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Sci-Hub Is Now on the ‘Uncensorable Web’
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- BrawnLongHaul 6y agoThanks for sharing. I had heard of Handshake before but forgot about it. After the events of the past few days by so-called "big tech", I will be looking into this more seriously.
- marvin 6y agoWe're inching closer to realizing the "reductio ad absurdum" of censorship. Someone actually got censored, and took "well, if you don't like how the DNS does things, you can just make your own!" as a literal challenge. Wonder if this will eventually lead to further fragmentation. Hopefully encryption will keep it out of the lowest levels of infrastructure, I'd hate to see separate fiber lines put down to share controversial communications.
- eli 6y ago"alternative" DNS is hardly a new idea, it's just kinda hard to get it to stick.
- marvin 6y agoI'm almost certain that a sufficient requirement for making it stick would be the existence of in-demand, legal/gray area (and objectionable) web content that is excluded from "legacy DNS", as the article's author poetically describes it.
- jquery 6y agoI wonder if the author of xkcd is ever going to apologize for his comic on free speech.
- bonoboTP 6y agoWhy would he? I think he's even more convinced of it today. "Free speech" is a pretty right-wing issue nowadays and people assume it's a dog whistle for hate speech. If you want to be a progressive leftist like Randall Munroe, you can't advocate for free speech without hurting your reputation in the current environment.
- the_af 6y agoIf this [1] is the xkcd strip we're talking about, and don't see how Randall Munroe isn't advocating for free speech, nor how it is a left vs right issue. He's simply saying "free speech means the government cannot arrest you for what you say", nothing more, nothing less. He furthermore argues that the right to free speech doesn't mean everyone else can't criticize you, have your shows/books/whatever canceled, shout you down, etc. He says "[free speech] doesn't shield you from criticism or consequences". Now, you may or may not agree with his position (I certainly don't agree with some key aspects of it) but Randall is explaining what free speech is, not arguing for censorship. The alt text is pretty thought provoking, too. [1] https://xkcd.com/1357/ https://xkcd.com/1357/
- baggy_trough 6y agoYou are confusing the 1st Amendment with 'free speech'. Free speech is a value that is broadly applicable to society, far larger in scope than prohibition from the government.
- jsonne 6y agoI have no idea why you're being downvoted because you're completely right. The petty legalism around the issue does nothing to further the conversation. The 1st amendment is about the US government censoring people. It doesn't own the concept of free speech as a whole in the same way the constitution doesn't own the idea of God given rights, or democracy, or republic, or numerous other concepts mentioned.
- metiscus 6y agoI am coming to support the notion that ISPs and Internet Backbone providers should be treated as first class utilities like electrical companies and not be able to deny access except for things like non-payment. Otherwise we do run the risk of a physically balkanized internet.
- metiscus 6y agoStupid question, is this the issue that was at the core of net neutrality? I may have misunderstood the entire thing if so.
- woodrowbarlow 6y agoit's related. ISPs and telecom in the US do not invest adequately in infrastructure, and the existing infrastructure is overloaded. net neutrality was all about how that infrastructure can be utilized; ISPs want to profit off the scarcity by allowing big companies to pay for priority so that their website would load faster at the expense of everyone else (big companies want this too, and they want it to be expensive, because that increases barrier for entry in a competitive space where they already have an upper hand), but the net neutrality laws used to prevent this sort of bidding for priority. some ISPs also wanted to sell "internet lite" packages that are cheaper and only allow you to connect to a fixed set of websites. presumably they would also take money off the back end from those websites that want to be in the list.
- skynet-9000 6y ago> some ISPs also wanted to sell "internet lite" packages that are cheaper and only allow you to connect to a fixed set of websites. presumably they would also take money off the back end from those websites that want to be in the list. In the U.S.? I thought this was only in India with Facebook's non-internet Internet.
- morlockabove 6y agoYou think they don't want to implement it in the US?
- dmingod666 6y agoBeyond those institutions that have a financial interest in this. What would be the motivation for someone like twitter to ban scihub?
