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This. The article was interesting but the copyright knighthood put me off. What if the person was simply serving those files for himself over the internet (I'v

This. The article was interesting but the copyright knighthood put me off. What if the person was simply serving those files for himself over the internet (I've done it countless times) and Google caught it because the author was careless with handling DNS entries? Now DO has an IP and an accusation, more power is given to the DMCA-strike-first-ask-later status quo, all for what? It's not child pornography we're talking about, it's books for Christ's sake. There's no harm, it does not affect your life, why go through the effort of bringing trouble to someone else because of your own lack of care with sensitive issues such as DNS entries?

nebulous1 8y ago
Then the webserver admin should work out how to stop google crawling his site and stop his site responding as any DNS name.
- hartator 8y ago
  Default Nginx and Apache configs serve all IPs. If you don't share your server IP, it's reasonable to think your content won't be indexed by Google.
  - Qwertie 8y ago
    Google seems to be very good at finding new never seen before content. If you don't want it public then put some kind of authentication on it.
    - dx034 8y ago
      But Google also always respects robots.txt. If you don't want your content to appear just put a deny all for all domains. You can easily set that up in nginx by returning static content, you don't even need to create a file in the right directories.
- human 8y ago
  Unless directory listing is turned on, I can’t see how Google would be able to index these PDFs given that no external links point to them.
  - fjsolwmv 8y ago
    And presumably it doesn't guess PATHs because Larry Page isn't in jail.
nickjj 8y ago
> What if the person was simply serving those files for himself over the internet (I've done it countless times) and Google caught it because the author was careless with handling DNS entries? Author here, I reached out to DO because as a fellow content creator I felt morally obligated to report this. I wouldn't like someone pirating my content and the people who created those 390,000+ PDFs put a lot of their time into making their content. > There's no harm, it does not affect your life, why go through the effort of bringing trouble to someone else because of your own lack of care with sensitive issues such as DNS entries? It does affect my life. I noticed now that there has been a couple of copyright infringement notices submit towards my domain (because of this PDF incident). When you run an online business and your website is your entire brand, something like that is a big deal. Also if you Googled for my name before I removed the A record, that SSL subdomain was coming up which was competing with my actual site's content. Not good!
- hartator 8y ago
  > Also if you Googled for my name before I removed the A record, that SSL subdomain was coming up which was competing with my actual site's content. Not good! Maybe do 301 redirections from ssl.nickjanetakis.com to your homepage, it can help with SEO.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
oh_sigh 8y ago
A personal library of 390,000 books? That's quite the collection. I wonder how much that person paid for those books?
- komali2 8y ago
  There's something very /r/latestagecapitalism about this but I can't quite put my finger on it.
- icebraining 8y ago
  It's not clear how OP reached that number, though. If they went by the number of results reported by Google, that's only an rough estimation.
  - nickjj 8y ago
    You guessed it. I based it on the Google search results. I did go back dozens upon dozens of pages (just skipping around) to spot check it and there were a ton of pages. It's a lot less results now because I wrote this article 6 days before I published it. At this point the A record has been removed for almost a week.
tzs 8y ago
> What if the person was simply serving those files for himself over the internet There are a couple of reasons to believe that this is not the case. First, there were thousands of them. Someone having thousands of books is not unreasonable, of course, but both the breadth and depth of this collection is such that it is extremely unlikely it is someone's personal library. Second, the PDFs aren't the actual books. They are just short blurbs describing the book and containing download deep links into bookfreenow.com. A couple examples [1] [2]. Clicking to create an account so you can start downloading redirects through some ad companies (and possibly some shady affiliate marketing companies), eventually reaching some download site (I think) that tells you no free slots are available and asks you to make an account. (The bookfreenow.com pages for each book all seem to be the same template with just the book info substituted. Even the comments on the each page are from the same people, at the same times, and say the exact same things except they have the correct book title on each page. They aren't even trying to make it look like the comments are legit). [1] http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/the-lm3900-a-new-current-differencing-quad-of-plus-or/ http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/the-lm3900-a-new-current-di... [2] http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/essential-orthopaedics-by-j-maheshwari/ http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/essential-orthopaedics-by-j...
- hartator 8y ago
  Shady business tactics don't make it illegal, and doesn't warrant an hosting provider block. There is worst on the Internet.
  - Digital-Citizen 8y ago
    The only thing "shady" going on here is this discussion's unquestioned acceptance of propaganda language -- "piracy"/"pirate" -- as a descriptive term for alleged copyright infringement; copyright infringement which nobody has proven occurred in the first place. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy for more on how "piracy" is propaganda.
- dbasedweeb 8y ago
  First, there were thousands of them. Someone having thousands of books is not unreasonable, of course, but both the breadth and depth of this collection is such that it is extremely unlikely it is someone's personal library. Sounds like my personal library actually. Second, the PDFs aren't the actual books. They are just short blurbs describing the book and containing download deep links into bookfreenow.com. A couple examples [1] [2]. Clicking to create an account so you can start downloading redirects through some ad companies (and possibly some shady affiliate marketing companies), eventually reaching some download site (I think) that tells you no free slots are available and asks you to make an account. Well that’s a lot harder to explain in charitable terms! So is this even piracy, or just some kind of scam based on the promise of piracy?
userbinator 8y ago
I would agree with you in principle, but this is just another one of those spam sites that flood the search results with useless crap when you're looking for bookz; there's no copyright infringement here, just spam. They're easily distinguished from "real" PDFs of books because the text clearly doesn't make any sense. Thus, in a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" sort of way, I'm thankful for the OP for removing another fake ebook site from the Internet.

