16 ms·

Cloudflare Terminates Service to Sci-Hub Domain Names

415 points by jakobdabo 9y ago

IntronExon 9y ago
According to Sci-Hub’s operator, losing access to Cloudflare is not “critical,” but it may “cause a short pause in website operation.” There is some kind of weird disconnect between the reality of distributed communications, and people/companies who seem to think that they have a prayer of stopping them. You’d think that the near implosion of the music industry would habpve be a clue though. Where there is demand and anti-consumer practices, there will be piracy. Is it just that people making these decisions are ignorant, or emotional? Does anyone know?
- lotyrin 9y ago
  Isn't it rational to hold on as hard as you can, to as much as you can, for as long as you can? The old models of commerce are so lucrative that adapting early to the sustainable models comes at a serious cost. Imagine the area under the curve, and how much money that adds up to, if we went from a market with CDs and DVDs and happy cable subscribers to Spotify and Netflix and internet-only broadband as they are today overnight instead of over the course of the years.
  - IntronExon 9y ago
    I see your and other poster’s points. I suppose that I let morality and rationality mix in my assessment of Elsevier’s behavior, with predictably confusing results. Yes, it is rational to fight for so much money and power, even if it’s just for another quarter. The fact that I despise that behavior doesn’t change the rationale behind it. Thanks.
  - the8472 9y ago
    > Isn't it rational to hold on as hard as you can, to as much as you can, for as long as you can? Depends on just exactly how rational you want to be. If your planning horizon is quarterly and annual numbers it makes perfect sense. If you want your company still do business in the coming decades then holding on and denying change can make you blind to the necessary adaptions.
    - mr_spothawk 9y ago
      > your planning horizon is quarterly I think their planning horizon is Retirement
- csydas 9y ago
  I really hate to sound like I'm defending Elsevier, but is it really unreasonable to assume that a large corporation that has built itself on an entire multibillion dollar company would be opposed to being toppled by piracy? I am 100% for Sci-Hub; I think it and sites like Arxiv are the natural evolution of professional journals and the future of academic publications. But I do understand why Elsevier is fighting this. It's not a disconnect, it's not like they don't see the writing on the wall, they just want secure their benefits as long as they can and enjoy the good life while it lasts. If their lawyers succeed, then there's no worry, the party continues. If they fail, at least they have plenty to rest on. If they're going to lose it all by not fighting, then it makes perfect sense to bet it all by fighting, because with Sci-hub and distributed systems (Tor, bit torrent), there is no winning in the long run. At least, not living with the revenue they are now. So you don't have to be ignorant or emotional to make such a decision, you just have to make a calculated gamble and figure out which is going to hurt the least in the long run all things considered.
  - syshum 9y ago
    >> is it really unreasonable to assume that a large corporation that has built itself on an entire multibillion dollar company would be opposed to being toppled by piracy? That position is not what is "unreasonable", their existence is what is unreasonable. The fact that a company like Elsevier needs to be toppled by piracy at all is unreasonable. The legal framework that has allowed Elsevier to profit from public research is unreasonable >>But I do understand why Elsevier is fighting this. I also understand why a serial killer would fight going to prison, that does not make the serial killer reasonable, ethical or just >>If their lawyers succeed, then there's no worry, the party continues. I disagree here, if their lawyers succeed then they do a great disservice to humanity, and further entrench copyright law, possibly even expanding it with legal precedent
    - mschuster91 9y ago
      Full +1 with you on this one. The core problem seems to me that ethics has way too low impact on university courses, no matter if in STEM, finance, law or everything else. For example, it is certainly justified for a lawyer to defend a serial killer (after all the right to representation in court is a basic human right, or at least should be) but a company has no moral right to legal assistance. No lawyer is bound by code or law to assist a company - but many do because of individual profit and ignore the loss that society has to shoulder.
- stfwn 9y ago
  > You’d think that the near implosion of the music industry would have been a clue though. Where there is demand and anti-consumer practices, there will be piracy. Is it just that people making these decisions are ignorant, or emotional? Does anyone know? Wow. That is harsh. The current state of music is that artists need about 4 million Spotify plays per month to make minimum wage ($1160) [1]. That's assuming the artist does not have to share the revenue with anyone and not counting the time needed to break even on the initial investment (if you even manage to break even before the recording is 'old' and you're up for a new one). Realistically there is no money in recorded music anymore except for the John Mayers and Taylor Swifts, so nothing has been solved in that industry and there is no 'clue' to get. There was a legitimate source of income, then technology devaluated the product to oblivion. It's not worthy of damnation that those in an industry that is being levelled with the ground are caught off guard and attempt to fix their problems. It would do us good to empathise with the people in these industries, because there are going to be a heck of a lot of them in the coming years. If we value the product of their labor we should want to offer them an alternative source of income instead of berating them. [1]: https://informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/ https://informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-ar...
  - chx 9y ago
    > Realistically there is no money in recorded music anymore except for the John Mayers and Taylor Swifts, so nothing has been solved in that industry and there is no 'clue' to get. Have you seen Patreon?
    - stfwn 9y ago
      > Have you seen Patreon? Patreon, Bandcamp and Tunecore collectively pay out about $25 million per month [1]. That's minimum wage for 21 000 people, assuming each artist gets an equal share (which they obviously don't). This doesn't seem like a lot to me. [1]: http://musically.com/2015/02/16/what-are-musicians-making-from-patreon/ http://musically.com/2015/02/16/what-are-musicians-making-fr...
      - 9y ago
- revelation 9y ago
  I mean, it was pretty clear the music industry would continue in one form or another. There is some form of value add. But science publishers? These guys haven't made an honest buck in decades now. Their business is entirely due to inertia and regulatory capture. The short to medium term goal of all stakeholders is their entire elimination.
- matt4077 9y ago
