Sci-Hub Is Now on the ‘Uncensorable Web’
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These days sometimes the same entities provide both SSL certificates and DNS, but they are different services.
> Handshake is “is effectively a decentralized domain name server,” Roquerre said. Instead of using the web-standard certificate authority to authenticate user connections to a server, Handshake stores references to the IP address of the websites registered in its system. Namebase is a platform that offers users access to the Handshake network
That makes no sense at all. But it sounds like handshake is simply an alternate DNS protocol? Or does it also serve as a certificate authority somehow? Is it actually more decentralized than DNS (which is already of course decentralized in one axis, but not the relevant one for keeping a lookup available if the entity hosting DNS decides to remove it).
Very confusing.
It seems like tor .onion address would be an actually mature solution to this problem, instead of this thing that seems like press release babble?
Replacing cert authorities with something DNS-based (or alternative decentralized DNS based) doesn't actually seem relevant to the problem they are highlighting, of sci-hub's DNS records being removed by private or government actors making it harder to find sci-hub... no?
In what sense is DNSSEC decentralized? IMHO signing the root zone is about the most-centralizing thing that has ever happened to the Internet.
Handshake [1] is the next generation of DNS, as opposed to the ICANN controlled legacy system. It is more decentralized since a single actor does not control the system. You cannot be de-platformed without the consensus of the community and a fork, as opposed to a decision made by a single or small group of actors.
> Or does it also serve as a certificate authority somehow?
Since you can verify a certificate against a DANE TLSA record which is retrievable from a DNS zone with DS records stored on chain, the CA is no longer required for trust -- only cryptography. Checkout the paper which goes into far more detail [2]. The entire system actually incentivizes the Internet to become more secure -- which is pretty exciting!
> Is it actually more decentralized than DNS
It's more decentralized than DNS in that the root becomes the blockchain instead of ICANN. This project simply finishes the beautiful DNS ecosystem, which was already decentralized, other than the root.
Now we are all root, democratically.
Its an alternative DNS, with a method to use that alternative DNS as a way of authorizing ssl certs too?
It perpetuates that problem of ICANN DNS becoming a "business" instead of solving it. (ICANN DNS domain names were originally free.) The potential for censorship is only one problem of ICANN DNS.
Also, this project introduces a new problem of wasting energy on mining tokens.
This is a major problem that the project has made a sincere attempt to address. Through scarcity certain sybil protections are afforded, which has been inherently architected into the consensus protocol [1]. Additionally, an airdrop to many internet pioneers and open source developers was built in as well, giving everyone similar resources to participate in the auction system which, in turn, affords everyone more equality in participation. Finally, the top 100k names as per alexa were pre-reserved for the holders in the alexa list, and these sites are incentivized to properly setup DNSSEC, as that's the only way they can claim their name on handshake.
This is a win for internet security and internet users. It's absolutely a big win for freedom of speech.
> the owners are ... selling the DNS naming hierarchy
The blockchain is providing names in a global namespace owned by the commons.
I cannot understand why you have been harassing and stalking this project with troll-like behavior and rude, snarky comments. Let's try to be constructive and provide value to society and the future. The next generation reads these threads, and they look up to you. There's no reason for you to change that. And with that respect, not to sound all Uncle Ben on you, does come responsibility.
Either way, love you tptacek and appreciate your contributions to HN. I can honestly say myself, that I've learned a lot by simply being audience to your conversation.
Cheers.
Here is a different idea. The intent is not "world-takeover" or "winning" any imaginary popularity contest but just a different kind of DNS service, because, well who needs a reason. Because we feel like it, how's that. The idea is: Start a registry that only allows djb-designed per-packet encrypted DNS to be used. That is, all persons running authoritative nameservers must follow some rules. They must publish public keys in subdomains of the nameserver's domain. For an example of how this looks, do an NS query to ianix.com. All authoritative nameservers in this imaginary registry would be required to offer per-packet encypted DNS. It would not be that difficult to start something like this at least on a small scale. People running authoritative nameservers simply need to run a CurveDNS forwarder in front of their preferred authoritative nameserver implementation. The CurveDNS forwarder is a small piece of free, open-source software. This type of encryption is different from DNSSEC, so this is not a "replacement" or even an "alternative" to that movement. It is something totally different. The purpose is not to address risk associated with shared DNS caches (e.g., poisoning and other tricks) as DNSSEC is intended to address, it is not to distinguish an "approved" domainname versus an "unapproved" one by creating some "chain of trust" to a "root". The purpose is just to encyrpt DNS packets. The focus is authoritative DNS, the folks that actually own the web resource, not recursive DNS, third party DNS cache providers, etc. There are couple of reference implementations of the DNSCurve-enabled cache and one of a dig-like client users would run on their home/own networks to send encypted queries and decrypt responses. This whole system for encrypting DNS has been around for over a decade and IMHO is easily as "battle-tested" as anything DNSSEC. Does that mean everyone should use it. No. But it means anyone could use it. For no other reason that because they feel like it.
