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Comment by dulpo | Hacker News Reader

This is surprising. I thought last I heard they'd arrested the guy who was suspected of running the site, about a year or so ago. Guess I'm misremembering.

Also I'm surprised Cloudflare hasn't shut them down like they do for other dodgy sites.

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When accessing from Belgium the link is blocked by Cloudflare:

Error HTTP 451 Unavailable For Legal Reasons

In response to a legal order, Cloudflare has taken steps to limit access to this website through Cloudflare's pass-through security and CDN services within Belgium

Man, I thought cloudflare stood in front of individual sites. When did they start becoming a filter on an individual’s web connections?

CF is in a position such that if they aren't cooperating with national laws, then they are actively hindering them. National governments don't like that, and will have ISPs block CF wholesale if that's what accomplishes their goals.

Eh, they can't block half the Internet.

Apparently in Spain they can: https://www.reddit.com/r/CloudFlare/comments/1j7yx5y/i_cant_...

To operate in Belgium, they have to follow local laws and comply with legal orders. They either make the site unavailable to local IPs or leave that market.

Interesting. Seems to be only certain jurisdictions. I can access it no problem from the UK Vodafone network.

I'm unable to resolve the domain on EE UK - looks like it's DNS blocked.

By comparison, on my work network (TalkTalk) I can resolve the domain but I get a connection reset from the site.

I think this might be the first time I've hit a DNS block. It feels rather eerie seeing people talking about a site that, from my point of view, doesn't even exist...

There's an inconsistent censoring of numerous websites across the UK. In short, the biggest ISPs (a list which changes over time), will block various sites (TPB, libgen, AA, and others), based on court orders taken out at different timesIn general, it's a good idea to use Private Relay if you're using Apple devices and have access to it, no matter what network you're on, and if you're doing anything you don't want your ISP to traffic capture you should be using VPNs and/or Tor.

There are a lot of legitimate reasons to want to use scraping sites that UK copyright law is not nuanced enough to protect, and so blanket bans just end up emerging at the demands of copyright owners (which more often than not, means Disney or Springer).

Yes, Ofcom really needs to sort this out properly. I shouldn't be able to access this site from a UK ISP. Makes no sense that it's blocked on some and not others.

It starts with one

Set proton VPN to Albania and enjoy the full internet is my experience.

Whats up with Albania?

Idk, I went there a couple of times, I just love the people, the country. It’s a trip back in time. So it was my “random pick” for an exit node. And now I can read rt.com, sail the high seas, open any libgen or Anna's Archive. They're not part of the EU, seem far away from it (no euro, guarded borders, ditched their communist dictator who completely isolated the country ~40 years ago). Perhaps they are less easily coerced into censoring as practiced by countries primarily governed based on GDP and what the big corps want (although everybody seems to smoke everywhere so they could use some of that EU influence).

Hmm. Even the title link above doesn't work for me on Virgin's cable, in the UK

Do you see an error page / blocked page?

I used to get archive.org blocked and had to contact my provider to have the filters taken off.

Nope,it just takes forever, then eventually shows a blank screen...

Yep blocked by Ziggo in NL as well

Whenever I'm in the Netherlands I need to set my DNS to 1.1.1.1 or similar, lots of blocks.

Except that that’s CloudFlare, which is also blocking Anna’s Archive.

Luckily it isn't the only public DNS.

8.8.8.8, 9.9.9.9, and many others exist.

Here it's Cloudflare the CDN, sitting in front of Anna's Archive, that's doing the blocking. The DNS resolver used doesn't come into play.

(Case in point, I am using Google's DNS, yet still encounter the block when accessing from a Belgian IP.)

Touché!

We should stop using public DNS and start using our own DNS.

I actually didn't know there were more error codes beyond error code 429

There's "431 Request Header Fields Too Large" which you will see occasionally. But after that 451 is the only other 400-level error code above 429. It was chosen as a reference to the book Fahrenheit 451.

451 is kind of a novelty code, its meaning being related to Bradbury's "Fahrenheit 451" SciFi novel.

Oh! You'll love this: 418 I'm a teapot

https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/HTTP/Reference/...

visit http.cat

The two behind Z-Library were arrested in late 2022.

Thank you, I think I must have got the details of that confused with the OCLC lawsuit.

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