7 ms·

One thing that worries me with Sci-Hub is that even though they put all of their PDFs on the torrent, it's too much to mirror by one individual. It would be nic

by d33 10y ago

One thing that worries me with Sci-Hub is that even though they put all of their PDFs on the torrent, it's too much to mirror by one individual. It would be nice if they implemented some scoring system that would help others mirror the most popular papers or if they worked like thepiratebay - just associating names to magnet links. It would be much easier to help work around the single point of failure then. Right now those huge torrents have as few as 4 seeders.

toomuchtodo 10y ago
https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/
- d33 10y ago
  Yeah, the thing is that SciHub controls the information now and it's up to them how they secure against failure they are. All in all, if we were to adopt IPFS, who would download all the terabytes of papers? Who and how would index them?
  - aw3c2 10y ago
    If they used ipfs as backend, everyone could sync and serve whatever parts they deem important. At least if I understand it correctly. ipfs is way too complicated for me. I would much prefer an anonymous network anyways.
    - dublinben 10y ago
      Freenet offers an anonymous, censorship-resistant distributed data store system like IPFS. It is very well suited to something like the Sci-Hub archive.
  - toomuchtodo 10y ago
    This is a work in progress.
petra 10y ago
I believe that when you download only a single file from a large torrent , you still help the torrent with your file. So if they just put torrent links in their search engines, and ask for people to install a browser torrent extention like [1], it could work pretty well. [1]for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torrent-tornado/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torrent-torna...
kanzure 10y ago
> Right now those huge torrents have as few as 4 seeders Any ideas on fixing this? I've tried offering her storage, bandwidth, or physical delivery of hard drives, but so far no bites (specifically, outright refusal).
- the8472 10y ago
  Install a torrent client, download the torrents, keep seeding?
  - nitin_flanker 10y ago
    Is it safe to do? I mean on the legal side.
    - the8472 10y ago
      Safe? No, it's probably copyright infringement. But you have to consider that so is reading them on sci-hub. The question is whether you want to engage in this particular act of civil disobedience and bear the risks or not. The risks can also be reduced by living in the right jurisdiction or obscuring your identity, e.g. by renting a torrent seedbox with bitcoins.
    - deleted 10y ago
      [deleted]
    - poooogles 10y ago
      No.
aw3c2 10y ago
It's not the popular papers that are important. Those will be well spread already. It's the unpopular "rare" ones that need help. You mean the libgen torrents or is there something spefically branded sci-hub?
- petra 10y ago
  It's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes 10 papers including the one they're interested.
  - aninhumer 10y ago
    Bitorrent kind of does this anyway, because in order to download one file, you need to download the entire block it's in. In a case like this where you have a large torrent with many small files, that will actually cover quite a few other files. If you ordered them strategically, you could even try to make sure every block has a fairly popular file in it.
    - jobigoud 10y ago
      Yeah, good idea. Sort the papers by popularity, and when grouping them find the distribution that minimizes the distance between any paper and the top-popular ones for atomic block size.
      - aninhumer 10y ago
        I don't think you need to do anything that complex. Just find the N most popular papers and make sure there's one in each block. Or thinking about, you could put them at block boundaries so people grab two blocks when they download them, in which case you'd only need half as many popular ones.
  - gherkin0 10y ago
    I don't think that would accomplish much. People would just delete the 9 papers that they don't care about rather than maintain them as clutter. And even if everyone did keep the extra files, would use would they be? It would be impossibly difficult to reconstruct the archive from them. It would probably be better to break down the torrents into smaller, more coherent, and organized collections that contain all associated metadata (e.g. a collection of biology papers from a certain time-span or set of publications). That way you might incentivize people to maintain smaller personal-use archives that could be recombined back into the whole, if the need arises. You could perhaps even build a system that could automatically generate, publish, and consume torrents with a particular (metadata + content) layout, but that's not restricted to a particular set of torrents. Then it could just consume certain topics from a feed of new torrents, from various sources, on the Pirate Bay.
nickpsecurity 10y ago
My suggestion for such filesharing is sending her money to anonymously send some people hard drives or access to file upload sites that have a copy. They can make their own copies that spread. And so on.
peterkelly 10y ago
Do you have a link for the torrents? I couldn't see anything on the main sci-hub site.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
colejohnson66 10y ago
What's wrong with setting up a mirror at archive.org? After all, they /are/ a library, so they get some immunity from copyright. Or can we not do that?
- gherkin0 10y ago
  > What's wrong with setting up a mirror at archive.org? After all, they /are/ a library, so they get some immunity from copyright. Or can we not do that? Pretty sure no-one gets "immunity from copyright," at list not to the point where they could mirror Sci-hub with impunity (at least no on in the US). I'd very surprised if archive.org did not respond to DMCA take-down requests, etc.
  - userbinator 10y ago
    On the other hand, I believe I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted, which in the case of SciHub sort of defeats the purpose; however, it does mean archive.org retains an "archive" of the content, presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change.
    - uxp 10y ago
      > I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted This is a violation of the takedown request, and can result in harsher penalties for the host. It's not a great example, but MegaUpload was faulted for doing just that: Removing the link between a url and the content that url pointed to. Granted they did deduplication so there could be other links from other urls pointed to the same "illegal" content, which is what the USA went after them for, but the fact remains that it's a pretty clear grey area whether or not the host can retain that data after someone claims rights to have it removed for their own future benefit.
      - detaro 10y ago
        Looking at the text of the law, it always uses "remove, or disable access to" or similar language: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512

