Hacker News Reader

Comment by daveguy | Hacker News Reader

If anyone is having trouble accessing https://scihub.io (the site providing the papers) you can find the site directly at the ip address: https://31.184.194.81/ ... Apparently the domain name was seized. The certificate is for sci-hub.io (safe to accept). Or you can just connect to http://31.184.194.81/ if you don't want to bother with the warnings (and are ok with DOIs and papers being transmitted without encryption).

EDIT:

Their other domains:

https://sci-hub.cc (uses sci-hub.io certificate)

https://sci-hub.bz (uses a separate certificate and ip address -- 104.28.20.155)

And a tor site: scihub22266oqcxt.onion

View on HN

Have there been attempts at dispersing the whole collection of papers through torrents or IPFS? The goal here is not to have a central location with a pretty web page but to make the content freely accessibly everywhere by anyone. Distributing it over thousands of nodes would achieve that goal.

That's a good question. I don't know if there has been an attempt to IPFS/Torrent the files, but it would be good. They are referenced by DOI on sci-hub so they are easily searched. It would probably be helpful to have a DOI -> IPFS/Torrent name. For IPFS a doi like 10.1037/rmh0000008 would probably work but I don't know if the '/' character will work as a torrent name.

I don't know that the sci-hub underlying database is available outside of the site. I expect with growth they will need to move to torrents or similar to minimize their bandwidth requirements.

Torrents are pretty bad at the archiving problem , i.e. maintaining copies of things with no readership over a long time. Not a great fit for this stuff.

Yes and no. You need servers that guarantee availability (but they could hide themselves pretty well if necessary). Then the torrents provide accessibility.

I agree. Setting up mirrors would probably be a better fit for this kind of content, but mirrors would be susceptible to the same dangers that the primary website may face: forced take-down by the hosting provider, domain blocking, etc.

The fundamental difference of content-addressed networks is their resiliency in the face a single authority trying to track down all of the sources that have copies of the content.

Even though IPFS is still in its infancy, one of its primary goals is to solve the problem of content suddenly disappearing from the Internet.

I believe that libgen torrents are available, which, as I understand it, are basically a mirror of the content available from scihub. I don't have a lot of information on it now and can't research it from work.

> the whole collection of papers through torrents

yes, although their bandwidth is horrible

Or even http://sci-hub.bz/ and http://sci-hub.cc/

Eventually they'll just setup their own DNS system, or replace it with something else entirely. something like a BitTorrent for nameservers.

https://bit.namecoin.info/

NameCoin is a failure. There are two problems. 1. no one uses it. 2. cybersquatters.

https://gnunet.org/gns

Or you can just enter "31.184.194.81 sci-hub.io" into your /etc/hosts, so the certificate will match up with the domain name.

Good point. Also, they have a facebook page: https://www.facebook.com/sci.hub.org/

.org was their original domain which was pulled a while ago.

They are still posting updates there. Hopefully they don't get that pulled too.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com