- BrawnLongHaul 6y agoWe can only guess their motivations and who pulls their (Twitter's) strings behind the scenes. I am not sure that most of us here will ever find out.
- llcoolv 6y agoAnd even if we do, we will never know for sure.
- balozi 6y agoAnd even if we knew, we can never talk about it.
- zerkten 6y ago> We can only guess their motivations I don't understand this perspective, but I guess my own is built from experience. We can never know exactly what Twitter discussed internally before taking this action, but there is lots of external evidence and signals as to what happened. It's unlikely to be different from the action taken by most other corporations with legal teams. Small organizations with outside counsel can surprise us with their decisions since there are more concentrated opinions and higher risk taking. Perhaps GitHub and youtube-dl is the only outcome that has surprised me recently.
- troymc 6y agoTwitter says they did it "due to a violation of Twitter policies, in particular the Counterfeiting Policy." The precipitating event was a lawsuit in India and the subsequent reactions. This article gives more details: https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-bans-sci-hub/ https://reclaimthenet.org/twitter-bans-sci-hub/
- 6y ago
- zoobab 6y agoFinally some fresh air in this censorship atmosphere.
- oefrha 6y ago> “The DNS is like a phonebook for the internet. The addresses in the phonebook are the server IP addresses. DNS was created to give IP addresses human-readable names so with our platform, you’re finding the IP address through Handshake, not through a certificate authority,” Namebase CEO Tieshun Roquerre told CoinDesk. (Emphasis mine.) Did this Namebase CEO just state on record that he doesn’t know how DNS works?
- rasengan 6y agoI think what he meant was that the domain resolution can be validated using the blockchain as opposed to needing a centralized/single actor certificate authority.
- dlor 6y agoI think the point is that certificates are built on top of DNS, not the other way around. Domain resolution does not require certificate authorities.
- rasengan 6y agoExactly. It doesn’t require strictly from a protocol sense, but from a security perspective you do want to validate certificates ON TOP as you said.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- emacdona 6y agoFollowed by this: 'Handshake is “is effectively a decentralized domain name server,” Roquerre said.' -- thus implying that DNS is NOT decentralized? The article is pretty bad. For his sake, I hope they are taking his quotes out of context. Because I had a quick look at https://www.namebase.io/ https://www.namebase.io/ -- and it does look interesting. It appears that they have decentralized the REGISTRY by putting it on the "Handshake" blockchain. Can I configure my resolver to use this "Handshake" blockchain?
- llcoolv 6y agoIt is worth noting that this is exactly what Aaron Swartz was bullied to his tragic death 8 years and a day ago. May he rest in peace. And kudos to Alexandra. P.S. Corrected the date, seems like I still live in 2020. Thank you, lazyant.
- calimac 6y agoRIP Aaron Schwartz. You are a patriot for truth and freedom.
- alienlid 6y agoTweet thread on his death that was illuminating for me https://mobile.twitter.com/hides_minimally/status/1348704670882037760 https://mobile.twitter.com/hides_minimally/status/1348704670...
- happytoexplain 6y agoThe first Tweet attempts to coopt the memory of him to legitimize an unsubstantive jab in an ideological battle that is adjacent to academic literature. That's sickening.
- llcoolv 6y agoYes, my interpretation of his actions is also way more moderate.
- MacsHeadroom 6y ago
- Triv888 6y agoDidn't last long? > sci-hub.hns/ could not be resolved by HNS.to. Please try another Handshake resolver..
- rasengan 6y agoIt resolves for me! Try installing a handshake resolver directly like hsd [1] for full chain or hnsd [2] for SPV. [1] https://GitHub.com/handshake-org/hsd https://GitHub.com/handshake-org/hsd [2] https://GitHub.com/handshake-org/hnsd https://GitHub.com/handshake-org/hnsd
- stevespang 6y agoJust tried to download and install handshake. Requires docker. Just tried to download and install docker on windows 7, failed install, requires more stuff. Opinion: This will never become a realization until these people realize the average Joe is not going to jump through all these hoops just to get an alternative browser up and running. It should be simple and seamless. Less than 1% will bother with all this.
