Z-Library Aftermath Reveals the Feds Seized Dozens of Domain Names
torrentfreak.com
torrentfreak.com
The way they eviscerated the service makes clear that in general we need more robust web services. Tor is not ideal for this, onions are excellent and fill their niche really well.
But we need something simpler here.
The people who do show up are independently wealthy, retirees, and people being paid to represent an organization. Representitive government doesn’t, and cannot represent the people.
This also helps curtail corruption. It is ostensibly easier to coerce/bribe/etc a state than a nation, but you have to do this for every single state and then try to keep them all under your thumb. A federal government may ostensibly be harder to corrupt, but once corrupted they can affect your whims on a national level and be relatively easier to maintain control of.
This decentralization of power seems to be the easiest way to have a functioning political system. It's always the same decision. Centralization paired with selflessness, benevolence, and competence will trend towards utopia. Centralization paired with selfishness, greed, or incompetence will trend towards dystopia. Decentralization will always just trend towards mediocrity as a mish mash of the averages of society.
They also explicitly dismissed the idea of one person, one vote.
And this all ignores the fact that there wasn't a singular, cohesive founding vision. Alexander Hamilton, for example, argued for a strong federal government.
With all that said, we shouldn't be hamstrung by what a deeply flawed group of people decided in the late 1700s.
Bringing this back to the discussion at hand, your point seems completely off the mark and basically irrelevant. The current copyright regime is nothing like what was created by those men hundreds of years ago. In the late 18th century after the country was founded, copyright was limited to 14 years plus another 14 year extension if the author was still alive. Going back to that would be a great idea.
the corollary being the further away government is from the people, the less accountable it is
Exhibit A: Brasilia
I hope you don't think "accountability" means some hill billies storming some offices and then going home having accomplished absolutely nothing, except in some cases going to jail.
We need to be careful with that - it's one thing to make tools that help circumvent harmful behaviors, such as censorship and privacy violations, but rendering authorities unable to enforce laws (or forcing them to partially enforce them, based on who has and who hasn't technology protecting them) is not a desirable outcome.
They still go through the onion circuit.
I agree with the GP, distinction you're trying to make is unclear - Tor is a browser that uses onion circuits to access the web, including onion sites. Without onion, Tor is just another flavor of Firefox.
As far as I know I2P is better for the second kind of the job but apparently is not nearly as popular, sadly.
> Be careful when misinforming people like this.
Who died and made you the captain of the truth police?
Tor/Onion addresses are great at what they do, but not appropriate to solve this problem.
It's basically ideal for drug dealing when infrequently small amounts of data are exchanged and a crypto payment made.
Not idea for frequently accessing large chunks of data 1-100mb PDFs.
This is where I2P and eepsites shine.
Just after I finished my studies things started becoming more difficult though, when additional instructional materials (graded tutorials, quizzes, and such) started going online.
It's been a racket for a long time, but it's gotten much worse recently.
I think authors get a pittance. I recall a professor getting something like $600 to write a chapter in a molecular pathology textbook back in 2008.
Predatory practices all around.
Adopting and requiring such courseware is somewhat abusive to students, but instructors are probably trying to save their own time and avoid reinventing the wheel.
Personally I'd be happier if the textbooks and courseware access were sold separately.
Nice. Long fly the pirate flags.
I don't think that is immoral in any way. (And I'm pretty sure it's not illegal -- but IANAL).
So you need to maintain your own address tables, and get updates through private communications.
Obviously there are more books than that but I'm sure it's a long-tail situation.
The full archive is also not that big (~30TB) so they are plenty of mirrors.
Like where? Zlibrary wasn't open for 'official' mirrors in the first place, and the 'unofficial mirror' hasn't had any seeders for its torrents since at least the seizure of the domains last week.
Here. Her name is Anna.
But intuitively and conceptually, there is a hypothetical scenario in which all of humanity's knowledge is ~free for anyone to access instantaneously and from anywhere.
The current scenario in which every meaningful piece of academic output is heavily paywalled makes for a disheartening comparison.