  In a society governed by the rule of law, nobody should have to defend their decision to avail themselves of the protections these laws offer. If large parts of the population disagree with a business model, they have the collective power to change it. As a former scientist, I can't wait to desecrate Elsevier's grave. But I'm still uneasy about the prospect of people taking matters into their own hands simply because their technical capabilities are more advanced than those of their opponents. There are also journals, such as Science, that finance the valuable non-profit foundations publishing them. Of course, this is to a large extend the fault of scientists and university administrators themselves, because they have all the power to refuse to publish in for-profit closed-access publications (as they are apparently doing in Germany.) And the political process in the US is basically broken. But look at other examples of the same principle, and you might find one where you land on the other side: The Federal Reserve seems the safer bet vis-a-vis the libertarians that jumped on Bitcoin to topple it. Uber has a litany of problems from their "rule-breaking DNA". Or, for the political right: should "illegal" immigrants receive citizenship simply for evading border checks?
  - mr_spothawk 9y ago
    > a society governed by the rule of law * stifled laugh * our actions are governed by the reality of enforcement. our planning is governed by the expectation of enforcement of the rule of law. this should be apparent by now.
- wmf 9y ago
  Even if a company knows that they are dying, there's a lot of money to be made by postponing that death as long as possible.
jimrandomh 9y ago
Sci-Hub pits US law against morality, public sentiment, and public interest much more directly than usual. Unfortunately, the US government is not the sort of entity which can notice itself being a villain, or notice itself burning its credibility.
- lucb1e 9y ago
  Is it just because I'm not a native speaker, or is that very cryptically phrased? I'm really not sure what you are trying to say, for or against the termination.
  - danielvf 9y ago
    He's saying - Sci-Hub is doing good, but breaking the US law. - The US law in this case is immoral, people don't like the law, and the law is bad for the country. - The US government is unable notice that these laws are bad, and so will continue to doing bad things (like shutting down Sci-Hub).
  - aminorex 9y ago
    Non-native speaker I think. It was unambiguously supportive of the unarmed party in the conflict.
  - AgentME 9y ago
    In the sentence "Sci-Hub pits US law against morality", "pits" means to put things in a fight against each other (ostensibly, a fight inside of a pit). He's saying that the situation shows that the US law is not on the side of morality in this specific spot at least.
  - smichel17 9y ago
    Native speaker. It is understandable (explained in sibling comments) but definitely puts eloquence before readability.
    - h2g3yhogw8 9y ago
      eloquence literally means readability
deleted 9y ago
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jerheinze 9y ago
Looks like their onion service is also down: http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ Can anyone test their i2p eepsite as well?
- akerro 9y ago
  Sci-Hub should host an IPFS node with all their contents. Once owner sets-up IPFS directory, owner can update it (it's not static like torrents), other nodes will download changes, it will be distributed, censorship-resistant and shared between community of people who pin directories on their PCs and ARM computers. Another similar solution would be to setup ResilioSync or LibreVault repositories, again makes it decentralized by P2P, there are public repositories so anyone can join and leach/seed files, owner can update files. I'm surprised they're not doing it already.
  - acdha 9y ago
    How does censorship resistance work in this case? Simply by giving the rights holders more targets to sue / have taken offline?
    - Rjevski 9y ago
      Exactly, which is extremely effective - good luck suing someone in China who doesn't give a fuck about US copyright (and in this case rightly so).
      - acdha 9y ago
        So in other words, the technology doesn't have any particular benefits in this regard — all of the advantages come from hosting somewhere without a high enforcement risk.
  - jerheinze 9y ago
    First off, there's a difference between Sci-Hub (no content is hosted, only a portal) and LibGen. Papers downloaded from Sci-Hub are hosted in the latter. And secondly, they do offer torrents as a P2P solution: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/ I'm not familiar enough with IPFS, but I think once onions play nicely with IPFS (i.e. when this is solved[1]), then it could be very promising. I'm not sure how censorship resistant it could be. [1] : https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37 https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37
breakingcups 9y ago
As much as I'd rather see it happen to something other than Sci-Hub, I'm glad Cloudflare is being held accountable for their hosting services. Their "we're only a neutral pipeline" spiel is complete bullshit and I'm glad they are being held accountable for it. (Short version: They are not neutral because they provide a paid service for the websites they host.. Yes, in some cases it's a free service but in that case you are still "paying" in good publicity. The fact that no money changes hands doesn't suddenly make them a neutral party. They are also absolutely a hosting provider. Even though they don't host the central, permanent, authorative data of the sites themselves, they still host plenty. They store images, code, stylesheets even complete pages in their cache. The data is on their servers, being pushed onto the internet from their ip's. They host the DNS. They can even host some business logic with their page rules.) Without going into whether the rules that apply to webhosts are fair, it is a very good thing that Cloudflare is being held just as accountable as any other service provider. Their IP's, their responsibility just like any other party. Edit: Those downvotes came quick. Care to comment on why you think Cloudflare should be held to a different standard than a traditional hosting provider?
- crankylinuxuser 9y ago
  www.stormfront.org -> Checking your browser before accessing stormfront.org. This process is automatic. Your browser will redirect to your requested content shortly. Please allow up to 5 seconds… DDoS protection by Cloudflare Ray ID: 3e87d9d41f9b5504 ------------------------------- I would posit that, although speed is protected in many ways in the USA, there are cases where there are definite actions behind the speakers. And I would therefore argue, that when X person gives hatred against a group, and later takes violent actions against said group, their speech isn't just speech. It's a definite call to action of assault and murder. I also recognize there are false flag operations that could demonize more legitimate groups. But then again, I don't believe that anti-war protestors, or the women protestors are going to advocate for killing Jews, blacks, and LGBT anytime soon.