The main problem something like Handshake is purportedly aimed at solving, namely centralisation of who controls "the" DNS, is IMO caused by the commercialisation and making a "market" for names. There is no way anyone is going to solve the centralisation problem by offering a commercial alternative that replays the "Gold Rush" of the first DNS (not to mention all the corruption that followed, culminating in "new gTLDs" for $185,000+). If we want to level the DNS playing field, then IMO we would have to take the money out of it. That might mean "vanity" names are not as important. Who knows, public keys might play a more important role. I am thinking of those Facebook workers who "brute-forced/mined" some .onion name they thought was more recognisable. Silly. "Decentralised" would seem to imply more equality across the namespace, not "I snagged the best names before everyone else" (using x kilowatts in the process) or "That name sucks."
Just an opinion. Good luck with the blockchain.
Already available:
[1] https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=...
Σ（ﾟдﾟlll）Something went wrong.
sci-hub/ could not be resolved by HNS.to. Please try another Handshake resolver..
Rather poor publicity for "namebase" I'd say
- Handshake names are not *.bit domains like NameCoin they're actually top-level domains. This is because Handshake's purpose is not to decentralize domain names per se but too decentralize the root zone and create a more secure root of trust than Certificate Authorities [1]
- Handshake name auctions were spread out over the course of the first year after launch to prevent early adopters from hoarding all the good names. For instance, .crypto was available in the first few weeks after launch but .information isn't available until next week. This is important because early adopters hoarding names prevents latecomers from supporting the protocol.
- Handshake names are sold via vickrey auction instead of a flat fee. Different names are more valuable than others. Flat fee pricing allows a hoarder to arbitrage that fact by being first whereas auction pricing ensures that names are better distributed. .X sold for 311k HNS[2] (about $40k) whereas other names sell for a few cents.
- Handshake has a light client[3] that can trustlessly verify DNS records on-chain. This is critical because very few people run full-nodes, so without a light client the majority of users would rely on third parties which provides worse security than users resolving names in a decentralized manner
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969 [2] https://namebase.io/domains/x [3] https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd
... and they have a million other little niche name spaces to compete with to reach the point of serving as "top-level domains". I can create my own alternate name space, too, and nobody will care about mine, either.
e.g. How are new blocks created? Proof of work, predefined functionaries, something else?
You say you have SPV proofs which allow a full node to prove a particular domain is owned by a particular party. How does that work?
[0]: https://handshake.org/grant-sponsors/
[1]: https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1...
Has never caught on. On the other hand I 100% endorse sci-hub having a presence as a tor service.
- There is no centralized party that owns Handshake. This allows for any party to step in and contribute to the protocol. We've already seen this play out in building Namebase (I'm the CEO) as numerous unrelated parties have come together to further Handshake adoption
- It's not just about opening up the TLD namespace. Handshake's main technical goal is to improve the security and censorship-resistance of DNS by shifting the root of trust from CAs to a distributed ledger. My article on the technical improvements Handshake can provide was previously discussed on HN [1]
- TLDs aren't sold for a set price. There's a vickrey auction which awards the TLD to the highest bidder. This creates a better distribution of names than selling at a set price or to the first buyer
- The Handshake coin (HNS) provides an incentive for miners to provide security to the network and for holders to support ongoing adoption of the protocol, similar to how Bitcoin holders have put in massive efforts to evangelize it (I recognize that on HN people may find the Bitcoin evangelists annoying but I believe Bitcoin wouldn't be where it is today without them)
for real money, USD or EUR or such? where does this money go? or do you have to first mine some cryptocoin, or buy it with real money, and it then goes to the entity 'namebase'?
scroll down here to the 'how it works': https://www.namebase.io/
this quite honestly looks really sketchy to me. I'd much rather take my chances with registering a domain name among the myriad of ICANN root nameserver gTLDs and ccTLDs than buy some weird, obscure cryptocoin, which can then be used to buy 'domain names' that only 0.000001% of the client devices presently operating on the planet can successfully resolve into IPs.
https://learn.namebase.io/starting-from-zero/buy-hns
all of this just looks like somebody has grafted 'blockchain' and 'crypto coins' onto the same alternative root DNS ideas that failed twenty years ago: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_DNS_root
"Purchasing HNS with USD is currently limited to those with a US passport or ID."
