Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub’s .SE Domain Name Offline
torrentfreak.comI 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.
At one point I noticed I was grabbing a lot of papers from Astrobiology, and I thought, this is a cool journal, let me go subscribe.
They didn't even have a price list on the site. The only option was to give them your full contact info, and after I did they told me a sales representative would be call me on the phone to discuss pricing. That's the last time I felt any guilt about using Sci-Hub.
May someone who supports the free sharing of Sci-Hub be the most fervent copyright supporter we have to convert.
Yar.
> 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?
Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine's dad.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b...
Lately the fringe theories that we live in a world run by absolutely perverted and demented psychos actively worshipping exploitation and sadism doesn't seem that far out when you start to connect the dots of who's who in the in the highest echelons.
Then they wash themselves with philanthropy and everyone praises them. The masses are easy to steer and have no interest in the esoteric power structures or foreign worldviews of the absolute elite.
Please stop repeating Russian conspiracy theories. Here in the Democratic west we have freedom and meritocracy. Not legal corruption and nepotism. Now please return to the latest woke outrage de jour /s.
In all serious the idea that the West is not profoundly corrupt in its own way is ludicrous.
Were it all went wrong is not clear. I'd say probably the first Gulf War era was an inflection point but not a start.
Perhaps the Kennedy Assassination or the literal defenestration of former Secretary of Defense Forestal.
Wow. Amazing article.
> 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.
It's also an indictment of academic culture that they can't overcome their collective action problem. Of course, the important people in academia largely became that way because of the currency of the brands of the journals they published in. Giving up the fixation on status quo brands probably threatens in some way the power of status quo academics.
edit: academics are who we're supposed to depend on in order to organize and maintain ourselves as post-Enlightenment people, and they're somehow inextricably caught up in such a simple and open swindle. Even fully knowing the real consequences of locking away some stray piece of knowledge from the random asshole who will stumble upon a way to change the world with it.
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...
Are any of those official mirrors?
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.
Any of them.
.se was the official, post-seizure Elbakyan suggests .ru.
Also https://sci-hub.ru as maintained and linked by Alexandra Elbakyan, Sci-Hub founder.
Is there an onion address too?
Any tor addresses?
There used to be one at http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ but that short address form is now obsolete.
Legend, ty for linking
First they destroyed the library of Alexandria. Now they want to destroy the library of Alexandra.
Library.nu / gigapedia was destroyed between those two. It was a really vast collection of material. Such a shame .
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.
Is the pause mentioned here still in place?
https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement...
Sadly yes. The court case in India keeps getting delayed and delayed. I think next hearing is Feb 8th?
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.
Your link seems to contradict your description,
- "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")
You can download tsv files with entries like this:
That's 3/4 of the IP address.2011-09-22 22:29:24 10.1007/BF01907940 www.springerlink.com/content/ppt42929g7645548/fulltext.pdf 213.87.138.* -176088 Russia
"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
It's really handy that they keep trying to damage sci-hub.
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!
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 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.
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.)
> 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.
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.
>land grab model where the person who snagged a name 30 years ago now owns it forever for free?
This is already the case with the current dns, since paying $10 per year is pretty much nothing to any middle class investor, so they do in fact "own" it forever for "free", relatively speaking.
If I had 10 dollars a year from everyone saying this I would be a new FAANG. Why is everything aimed at middle class Americans.. the average salary around the world is a lot smaller and many domains extensions exists which Americans can't buy.
The early adopters got the first twitter names, instagram names, etc for free forever. People invested time signing up when you never thought of it and they get rewarded.. the platform gets the early adopters. We don't force users to pay and let other take the name and continue to be that person.
Domains should be the same. When a domain expires someone can buy it and pretend they are the original owners.
If they were free you could buy coolformatbestnamecoolformat still get the name you wanted and use a prefix postfix custom format to identify with a group. rubycooldomainruby reactcooldomainreact
Human-readable names can potentially be pseudo-random, and thus securely generated. What's hard (indeed, considered largely infeasible) is meaningful, decentralized, secure names.
it was considered infeasible until bitcoin demonstrated that it was feasible, as zooko agreed: http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko
http://web.archive.org/web/20210118172102/https://squaretria...
The problem I've got with any signed, cryptographically secure replacement for DNS (including a blockchain-backed solution) is that over time names will be lost. Just like bitcoins get lost.
You need some kind of "admin access" for the system that can fix things like lost keys, at which point you might as well stick with DNS.
or you could stick with losing the names
aaronsw proposed that you could expire unrenewed names after 12 months
i forget what solution namecoin and ens use
I hadn't considered expiry. That does lets lost names re-enter the pool, at least, even if not under the control of the original owner.
