Rescue Mission for Sci-Hub and Open Science: We are the library
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Torrenting or hosting on ipfs solves a part of the problem, but it pushes the social and legal norms even farther apart. But perhaps the path towards a longer term solution is to lead with that social fix, and then let the law catch up with society? Feels gross, but it also feels substantially more feasible than fighting by someone else’s rules.
[0] https://www.slashfilm.com/fbi-warning-front-dvds-updated-uns...
Your comment is reasonable, but as an FYI this term makes me picture a tinfoil hat on your head.
https://www.reddit.com/r/DataHoarder/comments/8ky647/scihub_...
Archivists were asking for help with torrent seeding:
https://www.reddit.com/r/seedboxes/comments/e129yi/charitabl...
Under the circumstances I'm sure they could use help and development with that stage anyway, but it's not clear to me that whatever system was in place until last year has been put out of commission more permanently.
Why India specifically? Probably because the same court has previously decided that photocopying books for personal use is fair-use, as long as no profit is being made.
Being legal in India would be a huge benefit. sci-hub could be hosted on a .in domain with servers hosted in India. No more cat and mouse game.
~180 EUR a month for 160 TB. Would need RAID so the 224 TB for 300 EUR a month would be better.
There's a reason it hasn't taken over the torrenting/piracy world and it's not because those people are slow to adopt new technology.
A dystopian heaven.
IPFS had a really cool idea at the start but they quickly bent under legal pressure without even trying to fight back. They have lost all legitimacy in the circles of the people who want to distribute potentially sensitive data that's only deemed illegal by corporate interests (like scientific papers).
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And as the sibling poster alluded to, the network can be extremely slow. Even for well-known content hashes I often times had 5-10 minutes of preliminary phase where not a single byte was downloaded, only for finally start downloading 500MB at 20KB/s... And I have a gigabit connection.
The “problem” with ipfs is that without incentivizing someone to pin (basically to seed) your file, it will be slower to access/will not necessarily remain alive if you yourself stop hosting it. But it’s the same with torrent. It’s actually really cool that it has public gateways so you don’t need anything specific for access.
She's a nice person who I rather like. I have tried discussing the ethics of her employer's journals business in a polite way. She told me what I felt were the company's "talking points" - "well, publishing is actually quite expensive, we publish many more papers than we used to, etc" - all of which I think are not valid justifications - e.g. look at the huge profit margins of Elsevier. And yet I think she believes them, or at least "chooses" to believe them.
I find it rather depressing that someone, who is otherwise a fine human being, chooses to work there. I know quite a few other people in the same situation, in various other businesses.
Anyway, I thought it was worth mentioning what some of the people "on the dark side" are like, and that in the mirror they look rather like me and you in most respects. My opinion is that at work they are in an environment of people who all choose to believe the same thing, and so what they do is "normal" and "acceptable".
When they do they don’t see anything.
So unless you have some idea of how to do peer review by blockchain.
I mean, that's probably not impossible, but good luck. Since the idea would be preventing anybody from making money off of it, it kind of goes against what blockchain is actually used for. Scihub is trying to create abundance, not scarcity.
Additionally, IPFS has the same problem as torrent files in that it requires additional layers (which aren't all feasible or effective) to obfuscate the source of data. If sharing it has been declared, in some sense, illegal then IPFS will reveal who is sharing it. And once those nodes are forcibly removed (because governments are more capable of doing that than random individuals) then the data can disappear.
I guess, then I2P should be the solution?
Note: Filecoin despite advertising itself for years as an incentivisation layer for IPFS is not - it's two separate networks [1], so it lacks all the features of the mature IPFS protocol.
Yes, exactly. Would love being able to use Filecoin or any of the alternatives (Storj, Sia and those) but they are all very immature right now, both UX and stability wise. If it's not hard to get the files into the networks, it's hard to get them out again.
IPFS could work as it's not ruined by the whole blockchain mess, but then you might as well use torrents (which people are successfully using already for Sci-Hub).
And yeah, torrents already let you do this.
Sure, you could do that over IPFS. But if you really want scale, censorship-resistance and wide-spread usage/storing of it, you'll use torrents (today, maybe future will be different)
That would be https://old.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/awlc4s/full_archive...
The link lousken suggests seems to me more appropriate and useful however. (I've suggested this to mods via email.)