- MattGaiser 6y agoDocker does not work on non-professional versions of Windows. Was very annoying as a student. EDIT: Seems that progress has lead to this no longer being true.
- oneweekwonder 6y agoyou can run docker using WSL/WSL2 but you will need to enable hyper-v on win10.
- MattGaiser 6y agoGood to know. Glad that was fixed. Thank you.
- carlsborg 6y agoGet a VirtualBox VM running Linux, and take it from there.
- searchableguy 6y agoYou can use nextdns.io which has an option to resolve handshake domains. Other options also provided in the docs: https://learn.namebase.io/starting-from-zero/how-to-access-handshake-sites https://learn.namebase.io/starting-from-zero/how-to-access-h...
- C4stor 6y agoDoes the average Joe really reads articles from sci-hub ? The target public of sci-hub should be able to understand how to install a couple programs imo. Windows 7 has reached EOL a year ago (minus two days), so yeah, maybe it's not very well supported...
- pdevr 6y agoEssentially, isn't this just another domain registrar (Namebase.io) providing a few TLDs, following a much more complicated process, the advantage being a much more solid DNS entry substitute? If you run a high-traffic site, won't you still be at the mercy of hosting providers, CDN providers, etc.? Related question: Is there a true uncensorable (sic) protocol for hosting a website?
- owlmirror 6y agofreenet comes to mind but it's manyyears ago that I've looked into it. the experience than was rather lacking. other means might be an .onion site but I'm sure that a high traffic site is another beast
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- janandonly 6y agoWell, I2P and TOR come close, i think...
- rasengan 6y agoHandshake and Sia Sky together delivers a decentralized website.
- walrus01 6y agoPeople have been trying to make alternative DNS name systems and alternative root nameservers a thing for 20+ years now. Has never caught on. On the other hand I 100% endorse sci-hub having a presence as a tor service.
- azernik 6y agoI am continually shocked that sci-hub still does not have a working .onion address.
- input_sh 6y agoIMO not enough "useful" content is not reachable via "normal" DNS for anyone to care about the alternative DNS systems. Sure, sites like TPB and Sci-Hub need to switch to a different domain from time to time bringing some annoyance to their users, but that's about it. Only if all domain registrars at once started actively removing "shady" domains would an alternative DNS ever come to spotlight.
- generalizations 6y agoSeems like sci-hub might be the tipping point for useful content on alternative DNS.
- dempseye 6y agoNot much useful content needs it. The intersection of "universally criminal, such that it requires a censorship-resistant DNS alternative" and "valuable enough that normal people want to see it" is very very small.
- pluc 6y ago> sci-hub.hns/ could not be resolved by HNS.to. Please try another Handshake resolver.. Can't censor what you can't reach, checkmate.
- rasengan 6y agoResolves for me: $ host sci-hub.hns sci-hub.hns has address 186.2.163.57
- pluc 6y agoDoesn't resolve for me on Cloudflare DNS: $ host sci-hub.hns Host sci-hub.hns not found: 3(NXDOMAIN) And the web frontend is unable to render anything, echoing that message I quoted above.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- rasengan 6y agoCloudflare doesn’t yet resolve handshake names, but hopefully this changes soon. Paging @jgc !
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- zoobab 6y agoNext step is to censor the IP address.
- supandi 6y agoThat doesn't do much. One can easily switch to another ip within the same host provider. The real problem is censoring the name, which they claim to have resolved.
