Millions of individual torrents is not a great solution. Keeping them all seeded is basically impossible unless they run a seed for each one, at which point they might as well just host the files. Plus you'll never get the economy of scale that makes BitTorrent really shine.
When you have a whole lot of tiny files that people will generally only want one or two of there isn't much better than a plain old website.
A torrent that hosts all of the papers could be useful for people who want to make sure the data can't be lost by a single police raid.
IPFS seems like a perfect fit for this and some of the scihub torrents are already in IPFS, but it's not an anonymous network.
IPFS via the DHT tells the network of your whole network topology, including internal address you may have, and VPN endpoints too. It's all public by design as they don't want to associate IPFS with piracy per one of their developers.
You can build something like this on Skynet. Links on Skynet (called skylinks) can point to hashes of data (similar to IPFS)or can point to a pubkey. If the data points to a pubkey, it can be tweaked repeatedly and people with the old links will see the new data.
You can also point to full webapps. So for example you could have a pubkey point to a webapp that then loads the database from a list of moderators who update the data under their pubkeys to point to the latest version of scihub. Then you can even have different moderators curate articles of different subjects, and the webapp can combine everything together.
All the data is stored on Sia, which is a decentralized cloud storage platform. Skynet allows anyone to upload or download data from Sia directly from the web, no need for extensions or custom software. The Sia network handles what IPFS calls "seeding", so contributors don't need to worry about leaving their machines on.
Torrents are great and all but it's dependent on people seeding them, sci-hub/libgen is great because you don't have to worry about a download suddenly breaking because no one is seeding
from what I understand, the Authors are still free to send you their papers. So perhaps the simplest decentralized system is for each author to run an automatic email request system and have feeds / aggregators of papers titles/abstracts with author emails to make it easy to get the papers you want?
Thanks for the background link. I did not know about that and it's a good incentive to donate them some money for the legal battle.
TL;DR of the link: No more uploads to support a court case in India which SciHub might win and thus establish a legal basis for operation in the biggest democracy.
I'm growning skeptical of the idea that every science text should be free. As a community that values privacy, it's hypocritical that these widespread leaking is so well accepted.
The fact that scihub needs to skip domain names every couple of months and that ISPs start blocking the website, looks to confirm my theory, rather than imply some worldwide conspiracy.
The way SciHub is being treated by governments is pretty infuriating. There's a tiny minority of people who have an interest in keeping SciHub off the internet, and they're generally neither the researchers who write the papers, nor those who want to read them. Despite this, the power of the state has been used repeatedly to keep SciHub inaccessible and limit their ability to get funding.
A few years back, frustrated with increasaed DNS blocking of Sci-Hub, I wrote a quick DNSMasq hack (haq?) to return Sci-Hub IPs for any "sci-hub.<domain>" possible. The shins-n-grits factor of surfing "scihub.elsevier.com" were palpable.
As others have mentioned, Sci-Hub also maintains a Tor presence, and you can access the Onion link using the Tor browser (provided you can install that on your desktop or device).
There are lots of sites UK ISPs block even though the sites themselves are not illegal or host illegal content. For e.g. torrent indexing services (the content itself may be illegal but purely providing a search across that content is basically doing what Google do).
The UK internet is heavily filtered/censored and so doing this is useful anyway.
Business ISP connections don't seem to be restricted. And neither do most cloud providers I've tried.
Also worth adding if a site isn’t banned by the UK government many sites now georestrict UK residents or give you several opt-in pop ups because of GDPR.
This is a useful note on using PACs to set up proxies for just one site:
> Incidentally, you do not need to be running a web server to use the .pac file. You can access it via a file:// type URL. For example (note the 3 slashes): file:///Users/username/Library/proxy.pac
Another option is to simply configure your workstation to use DoH. Then your ISP can't fuck with your address resolution.
I recommend using NextDNS, and then setting up a provisioning profile at https://apple.nextdns.io to set it as your revolver on your macs and ios devices. The ad-blocking features are a nice bonus, too.
NextDNS also has a cool free software CLI local DoH proxy resolver which works a charm.