Historically, blockchains haven't been terribly firm on the "irreversibility" point. Ethereum reversed the DAO transactions. The BTC rollbacks in 2010 and 2013. Etc etc.
In practice, whoever owns the client update server and whoever has 51% of the hashing power can make arbitrary changes to the chain. For most cryptocurrencies, a meeting of these stakeholders could fit into a phone booth.
51% attacks on blockchains used as a store of value are bad because an attacker can spend their coins (ie BTC) on an exchange, withdraw their profits, then perform a 51% attack on the previous block to take back their spent coins.
On Handshake, that same attack exists for HNS, but DNS updates on chain take 36 blocks (about 6 hours worth of transactions) to propagate, which is significantly more expensive and unlikely than pulling off a normal 51% attack on a single block (it gets exponentially more unlikely). Furthermore this wouldn't even be an attack per se. An attacker may be able to undo a DNS update, but they wouldn't be able to falsify DNS records because only the owner of the name who controls the private key would be able to submit valid UPDATE transactioins.
Sure, sites like TPB and Sci-Hub need to switch to a different domain from time to time bringing some annoyance to their users, but that's about it. Only if all domain registrars at once started actively removing "shady" domains would an alternative DNS ever come to spotlight.
I have been in a few places with governments that qualify as "regimes." I have used the internet in some places that have a reputation for internet censorship.
What I have observed is that most of those billions of people you say would benefit from a censorship-resistant internet have little desire to say anything worth censoring. Free speech is a particularly American preoccupation, and this value is not universally shared. The overwhelming majority of people living under such "regimes" are not engaged in active resistance to them. They just want to get on with their lives, make money, go out with their friends, etc.
And they don't speak English anyway so it's irrelevant to them if some American websites are blocked. Those are not the websites they want to look at. The people who do want to look at them use VPNs, which are tolerated as a loophole because total blocking with no possibility of circumvention is too much trouble and would have negative economic consequences.
And if they ever do want to say something that would attract the ire of the censors, what would be the point of saying it to a tiny audience locked behind a wall of obscure tech? They say it on systems that have mass adoption in those countries, and they accept the consequences, which are usually small, because by the time they put it on their social media accounts thousands of others are saying the same thing, and there is strength in numbers.
Sure, some people do want this tech and use the current iterations of it. Most don't. It simply does not solve a problem they feel they have.
In any case, the conversation was about censorship of the DNS system. Most censorship via DNS that I have experienced was either enacted by private companies who decided they didn't like being the registrar for sites they objected to on the basis of values, not legality, or it was enacted by Western states at the behest of private companies who wanted to defend their intellectual property.
And censorship is not all that useful. It happens a bit, but why bother when amplification of the desired message is much more effective and generates better press by definition?
[0]: scihub22266oqcxt.onion
Plus there's a myriad of questionable TLDs. In my world these are 'alternative DNS'.
Also, something like DNSCrypt can work for clients regardless of DNS root servers.
I get what you mean though, and in that regard you're right.
(Emphasis mine.) Did this Namebase CEO just state on record that he doesn’t know how DNS works?
We are going to have to come up with a new metaphor soon. I haven't seen a phonebook in ages. Honestly I would be more likely to tell my kid "Phonebooks were like DNS for telephone numbers."
thanks I'll be stealing this quote 100%.
Just like DNS: - Which librarian you ask can result in being pointed to a different reference book. - If the librarian is already familiar with the subject, they may be able to give you the answer directly to save time instead of pointing you to the reference book.
The phonebook metaphor was a good one to give to completely non-technical people, but technical people used it as well, and so often didn't intuitively understand that DNS involves clients exchanging data with arbitrary servers on the internet, using their own DNS server as a proxy. As a result, they often leave s significant communication channel open to the internet even from supposedly secure environments.
There are mutiple phonebooks worldwide, each compiled by different organizations. There is just not one phonebook, similar to how there is not just one DNS-server.
A floppy was like the save icon on old software. :)
I suspect these jokes are more reality than we think.
"Phone[ ]book" is the 12th word on the page you linked, and described there as a synonym to "directory". There's no need to be that pedantic.
"A telephone book was a directory for telephone numbers" is clear and accurate. Unless knowing what the word "directory" means is asserted to be the domain of pedants.
"By providing a worldwide, distributed directory service, the Domain Name System has been an essential component of the functionality of the Internet since 1985."
A straightforward search for the term brings up large sites in the UK, India, Malta and Hong Kong. "Directory Enquiries" was (is?) the name for the service in the UK where you pay a fee for someone to look in the telephone directory for you.