- obblekk 6y agoI’m supportive of free distribution of scientific knowledge, BUT HN has a significant bias against believing in the power of legal systems. No matter how good the technology, it can eventually be censored if the law is strong enough. In the past, it was hard to separate “useful” internet activity from “illegitimate” because things were changing quickly. Today, a government might say its simply illegal to use end to end encryption without government ability to tap (with warrant and court approval) and even if you have innovative use cases that get killed, that’s ok because 99% of the value of the internet is available. Some say that math triumphs law, but you can see with Parler’s experience (ignoring political affiliation) that once a large group of people are organized against you, it’s simply in feasible to rebuild decades of infrastructure in isolation. All of this is to say, it’s a good start to restore sci hub, but it’s important to win the hearts and minds of society and lawmakers to legitimize free information. Otherwise, eventually, it may become suppressed for practical widespread access, destroying most of the value. EDIT RESPONSE TO RESPONSES Thanks for the thoughtful responses. A few counterpoints: * *Past encryption bans didn’t work.* Yes I agree. But I would argue it’s because lawmakers of the 90s really didn’t understand/care of the significance. Bans on pirated content in the 2000s worked well enough that my parents never really got into pirating, it was a young/hacker thing for the most part. Consider that just because hackers (in the PG/RMS sense of the word) can get info, doesn’t make it as useful to society as everyone getting it. * *Parler’s mistake was using AWS.* This is my broad point - it’s impossible to be an island unto yourself. At some point, they have to use fiber laid in ground, buildings cohousing data center, electricity from the grid, peering, LTE networks, etc to transmit information. Either you argue that every single layer can be vertically integrated into a parallel universe of thought (which certainly doesn’t sound friendly to new idea entrants) or acknowledge that we need some kind of rules to ensure equal access (requiring law or some other consensus mechanism). * *Law is different than public opinion.* Short run yes, long run not really. If the majority of people believe it’s more important to police child porn than ensure distributed ownership of the internet (whether they can articulate it as such or not) that will be the direction of law. If most people don’t care, but the ones working in lawmakers offices do, that’ll become the law. The purpose of law is to formalize social conventions and uniformly enforce them. * *We can hack/route around law.* By all means, please do continue. My point is just to also view law itself as something that is malleable. Do both. Build censorship resistant tools, and advocate and change law to reduce censorship. Both are necessary, neither one alone is sufficient. Information both needs to be technically accessible, and actually widely available for a democratic society to function well. I appreciate deeply that HN as a community can have thoughtful discussions on this topic. I’m glad I found you all.
- workOrNah 6y agoAnd just like that, free speech is back
- harryvederci 6y agoI accidentally clicked on the link in a browser without an ad blocker, worst mistake of my life. I forgot what a monstrosity the internet has become...
- xbar 6y agoWho should be allowed to charge for peer-reviewed scientific research?
- drocer88 6y agoThe copyright holder. Real problem is a lot of this research is funded by taxpayers and should be public domain.
- yters 6y agoNot sure about sci hub, but these open archive like arxiv and bioarxiv are still biased. I know one world renown scientist who cannot submit his article to bioarxiv even though Nature has no problem with his paper (but won't publish it either). The paper points out a certain bacteria did not in fact evolve the ability to consume the synthetic compound nylon, since the relevant genetic material existed before nylon had been invented, which can be easily demonstrated with a BLAST search.
- pradn 6y agoThe link didn't work for me, which gives me pause about the availability of this technology. For most, simply going to Wikipedia's Sci-Hub page to get the current domain is easy and good enough, as the domain rarely changes.
- troquerre 6y agoDid you use the HNS.to gateway or connect directly via NextDNS? Per the announcement tweet [1] the gateway has limited uptime guarantees — it's much better to connect directly and only takes a few minutes to set up. [1] https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=20 https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=...
- eythian 6y agoA note that if you use Telegram, there is @scihubbot which you can talk to and will send you papers if it can. In my opinion it's faster/easier than using a web interface also.
- xyst 6y agoWhere is the effort to get these articles published freely without having a private entity act as a middleman? This problem of publicly funded research only available behind a paywall is a bipartisan issue. The main issue is that there appears to be no movement or effort to push this forward so the public is largely uninformed.