  - charleslmunger 9y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal Poe's law can become a cudgel when paired with takedown rules that companies don't want to (or can't) enforce with the level of thought as a real court decision. I don't like cloudflare saying that they're totally absolved of responsibility, but I do have a lot of sympathy towards their CEO's complaint about being the gatekeeper. If I was in their shoes, I wouldn't want to have to try and formulate a policy rule that keeps Solanas but bans whatever satire or allegory the alt-right publishes.
bo1024 9y ago
I am surprised that so many sites rely on cloudflare. I'm sure they provide some very cool services, but I would be concerned both from - a design perspective (they are a somewhat single point of failure for much of the web, and add complexity/potential vulnerability), and from - a control perspective, you are giving them control over your site and they have shown themselves a capricious in the past as well as vulnerable to legal coercion. (For instance, could a malicious actor take down a website by sending CloudFlare fake DMCA notices?)
- deleted 9y ago
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- drvdevd 9y ago
  Indeed. As an end user who browses behind Tor frequently Just Because, this is actually welcome news. Solving captchas to access sci-hub was a frequent pain point. As a developer, I'm willing to try and help sci-hub secure their network against DDoS or other malicious traffic, assuming this was their reason for using Cloudflare services, and assuming sci-hub were to open source some of this effort publicly.
  - jerheinze 9y ago
    > As an end user who browses behind Tor frequently Just Because, this is actually welcome news. Solving captchas to access sci-hub was a frequent pain point. When using Tor you had the possibility of using captcha-free SciHub with their own onion service: http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ (it's down for now)
    - drvdevd 9y ago
      Yes it appears, AFAICT, that has been down for quite a while. In fact I’ve never gotten the onion service to load. I’m assuming malicious traffic at some point.
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aminorex 9y ago
Time for our sites to switch to keycdn or cachefly. I am not going to support cloudflare with my business any more.
- johannes1234321 9y ago
  Since those ignore court orders? Which in turn means they would ignore court orders if you sue them. Cloudflare didn't act on their own ("Cloudflare has received the attached court order, Case 1:17-cv-OO726-LMB-JFA")
- umann 9y ago
  I highly doubt if you handed either of these providers a court order to remove a site, they would go out of their way to prevent the court action.
wolco 9y ago
Cloudflare is on a path to no where. The more services they ban the less attractive they are.
- umann 9y ago
  Your comment makes it seem like they they had a choice here. Cloudflare were given a court order stop Sci-Hub from using its services.
  - wolco 9y ago
    In years past they would have made a big deal about fighting the order.
- web007 9y ago
  You are speaking only from a free-speech perspective. As a business user, I would absolutely want $CDN_PROVIDER to only allow / serve traffic in compliance with the laws of my country. I wouldn't want any chance of my non-controversial content being blocked because some third-party caused my host to be removed from the internet, either by direct action (BGP blackholing / similar) or by side-effect (IP or block being added to $FIREWALL blacklist).
  - wolco 9y ago
    When they change your acceptable content to non-acceptable content it might be too late to protest.
lucb1e 9y ago
Really disappointing of Cloudflare. I thought they were above this.
- gtirloni 9y ago
  Above the law? > Cloudflare has received the attached court order, Case 1:17-cv-OO726-LMB-JFA I must clarify I'm not saying this is fair or unfair, I just doubt CloudFlare has much room for maneuvering.
  - lucb1e 9y ago
    Oh, my bad. The bold text on top says they "seemed to offer no resistance this time," which made it sound like they could have. I should have read on and seen your quote.
  - gsich 9y ago
    Then just don't use US based servers to host them.
- mef 9y ago
  Above being sued?
- deleted 9y ago
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jacquesm 9y ago
HN is served up by Cloudflare. A pretty sizeable fraction of the internet is. Cloudflare showing they could take down some websites because of their content conveniently set them up to be a pressure point in other cases as well such as this one. The argument that they are 'just a common carrier' and have no influence over the content they serve went out the window that day.
- drunken-serval 9y ago
  They were served a court order to stop serving Sci-Hub. They had attempted to argue common carrier in a previous case and were told by the court that argument didn't hold water.
  - deleted 9y ago
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  - jacquesm 9y ago
    Yes, and my point is they owe that to themselves. Exercise control over content once and you lose any kind of common carrier argument that you might want to make in the future.
    - tonyztan 9y ago
      >"Exercise control over content once" Is this the incident you are referring to? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/16/cloudflare_ceo_daily_stormer/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/16/cloudflare_ceo_dail...
      - wyldfire 9y ago
        Regardless of whether that's the reference, it certainly satisfies the conditions of the argument.
      - randyrand 9y ago
        I'd imagine so. And because of that move they lost their common carrier argument.
ftoo 9y ago
To the people upset with CloudFlare: please explain why it is better for random startups and multinational corporations to set and enforce policy, than for elected officials and governments and courts. Because that’s basically what you’re saying...
- deleted 9y ago
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- larkeith 9y ago
  While I'm fine with CloudFlare's actions here, the reason one might hold independent companies to a higher standard than governmental entities is the fact that the U.S. government has, consistently and repeatedly, proven itself almost entirely invested in corporate interests with regards to the Internet. The government cannot be expected to work in favour of Internet users' interests in any situation except those where they coincide with corporate interests. This will remain the case, because the impact of tech-interested voters to whom elected officials' support of this status quo matters is trivialized by the apathetic majority. Therefore, the tech community's only recourse is to pressure the middlemen, such as CloudFlare, who can interfere with this type of corporate action.
- kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
  People upset with CloudFlare are not asking CloudFlare to set up policy instead. They are saying CloudFlare should behave like a common carrier and NOT have any policy to begin with. But Cloudflare already lost that privilege. And now the Common Carrier Chickens are coming home to roost.
  - matt4077 9y ago
    "Common Carrier" status is granted by the FCC to certain communication companies. It is not something acquired by (not) acting in a certain way. Example: You can't just run the mafia's books and "I'm a common-carrier accountant; I don't get involved in my customers' business".
    - 9y ago
izuchukwu 9y ago