Possibly also a path to greater decentralization. Relying on jurisdictional stuff isn't going to cut it forever (see the current pause on new uploads), but it's also hard to ask people to host data that'll get them sued without offering mitigations. Private torrent trackers do that through, well, being private, but I'm sure as hell not serving springer_catalogue_2020.tar.xz to the whole internet from an address linked to me in any way. Maybe an index of independently operated hidden services, each serving a (redundant) shard of the collection?
I use SciHub a lot, and just this week have been having problems accessing it on the internet (in the UK) - I don't use Tor, but I also never even thought of it. Totally agree it would be a good idea to promote the Onion address!
Dear authors: Just post your papers (before they have been formatted by the journal, but after they have been refereed at the latest) on the arXiv (maths, cs, physics) and similar repositories. Including the old ones you still have. Once a critical mass does this, the problem will be solved, whatever the Indian courts decide.
Wikimedia should start publishing science articles (legally). It has the infrastructure, money and culture to become a non-profit world-scale publisher with decentralized curation.
You're probably better off using a paid VPN provider than a paid proxy provider. A VPN can be used in more places, and some VPNs provide http proxy access (the kind used in the tutorial) in additional to openvpn/wireguard. If they have a browser extension, chances are they support http proxy.
I still cannot get my head around on to why the world is not embracing open sourcing of data. One way or other people get what the want so you might as well give open access and reinvent the entire business model altogether. Harnessing the power of community could be the key for this reinvention.
No need to use a .pac file for configuring site-based HTTP(S) proxy selection in modern browsers. I've just installed the FoxyProxy extension (works in Chrome and Firefox), and I was able to specify regexps for the URL, and select the HTTP(S) proxy based on which regexp matches.
Many years ago, Hollywood and the Music Industry argued in court in the UK that since most UK ISPs have a mechanism to block stuff like child pornography, they ought to be compelled by the court to use this same mechanism to protect the interests of these commercial entities.
The courts agreed. If your ISP has such a capability the court will cheerfully give rights holders authority to demand the ISP blocks stuff that they claim rights over.
The ISPs could choose to just not block stuff. I am looking at Sci-Hub right now, because my UK ISP (Andrews & Arnold) doesn't block anything. From time to time, parliamentarians get vexed about this, but there is a cultural memory in the place that passing laws intended to stop people from saying things doesn't work. Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned, because, the government argued, it was obscene but it turns out that a court didn't buy this argument, and instead Penguin made piles of money because everybody wanted to read the banned book.
But most UK ISPs have decided that it is in their better interests to block things. Their options for attempting to do this have narrowed over time, once upon a time DNS blocking was pretty effective, I assume that by now they're mostly relying on IP blocking, which of course means they run the risk of exciting collateral attacks...
I don't know. Virgin Media quote High Court orders saying they have to block several I tried, but my home ISP does not block any of them. These seems weird to me, that the court orders would cover a few specific ISPs, but I haven't looked in to it further.
[+] [-] tmkadamcz|4 years ago|reply
It would be great to develop a truly decentralised solution. Having a database of individual torrent links for each paper might be a start.
[+] [-] jandrese|4 years ago|reply
When you have a whole lot of tiny files that people will generally only want one or two of there isn't much better than a plain old website.
A torrent that hosts all of the papers could be useful for people who want to make sure the data can't be lost by a single police raid.
[+] [-] andyxor|4 years ago|reply
IPFS via the DHT tells the network of your whole network topology, including internal address you may have, and VPN endpoints too. It's all public by design as they don't want to associate IPFS with piracy per one of their developers.
this thread has some discussions on the alternatives https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/nc27fv/rescue_...
[+] [-] Taek|4 years ago|reply
You can also point to full webapps. So for example you could have a pubkey point to a webapp that then loads the database from a list of moderators who update the data under their pubkeys to point to the latest version of scihub. Then you can even have different moderators curate articles of different subjects, and the webapp can combine everything together.
All the data is stored on Sia, which is a decentralized cloud storage platform. Skynet allows anyone to upload or download data from Sia directly from the web, no need for extensions or custom software. The Sia network handles what IPFS calls "seeding", so contributors don't need to worry about leaving their machines on.
