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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. Yes, for
by mateo1 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.
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.
- agentphil 8y agoDoesn't https://builtwith.com https://builtwith.com do that already?
- agentphil 8y agoAlternatively this: https://stackshare.io https://stackshare.io
- andrepd 8y agoThus, but unironically.
- RugnirViking 8y agoYou're trying to make a snarky comment, but this is exactly what patents are supposed to do... Reveal how inventions and large companies work, as opposed to the old cloak-and-dagger method of 'secret formulas' and such. Then allowing anybody to see the method and licence it from the company, or be liable for a lawsuit. What we used to have is if somebody somehow stole the secret to an invention it became fair game. Nowadays though companies try to game the system by having intentionally labrinthian patchworks of patents that do their best to not reveal anything about how the invention works while still being able to be used to sue people.
- 0815test 8y ago> I'm sure that "library of Alexandria" would be burned quite quickly. Rightly so-- and nothing of value would be lost. SV companies don't have much in the way of "secret sauce", they just have $$$ to burn (from VC weenies buying equity stakes) for hosting costs and for developing increasingly-crappy web frontends.
- GGfpc 8y agoWhat.cd going down was terrible for that exact reason.
- kristofferR 8y agoYup, thankfully there are some great alternatives now.
- neau 8y agokeep it on the dl, dude...
- whitepoplar 8y agoWould you be able to privately message me with some said alternatives? I'm dying in the post-what era.
- ttsda 8y agoredacted.ch seems to be the spiritual successor.
- dzhiurgis 8y agoSoulseek is still pretty solid A lot of it was about album collecting which frankly is not working the same anymore Personally I am sad iOS poorly supports listening mixes plus Soundcloud slowly destroying itself...
- Dirlewanger 8y agoSoulseek is great, but you're essentially taking a gamble hoping that you aren't downloading some shitty transcode.
- dzhiurgis 8y agofs trigger to check actual bitrate could help
- Dirlewanger 8y agoMind explaining what this is? All I'm seeing are results for Jenkins plugins...
- dTal 8y agoMore like hundreds of man-years, when you factor in all the editions, bootlegs etc that are now forever lost to time. This should be a golden age for information preservation. Instead it's a dark age. I personally know several eye-wateringly good bands whose catalogs are not available anywhere, at all.
- yipbub 8y agoCould you give me an example?
- mcs_ 8y agoNot sure if it applies but... The entire Google plus.
- dTal 8y agoSure. Mooi were formed in 1999, split in 2006, made a bunch of great music in between, and all that remains is this one song on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF5cP8S0zOk https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF5cP8S0zOk The masters still exist, I'm told, but that's no good to anyone - they won't be re-released because it would require too much intellectual property wrangling and nobody cares enough to bother, and sooner or later that hard drive will die and that will be that.
- whatthewhatwhat 8y agoWow, that was a really pretty song. Thanks for sharing it. Someday humanity will look back on this as a dark, barbaric age, thinking that ideas and sounds can be owned.
- jacquesm 8y agoMooi! Thank you for that link.
- Simon_says 8y agoThat's great song. Thanks for getting me interested in a band I can't torrent. Edit: Wait. Am I part of the problem?
- jordigh 8y agoWell, they weren't torrent sites in the late 90s and probably not the early 2000s either. The Bittorrent protocol wasn't released until July 2001 and it took a few years to get popular. Back then, they were just servers you downloaded stuff from.
- YUMad 8y agoSuprNova started in 2nd half od 2002. Anime subbing groups also started offerin torrents very early.
- ElCapitanMarkla 8y agoI forgot about SuprNova. That site had me pushing my 10gb cap every month
- epanchin 8y agoNapster started in 1999. Search was centralised, but downloads were p2p. Edit: it shut down in 2001, and everyone I knew at the time was using it. vanderZwan might have misused the word torrent, but the rest of his post is spot on.
- zrav 8y agotorrent.ru still is excellent for music, as long as you manage to register despite the cyrillic text.
- Vaskivo 8y agoI remember a torrent site for old games. You had tremendous community efforts documenting and cataloging games. Gathering every thing from the different releases, patches, music, art, etc. It was a gaming historian's wet dream. They were even beginning to record the releases from different warez scene groups. But everything went away because, form what I gathered, someone in EA noticed you could download FIFA 96 for the Mega Drive/Genesis. Unfortunately, I don't remember the name of the site. RIP
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- orbital-decay 8y agoIt was Underground Gamer. The quality of the collection was astonishing, many games were impossible to get or purchase anywhere else due to abandonment. And everything just disappeared overnight. People still have all this on their drives. I'm sure the community can be revived someday.
- Vaskivo 8y agoIt WAS! Thank you. I sure hope the community can be revived. There's a lot more bandwidth and cheap storage today than 10 years ago. I'd love to be able to contribute and share to it.
- vanderZwan 8y ago> People still have all this on their drives. I'm sure the community can be revived someday. I so dearly hope this is true for other sites like What.CD
- tapoxi 8y agoI imagine EA doesn't care about sales of FIFA 96, but they sure as shit worry about losing their FIFA license.
- Vaskivo 8y agoPlaying devil's advocate, I think some lawyer got nervous about the licensed stuff in those games. The FIFA games usually have licenses to use the teams and player names. and lots of licensed music.
