11 ms·

Help seed Z-Library on IPFS

275 points by allenleee 4y ago

brokenmachine 4y ago
What am I missing about IPFS? It just seems like bittorrent, but worse.
holibops 4y ago
It would be nice if we could read these books online rather than having to download a file and find some sort of reading app for it. Like, what am I supposed to do with an "azw3" file? And do I really want evidence of piracy sitting on my hard disk?
- t-3 4y ago
  OK, but without seeders the project will die. If you only want to leech, maybe you should stay away from appeals for participation?
- kristofferR 4y ago
  Azw3 is main Kindle format, the best viewer apps for them are Calibre or even the official Kindle app. It does have previews for PDFs, better formats aren't easily displayed in a browser.
- constantcrying 4y ago
  In all likelihood the book you are looking for is available as a .pdf The "best" format for reading books is epub, as it is an opwn format which does not try to adapt a paper format. There are many free readers available for it. >And do I really want evidence of piracy sitting on my hard disk? If your house gets raided by law enforcement, charges for minor copyright infringement should be of absolutely zero concern to you.
  - azalemeth 4y ago
    > The "best" format for reading books is epub, as it is an opwn format which does not try to adapt a paper format. There are many free readers available for it. I disagree. ePub assumes that the thing you are reading can easily be reformatted – for mathematics, technical documents, or similar, this is really not true. I've got a few technical books where the publisher released them as either a LaTeX'd pdf or an epub and on my iPad reading the ePub is _awful_ -- the layout is worse, it's very distracting, and the effort that the author put into ideally putting "this equation" and "this text referring to this equation" together has been lost.
    - maweki 4y ago
      I haaaaate recipe books in ePub with a passion. They always look cheap and the images unapetizing and the formatting of the preparation steps never looks good.
    - Tepix 4y ago
      I'm pretty sure it's not EPUB that's at fault. I've seen very attractive EPUB books.
    - constantcrying 4y ago
      Epub pushes the duty of layout onto the reader, it is very similar to a website. With epub you can freely change font, spacing, etc. (great accesibility feature). PDF is a representation of paper. LaTeX files look good as a PDF because LaTeX files are created to be printed or viewed as a PDF. A digital book should not enforce layout. Yes, epub has flaws, especially if it is not seen as the main target for publication.
  - qwerty456127 4y ago
    > The "best" format for reading books is epub Not really. Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc. As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily. I usually convert ePub to FB2 before reading just to force my PocketBook reader to use its default typesetting instead of that hardcoded in the ePub file. FB2 also is much more convenient to process programmatically and it defines more meaningful metadata than ePub.
    - iggldiggl 4y ago
      > As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily. Problem is that as soon as you need some typographical or layout feature beyond what is natively supported by FB2 you're out of luck. With ePub you still have a chance of manually creating some custom effects before having to give up and fall back to a PDF. Now granted, for your typical run-of-the-mill novel it's usually not a problem, because those rarely do anything non-standard with regards to layouting or typography. However some books do play around with their layouting and/or typography, sometimes quite heavily. House of Leaves e.g. would be impossible to properly reproduce in FB2, and since that particular book goes really overboard in terms of playing around with the page layout, I think even as an ePub it'd be quite a feat to successfully pull it off.
    - constantcrying 4y ago
      >Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc. The reverse can be true as well, where the pdf is some badly compiled epub. And with the epub at least you can always read the actual text, without repeated swiping for each line.
  - holibops 4y ago
    Yes but even a PDF needs downloading on mobile browsers. Whereas the Books section of the Internet Archive has a consistent format and displays them all in-browser, it's so much more convenient and user-friendly. This archive should aim for the same.
    - UncleEntity 4y ago
      > This archive should aim for the same. This archive of a project where the principal actors are currently awaiting extradition to the US for copyright infringement charges should work on making the user experience better? Think they have bigger fish to fry like making sure the archive of the project survives which, incidentally, is what this is all about.
chmike 4y ago
Z-library is used for steeling author's work. Does IPFS want to support it ? z-library is not equivalent to sci-hub.
- bheadmaster 4y ago
  Copying is not stealing. Stealing removes the original, copying leaves the original intact.
  - numlock86 4y ago
    Taking all your fiat money technically doesn't "remove" it either, just relocation. Gets even better if we talk about virtual funds.
    - bheadmaster 4y ago
      When all my fiat money is taken, I cannot use it anymore, therefore it's removed. If you make an exact copy of my fiat money, yet I can still use it, nothing is stolen.
      - hippich 4y ago
        Let's go down the rabbit hole... When governments make exact copy of existing fiat money (i.e. engage in money printing) they increase supply of fiat money and as a result cause inflation, which decrease the value of fiat money existing before the money printer was turned on. So while such a copy did not completely eliminate your ability to use your money, it did in fact decreased its utility. And indeed can be a valid case of "stealing".
        bheadmaster 4y ago