To those unclear, Cloudflare is terminating Sci-Hub due to court order, not their own censorship.
- toomuchtodo 9y ago
  Terminating Stormfront voluntarily discredits any attempt at common carrier status. EDIT: I'm unsure you can argue, with a straight face in front of a judge, that you're a common carrier when you've publicly blogged about determining to terminate a user because you felt like it. I'm not judging Cloudflare (anymore), just observing the pickle they've put themselves in because of their own decisions.
  - epistasis 9y ago
    Edit: more connected than I thought it was! Explanation for why I downvoted your comment: Your comment is completely unconnected to the statement above it. It's only connected to the story in that Cloudflare was involved with both, but if you're going to try to connect it to this story your comment should go at the top level. But connecting a highly controversial subject to this one by posting inflammatory comments does not seem to be a good way to connect these two different stories.
    - toomuchtodo 9y ago
      It’s not unconnected. Cloudflare would’ve been able to defend against the court order more aggressively had they not made the mistake previously of violating the principal of common carrier status. Cloudflare wants to project the idea of being critical Internet infrastructure without the governance and responsibilities that go along with that. No one wakes up at a root DNS server one day and deregisters a domain because they feel slighted by the content of that domain.
    - stale2002 9y ago
      Well, it is connected because it has to do with cloud flare being a common carrier or not. If cloud flare hadn't effectively given up its status as a common carrier, by blocking stormfront, maybe it would have been able to defend itself from the sci-hub court order. Cloudflare being forced to take down content in the future is exactly what people predicted when they decided to give up their status as a common carrier.
acd 9y ago
There is other delivery networks that work peer2peer such as IPFS, Bittorrent and websockets p2p cdn.
- viraptor 9y ago
  Are you prepared to host and distribute copyrighted documents from your home connection and publically advertise that to the whole world? Because that's what P2P really means in this case, unfortunately.
  - RRRA 9y ago
    If a little civil disobedience is what it takes to save public access to human knowledge, than so be it...
    - aaron_m04 9y ago
      Yes, but if you get caught right away, you aren't maximizing your impact. It would be better to use P2P with anonymizing layers.
  - kodablah 9y ago
    True for the ones that were listed there. It's unfortunate that the networks that are getting the most pub weren't built with anonymity and plausible deniability in mind.
    - acdha 9y ago
      It’s a very hard problem in this case because it’s a public service and there’s no reliable way to prevent someone from firing up a client, downloading something copyrighted, and recording where the bits came from. That limits hosting to people who live in jurisdictions without copyright enforcement or who have very deep pockets for legal defenses.
saagarjha 9y ago
We're going to see this kind of thing happening more and more as Cloudflare receives takedown requests from every copyright association. By taking down websites, it signaled to the industry that Cloudflare was a viable place to go to if they wanted things to be removed from the Internet. Cloudflare dug this hole for themselves, and it's going to be very hard for them to go back to the "dumb pipe" status they enjoyed before.
mjevans 9y ago
This is terrible news in the chilling effects department. The mere fact that CloudFlare and similar services are a "requirement" for not being beaten in to submission for pennies of traffic flooding in to a website is a clear design flaw of the global communications system. No site or service should be forced to receive //every// bit of information sent at it. Nor should they be forced to blackhole (route) /themselves/ (giving in to the terrorists) out of existence. Clearly, we are lacking a means for pushing 'cancer' filtering over to the source side of data transit. To the point where it becomes the problem of the source ISP. "Block this customer" (for a while) and "don't send us any traffic at all" (for a while; in response to /far too many/ abusive customers) are the necessary solutions.
- devit 9y ago
  Yeah, it seems like it should be possible to send a packet using a "firewall rule protocol" to the DoSing IP address, and have any non-malicious routers in between enact a rule that blocks traffic in the opposite direction (obviously there needs to be either spoofing prevention, or the packet must be signed with a certificate provided by the RIR to prove ownership of the source IP address). Why not do this? Is it impossible to design it in a non-abusable way, or is there too much overhead to store and apply a possibly long list of arbitrary blocking rules?
  - mjevans 9y ago
    Well, there would be the overhead, so more ideally you'd be submitting such requests to an out of band network (possibly forward to such a CnC network /by/ the routers along the way). The command and control network would authenticate the source request via some means and if it's authentic act accordingly. The benefit of this is that it also allows for identifying infected or otherwise abusive customers and actually being proactive about getting them cleaned up. Of course all of that degrades the 'customer' experience, and costs money. Both of which are probably why no one does this right now.
  - zzzcpan 9y ago
    ISPs do this and have such capabilities. They don't necessarily use the same protocol, like BGP Flow Specification (RFC 5575), but they often do provide a way to push filtering rules if you need it and you are an ISP yourself.
zerostar07 9y ago
sci-hub.tv and sci-hub.hk seem to work fine why would they want to mess with cloudflare anyway.
deleted 9y ago
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markdown 9y ago
I can't stand companies like Cloudflare that won't let you contact them to get support. My phone was stolen and with it my 2nd factor. Now I can't get in, and you can't access any support whatsoever without logging in first. So now I have to transfer all my domains away from them and go through all the trouble of setting up DNS elsewhere.
- slig 9y ago
  Their CTO is always here on HN. Try to reply to him. Also, use a app such as Authy to store your 2-way tokens.
s2g 9y ago
Need alternatives outside the reach of the us government and other hostile entities.
dingo_bat 9y ago
I don't see the issue. We were all ok when daily stormer was kicked off the internet by godaddy and google. Apparently companies are within their rights to shut down anything they don't approve of. So wtf is the problem now?
scientician 9y ago
Can I offer my computer to Sci-Hub to store and retransmit encrypted content for them? If I could run software that would assist Sci-Hub, I would. Is anyone else doing something similar? Sci-Hub is important - it's one of the most important resources we have today. How can we support Sci-Hub?
- john_minsk 9y ago
  PopcornTime for Sci-Hub?
thecodeboy 9y ago
You can access Sci-Hub at https://5ly.me/scihub https://5ly.me/scihub .
stevefan1999 9y ago
Well, at least we still have SciHub access through Tor