- 0xbadcafebee 6y agoInstead of using this complicated custom thing, you could do something simpler. Serve an initial website on a regular domain. The website only displays a standard hosts file. Copy and paste it into your local system's hosts file. Now browse to the site listed in the hosts file. You can change the domains used in the hosts file at any time, and get real certs for those domains so you can use TLS. If the public browses to the IPs in the hosts file, they'll get nothing. But someone with the hosts file can see the actual site's content. This avoids domain takedowns, and allows changing IPs and domain names.
- LockAndLol 6y agoI fully expected a TOR or I2P address... do they have one?
- srean 6y agoThere are some comments here that note that sci-hub or Aaron's action on JSTOR data is/was illegal. Just leaving this thought out here -- if laws are considered unjust, it is ok, even noble, to break them. That is how one got rid of apartheid, how colonies became independent and LGBT marriages came to be legally recognized. If not for lawbreakers we would still be living in a world that approves of Turing's treatment post war.
- vinckr 6y agoRestricting access to scientific material just to make money is holding us all back and I wouldn't consider people who leak such material criminals.
- mellavora 6y agoCorrection: restricting public access to scientific material paid for by public funds...
- green_on_black 6y agoAnd the opposite is how Nazi Germany rose and continued.
- Grustaf 6y agoThat’s possibly true. It doesn’t follow that all illegal activity is just though.
- jrochkind1 6y agoThis article (really it's more of a press release from the interested parties) seems to confuse the role of DNS from the role of certificate authority, making it hard for me to understand what they're talking about. These days sometimes the same entities provide both SSL certificates and DNS, but they are different services. > Handshake is “is effectively a decentralized domain name server,” Roquerre said. Instead of using the web-standard certificate authority to authenticate user connections to a server, Handshake stores references to the IP address of the websites registered in its system. Namebase is a platform that offers users access to the Handshake network That makes no sense at all. But it sounds like handshake is simply an alternate DNS protocol? Or does it also serve as a certificate authority somehow? Is it actually more decentralized than DNS (which is already of course decentralized in one axis, but not the relevant one for keeping a lookup available if the entity hosting DNS decides to remove it). Very confusing. It seems like tor .onion address would be an actually mature solution to this problem, instead of this thing that seems like press release babble?
- troquerre 6y agoThe article has a few technical mistakes in it (I've found most publications do that when it comes to a technical subject I'm familiar with...), but in short Handshake is an alternative decentralized DNS root hosted on a blockchain. It aims to replace Certificate Authorities as the root of trust by pinning TLSA keys directly on the blockchain instead of relying on trusted parties for verfication.
- jrochkind1 6y agoSo it aims to replace both DNS (a way of looking up IP address for a hostname) as well as certificate authorities (a way of knowing if the SSL cert being used by your connection is 'good')? Its an alternative DNS, with a method to use that alternative DNS as a way of authorizing ssl certs too?
- troquerre 6y agoThat's right! Though the infrastructure for HTTPS without CAs on Handshake is still nascent (the community welcomes contributors if you're interested!). This article covers how to set up HTTPS on Handshake using DANE https://medium.com/@ca98am79/how-to-view-dane-tlsa-websites-on-handshake-with-firefox-f55eb1dd5be9 https://medium.com/@ca98am79/how-to-view-dane-tlsa-websites-...
- troquerre 6y agoCEO of Namebase here. We posted the original tweet announcing the news[1]. If any of y'all have questions about how sci-hub.hns works or how Handshake works in general I'll be online today to chat! [1] https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=20 https://twitter.com/NamebaseHQ/status/1348707701744922625?s=...
- nickodell 6y agoHow does your service differ from NameCoin?
- Hizonner 6y agoIt's more profiteering-oriented.
- tasuki 6y agoI beg to differ. The original Handshake developers collected 10.2MM USD from sponsors and distributed it among free software and open source projects [0]. Actual USD were given out, not just magical internet money, eg FSF received 1 million [1]. [0]: https://handshake.org/grant-sponsors/ https://handshake.org/grant-sponsors/ [1]: https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1-million-from-handshake https://www.fsf.org/news/free-software-foundation-receives-1...