        > And indeed can be a valid case of "stealing". It's not stealing, government didn't steal anyone's money, they just devalued it. In a similar sense, gold miners are increasing the supply of gold and lowering its price, but they still aren't stealing anyone's gold - they're making more. The fact that fiat money is completely fictional does make it more prone to systemic abuse - but even in that case, what the government is taking away from people is value and labor, not money itself, and those two are a little more abstract and harder to reason about. The word "stealing" has a specific meaning related to physically taking something away from someone else, let's not use it in contexts where it doesn't apply. Especially when the use of the word is mostly perpetuated by copyright holders who want to persuade the public that not giving money to them is equal to stealing from them. That's bullshit, and it will always be bullshit. To me, it sounds horribly similar to narcissistic abuse: "How could you not give money to me? Do you have any idea how much that hurts me?".
8t88t8tttt8 4y ago
There is no chance that I would risk this. I would gladly donate several Terabytes of seeding if this possible in a secure and _anonymous_ network.
- 2Gkashmiri 4y ago
  you could probably seed over clear in the first go and then actual long term seeding over tor to protect you
- snvzz 4y ago
  It is possible to run ipfs behind tor. And I'd argue it is the right way to do so.
  - deknos 4y ago
    how? i am behind NAT for example, i tried doing it. it did not work. Is there a way for people who have just 20 mbit/s up/downstream and do not have an stable IP addres from home behind NAT? I would run a server for long for seeding if it would be over TOR.
    - xwolfi 4y ago
      Dude come on, 20mb/s who will you serve with that, forget about it and move near a backbone.
      - brokenmachine 4y ago
        If he's got the rare file that you need, who cares if he's on 20mb/s or 2mb/s? Pepperidge Farm remembers 300 baud.
      - deknos 4y ago
        Well.. do you have Money for moving and paying subscription? :D
      - _joel 4y ago
        That's the point of p2p with multiple seed though, every extra bps helps.
2Gkashmiri 4y ago
started using this and am VERY VERY excited.this comes from someone who "witnessed" takedown of megaupload, rise and fall of popcorn time, the rise of scihub and library genesis so i VERY MUCH hope this stays online.
Proven 4y ago
psychphysic 4y ago
Still no meaningful promises around the safety or effectiveness of this. Seems like this will get many people a love letter from their ISP. Not worth the hassle with no idea of if this will work in even the medium term.
- sixtyfourbits 4y ago
  IPFS provides the same privacy guarantees as bittorrent (i.e. none). Use a VPN.
  - 8t88t8tttt8 4y ago
    A VPN does not protect you well from law enforcement.
    - sva_ 4y ago
      I think in this case a wisely picked VPN likely offers more than "good enough" protection.
- ajsnigrutin 4y ago
  > Seems like this will get many people a love letter from their ISP. Many countries just don't care. A few EU ones and USA might, but once you go into slightly poorer territories, noone cares about foreign copyright. So, treat it like you would treat seeding a pirate bittorrent.
  - technoooooost 4y ago
    In Canada the ISPs send email threats but do absolutely nothing. I get them all the time.
    - ornornor 4y ago
      This is because the federal government had the foresight to make a law that 1. Limits maximum damages to something like 5,000$ so that it isn’t worth the copyright mafia’s time to pursue, 2. ISP get complaints from copyright mafia and forwards it to the user but the ISP isn’t allowed to share the user details with the copyright mafia. That’s why these emails always try and entice you to click a link and settle the crime for a few hundred dollars. They can’t do anything else as they don’t even know who you are but a few chumps will click and pay so it’s free money in a way. Anyway, great piece of law and I’m glad lobbies didn’t get their way with that in Canada.
pt_PT_guy 4y ago
Instructions are not easy. I want a out of the box solution to help without having to deeply dig into the internals. Something like archive team warriors: http://warrior.archiveteam.org/ http://warrior.archiveteam.org/ For example, > Bitswap vs DHT I don't care. I want to help without having to care about these details. > Launch one or multiple IPFS servers (see previous blog post; we currently use 4 servers in Docker). what? how? where? link? no out of the box deployment? > Alternatively, you can do what we did: add in offline mode first, add the files, then take the node online, peer with public gateways, and then finally run ipfs dht provide -r <root-cid>. what? lol
- wwwlibra 4y ago
  https://www.glagt.com/help-seed-zlibrary-on-ipfs.html https://www.glagt.com/help-seed-zlibrary-on-ipfs.html
- simongr3dal 4y ago
  From the article: > If this is all too involved for you, or you only want to seed a small subset of the data, then it might be easier to pin a few directories: 1. Use a VPN. 2. Install an IPFS client. 3. Google the “Pirate Library Mirror”, go to “The Z-Library Collection”, and find a list of directory CIDs at the bottom of the page. 4. Pin one or more of these CIDs. It will automatically start downloading and seeding.
  - stared 4y ago
    Any instruction that involves "Google X" (or even a general term "Install Y"), is not a good instruction. It is like a maze - easy to go once you know the path. Otherwise - dozens of subtle things that can go wrong, at each step (e.g. installing a different version of Y, or to a wrong path, etc). The best instructions can have descirptions, but also contains a FULL list of command lines instructions, ideally without any placeholders.
    - boramalper 4y ago
      It's presumably deliberate: by keeping annas-blog.org clean from copyrighted content (or links to copyrighted content), they will be able to retain a public channel despite the illegal nature of their work.
zozbot234 4y ago
Does anyone know if this dataset happens to include any pre-1925 published works, that might not have made it to the Internet Archive yet? I have no idea whether the publication metadata that they have is even good enough to address such questions in the first place.
- torified 4y ago
  http://bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6qead.onion/ http://bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6q... Press on Search Options under the search box, and you can filter from 1800-1925. It didn't show an exact number of matches (500+), but there were a lot of pages...
dale_glass 4y ago
Be warned that IPFS is not anonymous, and the IP addresses of the nodes serving the content are quite easily obtainable. And since the FBI already got involved and arrested people, this is quite the risky endeavor.
- Tepix 4y ago