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.
curious what “malicious” use cases a decentralized name registry enables that dns doesn’t?
you're focusing on the first part (what it enables) and not the last part (without any way to mitigate)
ah interesting. won’t multi sig solve this issue? create multiple keys, and have a 2/3. if you lose one, hope you don’t lose the other.
and also - there may be a way for the naming contract to use social recovery for keys.
This, for example I lost my keys or my keys were stolen
[cricket tunes intensify]
>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.
I was going to argue that remembering "CorrectBatteryHorseStaple.com" is leagues easier than remembering an 128 bit number, but then I did the math and using the 20k most common english words to encode 128bits you'd need an 8 word phrase, which pretty much solidifies the point you've made.
I mean, people can recite poetry far longer, even nonsense poetry ("Twas brillig, and the slithy toves / did gyre and gimble in the wabe") so it's not impossible. But generally speaking, yeah. Nobody wants to navigate to that bit of jabberwocky instead of google.com
It does kind of make me long for the days of the HOSTS file, where anyone might alias a hard-to-remember address as something locally meaningful.
> 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.
Apps on blockchains already play the role of that centralized structure. The most successful I'm aware of is ENS on Ethereum. Whatever economic model you prefer can be implemented this way.
Anybody involved in a "rent-seeking certificate infrastructure" is doing so by choice. Certificates are free. ISRG saw to that. Web browsers aren't going to use DNSSEC.
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.
> attempting to sell the Brooklyn Bridge
Handshake reserved the top 100,000 Alexa domains and allowed all trademark name holders to claim theirs.
Not to mention the ten million in FOSS grants for developers to build tooling
Sadly the ideologues will somehow decry their attempts for an alternative while defending the indefensible ICAAN.
Handshake requires domain owners to pay a biennial "mining fee" to maintain their names, even for names that were "airdropped" to FOSS projects. This is no less of a grift than ICANN.
Oh, that's nice of Handshake. Definitely it makes sense to me now that Handshake should be able to sell the domain namespace! Why not, if they're going to donate to FOSS?
My question to you is: if I donate MAC addresses to FOSS projects, can I tokenize ARP? I promise to be nice about it. The first 10,000 IP addresses can have their ARPCoin for free.
Seriously, this FOSS donation thing with Handshake: it's like selling people the Brooklyn Bridge, but promising generous new bike lanes. See, the FOSS stuff? It wasn't the problem with the plan.
What about everyone else after the 100k? What recourse are they left with when their domain is/was taken by another party? Which party should own the domain? How would doubly registered domains be resolved?
They will remain on their original tld, so brand.com will remain brand.com, they just won't automatically receive their own brand tld, unless they manually start the auction themselves.
so those below 100k were not reserved, a squatter bought their brand tld, what recourse do they have? What about new brands that have reached the 100k mark since the great reservation?
if a brand was not significant enough to reach internet search significance why should they be entitled to their own tld? why should be some company "co" from country x be more entitled to their own tld than the company co with the same name from country y? If they feel they are, they can a) manually start and win the auction b) buy the tld c) use an alternative like .brandHQ,.getbrand,.usebrand or whatever d) just keep using their original domain brand.com, which is the most simple and straight forward solution that requires no effort on their part.
By your logic the evolution of the internet would forever stagnate because developers would be stuck reserving an infinite amount of tlds that keep on popping up, it's just unrealistic and not pragmatic. reserving 100k of the most popular domains is a good faith effort and a pragmatic solution.
And if you want to talk about fairness let's first start talking about the corruption of ICANN[0][1][2] before criticizing emerging solutions.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/sep/21/icann-int...
[1] https://www.politico.com/news/2022/04/09/website-domain-more...
[2] https://circleid.com/posts/20210413-insult-and-injury-of-us-...
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, the happy path is ACM. These are “free”, but arguably you’re paying for the cert with the load balancer or edge resource.
There’s no difference between a blockchain and a cryptographically secure write ahead log, indeed that is how blockchains are defined. Perhaps you assumed that I meant cryptocurrency when I said blockchain? I did not.
(Sorry for the delayed reply.)
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.
Sure - for example, when the organization requires an OV or EV certificate.
What’s the use case for OV/EV certs? I thought it was reasonably well established that they herald from the same era as “this site secured by Symantec” icons, and were basically just the same security as DV certs but with the wheels painted chrome and an extra tax for gullible buyers.
It doesn't matter, right? Because anyone who relies on OV/EV certs has chosen to rely on OV/EV certs. If we replaced the whole WebPKI edifice with a blockchain, they'd still make the same decision not to trust the baseline system.