I'm happy to talk through how Handshake works if you have any questions about it. I also wrote an article on how Handshake can improve the root of trust for DNS which was previously discussed on HN [1]
Can I configure my resolver to use this "Handshake" blockchain?
[1] https://medium.com/@VitalikButerin/the-meaning-of-decentrali...
Technically DNS-the-protocol is suitably decentralized to resist censorship[0]; it's the particular canonical infrastructure of the main DNS system that's the weak link there. (Edit: by which I mean I think emacdona was talking about the protocol in general, and if you meant to object to that admittedly-debateable choice of focus, you should probably explicitly point out the distinction between the protocol (that anyone can use) and the canonical system (that is run by (tautologically) malicious corporations).)
0: Although it could use some cryptographic additions for better security, and it has problems with global uniqueness in the face of malicious actors pushing records to the effect of "sci-hub.org IN A some.fbi.ip.addr". But if you can find a trustworthy (possibly-suffix-indexed collection of) root server to start from, the protocol itself works fine.
That works great until the only names that are left are all too long to remember.
And if you buy space from someone else's TLD, well... you've just given someone the power to censor you.
Or am I missing something here?
For owners, it's important that their domain names can't be taken down or seized from them. Sci-Hub has dealt with this issue numerous times and has had to register a pool of domain names to try too counteract this issue before getting their Handshake name. Domain registrars can seize domain names and there isn't much recourse for the owners — it doesn't even need to be for a good reason[1]. On Handshake, ownership is controlled by your wallet's private key (similar to owning Bitcoin). As long as you control your private key no one can take your name from you.
For consumers, it's important that you can 1) access the domain name and 2) trust that the DNS records you're seeing are authentic. Handshake is a distributed network so as long as you can connect to a single node you can access it. This mechanic is what gives other distributed networks like Bitcoin and BitTorrent their strength. Furthermore, you can verify the authenticity of the records since each DNS update is reflected on the blockchain similar to how you can verify transactions on Bitcoin.
[1] https://www.izoologic.com/2018/12/20/zoho-domain-taken-mista...
Do you really believe this is a serious problem? I don't think it is by any stretch of the imagination.
---
> It seems like the answer is "everyone buys their own TLD", right?
Yeah, why not? The conceptual distinction between a domain and a TLD isn't necessary. From the Namebase docs:
> For instance, if you own "nakamoto" on Handshake, you can use "nakamoto" as a domain itself. In that case, you would point "nakamoto" to your website and visit it at http://nakamoto/ in your browser. You can also use "nakamoto" as a TLD and issue your own subdomains. In that case you can create "satoshi.nakamoto" and visit it at http://satoshi.nakamoto in your browser. A Handshake name can be used as both a domain name directly and as a TLD at the same time.
---
> And if you buy space from someone else's TLD, well... you've just given someone the power to censor you.
Maybe? Buying from someone else's TLD isn't the point of Handshake, for the reasons I mentioned above. But if you wanted to buy a subdomain for some reason, and still wanted it to be uncensorable, you should buy one from someone who revokes their censorship capabilities programmatically.
And that point is the big picture: reasoning about transparent code for very important things gives you a level of control you can't obtain through trusting people.
https://www.namebase.io/blog/how-to-access-handshake-domains...
A and J are controlled by Verisign (a US public company)
B and D by different US universities
C by Cogent (another US public company)
E by NASA
F by Internet Systems Consortium (an American not-for-profit)
G by the US Department of Defense
H by the US Army
I by Netnod (a Swedish non-profit)
K by RIPE (the European RIR)
and finally M by WIDE (a project of several Japanese universities)
>a privacy-focused, cloud-based domain name service resolver which converts IP addresses into domain names.
Except for being privacy focused, this literally describes every domain name service in the Internet.
To be forgetful or ignore this when turning the page regarding another subject on which you are less knowledgeable is known as the Gell-Mann amnesia effect [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Crichton#GellMannAmnes...
Someone actually got censored, and took "well, if you don't like how the DNS does things, you can just make your own!" as a literal challenge.
Wonder if this will eventually lead to further fragmentation. Hopefully encryption will keep it out of the lowest levels of infrastructure, I'd hate to see separate fiber lines put down to share controversial communications.
some ISPs also wanted to sell "internet lite" packages that are cheaper and only allow you to connect to a fixed set of websites. presumably they would also take money off the back end from those websites that want to be in the list.
It conflates the principle free speech with a narrow legal reading of the first amendment. Whether on purpose, or accident, I cannot say. The alt-text is also only illuminating in the sense that the CCP might heartily agree with it as well, as they see their crusade against free speech as nothing more than maintaining the public order and peace. In publishing the comic and leaving it up, Munroe has done more to damage the principle of free speech in the West than any opinion article I can think of, because it chains together several fallacies in a clever and funny way.
