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French ISPs Ordered to Block Sci-Hub and LibGen
- a1rb4Ck 8y agoNote that French universities use the public RENATER provider, which do not block, for now. More great technical details in a blog post by Rémy Grünblatt [1]. He use the RIPE Atlas network to probe. [1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fremy.grunblatt.org%2Fla-censure-de-sci-hub-et-libgen-vue-depuis-le-reseau-ripe-atlas.html https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3...
- itpasst 8y agoFrance is an internet censorship champion. When they blocked the french dailystormer without a trial, everybody was laughing. "hate speech" and "protect the children" are false flags to spread censorship from big corporations & governments.
- atemerev 8y agoWestern countries are becoming increasingly like China and Russia. UK, Australia, Germany, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand... So far, only the US still holds some resemblance to “protecting the freedom of speech” — sure, copyright violators are pursued, but at least nobody is trying to censor the Internet... yet.
- naraic0o 8y agoEnforcement of copyright seems more like the opposite of China, to be honest. I don’t believe the US allows freedom of intellectual property either, the US government have been shutting down torrent sites for years.
- larkeith 8y agoOn the other hand, large corporations (i.e. Elsevier) profiting from others' creation of intellectual property seems very inline with China's model in certain sectors... Though I would agree that the comparison is weak. While I'm always against censorship in all its forms, relating it to China seems... stretched.
- codedokode 8y agoIn the West, the surveillance is usually done by the private corporations instead of the government. Like Google, Facebook etc. For the end user there is no big difference.
- billfruit 8y agoI think NSA is major agent in surveillance. I am frankly more wary about governments and shady national security agencies doing surveillance on citizens than private companies doing it for commercial gains.
- ElBarto 8y agoUpholding copyrights in court seems the basis of the rule of Law, and quite far from the situation in China and Russia. Living in a 'free' country' does not mean being able to flaunt the law, especially in this case what those sites do is hardly defensible. > the French court ruled that the two sites “clearly claim to be pirate platforms rejecting the principle of copyright and bypassing publishers’ subscription access portals.
- atemerev 8y agoThe difference is the ability of the government to pass arbitrary laws. There are (currently, in the West) two opposing views: natural law (laws are the refinement of what already is a natural part of human aspirations), and consensus law (law is what social consensus agrees upon). There’s also authoritarian law, but that is dictatorship. Of these possibilities, only natural law can command respect. Society can be irrational and pass arbitrary laws for longer than you can stay sane, and dictatorship is, well, dictatorship. The US constitution and the bill of rights are explicitly based on the idea of natural law.
- Zrdr 8y agoUS constitution is based on enlightenment philosophy. Even if I tend to like this more than alternatives, I would not call it natural. As homo sapiens sapiens is a social animal, it's difficult to make the distinction between what it "natural aspirations" and "social consensus".
- simonh 8y agoThe concept of Natural Law was an important part of enlightenment legal thinking. When the Declaration of Independence invokes the 'Laws of Nature', it's authors would certainly have been aware of and intentionally referencing contemporary thinking on the subject to justify the declaration. In fact we know from some legal decisions of the time that Natural Law was explicitly used as justification for various legal decisions, in the absence of explicit written laws on the subject.
- Vinnl 8y agoAlthough they do allow ISPs to censor it, and have been shown to employ massive surveillance methods. I wouldn't hold the US as the bastion of free speech on the internet.
- kmlx 8y agothe US? COPPA brought down a whole piece of the Internet. the US is no better than any other country.
- mschuster91 8y ago> COPPA brought down a whole piece of the Internet. You mean FOSTA/SESTA?
- pndy 8y ago> Western countries are becoming increasingly (...) Authoritarian is the word, I believe. Thing is, along with that, there is this dangerous corporations embracing over own citizens. A weird and toxic relationship.