415 points by jakobdabo 9y ago

According to Sci-Hub’s operator, losing access to Cloudflare is not “critical,” but it may “cause a short pause in website operation.” There is some kind of weird disconnect between the reality of distributed communications, and people/companies who seem to think that they have a prayer of stopping them. You’d think that the near implosion of the music industry would habpve be a clue though. Where there is demand and anti-consumer practices, there will be piracy. Is it just that people making these decisions are ignorant, or emotional? Does anyone know?

lotyrin 9y ago
Isn't it rational to hold on as hard as you can, to as much as you can, for as long as you can? The old models of commerce are so lucrative that adapting early to the sustainable models comes at a serious cost. Imagine the area under the curve, and how much money that adds up to, if we went from a market with CDs and DVDs and happy cable subscribers to Spotify and Netflix and internet-only broadband as they are today overnight instead of over the course of the years.
- IntronExon 9y ago
  I see your and other poster’s points. I suppose that I let morality and rationality mix in my assessment of Elsevier’s behavior, with predictably confusing results. Yes, it is rational to fight for so much money and power, even if it’s just for another quarter. The fact that I despise that behavior doesn’t change the rationale behind it. Thanks.
- the8472 9y ago
  > Isn't it rational to hold on as hard as you can, to as much as you can, for as long as you can? Depends on just exactly how rational you want to be. If your planning horizon is quarterly and annual numbers it makes perfect sense. If you want your company still do business in the coming decades then holding on and denying change can make you blind to the necessary adaptions.
  - mr_spothawk 9y ago
    > your planning horizon is quarterly I think their planning horizon is Retirement
csydas 9y ago
I really hate to sound like I'm defending Elsevier, but is it really unreasonable to assume that a large corporation that has built itself on an entire multibillion dollar company would be opposed to being toppled by piracy? I am 100% for Sci-Hub; I think it and sites like Arxiv are the natural evolution of professional journals and the future of academic publications. But I do understand why Elsevier is fighting this. It's not a disconnect, it's not like they don't see the writing on the wall, they just want secure their benefits as long as they can and enjoy the good life while it lasts. If their lawyers succeed, then there's no worry, the party continues. If they fail, at least they have plenty to rest on. If they're going to lose it all by not fighting, then it makes perfect sense to bet it all by fighting, because with Sci-hub and distributed systems (Tor, bit torrent), there is no winning in the long run. At least, not living with the revenue they are now. So you don't have to be ignorant or emotional to make such a decision, you just have to make a calculated gamble and figure out which is going to hurt the least in the long run all things considered.
- syshum 9y ago
  >> is it really unreasonable to assume that a large corporation that has built itself on an entire multibillion dollar company would be opposed to being toppled by piracy? That position is not what is "unreasonable", their existence is what is unreasonable. The fact that a company like Elsevier needs to be toppled by piracy at all is unreasonable. The legal framework that has allowed Elsevier to profit from public research is unreasonable >>But I do understand why Elsevier is fighting this. I also understand why a serial killer would fight going to prison, that does not make the serial killer reasonable, ethical or just >>If their lawyers succeed, then there's no worry, the party continues. I disagree here, if their lawyers succeed then they do a great disservice to humanity, and further entrench copyright law, possibly even expanding it with legal precedent
  - mschuster91 9y ago
    Full +1 with you on this one. The core problem seems to me that ethics has way too low impact on university courses, no matter if in STEM, finance, law or everything else. For example, it is certainly justified for a lawyer to defend a serial killer (after all the right to representation in court is a basic human right, or at least should be) but a company has no moral right to legal assistance. No lawyer is bound by code or law to assist a company - but many do because of individual profit and ignore the loss that society has to shoulder.
stfwn 9y ago
> You’d think that the near implosion of the music industry would have been a clue though. Where there is demand and anti-consumer practices, there will be piracy. Is it just that people making these decisions are ignorant, or emotional? Does anyone know? Wow. That is harsh. The current state of music is that artists need about 4 million Spotify plays per month to make minimum wage ($1160) [1]. That's assuming the artist does not have to share the revenue with anyone and not counting the time needed to break even on the initial investment (if you even manage to break even before the recording is 'old' and you're up for a new one). Realistically there is no money in recorded music anymore except for the John Mayers and Taylor Swifts, so nothing has been solved in that industry and there is no 'clue' to get. There was a legitimate source of income, then technology devaluated the product to oblivion. It's not worthy of damnation that those in an industry that is being levelled with the ground are caught off guard and attempt to fix their problems. It would do us good to empathise with the people in these industries, because there are going to be a heck of a lot of them in the coming years. If we value the product of their labor we should want to offer them an alternative source of income instead of berating them. [1]: https://informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-artists-earn-online/ https://informationisbeautiful.net/2010/how-much-do-music-ar...
- chx 9y ago
  > Realistically there is no money in recorded music anymore except for the John Mayers and Taylor Swifts, so nothing has been solved in that industry and there is no 'clue' to get. Have you seen Patreon?
  - stfwn 9y ago
    > Have you seen Patreon? Patreon, Bandcamp and Tunecore collectively pay out about $25 million per month [1]. That's minimum wage for 21 000 people, assuming each artist gets an equal share (which they obviously don't). This doesn't seem like a lot to me. [1]: http://musically.com/2015/02/16/what-are-musicians-making-from-patreon/ http://musically.com/2015/02/16/what-are-musicians-making-fr...
    - 9y ago
revelation 9y ago
I mean, it was pretty clear the music industry would continue in one form or another. There is some form of value add. But science publishers? These guys haven't made an honest buck in decades now. Their business is entirely due to inertia and regulatory capture. The short to medium term goal of all stakeholders is their entire elimination.
matt4077 9y ago
In a society governed by the rule of law, nobody should have to defend their decision to avail themselves of the protections these laws offer. If large parts of the population disagree with a business model, they have the collective power to change it. As a former scientist, I can't wait to desecrate Elsevier's grave. But I'm still uneasy about the prospect of people taking matters into their own hands simply because their technical capabilities are more advanced than those of their opponents. There are also journals, such as Science, that finance the valuable non-profit foundations publishing them. Of course, this is to a large extend the fault of scientists and university administrators themselves, because they have all the power to refuse to publish in for-profit closed-access publications (as they are apparently doing in Germany.) And the political process in the US is basically broken. But look at other examples of the same principle, and you might find one where you land on the other side: The Federal Reserve seems the safer bet vis-a-vis the libertarians that jumped on Bitcoin to topple it. Uber has a litany of problems from their "rule-breaking DNA". Or, for the political right: should "illegal" immigrants receive citizenship simply for evading border checks?
- mr_spothawk 9y ago
  > a society governed by the rule of law * stifled laugh * our actions are governed by the reality of enforcement. our planning is governed by the expectation of enforcement of the rule of law. this should be apparent by now.
wmf 9y ago
Even if a company knows that they are dying, there's a lot of money to be made by postponing that death as long as possible.