A comic response to xkcd - https://sealedabstract.com/rants/re-xkcd-1357-free-speech/in...
A legal rebuttal to anybody thinking AWS’s actions were legal (they were not, and hopefully a judge will agree soon) - https://cdn.pacermonitor.com/pdfserver/SGS7Z4Y/137165184/Par...
Now, you may or may not agree with his position (I certainly don't agree with some key aspects of it) but Randall is explaining what free speech is, not arguing for censorship.
The alt text is pretty thought provoking, too.
At the root, the problem is trying to use the highly centralized legacy DNS system for purposes contrary to the wishes of those who control that system. To be "uncensorable", you need to change clients to use something other than DNS to resolve names.
Anyway, the property you usually want to abandon for global names is "human-meaningful". Just use key hashes as names. "Human-meaningful" strings should be reserved for local nicknames, for the simple reason that the same string will often have different meanings to different humans, for reasons predating your system and entirely outside of its control. You have no way to guarantee that what you list as "Sci-Hub" is actually what the user thinks she's looking for as "Sci-Hub", and you have even less certainty of that for any less famous name.
It's on Brave Browser's roadmap to resolve handshake DNS directly.
[1] https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=...
> sci-hub.hns/ could not be resolved by HNS.to. Please try another Handshake resolver..
futurama_fry_not_sure_if.jpg
This is actually an awesome tip for sci-hub though that I'll be using.
Vaguely implying that you're considering a drastic remark about someone else is barely better than an accusation. It's like "no offense, but".
Or if you don't have something specific in mind then just leave it out of the comment.
No offense, but this was a strange micro-rant.
[1] https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=...
No matter how good the technology, it can eventually be censored if the law is strong enough.
In the past, it was hard to separate “useful” internet activity from “illegitimate” because things were changing quickly. Today, a government might say its simply illegal to use end to end encryption without government ability to tap (with warrant and court approval) and even if you have innovative use cases that get killed, that’s ok because 99% of the value of the internet is available.
Some say that math triumphs law, but you can see with Parler’s experience (ignoring political affiliation) that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation.
All of this is to say, it’s a good start to restore sci hub, but it’s important to win the hearts and minds of society and lawmakers to legitimize free information. Otherwise, eventually, it may become suppressed for practical widespread access, destroying most of the value.
EDIT RESPONSE TO RESPONSES
Thanks for the thoughtful responses. A few counterpoints:
* *Past encryption bans didn’t work.* Yes I agree. But I would argue it’s because lawmakers of the 90s really didn’t understand/care of the significance. Bans on pirated content in the 2000s worked well enough that my parents never really got into pirating, it was a young/hacker thing for the most part. Consider that just because hackers (in the PG/RMS sense of the word) can get info, doesn’t make it as useful to society as everyone getting it.
* *Parler’s mistake was using AWS.* This is my broad point - it’s impossible to be an island unto yourself. At some point, they have to use fiber laid in ground, buildings cohousing data center, electricity from the grid, peering, LTE networks, etc to transmit information. Either you argue that every single layer can be vertically integrated into a parallel universe of thought (which certainly doesn’t sound friendly to new idea entrants) or acknowledge that we need some kind of rules to ensure equal access (requiring law or some other consensus mechanism).
* *Law is different than public opinion.* Short run yes, long run not really. If the majority of people believe it’s more important to police child porn than ensure distributed ownership of the internet (whether they can articulate it as such or not) that will be the direction of law. If most people don’t care, but the ones working in lawmakers offices do, that’ll become the law. The purpose of law is to formalize social conventions and uniformly enforce them.
* *We can hack/route around law.* By all means, please do continue. My point is just to also view law itself as something that is malleable. Do both. Build censorship resistant tools, and advocate and change law to reduce censorship. Both are necessary, neither one alone is sufficient. Information both needs to be technically accessible, and actually widely available for a democratic society to function well.
I appreciate deeply that HN as a community can have thoughtful discussions on this topic. I’m glad I found you all.
I won't repeat sibling commenters here giving examples of where this is not true (US encryption mainly). I'm wondering if you have any examples of where it is true. What has been censored effectively?
As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked. "Cultural censorship" (a.k.a. "taboo") can be quite effective, but I'm not aware of any examples where the law has been in any way effective at all in this area.
> you can see with Parler’s experience (ignoring political affiliation) that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation.
There's two issues with this. Firstly, you're conflating "a large group of people", with "the law": these are not the same thing. Far from it.