When we talk about the WebPKI being coercively annoying, what we're really talking about are the roots of trust that the browsers have chosen to trust. No browser requires OV/EV.
Yes, a baseline system built on a blockchain could support the validated identity and KYC features of OV/EV certificates. Indeed, this already exists in Sovrin (sovrin.org).
The use case is knowing that a server is owned by who it says it's owned by as validated by a trusted KYC provider. For example, Stripe has an EV cert. Let's Encrypt does not support OV/EV because they cannot automate the KYC checks. Let's Encrypt is focused on the encrypted connection use case.
Yeah, and that happens where?
Can you name some examples?
You know what? You're right. That's literally the only proposed blockchain application I think I've ever read that I think would actually work.
I don't think it would. The moment the blockchain would start getting any traction, the big blockchain companies would use their capital to get their hands on every recognizable domain name and within days the only remaining "domains" would look like passwords. You could then probably buy readable domains for exorbitant amounts of cryptocoins.
I prefer the current registrar setup over anarchist blockchain hellscapes. You can sue Verisign, you can't sue 0xEf1c6E67703c7BD7107eed8303Fbe6EC2554BF6B.
Good points, but I have to point out that what you're describing is literally what happened with our current system, just less extreme.
I was recently quoted $250,000 to buy a .com that is not being used and as far as I can tell has never been used but some guy bought in the 90s when I was a young child. Aside from the level of extreme is that really different from "You could then probably buy readable domains for exorbitant amounts of cryptocoins."
You touch on what I think the core issue is with domains when you talk about suing Verisign. In some very limited cases, it's possible through litigation to get a domain you feel like you should have. But therein lies the crux of the whole issue: What standard needs to be met before you qualify for a domain name, especially one that is in contention?
In cryptocurrency, the criteria to receive the currency was originally solving problems with computing power because they needed some arbitrary measure. In the world of domain names, it's been a lot of different things but mostly just money and time.
That standard - what "qualifies" you to own a domain over someone else I think would have to be decided before truly effective regulation can be made or enforced, blockchain or not. Right now it's basically temporal, with some carveouts from lawsuits for trademarks.
The current regulations around how domain names work is woefully inadequate (like most regulation around technology) and gives outsized power to private entities. This is something that I think people don't talk about enough when they criticize blockchains.
If there was a better job being done with public policy, you'd likely have less people who think a system where there's no way of imposing real regulation is desirable.
It's especially bad with technology. My go to example is Apple's App Store, but this area is a good topic too.
To me, a happy mix of public/private policy would be best. The government allowing private TLDs, but regulating them. An anti squatting law, price capping new TLD name registrations, an enshrined "specificity system" to claiming an unused (or even used) domain would make the situation so much better, but it'll never happen.
You know domain sniping already happens right? There is extensive auctioning infrastructure. And most of the good names were claimed a long time ago. The only way to get an existing domain name without paying the owner for it is to sue over trademark violations or stuff like that which often will cost more than just buying it.
Domain sniping already happens, sure. However, squatters need to invest time and energy into registering these domains whereas a cryptographic system can do all that offline inside the data centers of the cryptosquatter.
Some TLDs have provisions against domain squatters and in case of copyright disputes, you can sue the squatters (or request ICANN to release the domain if that isn't possible for some reason). If you have a good reason to demand a domain currently unused, there are ways to get it.
With crypto-TLDs, nike.com and microsoft.com would be registered by a malicious player without any kind of recourse. The lack of enforceability makes the entire system pretty useless the moment it takes off.
> However, squatters need to invest time and energy into registering these domains whereas a cryptographic system...
The auction system is actually fairer since it gives enough time for every party to bid the highest amount according to their interest instead of relying on sniping services like in the current legacy systems.
> whereas a cryptographic system can do all that offline inside the data centers of the cryptosquatter.
what does this even mean?
>Some TLDs have provisions against domain squatters and in case of copyright disputes, you can sue the squatters
Sure, but this is also a double edged sword, since it also opens up abuse i.e. reverse domain hijacking which is a real and common problem. Just this week Charles Schwab tried to rob the legitimate owner of a domain that contained "Schwab", while they tried to hide the fact that the owner's name is also Schwab. [0]
>With crypto-TLDs, nike.com and microsoft.com would be registered by a malicious player
That's why good builders put in the time and effort to reserve these names from the start.
>The lack of enforceability makes the entire system pretty useless the moment it takes off.
Sovereignty has its price. No system is perfect, everything has its trade-offs, but I see a lot of people highlighting the best properties of the legacy system while ignoring the best properties of the new systems. The comparisons should be fair and compare the full range of positives and negatives instead of picking and comparing in a bad faith manner.