jimrandomh 9y ago

Sci-Hub pits US law against morality, public sentiment, and public interest much more directly than usual. Unfortunately, the US government is not the sort of entity which can notice itself being a villain, or notice itself burning its credibility.

lucb1e 9y ago
Is it just because I'm not a native speaker, or is that very cryptically phrased? I'm really not sure what you are trying to say, for or against the termination.
- danielvf 9y ago
  He's saying - Sci-Hub is doing good, but breaking the US law. - The US law in this case is immoral, people don't like the law, and the law is bad for the country. - The US government is unable notice that these laws are bad, and so will continue to doing bad things (like shutting down Sci-Hub).
- aminorex 9y ago
  Non-native speaker I think. It was unambiguously supportive of the unarmed party in the conflict.
- AgentME 9y ago
  In the sentence "Sci-Hub pits US law against morality", "pits" means to put things in a fight against each other (ostensibly, a fight inside of a pit). He's saying that the situation shows that the US law is not on the side of morality in this specific spot at least.
- smichel17 9y ago
  Native speaker. It is understandable (explained in sibling comments) but definitely puts eloquence before readability.
  - h2g3yhogw8 9y ago
    eloquence literally means readability

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jerheinze 9y ago

Looks like their onion service is also down: http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ Can anyone test their i2p eepsite as well?

akerro 9y ago
Sci-Hub should host an IPFS node with all their contents. Once owner sets-up IPFS directory, owner can update it (it's not static like torrents), other nodes will download changes, it will be distributed, censorship-resistant and shared between community of people who pin directories on their PCs and ARM computers. Another similar solution would be to setup ResilioSync or LibreVault repositories, again makes it decentralized by P2P, there are public repositories so anyone can join and leach/seed files, owner can update files. I'm surprised they're not doing it already.
- acdha 9y ago
  How does censorship resistance work in this case? Simply by giving the rights holders more targets to sue / have taken offline?
  - Rjevski 9y ago
    Exactly, which is extremely effective - good luck suing someone in China who doesn't give a fuck about US copyright (and in this case rightly so).
    - acdha 9y ago
      So in other words, the technology doesn't have any particular benefits in this regard — all of the advantages come from hosting somewhere without a high enforcement risk.
- jerheinze 9y ago
  First off, there's a difference between Sci-Hub (no content is hosted, only a portal) and LibGen. Papers downloaded from Sci-Hub are hosted in the latter. And secondly, they do offer torrents as a P2P solution: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/ http://gen.lib.rus.ec/repository_torrent/ I'm not familiar enough with IPFS, but I think once onions play nicely with IPFS (i.e. when this is solved[1]), then it could be very promising. I'm not sure how censorship resistant it could be. [1] : https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37 https://github.com/ipfs/notes/issues/37

breakingcups 9y ago

As much as I'd rather see it happen to something other than Sci-Hub, I'm glad Cloudflare is being held accountable for their hosting services. Their "we're only a neutral pipeline" spiel is complete bullshit and I'm glad they are being held accountable for it. (Short version: They are not neutral because they provide a paid service for the websites they host.. Yes, in some cases it's a free service but in that case you are still "paying" in good publicity. The fact that no money changes hands doesn't suddenly make them a neutral party. They are also absolutely a hosting provider. Even though they don't host the central, permanent, authorative data of the sites themselves, they still host plenty. They store images, code, stylesheets even complete pages in their cache. The data is on their servers, being pushed onto the internet from their ip's. They host the DNS. They can even host some business logic with their page rules.) Without going into whether the rules that apply to webhosts are fair, it is a very good thing that Cloudflare is being held just as accountable as any other service provider. Their IP's, their responsibility just like any other party. Edit: Those downvotes came quick. Care to comment on why you think Cloudflare should be held to a different standard than a traditional hosting provider?

crankylinuxuser 9y ago
www.stormfront.org -> Checking your browser before accessing stormfront.org. This process is automatic. Your browser will redirect to your requested content shortly. Please allow up to 5 seconds… DDoS protection by Cloudflare Ray ID: 3e87d9d41f9b5504 ------------------------------- I would posit that, although speed is protected in many ways in the USA, there are cases where there are definite actions behind the speakers. And I would therefore argue, that when X person gives hatred against a group, and later takes violent actions against said group, their speech isn't just speech. It's a definite call to action of assault and murder. I also recognize there are false flag operations that could demonize more legitimate groups. But then again, I don't believe that anti-war protestors, or the women protestors are going to advocate for killing Jews, blacks, and LGBT anytime soon.
- charleslmunger 9y ago
  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SCUM_Manifesto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Modest_Proposal Poe's law can become a cudgel when paired with takedown rules that companies don't want to (or can't) enforce with the level of thought as a real court decision. I don't like cloudflare saying that they're totally absolved of responsibility, but I do have a lot of sympathy towards their CEO's complaint about being the gatekeeper. If I was in their shoes, I wouldn't want to have to try and formulate a policy rule that keeps Solanas but bans whatever satire or allegory the alt-right publishes.