Secondly, Parler is not exactly a shining example of technical competency. I wouldn't hold them up as "the example" of technology -vs- legal censorship purely because there are much stronger/actually competent representatives of the technological side out there that would fair far better than Parler.
It's also notable that many of the learned "techie" individuals who might rally to defend some other technology were it under siege from powerful state & corporate censorship, in this case actually rallied against Parler. So Parler were up against far more than just the forces of legal censorship.
>As far as I've been aware, legal censorship has never worked.
If you hold "worked" to the impossible standard of "completely eradicated its target" then no, just as basically no policy or initiative has ever "worked." Hell, polio still exists![0] By the much more reasonable standard of "suppressed the dissemination and popularization of its target" then there are a plethora of examples:
- Libel and slander laws successfully limit outright lies reported by the media.
- Various governments censor and punish criticism of themselves or specific officials.
- Copyright law successfully limits propagation of media.
- Certain content - typically sexual or graphically violent - cannot legally be broadcast.
- You are legally barred from lying about, for example, the ingredients of a product you produce or its efficacy.
- State secrets are heavily censored, and those who circumvent this censorship are heavily punished.
Not to mention individual cases of censorship, such as whether a man may publish his own autobiography.[1] That particular case was eventually decided in his favor, but there was no guarantee of that.
[0] https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2020/10/30/9290806...
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/may/20/concert-pianis...
There's often this fallacy when discussing governmental action that if it's not 100% effective it's useless. It's of course not true.
But, that said, our profession has never attempted a revolution where we explicitly try to breach this born secret. It's not clear whether we'd succeed, and the victory cup is literally nuclear waste, so it's not exactly desirable either.
I would argue that legalizing marijuana massively increased consumption (because so much friction and risk went away), legalizing encryption massively increased adoption on the internet (compared to a world where it was formally illegal and ISPs were used to enforce mandatory cleartext), bans on medical drugs without prescription have reduced how much people develop experimental drugs, bans on child porn have massively reduced number of people ever exposed to it, etc.
I think most information bans can be enforced with such high effectiveness that it becomes difficult to consider a society in which that weren’t the case. Much of “regulatory reform” is actually about legalizing and normalizing behavior/information that was always doable but banned. Rarely does the government invent a new type of behavior (patent law is a good example of that).
Sorry, but this is extremely naive. Russia routinely jails people for merely liking (not to mention, reposting) improper things on social media.
The most recent US example I can think of is that the Trump administration has been reasonably successful in suppressing hospital C19 images:
https://theintercept.com/2020/12/27/covid-photography-hospit...
But every administration in living memory (and probably without that qualifier, too) has suppressed something.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Censorship_in_the_United_State...
Parler build itself on Amazon which was the big mistake the next company won't follow.
It's a wakeup call to anyone using the cloud that one day it might decide you are not welcome.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Export_of_cryptography_from_th...
There are servers you can host yourself, and there are networks (payments and communication) from which you can’t be independent, in practice.
But I guess that plane has sailed. All hail the one true platform: Chrome.
Those that do command a premium ("Bulletproof hosting") ...and are sometimes shut down themselves: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CyberBunker
Knowledge is maybe not as addictive as meth, and people may not be willing to make the same sacrifices to get it across, but the risk required to run an encrypted network without government approval, and the efforts the government is willing to take to squash it, are also less.
Secondly, this is hacker news. Our culture is to route around these kinds of things. ;)
But if the goal of censorship is to completely prevent a leaked fact from being communicated - that's much harder (and I'll say it's practically impossible after a certain point).
Thinking how a quick decision now will possibly turn in ten years down the road is how we can retain our rights but still move our democracy forward. A perfect example is championing the destruction and banning of all right leaning social media / twitter users... but when SciHub gets banned all the sudden its a travesty of free expression. Unfortunately, this line of reasoning is not a two way street. Even as a staunch liberal try my best to not let my anger at the other side get the best of me and play into the hands of the corporatists and statist who actually want to recreate what many refer to as fascism (melding of the state and corporate powers).
We used to have that, it was called "net neutrality" and it was killed by Parler's political party.
I don't think any government could disallow end-to-end encryption at this point. I think they are careful because it could seriously undermine their authority if they fail, which they very likely would, which would lead to severe embarrassment.
They could still do significant damage of course.
Time will tell. Right we are on day 2(?) of Parler being banned from major platforms, and their main problems seems to be being banned from app stores and not necessarily infrastructure problems. thedonald.win seems to be doing just fine and Voat also seemed to sustain a significant userbase before shutting down (financing a platform is a whole other thing entirely).
The science should be funded and free. The applications of the science are where the money is to be made.
These companies are unnecessary dinosaurs from a bygone era. It's time for them to fail and die off naturally. But it will probably take legislation to do so. And I for one can't wait to see them gone.