- NoirDesir 8y agoRIP Oink.me :(
- layoutIfNeeded 8y ago>And then it all was destroyed. We still have communities like that, but you need the right connections to get in.
- 0815test 8y agoSo, like the warez d00dz of old? That's to be expected I suppose, but not really what parent poster was talking about!
- layoutIfNeeded 8y agoNah, not the WaReZ scene (which is also very much alive), but the private torrent trackers, like HDBits, redacted, passthepopcorn, etc.
- nwhitehead 8y agoOLGA was full of transcribed songs, great for learning guitar. Now it's gone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On-line_Guitar_Archive
- class4behavior 8y ago>(...) but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses. The EU just passed the directive for the new copyright package which further cements the status quo (the two often mentioned articles are just the worst of it), so don't expect any progress if people don't start to elect more progressive politicians. The projections for the EU election show that the shares of the fractions won't change much, beside a slight shift to the right. The composition of the Conservative wing, however, will become more Euroskeptic and nationalistic. And from an economic perspective, I don't see any big shift towards more consumer-oriented party programs, while the right-wing generally tends to be liberal(classical), or neoliberal even, anyway. P.S.: To avoid DNS blocking, use a DNS server from a private party; and since in some countries such data streams are manipulated, use encrypted DNS to ensure integrity. https://dnscrypt.info/faq https://dnscrypt.info/faq
- narag 8y agoI don't know about other countries, but in Spain the left wing is the best friend of the copyright lobby.
- sampo 8y agoAlso from Finland, the left wing (Social Democrat, Left Alliance) MEPs voted in favor of Article 13 recently.
- AsyncAwait 8y agoAre they "left-wing" or socially left neoliberals. There is a difference between "left-wing" as in economic AND social leftism vs the sort of neoliberal, "Third Way" politics, which equal socially left-wing, but economically center-right. Most of the "social democratic" parties in Europe are that way these days. They don't really champion economic populism, wealth redistribution etc.
- narag 8y agoI'm not sure what you mean with "socially left-wing". Is that something that doesn't cost money? And IMO there are no (neo)liberals in Spain, if you listen to facts instead of words. Every party currently in Parliament is big-state. PP raised taxes over Zapatero levels and public expenses even more, systematically breaking expense limits every single year they were in government.
- codedokode 8y agoWhat if we look at the sitiuation from publishers' point of view? Yesterday those weird scientints gave to you the rights to their works, and the next day they demand that you allow them to read their works for free.
- jimktrains2 8y ago> Yesterday those weird scientints gave to you the rights to their works. Yesterday there weren't any, let alone good, alternatives. Even today with good alternatives, the way publishing in "high impact" journals is tied to pay can make the issue not really have other options. Free access to knowledge is fairly foundational to science and something that's has been talked about for a while. This isn't a new problem. It comes as a surprise to no one. This is doubly true given the amount of government money spent on this research that is then being kept from the public.
- codedokode 8y agoBut today, even with alternatives present, scientists still give away or sell their rights to the journals. The scientists are often paid be the government. So it is the government that creates this situation and makes "high impact" journals what they are. It is the government that doesn't mandate free access to the knowledge.
- jimktrains2 8y agoYes, I covered that in my response. Alternatives exist, but can't be used in circumstances where your career may be on the line. I agree, however, that receiving government funding should require open access publishing.
- pfortuny 8y agoThe thing is: as long as you do not have tenure, you simply CANNOT fight. At least in a meaningful way. My case, by the way.
- AGWeir 8y ago
- 0815test 8y agoOK, since it looks like these libraries are going down after all, can we systematically download the content in them that's verifiably in the public domain, and upload it to the Internet Archive so that it becomes legitimately available and findable? There's a lot of such stuff that gets entirely fraudulent copyright claims tacked on to it, or claims that might apply only to supplemental matter (especially prefaces) that can be stripped out of a (DRM-free!) PDF file. And if something was first published before the late 19th century, it's quite obviously PD even in "life+X" countries where it might be hard to find info about all the people who could've had a hand in it back then.
- random878 8y agoMy issue with this is that in a way it gives strength to their argument - i.e. segregation reinforces the concept of there being a fundamental difference between the two groups.
- 0815test 8y agoWell, practically, there absolutely is a difference. You can host above-board content any way you like, even on things like IPFS, and tell anyone who makes fraudulent copyright claims about it to sod off-- but if you're not being totally above-board, you won't get that luxury. It's a very different trade-off compared to the likes of SH and LG, and one that's quite valuable.
- acct1771 8y agoNo, you still get that luxury. Just until the people with guns come.
- deleted 8y ago[deleted]
- papermill 8y agoYou could argue that the internet itself is the greatest library we've ever had and over the past decade, the internet has been slowly destroyed. The saddest part is that it isn't the luddites or religious fundamentalists behind the destruction of knowledge and the internet. It's politicians, journalists and CEOs behind the incredible push to "clean up" the internet. The internet went from an anonymous information sharing space to a pathetic censored version of facebook/twitter/google.
- ridgeguy 8y agoI hope these are archived as they accrete content. Assembling and torrenting sub-petabyte archives can't be easy, but it beats stirring the ashes of a digital Alexandria to find snippets of knowledge. Donating to Sci-Hub today.