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.
I think I'm probably HN's most fervent copyright supporter, and I want to find a way to disapprove of Sci-Hub; it feels like cheating? Like sidestepping the real issue, of how journals are organized? But I can't take myself seriously trying to argue that. Even my kids, who are both practicing scientists at institutions with official access to all these papers, use Sci-Hub to get stuff.
> 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?
> 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.
That these online publishers are able to rent collect for papers that are in the public domain, or long out of copyright, is an example of how broken our system is.
I can get access to papers through my university, but even then there are many which lack subscription. And working from home, usually it is faster to just download the paper from sci-hub than go through a university login to get access.
I remember even using sci-hub for some 19th century papers, which are surely in the public domain...
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.
Little known fact: your Sci-Hub downloads are not private - https://sci-hub.ru/stats has historic access logs with IP addresses, paper identifiers, and timestamps, and plans to publish more logs in the future.
- "To protect the privacy of Sci-Hub users, we agreed that she would first aggregate users’ geographic locations to the nearest city using data from Google Maps; no identifying inter- net protocol (IP) addresses were given to me. (The data set and details on how it was analyzed are freely accessible at http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q447c.)"
"I can give statistics, as they say, in a hurry, which the Yandex counter collected, according to the number of unique visitors to the site:
from September 5, 2011 to December 31, 2015 - 7.92 million
from January 01, 2016 to December 31, 2018 - 67.5 million
from January 01, 2019 to December 15, 2021 – 119 million"
Source: https://pressunity.org/archives/18381
Sci-hub's offshore host: "DDoS-Guard is a Russian Internet infrastructure company which provides DDoS protection and web hosting services.[1][2] Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online".[3][1] Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.[3][4][1]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard
Sci-Hub
In 2017, a U.S. court ordered all internet infrastructure companies to stop doing business with Sci-Hub, the shadow library which shares scholarly papers without regard to copyright.[22][23] As a result, Sci-Hub switched from Cloudflare to DDoS-Guard for DDoS protection.[23][8] Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan says that DDoS-Guard initially contacted her, and that the company volunteered that it works with piracy sites including Rutracker.org.[23] Some experts identify Sci-Hub's use of DDoS-Guard as a security risk given its involvement with the Russian state and that it could monitor Sci-Hub's traffic.[23] Elbakyan says she pays DDoS-Guard about US$1,000 per month (one sixth of Sci-Hub's operating budget), all for DDoS protection; an expert found this amount credible.[23]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard#Sci-Hub
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 monolithic. And then it becomes a question of: do you want name holders to continually pay for names in some way, or do you want a land grab model where the person who snagged a name 30 years ago now owns it forever for free? With DNS, that question is decided by each node in the tree of the hierarchy.
Certificates are free, and all certificates are surveilled with a cryptographically secure append-only log. Meanwhile, if you think the biggest problem with the DNS infrastructure we have now is rent-seeking, take a look at the blockchain alternatives that have been proposed. There might be no modern analog to "attempting to sell the Brooklyn Bridge" more fitting than blockchain DNS.
Given how useful scihub obviously is, how could we reasonably make it legal? Is there any chance we could fix the legal system to make scihub officially possible?
A law stating that papers resulting from publicly funded research must be freely redistributable should do the trick. Just a matter of finding the political will.
Complete political non-starter. Might as well argue for the moon to be painted blue. Not only is it a complete waste of time, any effort spent on this is also detrimental to any proposals that actually can be enacted.
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.
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.
Register them with cnobin or some other Chinese registrar with an abuse mail that doesn't exist, don't use any TLD owned by Verisign, and you will be able to delay domain seizure for a long amount of time. There's nothing you can do to stop it forever other than keep making more mirrors - see what fmovies and sites like that do.
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
[+] [-] idlewords|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] oefrha|3 years ago|reply
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?
[+] [-] OrvalWintermute|3 years ago|reply
That these online publishers are able to rent collect for papers that are in the public domain, or long out of copyright, is an example of how broken our system is.
[+] [-] ta123456789|3 years ago|reply
I remember even using sci-hub for some 19th century papers, which are surely in the public domain...