Most scientific research is funded with grants and by universities with billion dollar endowments. They are not struggling.
You should not make money on the deaths of others because you think it's more important to charge for the knowledge that can save them.
I'm in medical. Some of these papers are life saving. Please don't discount how valuable that science is to humanity as a whole.
This is not about companies making profit. This is about science and the freedom of information. Data wants to be free and it should be.
Sci-hub was created under Obama, I don't remember neither him nor the party making anything to help them, quite the opposite actually: Elbakyan has been judged in absentia and sentenced twice under his presidency. Were she to put the foot on Western soil, she would pay it dearly thanks to this.
"Yeah, meet the new boss, same as the old boss..."
You write like someone who's never heard of "regulatory capture."
I personally believe this is wishful thinking (similarly when I read about how companies have "outdated business models"). Publishers sell prestigue and attention, and this can't easily be replicated, nor is it unnecessary. The increase in research papers makes them even more valueable in my eyes.
This is despite me wanting to see many changes to publishing and science distribution.
edit: removed part that I deemed unecessarily hostile.
This saves lives. I think we can all agree there are certain things that are a benefit to humanity and we should place these things over profits.
These companies are less valuable than they appear IMHO. These gatekeepers of knowledge. More like stonewallers.
There's optimism, and then there is naiveté.
We all know what we got with the Republicans last 4 years. Let's see what changed on the other side of the aisle if anything.
Elsevier is a very diverse company with a lot of product offerings that are not antiquated. People here tend to just think of them as a journal publication company, but they are much more than that. The company sells (through subsidiaries) a lot of IT products to governments and law enforcement around the world.
They, as a small example, offer a service that allow LEO to perform comprehensive background & arrest record checks on individuals in custody.
I don't understand this perspective, but I guess my own is built from experience. We can never know exactly what Twitter discussed internally before taking this action, but there is lots of external evidence and signals as to what happened. It's unlikely to be different from the action taken by most other corporations with legal teams.
Small organizations with outside counsel can surprise us with their decisions since there are more concentrated opinions and higher risk taking. Perhaps GitHub and youtube-dl is the only outcome that has surprised me recently.
The precipitating event was a lawsuit in India and the subsequent reactions.
This article gives more details: https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-bans-sci-hub/
In this case it seems that they would have considered the actions of the companies running the paywalls. How likely would they be to take legal action (not all of which is public) against Twitter? Fairly likely, if they feel that Twitter is helping to publicize the service they want to take down.
This is both in the legal and financial interest of Twitter. There is no real blow back from kicking off this person and their service versus dealing with US corporations. Copyright law changes and the impact of court decisions likely play a factor too. I find it hard to believe that some court somewhere, hasn't held Twitter (or similar service) liable for indirect copyright damages (that is likely being appealed.)
Related question: Is there a true uncensorable (sic) protocol for hosting a website?
Can't censor what you can't reach, checkmate.
$ host sci-hub.hns
sci-hub.hns has address 186.2.163.57
$ host sci-hub.hns
Host sci-hub.hns not found: 3(NXDOMAIN)
And the web frontend is unable to render anything, echoing that message I quoted above.
Paging @jgc !
What laws will need to change (or be revoked) in the US and EU for them to operate legally ? Also, I never clearly understood on why is a trove of public research papers considered such a threat ?
Copyright laws would needs to be abolished, or new laws made that scientific research cannot be copyrighted (in many cases publicly funded research is already required to made open access, though).
Serve an initial website on a regular domain. The website only displays a standard hosts file. Copy and paste it into your local system's hosts file. Now browse to the site listed in the hosts file.
You can change the domains used in the hosts file at any time, and get real certs for those domains so you can use TLS. If the public browses to the IPs in the hosts file, they'll get nothing. But someone with the hosts file can see the actual site's content.
This avoids domain takedowns, and allows changing IPs and domain names.
There's alaways a way to kill an online system!
Real problem is a lot of this research is funded by taxpayers and should be public domain.
This problem of publicly funded research only available behind a paywall is a bipartisan issue. The main issue is that there appears to be no movement or effort to push this forward so the public is largely uninformed.
P.S. Corrected the date, seems like I still live in 2020. Thank you, lazyant.
About Aaron: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Swartz
E: At the same time, I feel like I should state - Aaron Swartz was a martyr, and I don't mean to disparage him or his legacy.
> Ohanian launched Reddit in June 2005.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit
> When Infogami failed to find further funding, Y-Combinator organizers suggested that Infogami merge with Reddit,[32][33] which it did in November 2005, resulting in the formation of a new firm, Not a Bug, devoted to promoting both products.[32][34] As a result of this merger, Swartz was given the title of co-founder of Reddit.