nebulous1 8y ago

Then the webserver admin should work out how to stop google crawling his site and stop his site responding as any DNS name.

hartator 8y ago
Default Nginx and Apache configs serve all IPs. If you don't share your server IP, it's reasonable to think your content won't be indexed by Google.
- Qwertie 8y ago
  Google seems to be very good at finding new never seen before content. If you don't want it public then put some kind of authentication on it.
  - dx034 8y ago
    But Google also always respects robots.txt. If you don't want your content to appear just put a deny all for all domains. You can easily set that up in nginx by returning static content, you don't even need to create a file in the right directories.
human 8y ago
Unless directory listing is turned on, I can’t see how Google would be able to index these PDFs given that no external links point to them.
- fjsolwmv 8y ago
  And presumably it doesn't guess PATHs because Larry Page isn't in jail.

nickjj 8y ago

> What if the person was simply serving those files for himself over the internet (I've done it countless times) and Google caught it because the author was careless with handling DNS entries? Author here, I reached out to DO because as a fellow content creator I felt morally obligated to report this. I wouldn't like someone pirating my content and the people who created those 390,000+ PDFs put a lot of their time into making their content. > There's no harm, it does not affect your life, why go through the effort of bringing trouble to someone else because of your own lack of care with sensitive issues such as DNS entries? It does affect my life. I noticed now that there has been a couple of copyright infringement notices submit towards my domain (because of this PDF incident). When you run an online business and your website is your entire brand, something like that is a big deal. Also if you Googled for my name before I removed the A record, that SSL subdomain was coming up which was competing with my actual site's content. Not good!

hartator 8y ago
> Also if you Googled for my name before I removed the A record, that SSL subdomain was coming up which was competing with my actual site's content. Not good! Maybe do 301 redirections from ssl.nickjanetakis.com to your homepage, it can help with SEO.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]

oh_sigh 8y ago

A personal library of 390,000 books? That's quite the collection. I wonder how much that person paid for those books?

komali2 8y ago
There's something very /r/latestagecapitalism about this but I can't quite put my finger on it.
icebraining 8y ago
It's not clear how OP reached that number, though. If they went by the number of results reported by Google, that's only an rough estimation.
- nickjj 8y ago
  You guessed it. I based it on the Google search results. I did go back dozens upon dozens of pages (just skipping around) to spot check it and there were a ton of pages. It's a lot less results now because I wrote this article 6 days before I published it. At this point the A record has been removed for almost a week.

tzs 8y ago

> What if the person was simply serving those files for himself over the internet There are a couple of reasons to believe that this is not the case. First, there were thousands of them. Someone having thousands of books is not unreasonable, of course, but both the breadth and depth of this collection is such that it is extremely unlikely it is someone's personal library. Second, the PDFs aren't the actual books. They are just short blurbs describing the book and containing download deep links into bookfreenow.com. A couple examples [1] [2]. Clicking to create an account so you can start downloading redirects through some ad companies (and possibly some shady affiliate marketing companies), eventually reaching some download site (I think) that tells you no free slots are available and asks you to make an account. (The bookfreenow.com pages for each book all seem to be the same template with just the book info substituted. Even the comments on the each page are from the same people, at the same times, and say the exact same things except they have the correct book title on each page. They aren't even trying to make it look like the comments are legit). [1] http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/the-lm3900-a-new-current-differencing-quad-of-plus-or/ http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/the-lm3900-a-new-current-di... [2] http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/essential-orthopaedics-by-j-maheshwari/ http://bookfreenow.com/downloads/essential-orthopaedics-by-j...

hartator 8y ago
Shady business tactics don't make it illegal, and doesn't warrant an hosting provider block. There is worst on the Internet.
- Digital-Citizen 8y ago
  The only thing "shady" going on here is this discussion's unquestioned acceptance of propaganda language -- "piracy"/"pirate" -- as a descriptive term for alleged copyright infringement; copyright infringement which nobody has proven occurred in the first place. See https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Piracy for more on how "piracy" is propaganda.
dbasedweeb 8y ago
First, there were thousands of them. Someone having thousands of books is not unreasonable, of course, but both the breadth and depth of this collection is such that it is extremely unlikely it is someone's personal library. Sounds like my personal library actually. Second, the PDFs aren't the actual books. They are just short blurbs describing the book and containing download deep links into bookfreenow.com. A couple examples [1] [2]. Clicking to create an account so you can start downloading redirects through some ad companies (and possibly some shady affiliate marketing companies), eventually reaching some download site (I think) that tells you no free slots are available and asks you to make an account. Well that’s a lot harder to explain in charitable terms! So is this even piracy, or just some kind of scam based on the promise of piracy?

userbinator 8y ago

I would agree with you in principle, but this is just another one of those spam sites that flood the search results with useless crap when you're looking for bookz; there's no copyright infringement here, just spam. They're easily distinguished from "real" PDFs of books because the text clearly doesn't make any sense. Thus, in a "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" sort of way, I'm thankful for the OP for removing another fake ebook site from the Internet.