lett. costs $35 without a subscription. $35 for a few pages of PDF; ~100% margin for the publisher and the publisher alone. (And the publisher here, APS, is not-for-profit.) Who the fuck came up with this kind of pricing?

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

#93
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…

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…

> 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.

Hmm. At some point, a user agent would need to disambiguate between competing identical names somehow (at least for the sort of names that identify global internet resources). Are you assuming the existence of a web-of-trust of some sort as an arbiter?

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

#94
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thomas, I’m not sure what you mean when you say that certificates are free. Self-signed certs are free, but only situationally useful in a business context. Let’s Encrypt certs are free, but not usable in all contexts. GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Verisign will still gladly charge $50-$1500 for certs will various features like $50/SAN, and extended validation. If you want to terminate TLS at an AWS managed edge resource,…

Tell me more about the contexts in which you can't use LetsEncrypt certificates.

Older OS. Certbot only supports a limited number of OS (centos 6 not so much). Longer expiry dates.

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

#95
post #81
post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>(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 the…

> The fact that you casually lump them together suggests that you don't understand what you're even arguing against. On the contrary, the fact you don't see how they both are at play suggests the opposite. Patented drugs are always inferior, but the truth has a hard time getting out due to (c)opywrong laws. ( https://longbets.org/855/ ) > Alright I'll bite. Can you elaborate on how they're "worse than useless"? Follo…

>On the contrary, the fact you don't see how they both are at play suggests the opposite

Doing a quick skim of the linked article, the basis of argument seems to be:

"copyright laws protecting Purdue from true and damaging information about the dangers of the medication from leaking and spreading"

Which, so far as I can tell has nothing backing it. Do you mind elaborating what specific aspect of copyright law hindered the public from learning about the "dangers of the medication"?

>Follow this $1M bet for the truth: https://blog.rootclaim.com/rootclaim-accepts-500000-challeng...

I don't get it. The source you linked is arguing for the opposite (ie. "we conclude that despite several shortcomings, mRNA vaccines have saved many more lives than they cost"). Regardless, neither the the source you linked nor Kirsch's substack contains any evidence, so it's impossible to evaluate either side's claims.

>None. Very few of the most critical medicines are modern inventions. [...]

Ah, so your claim is that if something's gone off patent, then it's in the public domain. I don't object to that characterization, but I have the following follow up questions:

1. going back to your claim of "Public domain has given us 99% of life saving medicines", is it also accurate to say "public domain has given us 99% of life destroying toxins (eg. oxycontin or leaded gas)" since those products have gone off patent and are therefore in the public domain as well?

2. perhaps my original question wasn't clear, but the standard argument for patents is that if it weren't for patents, then the life saving medication wouldn't exist in the first place, or would exist but would be delayed for decades/centuries. Declaring that "Public domain has given us 99% of life saving medicines" after they've been developed under a legal regime with patent protection ignores this.

>But they were (c)opyrightable. I have an original 1920 first edition copy of Albert Einstein's Theory of Relativity and he put it in the public domain.

Again, this is a misunderstanding of how copyrights/patents work. The exact manuscript that Einstein wrote might be copyrightable, but the abstract concepts (eg. e=mc^2) were not. Even if Einstein didn't put it into the public domain, he wouldn't be able to hold a monopoly on the theory of relativity, only his specific manuscript discussing it. Likewise, I can write a book about the Theory of Relativity right now and it would get copyright protection, but that doesn't mean I can charge people for using e=mc^2. It just means people can't copy the contents of my book.

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

#96
post #94
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me more about the contexts in which you can't use LetsEncrypt certificates.

Older OS. Certbot only supports a limited number of OS (centos 6 not so much). Longer expiry dates.

Certbot isn't the only way to automate Let's Encrypt certificate issuance, and even if it was, you can use hooks to have certbot push certs to other machines.

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

#97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I wonder if you are just seeing the standard five-minute delay that everyone gets when replying inline in a thread. That delay is indeed intended to discourage too-fast back and forth comments, which sometimes lead to arguments. If that is what you've encountered, you can bypass the delay by clicking the timestamp of the comment you want to reply to. This opens the comment in its own page with a reply box.

Thanks, but no, I don't think that's what's going on here. What I'm experiencing is 60+ minute rate limits after 5 comments plus maybe 5 edits ("You're posting too fast, please slow down. Thanks."), frequently coinciding with higher karma (15k+) users leaving the first reply and a -1 or -2 downvote balance that usually eventually fights its way back up to +1 or +2. When this happens, I'll try to post every 20 minutes or so to test the boundary. Of course, doing that might be tripping a sliding window, or it might be indeed a stricter rate limit. It's hard to know for sure what's going on. In any case, I don't expect an explanation, if the site is really giving super downvotes to certain users with or without their knowledge, telling people that that's the case would undermine the impact of the approach.

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

#98
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thomas, I’m not sure what you mean when you say that certificates are free. Self-signed certs are free, but only situationally useful in a business context. Let’s Encrypt certs are free, but not usable in all contexts. GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Verisign will still gladly charge $50-$1500 for certs will various features like $50/SAN, and extended validation. If you want to terminate TLS at an AWS managed edge resource,…

Tell me more about the contexts in which you can't use LetsEncrypt certificates.

Sure - for example, when the organization requires an OV or EV certificate.

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

#99
post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell me more about the contexts in which you can't use LetsEncrypt certificates.

Sure - for example, when the organization requires an OV or EV certificate.

Yeah, and that happens where?

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

#100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. Hmm. At some point, a user agent would need to disambiguate between competing identical names somehow (at least for the sort of names that identify global internet resources). Are you assuming the existence of a web-of-trust of some sort as an arbiter…

Well, at some point the end-user will have to make a judgement call about the authenticity of the server they're interacting with, but that is no different from what happens now.
Post reply on HN