bo1024 9y ago

I am surprised that so many sites rely on cloudflare. I'm sure they provide some very cool services, but I would be concerned both from - a design perspective (they are a somewhat single point of failure for much of the web, and add complexity/potential vulnerability), and from - a control perspective, you are giving them control over your site and they have shown themselves a capricious in the past as well as vulnerable to legal coercion. (For instance, could a malicious actor take down a website by sending CloudFlare fake DMCA notices?)

deleted 9y ago
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drvdevd 9y ago
Indeed. As an end user who browses behind Tor frequently Just Because, this is actually welcome news. Solving captchas to access sci-hub was a frequent pain point. As a developer, I'm willing to try and help sci-hub secure their network against DDoS or other malicious traffic, assuming this was their reason for using Cloudflare services, and assuming sci-hub were to open source some of this effort publicly.
- jerheinze 9y ago
  > As an end user who browses behind Tor frequently Just Because, this is actually welcome news. Solving captchas to access sci-hub was a frequent pain point. When using Tor you had the possibility of using captcha-free SciHub with their own onion service: http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ (it's down for now)
  - drvdevd 9y ago
    Yes it appears, AFAICT, that has been down for quite a while. In fact I’ve never gotten the onion service to load. I’m assuming malicious traffic at some point.

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aminorex 9y ago

Time for our sites to switch to keycdn or cachefly. I am not going to support cloudflare with my business any more.

johannes1234321 9y ago
Since those ignore court orders? Which in turn means they would ignore court orders if you sue them. Cloudflare didn't act on their own ("Cloudflare has received the attached court order, Case 1:17-cv-OO726-LMB-JFA")
umann 9y ago
I highly doubt if you handed either of these providers a court order to remove a site, they would go out of their way to prevent the court action.

wolco 9y ago

Cloudflare is on a path to no where. The more services they ban the less attractive they are.

umann 9y ago
Your comment makes it seem like they they had a choice here. Cloudflare were given a court order stop Sci-Hub from using its services.
- wolco 9y ago
  In years past they would have made a big deal about fighting the order.
web007 9y ago
You are speaking only from a free-speech perspective. As a business user, I would absolutely want $CDN_PROVIDER to only allow / serve traffic in compliance with the laws of my country. I wouldn't want any chance of my non-controversial content being blocked because some third-party caused my host to be removed from the internet, either by direct action (BGP blackholing / similar) or by side-effect (IP or block being added to $FIREWALL blacklist).
- wolco 9y ago
  When they change your acceptable content to non-acceptable content it might be too late to protest.

lucb1e 9y ago

Really disappointing of Cloudflare. I thought they were above this.

gtirloni 9y ago
Above the law? > Cloudflare has received the attached court order, Case 1:17-cv-OO726-LMB-JFA I must clarify I'm not saying this is fair or unfair, I just doubt CloudFlare has much room for maneuvering.
- lucb1e 9y ago
  Oh, my bad. The bold text on top says they "seemed to offer no resistance this time," which made it sound like they could have. I should have read on and seen your quote.
- gsich 9y ago
  Then just don't use US based servers to host them.
mef 9y ago
Above being sued?
deleted 9y ago
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jacquesm 9y ago

HN is served up by Cloudflare. A pretty sizeable fraction of the internet is. Cloudflare showing they could take down some websites because of their content conveniently set them up to be a pressure point in other cases as well such as this one. The argument that they are 'just a common carrier' and have no influence over the content they serve went out the window that day.

drunken-serval 9y ago
They were served a court order to stop serving Sci-Hub. They had attempted to argue common carrier in a previous case and were told by the court that argument didn't hold water.
- deleted 9y ago
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- jacquesm 9y ago
  Yes, and my point is they owe that to themselves. Exercise control over content once and you lose any kind of common carrier argument that you might want to make in the future.
  - tonyztan 9y ago
    >"Exercise control over content once" Is this the incident you are referring to? https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/16/cloudflare_ceo_daily_stormer/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2017/08/16/cloudflare_ceo_dail...
    - wyldfire 9y ago
      Regardless of whether that's the reference, it certainly satisfies the conditions of the argument.
    - randyrand 9y ago
      I'd imagine so. And because of that move they lost their common carrier argument.

ftoo 9y ago

To the people upset with CloudFlare: please explain why it is better for random startups and multinational corporations to set and enforce policy, than for elected officials and governments and courts. Because that’s basically what you’re saying...

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larkeith 9y ago
While I'm fine with CloudFlare's actions here, the reason one might hold independent companies to a higher standard than governmental entities is the fact that the U.S. government has, consistently and repeatedly, proven itself almost entirely invested in corporate interests with regards to the Internet. The government cannot be expected to work in favour of Internet users' interests in any situation except those where they coincide with corporate interests. This will remain the case, because the impact of tech-interested voters to whom elected officials' support of this status quo matters is trivialized by the apathetic majority. Therefore, the tech community's only recourse is to pressure the middlemen, such as CloudFlare, who can interfere with this type of corporate action.
kinkrtyavimoodh 9y ago
People upset with CloudFlare are not asking CloudFlare to set up policy instead. They are saying CloudFlare should behave like a common carrier and NOT have any policy to begin with. But Cloudflare already lost that privilege. And now the Common Carrier Chickens are coming home to roost.
- matt4077 9y ago
  "Common Carrier" status is granted by the FCC to certain communication companies. It is not something acquired by (not) acting in a certain way. Example: You can't just run the mafia's books and "I'm a common-carrier accountant; I don't get involved in my customers' business".
  - 9y ago

izuchukwu 9y ago

To those unclear, Cloudflare is terminating Sci-Hub due to court order, not their own censorship.