- hevi_jos 8y agoFor your information, the one country that is pushing forward for more restrictions on Internet on the world is called "The United States of America". All the copyright laws in Germany, France, Canada, New Zealand, UK and Australia, come after the US demands the change in law or else they will apply economic sanctions in commerce. You probably live in the US and are under the influence of propaganda(like pronouncing constantly void phrases like "land of the freedom"). You should get out and live in another country for a while to get perspective.
- atemerev 8y agoI am Russian living in Switzerland.
- codedokode 8y agoUS doesn't need to block sites because many major IT companies are under their jurisdiction and they (their courts) can just order to remove the content or stop serving the domain name. For example, they seize casino's domain names and order the banks not to allow payment to them. What's wrong with online casinos? Should't people have the right to decide how to spend their money?
- atemerev 8y agoI am not saying that the US are perfect in every regard. I only admire their anti-censorship stance, which is increasingly rare. There are still many problems, e.g. with arbitrariness of law application, and the popularity of surveillance state. However, there is subtle, but important (at least to me) distinction between “this site violates the law — let’s pursuit its owners legally” and “this site violates the law — let’s block it for everyone and censor communications to implement that”.
- codedokode 8y agoBut US blocks casino sites for everyone when it seizes their domain names.
- oytis 8y agoAs a Russian (and not a really fond of Putin's regime one) living in Germany, I can tell you that Russia's copyright policy is nowhere as strict as one of Germany. A lot of copyrighted content can be found on Russian websites, and what's missing from there is on Chinese ones. You still need VPN if you want to get to some content forbidden for political reasons, but for most people the ability to get a movie/album/book they want matters more.
- atemerev 8y agoI already explained — there is a difference between legal pursuits and state-sponsored censorship. Also in Russia you basically need VPNs for everything — LinkedIn, Telegram etc. Here in Switzerland, obtaining copyrighted content for own use is basically decriminalized (its illegal distribution, however, is not).
- xvilka 8y agoWould be interesting to measure the negative impact on a French science. Not sure how much though.
- mlinksva 8y agoAlso impact on use of Tor.
- madhadron 8y agoI would expect there to be basically none. Most of the journals that people are after their university still pays for access for. Failing that, they email the author and get a copy directly. And if that isn't possible, there are a few people with wider ranging interests or wider ranging technical skills who know about sci-hub and libgen, and they will pass out the new domain name as necessary. Or even convince the department's IT to use a non-French DNS provider as the DHCP setting. Sci-hub and LibGen are services that those of us outside a university or at something besides rich research universities depend on more.
- xvilka 8y agoYou still can't compare the ease of an access. It is like Google+click to read the article vs emailing authors for every article you want to read. At least that would decrease reading efficiency of the related research, at most - reduce the coverage of the studied material, just because it would require substantial amount of time, compared to direct click. That, in turn, might reduce the percentage of ideas that came during reading others' articles. Think of Sci-Hub as a hypertext engine for science. You copy DOI, you press the Enter, and you are reading an article.
- semi-extrinsic 8y agoRecently quite a few countries in the EU (including Germany), along with the University of California, have cancelled their contracts with Elsevier et al. France has not yet joined the rebellion. Just speculation, but maybe this is a pre-emptive strike? Probably the courts would be less inclined to support the publishers if they sued to block these services only after they entered into conflict (with the universities)?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- solstice 8y agoWhy do the French have such a hard-on for copyright enforcement? (Honest question)
- ams6110 8y agoI guess because it's the law, and governments are supposed to enforce the law.
- anoncake 8y agoThats not a special property of France though.
- cheeze 8y agoWhy doesn't France care as much about other laws?
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- atomi 8y agoPeople write laws. They're generally lobbied for.
- ptaipale 8y agoI'm slightly baffled by the difference, though, as some other laws are not enforced. For instance, the case where directors of a tyre manufacturer were forcibly taken hostage and physically abused by the workers. Normally, you'd send in the police, arrest hostage-takers and give them long imprisonment.
- vkou 8y agoJust like when your employer commits wage theft, you call the police, they drive over, taze your boss, put him in handcuffs, and book him? After all, that's what I would expect should happen to a regular thief. Do you also expect that industrial executives, managers, and everyone down to the line workers get booked on terrorism charges, for poisoning our water supplies, if they are caught illegally polluting?