  If you run an IPFS server, you don't know what's on it, do you?
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    You do. IPFS isn't Freenet, you're not contributing to some global pool of amorphous storage. It's just like running a webserver, but with content-based addressing, the possibility of having multiple machines provide the same content and much more convenient mirroring than over HTTP. If you start an IPFS node, it'll remain empty until you upload something, or pin (copy) somebody else's content. I think your node might also cache requests you make to it for some time, but that's also something that's a result of you asking for it.
  - danwee 4y ago
    So, if the FBI comes to arrest me can I just get away with that? "Sorry guys, I do have an IPFS server but I had no idea it was distributing illegal content to the world. Can I go now?"
    - sdze 4y ago
      Who wants to deal with that? In the best case they confiscate all tech stuff from my home (including my employer’s laptop).
    - dale_glass 4y ago
      Some systems have tried that approach, yes! In Freenet you contribute to a global pool of storage, and end up storing and transmitting whatever the network happens to need. Freenet is intentionally obscure about it. The archive is encrypted, there are no logs, there's no way to list what your node contains, and storage is probabilistic making it hard to determine if something is there because you asked for it, or it passed through your node. Tor also tries something similar, and has premade explanations to give to authorities if they ask about your exit node. But those are specifically built to try to work with that case. Stuff happens behind your back that you have zero involvement in besides providing a piece of infrastructure for the network. In IPFS on the other hand you make a personal, intentional choice to mirror or upload something.
imhoguy 4y ago
I just wonder why all that can't be uploaded into Library Genesis? They already have the distribution part sorted out (IPFS, Torrent, even ed2k!).
- t-3 4y ago
  Most of it probably is on libgen. Putting all the eggs into one basket doesn't seem like a good move when booksharing sites keep getting shut down.
  - DoItToMe81 4y ago
    From what I've heard, about 5% of it isn't on Libgen. Assuming that's accurate, that's still several hundred thousand books and several million articles.
  - aftbit 4y ago
    Not according to the author: We are happy to announce that we have gotten all books that were added to the Z-Library between our last mirror and August 2022. We have also gone back and scraped some books that we missed the first time around. All in all, this new collection is about 24TB, which is much bigger than the last one (7TB). Our mirror is now 31TB in total. Again, we deduplicated against Library Genesis, since there are already torrents available for that collection. http://annas-blog.org/blog-3x-new-books.html http://annas-blog.org/blog-3x-new-books.html
- nisegami 4y ago
  Z-Library was essentially a clone of LibGen with a more accessible UX and monetization. Though I believe they eventually solicited new material that was not fed back into LibGen.
- eulgro 4y ago
  Anna had a post about this. Basically libgen has more strict requirements on metadata, fiction/non fiction split, so it makes meeting difficult.
sneak 4y ago
> Be sure to use these exact hash and chunker values, otherwise you will get a different CID! It might be good to do a quick test run and make sure your CIDs match with ours (we also posted a CSV file with our CIDs in one of the torrents). This can take a long time — multiple weeks for everything, if you use a single IPFS instance! IPFS devs, take heed. This is a very dedicated and determined user. You should make this very obvious hot path a lot easier for users who are not this determined.
hellfish 4y ago
Why the hell is this site not https? Note the first blog post was in 2022. No https in 2022? Red flag. This looks like a honeypot to me And for the record, z library gets its books from libgen? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was just a frontend?
- wilsongoode 4y ago
  Z library extended the libgen collection (apparently without contributing back to it).
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]
- thinkmcfly 4y ago
  Also it requires a login to do anything with. Add another check mark on the Honeypot theory
- capableweb 4y ago
  > Why the hell is this site not https? This looks like a honeypot to me How does TLS vs No TLS weight in on your suspicious if something is a honeypot or not? It's as trivial for three-letter agencies/black hats to setup as for trusty individuals/corporations.
  - hellfish 4y ago
    We're talking about seeding a library full of copyrighted content. The person who made this site couldn't take 2 seconds to set up HTTPS? They're either incompetent or part of a honeypot. In either case, it's best to steer clear Keep in mind, the first post on this site was in 2022. 2022, and no https... is this some kind of joke? And in this case the adversary isn't necessarily the three letters, it's the copyright holders and legal system. No https makes ISP logs even more useful
    - capableweb 4y ago
encryptluks2 4y ago
Even if sharing behind Tor, doesn't IPFS expose all your interfaces bu default? This should also be done in network namespaces preferably so that you're only sending specific traffic. I believe having users subscribe to Mullvad would offer much better performance as I don't think IPFS does any sort of bandwidth optimization to find peers that have better speeds.
api 4y ago
Trend I’m spotting: things like Mastodon / ActivityPub and IPFS are having a moment.
- michelb 4y ago
  and the usability/UX is horrible.
  - api 4y ago
    I use Mastodon a lot now. It has greatly improved vs years ago but yes it still lags behind what closed silos can do. The main reason for this is lack of an economic model to fund polish. Same is true for all the other FOSS decentralized things.
    - dane-pgp 4y ago
      Maybe Mastodon/Fediverse instances need to start giving out blue checkmarks to accounts that pay them $8 per month to fund development/design work. Then if enough brands and celebrities move away from Twitter, their followers could bully them into paying this fee to support the ecosystem.
    - deleted 4y ago
      [deleted]
dang 4y ago
Recent and related: Putting Z-Library on IPFS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675224 - Nov 2022 (129 comments)