by d33 10y ago

toomuchtodo 10y ago

https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/

d33 10y ago
Yeah, the thing is that SciHub controls the information now and it's up to them how they secure against failure they are. All in all, if we were to adopt IPFS, who would download all the terabytes of papers? Who and how would index them?
- aw3c2 10y ago
  If they used ipfs as backend, everyone could sync and serve whatever parts they deem important. At least if I understand it correctly. ipfs is way too complicated for me. I would much prefer an anonymous network anyways.
  - dublinben 10y ago
    Freenet offers an anonymous, censorship-resistant distributed data store system like IPFS. It is very well suited to something like the Sci-Hub archive.
- toomuchtodo 10y ago
  This is a work in progress.

petra 10y ago

I believe that when you download only a single file from a large torrent , you still help the torrent with your file. So if they just put torrent links in their search engines, and ask for people to install a browser torrent extention like [1], it could work pretty well. [1]for firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torrent-tornado/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/torrent-torna...

kanzure 10y ago

> Right now those huge torrents have as few as 4 seeders Any ideas on fixing this? I've tried offering her storage, bandwidth, or physical delivery of hard drives, but so far no bites (specifically, outright refusal).

the8472 10y ago
Install a torrent client, download the torrents, keep seeding?
- nitin_flanker 10y ago
  Is it safe to do? I mean on the legal side.
  - the8472 10y ago
    Safe? No, it's probably copyright infringement. But you have to consider that so is reading them on sci-hub. The question is whether you want to engage in this particular act of civil disobedience and bear the risks or not. The risks can also be reduced by living in the right jurisdiction or obscuring your identity, e.g. by renting a torrent seedbox with bitcoins.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - poooogles 10y ago
    No.

aw3c2 10y ago

It's not the popular papers that are important. Those will be well spread already. It's the unpopular "rare" ones that need help. You mean the libgen torrents or is there something spefically branded sci-hub?

petra 10y ago
It's possible to solve, you just make users download a zip file which includes 10 papers including the one they're interested.
- aninhumer 10y ago
  Bitorrent kind of does this anyway, because in order to download one file, you need to download the entire block it's in. In a case like this where you have a large torrent with many small files, that will actually cover quite a few other files. If you ordered them strategically, you could even try to make sure every block has a fairly popular file in it.
  - jobigoud 10y ago
    Yeah, good idea. Sort the papers by popularity, and when grouping them find the distribution that minimizes the distance between any paper and the top-popular ones for atomic block size.
    - aninhumer 10y ago
      I don't think you need to do anything that complex. Just find the N most popular papers and make sure there's one in each block. Or thinking about, you could put them at block boundaries so people grab two blocks when they download them, in which case you'd only need half as many popular ones.
- gherkin0 10y ago
  I don't think that would accomplish much. People would just delete the 9 papers that they don't care about rather than maintain them as clutter. And even if everyone did keep the extra files, would use would they be? It would be impossibly difficult to reconstruct the archive from them. It would probably be better to break down the torrents into smaller, more coherent, and organized collections that contain all associated metadata (e.g. a collection of biology papers from a certain time-span or set of publications). That way you might incentivize people to maintain smaller personal-use archives that could be recombined back into the whole, if the need arises. You could perhaps even build a system that could automatically generate, publish, and consume torrents with a particular (metadata + content) layout, but that's not restricted to a particular set of torrents. Then it could just consume certain topics from a feed of new torrents, from various sources, on the Pirate Bay.

nickpsecurity 10y ago

My suggestion for such filesharing is sending her money to anonymously send some people hard drives or access to file upload sites that have a copy. They can make their own copies that spread. And so on.

peterkelly 10y ago

Do you have a link for the torrents? I couldn't see anything on the main sci-hub site.

deleted 10y ago
[deleted]

colejohnson66 10y ago

What's wrong with setting up a mirror at archive.org? After all, they /are/ a library, so they get some immunity from copyright. Or can we not do that?

gherkin0 10y ago
> What's wrong with setting up a mirror at archive.org? After all, they /are/ a library, so they get some immunity from copyright. Or can we not do that? Pretty sure no-one gets "immunity from copyright," at list not to the point where they could mirror Sci-hub with impunity (at least no on in the US). I'd very surprised if archive.org did not respond to DMCA take-down requests, etc.
- userbinator 10y ago
  On the other hand, I believe I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted, which in the case of SciHub sort of defeats the purpose; however, it does mean archive.org retains an "archive" of the content, presumably until its copyright expires or copyright laws change.
  - uxp 10y ago
    > I've read before that DMCA takedowns only cause content to become inaccessible publicly but not actually deleted This is a violation of the takedown request, and can result in harsher penalties for the host. It's not a great example, but MegaUpload was faulted for doing just that: Removing the link between a url and the content that url pointed to. Granted they did deduplication so there could be other links from other urls pointed to the same "illegal" content, which is what the USA went after them for, but the fact remains that it's a pretty clear grey area whether or not the host can retain that data after someone claims rights to have it removed for their own future benefit.
    - detaro 10y ago
      Looking at the text of the law, it always uses "remove, or disable access to" or similar language: https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/512