- troquerre 6y agoHandshake has taken a lot of lessons from previous attempts at alternative blockchain DNS roots like NameCoin. Here are some ways its different: - Handshake names are not *.bit domains like NameCoin they're actually top-level domains. This is because Handshake's purpose is not to decentralize domain names per se but too decentralize the root zone and create a more secure root of trust than Certificate Authorities [1] - Handshake name auctions were spread out over the course of the first year after launch to prevent early adopters from hoarding all the good names. For instance, .crypto was available in the first few weeks after launch but .information isn't available until next week. This is important because early adopters hoarding names prevents latecomers from supporting the protocol. - Handshake names are sold via vickrey auction instead of a flat fee. Different names are more valuable than others. Flat fee pricing allows a hoarder to arbitrage that fact by being first whereas auction pricing ensures that names are better distributed. .X sold for 311k HNS[2] (about $40k) whereas other names sell for a few cents. - Handshake has a light client[3] that can trustlessly verify DNS records on-chain. This is critical because very few people run full-nodes, so without a light client the majority of users would rely on third parties which provides worse security than users resolving names in a decentralized manner [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20995969 [2] https://namebase.io/domains/x https://namebase.io/domains/x [3] https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd https://github.com/handshake-org/hnsd
- aj7 6y agoIt’s not pirated. The vast majority of this research has been paid for by the public. Eykaban is a hero, and has liberated it. Aaron Swartz died for this cause.
- justmyname 6y agoOne correction. Her surname is Elbakyan.
- aj7 6y agoWhy is there so much babbling about Reddit here? It’s mainly a porn-sharing site, having taken advantage of the demise of that function at Tumblr. I can’t think of a single topic where the Reddit forum is not done better, much better, somewhere else. Am I wrong? Illuminate me. I’m looking for a USE for Reddit.
- sumanthvepa 6y agoAll very nice. But SciHub doesn't seem to resolve.
- notorandit 6y ago... untill they take down those "root servers". There's alaways a way to kill an online system!
- Hizonner 6y agoIt'd be funny if hns.to got taken down for providing a path to Sci-Hub. At the root, the problem is trying to use the highly centralized legacy DNS system for purposes contrary to the wishes of those who control that system. To be "uncensorable", you need to change clients to use something other than DNS to resolve names. Anyway, the property you usually want to abandon for global names is "human-meaningful". Just use key hashes as names. "Human-meaningful" strings should be reserved for local nicknames, for the simple reason that the same string will often have different meanings to different humans, for reasons predating your system and entirely outside of its control. You have no way to guarantee that what you list as "Sci-Hub" is actually what the user thinks she's looking for as "Sci-Hub", and you have even less certainty of that for any less famous name.
- evbots 6y agoyou only need hns.to if you haven't set up your system to resolve handshake names directly, or (theoretically) use a browser that has support baked in. It's on Brave Browser's roadmap to resolve handshake DNS directly.
- Funes- 6y agoWhy not host it on I2P, Tor, ZeroNet, etcetera? I'd like to see anyone trying to take it down permanently there.
- dsgriffin 6y agoWhat are the advantages of this compared with ENS (Ethereum Name Service) and Unstoppable Domains?
- 5etho 6y agothings like this make me want to download whole sci-hub content, anyone knew the size of it?
- lenkite 6y agoThe extraordinary actions taken to bring Sci-Hub down utterly amaze me. Just about every researcher I know uses Sci-Hub. One of the gems that actually make the Internet matter rather than toxic social media. Yet it seems to continually struggle for its daily existence. What laws will need to change (or be revoked) in the US and EU for them to operate legally ? Also, I never clearly understood on why is a trove of public research papers considered such a threat ?
- ac29 6y ago> What laws will need to change (or be revoked) in the US and EU for them to operate legally ? Copyright laws would needs to be abolished, or new laws made that scientific research cannot be copyrighted (in many cases publicly funded research is already required to made open access, though).