- lskopwol 8y agoIs elsevier French ?
- drewmol 8y ago>The court order targets a total of 57 domain names, including various mirror sites. The academic publishers had asked the court for a more flexible blocklist, which they could update whenever new domains would become available, but this was denied. If the publishers want to expand the blocklist, they will have to go back to court. This ensures that there remains judicial oversight over local website blockades. Also, a request for a specific IP-address block was denied. So a DNS level block... This should help to educate some French users on what a DNS is, and steer some of them away from using their ISP provided DNS servers.
- giomasce 8y agoOr to use Tor, or to use the Telegram bot...
- theshrike79 8y ago
- doorbellguy 8y agoDoes this mean other countries in the EU and at international level could follow suit?
- k_ 8y agoThe linked document (in french) [0] says that there have been similar requests in the USA, Italy, Germany and UK. [0]: https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf
- niyaven 8y agoThese paywall bypassers are revealing a problem and offering a temporary solution. However this situation wherein scientists are both providers and consumers of editors, and forced to go to pirate websites in order to work is not sustainable. I feel like a permanent solution needs to be found. I'm not a scientist myself, and would be happy to hear anyone else's opinion, but alternatives like peercommunityin.org look more promising. All in all, this ban can be easily be circumvented (it's just a DNS block), so I'm not really sure it will help editors. It may cause an opposite effect, helping people to move to different solutions. But maybe I'm over optimistic.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- JeanMarcS 8y agoOr alternative like https://gatesopenresearch.org https://gatesopenresearch.org maybe ?
- sroussey 8y agoMore of a push to open access like this: https://gatesopenresearch.org/ https://gatesopenresearch.org/
- emptybits 8y agoAnd with this news, millions of French now become aware of these tempting sites they wouldn't otherwise even know about. (And Google methods of alternative access.) #streisandeffect
- k_ 8y agoWith a lot of proxies (in the linked document (french) [0]) I didn't know about; perfect! [0]: https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf
- Phlogi 8y agoAlso it feels so old-school to see the same list 4 times in the juristic document.
- k_ 8y agoYeah.. which will be printed a couple dozen times (with I guess most of the copies ending up never being read?).
- degenerate 8y agoNever heard of https://unblocked.krd https://unblocked.krd - cool site. Thanks Elsevier & Springer!
- ptidhomme 8y agoCould be, yes. Although I'm always struck how the French are just unknowledgeable of huge swathes of the english-speaking internet (me included, sometimes). Because it is english-speaking, for that matter.
- jancsika 8y agoHow long would it take the cryptocurrency miners to use all their hashing power to find the deterministic key that generates the content of libgen? That might be an easier solution than trying to achieve minimally sane copyright reform.
- na85 8y ago>How long would it take the cryptocurrency miners to use all their hashing power to find the deterministic key that generates the content of libgen? Could you not simply hash the content of libgen to find said key?
- colordrops 8y agoIt doesn't work like that. Hashes aren't compressed versions of the hashed content.
- canjobear 8y agoWell, not losslessly compressed :)
- bepvte 8y agoI think theyre suggesting hashing all of libgen and distributing and working backwards from that hash, as a joke
- na85 8y agoIt's not totally ridiculous, just wildly impractical. There is a hash out there that if brute-forced would yield a Windows 10 version of Half-Life 3.
- snovv_crash 8y agoAmong many other things.
- raxxorrax 8y agoChose your hash carefully or might end up with the ask toolbar for windows ME because of collisions.
- gcb0 8y agofirst they came for the torrent listing sites, then they came for the open research databases, and then it was too late.