[+] [-] Overtonwindow|3 years ago|reply
http://sci-hub.ee https://sci-hub.ee https://sci-hub.wf http://sci-hub.wf https://sci-hub.cat
[+] [-] crazygringo|3 years ago|reply
Wikipedia points to https://sci-hub.ru as the official URL, and that site lists all official mirrors as [1]:
sci-hub.se
sci-hub.st
sci-hub.ru
All of which are different from your list. I have no idea personally, I'm just wondering how to know what to use.
[1] https://sci-hub.ru/mirrors
[+] [-] btdmaster|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] alexvoda|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] huggingmouth|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cantbeawiseman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Strilanc|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xtracto|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] disadvantage|3 years ago|reply
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/
[+] [-] belter|3 years ago|reply
https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement...
[+] [-] dogmatism|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] madars|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] perihelions|3 years ago|reply
- "To protect the privacy of Sci-Hub users, we agreed that she would first aggregate users’ geographic locations to the nearest city using data from Google Maps; no identifying inter- net protocol (IP) addresses were given to me. (The data set and details on how it was analyzed are freely accessible at http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q447c.)"
https://sci-hub.ru/10.1126/science.352.6285.508 ("Bohannon, J. (2016). Who’s downloading pirated [sic] papers? Everyone. Science, 352(6285), 508–512")
[+] [-] B4n4n4|3 years ago|reply
Sci-hub's offshore host: "DDoS-Guard is a Russian Internet infrastructure company which provides DDoS protection and web hosting services.[1][2] Researchers and journalists have alleged that many of DDoS-Guard's clients are engaged in criminal activity, and investigative reporter Brian Krebs reported in January 2021 that a "vast number" of the websites hosted by DDoS-Guard are "phishing sites and domains tied to cybercrime services or forums online".[3][1] Some of DDoS-Guard's notable clients have included the Palestinian Islamic militant nationalist movement Hamas, American alt-tech social network Parler, and various groups associated with the Russian state.[3][4][1]" https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard
Sci-Hub In 2017, a U.S. court ordered all internet infrastructure companies to stop doing business with Sci-Hub, the shadow library which shares scholarly papers without regard to copyright.[22][23] As a result, Sci-Hub switched from Cloudflare to DDoS-Guard for DDoS protection.[23][8] Sci-Hub founder Alexandra Elbakyan says that DDoS-Guard initially contacted her, and that the company volunteered that it works with piracy sites including Rutracker.org.[23] Some experts identify Sci-Hub's use of DDoS-Guard as a security risk given its involvement with the Russian state and that it could monitor Sci-Hub's traffic.[23] Elbakyan says she pays DDoS-Guard about US$1,000 per month (one sixth of Sci-Hub's operating budget), all for DDoS protection; an expert found this amount credible.[23] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DDoS-Guard#Sci-Hub
[+] [-] corobo|3 years ago|reply
I've got no direct use but every time it comes up I have a think just in case I know anyone it would be useful for.
Ta for the reminders!
[+] [-] politician|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] teddyh|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tptacek|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dimmke|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] agilob|3 years ago|reply
https://www.namecoin.org/
[+] [-] kragen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ridgeguy|3 years ago|reply
https://www.ilovephd.com/working-sci-hub-proxy-links-updated...
[+] [-] joelthelion|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cellularmitosis|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] CommanderData|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] hallway_monitor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cutemonster|3 years ago|reply
Hmm I guess they don't want to get accidentally DoS attacked
[+] [-] Kukumber|3 years ago|reply
Microsoft can get away with it, we might as well do the same
[+] [-] Kukumber|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] counttheforks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] drexlspivey|3 years ago|reply
https://handshake.org/
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] breck|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] arp242|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zzo38computer|3 years ago|reply
> 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.
[+] [-] idlewords|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] glerk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Dalewyn|3 years ago|reply
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.
[+] [-] 88stacks|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] from|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NetOpWibby|3 years ago|reply
https://blog.neuenet.com/post/why-get-a-tld
[+] [-] verdverm|3 years ago|reply