[+] [-] HideousKojima|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] keithnz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Azrael3000|4 years ago|reply
TL;DR of the link: No more uploads to support a court case in India which SciHub might win and thus establish a legal basis for operation in the biggest democracy.
[+] [-] nandhinianand|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] i5heu|4 years ago|reply
In fact, there is already a ipfs mirror of scihub.
[+] [-] unknown|4 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] josephagoss|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] TZubiri|4 years ago|reply
The fact that scihub needs to skip domain names every couple of months and that ISPs start blocking the website, looks to confirm my theory, rather than imply some worldwide conspiracy.
[+] [-] AlexandrB|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dredmorbius|4 years ago|reply
https://old.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/7m3uin/meta_if_you...
As others have mentioned, Sci-Hub also maintains a Tor presence, and you can access the Onion link using the Tor browser (provided you can install that on your desktop or device).
https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion
[+] [-] lapsis_beeftech|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] crtasm|4 years ago|reply
Love the haq!
[+] [-] beermonster|4 years ago|reply
There are lots of sites UK ISPs block even though the sites themselves are not illegal or host illegal content. For e.g. torrent indexing services (the content itself may be illegal but purely providing a search across that content is basically doing what Google do).
The UK internet is heavily filtered/censored and so doing this is useful anyway.
Business ISP connections don't seem to be restricted. And neither do most cloud providers I've tried.
Might be better than using temporary proxies.
[+] [-] Quarrel|4 years ago|reply
Afaik, my (London) ISP does not block anything. No idea why, as all the others quote high court orders.
[+] [-] Reason077|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] koheripbal|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kypro|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] deadalus|4 years ago|reply
https://github.com/SadeghHayeri/GreenTunnel
[+] [-] leephillips|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Gormisdomai|4 years ago|reply
> Incidentally, you do not need to be running a web server to use the .pac file. You can access it via a file:// type URL. For example (note the 3 slashes): file:///Users/username/Library/proxy.pac
http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2004010109555326...
[+] [-] sneak|4 years ago|reply
I recommend using NextDNS, and then setting up a provisioning profile at https://apple.nextdns.io to set it as your revolver on your macs and ios devices. The ad-blocking features are a nice bonus, too.
NextDNS also has a cool free software CLI local DoH proxy resolver which works a charm.
[+] [-] joelthelion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kickout|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] paufernandez|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dijit|4 years ago|reply
Having SciHub as a hidden service would bring a lot of people to Tor.
EDIT: apparently I'm a bit stupid; it exists: https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion
But it would be cool to promote the hell out of the onion address and tor browser, rather than trying to bypass ISP restrictions.
[+] [-] livueta|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GordonS|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] generationP|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lobocinza|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jwilk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] igbk|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tmkadamcz|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] callahad|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hkt|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] gruez|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] valprop1|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ptspts|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] edeion|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xvector|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] lapinot|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tpmx|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tialaramex|4 years ago|reply
The courts agreed. If your ISP has such a capability the court will cheerfully give rights holders authority to demand the ISP blocks stuff that they claim rights over.
The ISPs could choose to just not block stuff. I am looking at Sci-Hub right now, because my UK ISP (Andrews & Arnold) doesn't block anything. From time to time, parliamentarians get vexed about this, but there is a cultural memory in the place that passing laws intended to stop people from saying things doesn't work. Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned, because, the government argued, it was obscene but it turns out that a court didn't buy this argument, and instead Penguin made piles of money because everybody wanted to read the banned book.
But most UK ISPs have decided that it is in their better interests to block things. Their options for attempting to do this have narrowed over time, once upon a time DNS blocking was pretty effective, I assume that by now they're mostly relying on IP blocking, which of course means they run the risk of exciting collateral attacks...
[+] [-] dijit|4 years ago|reply
Also: all data is required to be logged, and those logs are searchable by civil servants without a warrant.
[+] [-] Quarrel|4 years ago|reply
[+] [-] beermonster|4 years ago|reply