- forty 8y agoI don't understand why many people here seems to agree blocking is a bad thing. If some content is illegal in the country, isn't it normal that the state is enforcing the law? I'm mean that's one of the things it is supposed to do I believe On the other hand, I understand disagreements with the law exist, but that's a normal thing and we (in France) are still able to vote for some parties with different point of view on copyright, so I'm not sure why some people are speaking of "authoritarian" or "censorship"
- larkeith 8y agoHow difficult would it be to host one or more IPFS nodes with the files on Sci-Hub (and a directory thereof)? My understanding is that would be infeasible to block, and quite probably cheaper to host, as oft-requested papers would get mirrored.
- throwaway0402 8y agoI look forward to seeing this kind of use case on ethereum swarm when it is ready. It has built in anonymity for the person hosting and downloading any content. It also has incentive structure to continue hosting content built in as well. Otherwise very similar to IPFS.
- yason 8y agoHard to block, yes, but the problem would be to find people who'd publicly share a copy or parts of scihub from their IP address.
- ShorsHammer 8y agoI've been seeding libgen torrents for quite a while from home without problem while many I know get desist letters from their ISP for downloading a single Disney movie.
- amelius 8y agoI was just thinking about a solution for this. What if two users share files A and B, where both A and B look like noise, but when XOR-ed, they form the copyrighted work? Both users can claim plausible deniability. Especially if A XOR-ed with another file C results in a copyright-free work (and similarly for B and another file D).
- 0x0000000 8y agoHave you ever read "What colour are your bits"[0]? It discusses this idea a bit. [0] https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23 https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
- 8y ago
- vikaskyadav 8y agoOH man. This is not good.
- GorgeRonde 8y agoBought a book on GooglePlay once. Wanted to download it as an ePub. ePub wasn't available due to a technical error on Google's side (apparently affecting all epubs). Had to use Adobe Digital Editions to "download" it only to figure out the download wasn't available. + DRMs (i.e. can't read the ebook on a smartphone). Went to libgen instead, will never buy a book on GooglePlay again.
- Dylan16807 8y agoHow long did the ePub error last?
- GorgeRonde 8y agoSeems like it is gone now (you still have to juggle with DRMs though). However when it happened I searched for the error code and found some posts on Google forums. They were 6 months to 1 year old, with no provided solution.
- harshitaneja 8y agoWhen did this happen? Maybe it affected limited number of users. I use google play books all the time and this was never an issue for me.
- Not_a_pizza 8y agoHere we are in the "age of information" and there is still no way to distinguish between the shill and/or troll and the genuine information provider. Glorious. This age of electronics and logic and AI should have been able to provide a reasonable benefit to consumers at the very bottom. Instead, corporations have found new ways to rig things, impersonate people, and generally be dishonest about the quality and effectiveness of their offerings.
- 0xfaded 8y agoI begrudgingly bought an ebook from google once. I knew there was DRM, but the store page said I could read it in my browser. google-chrome != browser grrrrr
- vectorEQ 8y agoproxy to afghanistan for free books <3 yalla yalla
- cultureswitch 8y agoAmusing that we'll soon live in a world where Afghanistan will be freer than the EU.
- mateo1 8y agoThose 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down. Yes, for now governments only caught up to DNS level blocking, but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses.
- vanderZwan 8y ago> Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria". I hope they don't manage to burn in down. This just reminds of how in the late nineties and early 2000s we used to have torrent sites for music enthusiasts with an archive of all the different versions, editions, bootlegs, all painstakingly added and catalogued, representing tens if not hundreds of man-hours worth of work by people who simply love music and wanted to share that love with other enthusiasts, creating some of the richest catalogues of music and music metadata the world has ever seen. And then it all was destroyed. And this was true for many other topics of interest too. We have burned many digital libraries in the last few decades, and we will probably continue to do so for a while longer.
- cpeters10 8y agoPerhaps someone should painstakingly make a catalog of the internal web stacks of SV companies for people who love code. I'm sure that "library of Alexandria" would be burned quite quickly.
- valerij 8y agowonder why SciHub was not already moved to distributed hosting system like https://ipfs.io/ https://ipfs.io/ or https://zeronet.io/ https://zeronet.io/
- agumonkey 8y agoGreat way to revive the storage industry.. am now buying 400TB of space to make mirrors...