toomuchtodo 9y ago
Terminating Stormfront voluntarily discredits any attempt at common carrier status. EDIT: I'm unsure you can argue, with a straight face in front of a judge, that you're a common carrier when you've publicly blogged about determining to terminate a user because you felt like it. I'm not judging Cloudflare (anymore), just observing the pickle they've put themselves in because of their own decisions.
- epistasis 9y ago
  Edit: more connected than I thought it was! Explanation for why I downvoted your comment: Your comment is completely unconnected to the statement above it. It's only connected to the story in that Cloudflare was involved with both, but if you're going to try to connect it to this story your comment should go at the top level. But connecting a highly controversial subject to this one by posting inflammatory comments does not seem to be a good way to connect these two different stories.
  - toomuchtodo 9y ago
    It’s not unconnected. Cloudflare would’ve been able to defend against the court order more aggressively had they not made the mistake previously of violating the principal of common carrier status. Cloudflare wants to project the idea of being critical Internet infrastructure without the governance and responsibilities that go along with that. No one wakes up at a root DNS server one day and deregisters a domain because they feel slighted by the content of that domain.
  - stale2002 9y ago
    Well, it is connected because it has to do with cloud flare being a common carrier or not. If cloud flare hadn't effectively given up its status as a common carrier, by blocking stormfront, maybe it would have been able to defend itself from the sci-hub court order. Cloudflare being forced to take down content in the future is exactly what people predicted when they decided to give up their status as a common carrier.

acd 9y ago

There is other delivery networks that work peer2peer such as IPFS, Bittorrent and websockets p2p cdn.

viraptor 9y ago
Are you prepared to host and distribute copyrighted documents from your home connection and publically advertise that to the whole world? Because that's what P2P really means in this case, unfortunately.
- RRRA 9y ago
  If a little civil disobedience is what it takes to save public access to human knowledge, than so be it...
  - aaron_m04 9y ago
    Yes, but if you get caught right away, you aren't maximizing your impact. It would be better to use P2P with anonymizing layers.
- kodablah 9y ago
  True for the ones that were listed there. It's unfortunate that the networks that are getting the most pub weren't built with anonymity and plausible deniability in mind.
  - acdha 9y ago
    It’s a very hard problem in this case because it’s a public service and there’s no reliable way to prevent someone from firing up a client, downloading something copyrighted, and recording where the bits came from. That limits hosting to people who live in jurisdictions without copyright enforcement or who have very deep pockets for legal defenses.

saagarjha 9y ago

We're going to see this kind of thing happening more and more as Cloudflare receives takedown requests from every copyright association. By taking down websites, it signaled to the industry that Cloudflare was a viable place to go to if they wanted things to be removed from the Internet. Cloudflare dug this hole for themselves, and it's going to be very hard for them to go back to the "dumb pipe" status they enjoyed before.

mjevans 9y ago

This is terrible news in the chilling effects department. The mere fact that CloudFlare and similar services are a "requirement" for not being beaten in to submission for pennies of traffic flooding in to a website is a clear design flaw of the global communications system. No site or service should be forced to receive //every// bit of information sent at it. Nor should they be forced to blackhole (route) /themselves/ (giving in to the terrorists) out of existence. Clearly, we are lacking a means for pushing 'cancer' filtering over to the source side of data transit. To the point where it becomes the problem of the source ISP. "Block this customer" (for a while) and "don't send us any traffic at all" (for a while; in response to /far too many/ abusive customers) are the necessary solutions.

devit 9y ago
Yeah, it seems like it should be possible to send a packet using a "firewall rule protocol" to the DoSing IP address, and have any non-malicious routers in between enact a rule that blocks traffic in the opposite direction (obviously there needs to be either spoofing prevention, or the packet must be signed with a certificate provided by the RIR to prove ownership of the source IP address). Why not do this? Is it impossible to design it in a non-abusable way, or is there too much overhead to store and apply a possibly long list of arbitrary blocking rules?
- mjevans 9y ago
  Well, there would be the overhead, so more ideally you'd be submitting such requests to an out of band network (possibly forward to such a CnC network /by/ the routers along the way). The command and control network would authenticate the source request via some means and if it's authentic act accordingly. The benefit of this is that it also allows for identifying infected or otherwise abusive customers and actually being proactive about getting them cleaned up. Of course all of that degrades the 'customer' experience, and costs money. Both of which are probably why no one does this right now.
- zzzcpan 9y ago
  ISPs do this and have such capabilities. They don't necessarily use the same protocol, like BGP Flow Specification (RFC 5575), but they often do provide a way to push filtering rules if you need it and you are an ISP yourself.

zerostar07 9y ago

sci-hub.tv and sci-hub.hk seem to work fine why would they want to mess with cloudflare anyway.

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markdown 9y ago

I can't stand companies like Cloudflare that won't let you contact them to get support. My phone was stolen and with it my 2nd factor. Now I can't get in, and you can't access any support whatsoever without logging in first. So now I have to transfer all my domains away from them and go through all the trouble of setting up DNS elsewhere.

slig 9y ago
Their CTO is always here on HN. Try to reply to him. Also, use a app such as Authy to store your 2-way tokens.

s2g 9y ago

Need alternatives outside the reach of the us government and other hostile entities.

dingo_bat 9y ago

I don't see the issue. We were all ok when daily stormer was kicked off the internet by godaddy and google. Apparently companies are within their rights to shut down anything they don't approve of. So wtf is the problem now?

scientician 9y ago

Can I offer my computer to Sci-Hub to store and retransmit encrypted content for them? If I could run software that would assist Sci-Hub, I would. Is anyone else doing something similar? Sci-Hub is important - it's one of the most important resources we have today. How can we support Sci-Hub?

john_minsk 9y ago
PopcornTime for Sci-Hub?

thecodeboy 9y ago

You can access Sci-Hub at https://5ly.me/scihub https://5ly.me/scihub .

stevefan1999 9y ago

Well, at least we still have SciHub access through Tor