A company with the mendacity to misrepresent an employee as a co-founder in order to attract said employee wasn't happy with that employee's performance. So they boldly refuse to continue misrepresenting him as a co-founder on their about page.
If so, I would like to nominate Reddit for the Silicon Valley Courage Award. (However, I think Facebook is the clear front-runner for clamping down on "Stop the Steal" disinformation now that both houses of Congress and the presidency are under Democratic control.)
He made a webapp, and partnered with reddit founders to maybe merge things but AFAIK conflicting (technical and non technical) visions made the next step impossible.
Not unlike most orgs I suppose.
edit: to make this answer less of a throwaway line: it's a principle that underpins most of the MMR-based ideology on this very same website and animates most of the tech scene in general, "making the world a better place" statements notwithstanding. How many of you here can genuinely pretend otherwise in your professional life? A portion perhaps, but clearly the minority.
Beyond the simple cynicism of pointing it out, this principle seems to be quite stable and efficient in the face of an audience that shifts its priorities every two seconds. Perhaps the better question to ask would be why the system of incentives that we have cultivated rewards this behavior. The crowd rewards certain behaviors, and in an increasingly postmodern world moral statements are usually lost in the noise or take the shape of a parody of themselves.
Then Reddit was still trying to figure out how to generate revenue years after a conde nast acquisition and you could tell that the "leadership" team very quickly wanted to distance themselves from any controversy.
Anyone active on Reddit or HN in the early days would have been surprised to here that Aaron was not considered a cofounder. It wasn't until after his legal trouble that the Reddit team tried to distance themselves from him and an his cause as fast as possible.
> Speaking on Reddit a few years ago, Graham said: “The company behind Reddit was a merger of two startups…and in that situation the founders of both startups are considered founders of the combined company.” [1]
sounds pretty clear to me..
But, without passing judgement one way or the other, Aaron's beliefs about free speech and information freedom which informed his activism cannot be reasonably described as moderate.
Just leaving this thought out here -- if laws are considered unjust, it is ok, even noble, to break them. That is how one got rid of apartheid, how colonies became independent and LGBT marriages came to be legally recognized.
If not for lawbreakers we would still be living in a world that approves of Turing's treatment post war.
I think intellectual property laws are always unjust, but most people disagree with me and they probably think that what sci-hub is doing is wrong.
There are probably some murderers out there who think that murder is justifiable in some cases.
"Don't be snarky."
Opinion: This will never become a realization until these people realize the average Joe is not going to jump through all these hoops just to get an alternative browser up and running. It should be simple and seamless. Less than 1% will bother with all this.
Other options also provided in the docs: https://learn.namebase.io/starting-from-zero/how-to-access-h...
I had a look at their website: https://hsd-dev.org/guides/win-install.html
It doesn't say that you require docker. Docker is one of the options.
You could either build it from source using NodeJS or use node JS's package manager NPM to install it.
Docker is a containerisation platform that requires virtualisation support:
https://docs.docker.com/docker-for-windows/install/
The system requirements are as follows:
* Windows 10 64-bit * Hyper-V and Containers Windows features enabled
So of course this method is not going to run on Windows 7 and it clearly has stated so.
Plus it's not a web browser. It's a blockchain DNS.
Is it really that hard to distribute an application? A statically linked executable, or a portable directory with an executable in it. Thousands of projects do it every day. Why do so many developers insist on making a simple thing like actually running their software so complicated?
Windows 7 has reached EOL a year ago (minus two days), so yeah, maybe it's not very well supported...
What a ridiculous statement, do you truly want to live in a world where they can't? Most authors on sci-hub themselves would struggle with containers.
If a mechanic mocked a room full of people for not being able to change their own oil what would you think of them?
Please reconsider such an ideological stance.
I doubt that most people able to read and publish complex scientitic papers would "struggle" to follow what is overall a one page sequence of instructions to enter in a computer. You don't need to understand containers to run docker.
I don't really get the analogy with the mechanic ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Maybe we live in different worlds but the average (non-cs)professor would very much struggle with this stuff. I've seen some barely being able to use basic programs, they are skilled in very different domains and no one will bat an eyelid if they slowly click on the mouse to copy/paste every day of the week. Rocking the command line is certainly not in their job description for the most part.
Even comp-sci academics do work that is horrendously bad and not even close to what would pass in the workplace for an entry level graduate.
> the analogy with the mechanic
Essentially an adult saying to a group of children "this is so simple for me, what are you a dumbass?"
EDIT: Seems that progress has lead to this no longer being true.