[0] https://domainnamewire.com/2023/01/24/charles-schwab-tries-t...
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 issuance of the new on-chain version.
This essentially allows for a fair transition from the old system to the new system, while eliminating squatting.
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.
The first question is irrelevant and affects nothing - the same owner proves ownership of both at the outset, if they choose to let the legacy version expire, well they chose that - so who cares what happens to it?
I suppose it could be configurable at purchase to allow it to be a recurring verification, if that was desired, but it would seem to overcomplicate for no reason. "Subscribing" to domains each year is legacy inefficiency.
I'm not sure what you mean about DNS, any chain-based system would be... chain-based, and therefore cryptographically-assured that a domain points where the owner chooses. "Not your keys, not your domain" applies.
I don't think that's happened on ENS so far, though there is some domain squatting just like there is on DNS.
Though ENS doesn't implement this, it'd be possible to add paid arbitration by humans for resolving trademark disputes. You couldn't get damages but you could get the domain.
It's been working... for awhile now. But no traction here because... crypto = bad.
There's Handshake, ENS, and UnstoppableDomains.
Brave supports .eth domains out-of-the-box, hopefully Handshake soon.
For Handshake you can use a local resolver that reads the blockchain or use NextDNS.
NFTs aren't just for art, y'know. They have real [digital] world use cases for ownership, like DNS.
There is no traction because it's a vanity item. Most people/businesses need their websites to work on the average Joe/Jane's mobile phone, not just on some specialized browser that only a few people use. (=Chrome, Safari, Edge)
So tech here doesn't gain traction unless the average Joe already uses it?
And Brave and NextDNS aren't popular enough for your threshold?
Handshake is exactly what would stop the issue happening in TFA, yet everyone ignores it here.
For something to go mainstream, you have to talk about it...
HN is not a very good tech site if you only talk about the tech that the common person already knows about.
For some products, yes. For example, if you were to make a social media network that targets the general populace for finding their real life friends, it wouldn't work unless you had... well, the general populace on it. No matter how awesome the technology would be. The same with DNS replacements.
The projects mentioned in this thread aren't the first to offer an expanded DNS solution for one reason or another. None of them gained traction.
> For some products, yes. For example, if you were to make a social media network that targets the general populace for finding their real life friends, it wouldn't work unless you had... well, the general populace on it.
Hence why Twitter still has no viable competitor or replacement, especially when the money is still there despite all the hype and mania of it 'dying'.
Literally one of the first applications of a blockchain tech
You're looking for the Ethereum Name Service.
I've found this to be helpful:
https://www.ilovephd.com/working-sci-hub-proxy-links-updated...
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.
Is there a way to mirror parts of sci hub?
Was going to ask this as well. It seems sci-hub would enable or encourage mirroring to serve the cause of open science.
Or all of it? How many TB
Hmm I guess they don't want to get accidentally DoS attacked
they should just mention that the content is only available for people to train their ML model
Microsoft can get away with it, we might as well do the same
What is this referencing? Just ChatGPT et al illegally slurping up everything they can get their hands on, or something more specific?
I think this is referencing GitHub's slurping of code for Copilot
Decentralized DNS protocols like handshake were created to circumvent this kind of thing.
I mentioned here before, but how can we stop these domains from dying like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34541672
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.
Handshake solves this.
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
You're operating under several incorrect pretenses.
Handshake works with the existing DNS. "The guy who ruined Freenode" had a minor part in the creation of Handshake but does not control it. The core developers of Handshake are still active.
Sorry, but my best friend was one of the core developers who left. I have heard tons of stories that the public has not. Another core dev died. I said several, not all...
Yes, handshake can work alongside, technically, but the leadership did not want to, in practice
"Leadership" should be used extremely loosely. Imagine the first droplets of a puddle. Sure, the water is there but it doesn't dictate the spread. "In practice" is irrelevant to how Handshake is working right now.
I'm not here to convince you of the merits of Handshake, you clearly don't see nor care for it. Just clarifying facts over opinion.
EDIT: FWIW, I don't know who your best friend is but JJ remaining a part of Handshake is a major plus in my book. I personally don't find Andrew Lee (there are two in the Handshake story, we're talking about the Freenode one though) palatable and have clashed with him on occasion. Jackasses exist everywhere but IMHO, good people outnumber them by a massive margin.
That's a good thing, when a project in this space keeps jugging along because a diverse group of keep believing and working, it becomes a testament to the decentralization and value of its core idea.
sorry for the typos, I meant jogging along and diverse group of people. (i.e. diversity through a constant stream of people parting and joining, which is positive because it prevents stagnation and opens up space for new ideas and evolutions)