- throwawaw434234 8y agoI hope the Indian govt. doesn't follow suit. Libgen and Scihub serve a very great resource in a country that can't afford the absurd rates to go through the paywall; rare books that are not popular, and thus not part of the South-Asia-only reprints, are absurdly expensive. Sadly, the current idiots in power think following the diktats of any and every passing foreign bureaucrat is an order from the Devas themselves. I don't think anyone who'll be coming in May will be any good either (if not worse).
- kkarakk 8y agoIndian govt doesn't have to - Reliance Jio is proactively censoring all sorts of "problematic" sites without any government mandate. they took down reddit for some states already
- kristofferR 8y agoI'd really recommend the Sci-Hub Button script. It places buttons for the open paper on Sci-Hub just about anywhere you encounter a science paywall: https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/370246-sci-hub-button https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/370246-sci-hub-button
- imartin2k 8y agoDidn't know these sites. Thanks to the French ISP for helping to spread the word.
- Cenk 8y agoFYI, for anyone not in France, this site automatically checks for the latest working Sci Hub links: https://sci-hub.now.sh/ https://sci-hub.now.sh/
- Cenk 8y agoWould using Tor bypass this block? Or changing DNS servers to Google DNS?
- anextomp 8y agoYes, both would work. Other countries have started with DNS blocks and eventually moved to IP blocks, which would prevent Google DNS from bypassing the block. For now though, changing your DNS will be sufficient. I'm not aware of any block that is effective against TOR. Even if that were possible, I bet sci-hub has a .onion mirror, which is by definition not blockable.
- Funes- 8y agoAccess to knowledge should be open and free. Especially if it has been produced by an institution that receives public funding.
- Mediterraneo10 8y agoNote that not just Sci-Hub but Libgen was blocked as well. Libgen hosts academic works, sure, but it also hosts literature, including popular literature like everyone’s favourite science-fiction and fantasy series, children’s books, etc. So, the "access to knowledge should be open and free; the public might have paid for it anyway" isn’t a suitable defense of it here. As a big fan of Libgen who has scanned and uploaded many books myself, I would rather take an overall position against copyright in general, regardless of whether the text matches what people think of as "knowledge" or not.
- Funes- 8y agoI was strictly referring to research papers and other academic publications; maybe I should have said "access to academic works" instead. Other than that, I could do away with Libgen's copyrighted literature, since I've never downloaded any of it. Also, I personally wouldn't be so fast to take a position against copyright in general, to be honest, but that discussion will have to take place somewhere else.
- codedokode 8y ago> Also, a request for a specific IP-address block was denied. The court sided with the ISPs, who argued that they should have the freedom to choose their own blocking method, including DNS blocking. That does mean, however, that the ISPs will also have to bear the costs. There are several issues that make blocking a website ineffective: - if you intercept and replace DNS responses for these sites then users with DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TCP will bypass the block. So let's promote using DoH/DoT and enabling it by default instead of relying on ISP's DNS servers. - if you examine the domain name in SSL Server Hello message then the site can switch to TLS 1.3 where it is encrypted. - if you resolve domain names and block access to those IPs automatically without human review then the owner of the blocked site can block any other site by adding its IP address to their DNS server. This can be funny, and we had such cases in Russia. - if you resolve domain names not very often, for example once every day, then the owner of the site can avoid blocking by regularly changing IP address. Let me give a hint to French court: ordering the search engines and advertisement companies to stop dealing with the site is much more effective.
- xorand 8y agoThis was demanded by Elsevier and Springer, as the copy of the order shows https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf . Every researcher who still is an editor of one of their journals is responsible for this. Any academic manager who supports these journals, either by buying them or by counting impact factor points, is responsible of this. People should know that all of these people who support this are paid from their pockets.
- 99052882514569 8y agoIs responsible for what? I support efforts to use open-access journals whenever possible and putting these ungodly abominations out of business. But that's up to researchers and funding agencies, not up to "the Pirate Bay of science" or any other site that breaks the law. And while I don't think it's immoral or anything to use it, I do think it's somewhat shrill and disingenuous to act like its blockage is some kind of a civil rights/ free speech issue. It's a paper pirating site, guys. Getting blocked and closed down is part of the game. Calm down.
- woofcat 8y agoWhile this area isn't my expertise. My understanding is that a large percentage of papers published have some Government funding. I would really like to see research which is conducted with the public's money required to be entered into the public domain and currently that doesn't seem to be the case.
- teh_infallible 8y agoNASA comes to mind..
- leereeves 8y agoLet's be clear who's being "pirated" from. Elsevier and Springer don't pay for the research, or for the rights to the paper, or even the peer review. The only compensation they're giving anyone is "exposure". Given how little that is worth these days, the validity of the copyright assignments they hold are questionable at best.
- wiggler00m 8y agoScientists etc are probably smart enough to find ways around this (or already have access). For example, there was a Twitter convention to request journal articles, and researchers with free access would retrieve them and send them via email as PDFs. Of course, I am not suggesting you do this if it contravenes the law. On a brighter note: cosmic rays are coming at you; and Elsevier and Springer are making bank.
- rapht 8y agoAs Western countries are all slowly drifting towards what amounts to government-sanctionned censorship by ISPs - especially after the adoption by the EU Parliement of the copyright directive, but it's just one more step in the general movement towards controlling who can publish what on the web -, we need more initiatives that bypass those ISPs, which are currently in the Western world the only ones capable of enforcing censorship. I'm no expert on this and the ways of achieving it, but as a citizen I feel more and more concerned about this - in particular as my (French) government seems eager to move in the not-right direction.
- cultureswitch 8y agoI wonder how much time will pass before using a debugger becomes illegal unless you have a license.
- tzfld 8y agoSo, after pirate sites we will have to see pirate ISPs too.
- Raphmedia 8y agoStreisand effect. Now everyone will know about those two websites, get curious and visit them from behind a VPN.
- lohszvu 8y agoWhy do researchers publish with these companies that lock their papers behind paywalls? Do the researchers get a part of the paywall profits? Are there not any alternative publishers that have free academic journals or release papers for free?
- lohszvu 8y agoHow do we get widespread adoption of a uncensorable DNS alternative?
- Myrmornis 8y agoSciHub and LibGen seems like very different things. They're both extremely useful. However, surely the ethical situation is very different? For SciHub I see little ethical problem: the authors of scientific papers never expect royalties and will almost universally welcome free access to their publications. No-one's going to shed tears on behalf of scientific publishing companies; they had their time, in the era of type-writers, but nowadays we can create our own PDFs, thanks very much. LibGen on the other hand I'm fascinated by. Most people I meet have absolutely no idea that a vast proportion of all commercially-produced (more or less technical) books are available for convenient free download. And while I would love for that human knowledge to be freely available to everyone on the planet, we do have to concede that many of those books were written by authors on the understanding that it was a commercial project and they would receive income for it. Do people generally agree with the above distinction? I feel that this thread (and perhaps the French government / courts) should be making it more clearly.
- neokantian 8y agoI wonder what exactly they will be blocking? $ nslookup http://sci-hub.tw/ http://sci-hub.tw/ Server: 127.0.0.53 Address: 127.0.0.53#53 Non-authoritative answer: Name: http://sci-hub.tw/ http://sci-hub.tw/ Address: 36.37.242.94 It is trivial for the user to appoint another DNS server, or even to add the site to his /etc/hosts file manually, if they try to block at that level. It is also trivial to tunnel over another ip address to reach the one wanted. How is "blocking" supposed to work? In the court document, they asked for an injunction against a list of domain names. Therefore, I assume the "block" will be limited to blocking them at the DNS level. "Toutes mesures propres à empêcher l'accès" ("All appropriate measures to prevent access"), means everything and nothing, especially, when it is most likely impossible to do. What they really want is to block particular content. In my opinion, it is not possible for an ISP to support that.