275 points by allenleee 4y ago

What am I missing about IPFS? It just seems like bittorrent, but worse.

It would be nice if we could read these books online rather than having to download a file and find some sort of reading app for it. Like, what am I supposed to do with an "azw3" file? And do I really want evidence of piracy sitting on my hard disk?

t-3 4y ago
OK, but without seeders the project will die. If you only want to leech, maybe you should stay away from appeals for participation?
kristofferR 4y ago
Azw3 is main Kindle format, the best viewer apps for them are Calibre or even the official Kindle app. It does have previews for PDFs, better formats aren't easily displayed in a browser.
constantcrying 4y ago
In all likelihood the book you are looking for is available as a .pdf The "best" format for reading books is epub, as it is an opwn format which does not try to adapt a paper format. There are many free readers available for it. >And do I really want evidence of piracy sitting on my hard disk? If your house gets raided by law enforcement, charges for minor copyright infringement should be of absolutely zero concern to you.
- azalemeth 4y ago
  > The "best" format for reading books is epub, as it is an opwn format which does not try to adapt a paper format. There are many free readers available for it. I disagree. ePub assumes that the thing you are reading can easily be reformatted – for mathematics, technical documents, or similar, this is really not true. I've got a few technical books where the publisher released them as either a LaTeX'd pdf or an epub and on my iPad reading the ePub is _awful_ -- the layout is worse, it's very distracting, and the effort that the author put into ideally putting "this equation" and "this text referring to this equation" together has been lost.
  - maweki 4y ago
    I haaaaate recipe books in ePub with a passion. They always look cheap and the images unapetizing and the formatting of the preparation steps never looks good.
  - Tepix 4y ago
    I'm pretty sure it's not EPUB that's at fault. I've seen very attractive EPUB books.
  - constantcrying 4y ago
    Epub pushes the duty of layout onto the reader, it is very similar to a website. With epub you can freely change font, spacing, etc. (great accesibility feature). PDF is a representation of paper. LaTeX files look good as a PDF because LaTeX files are created to be printed or viewed as a PDF. A digital book should not enforce layout. Yes, epub has flaws, especially if it is not seen as the main target for publication.
- qwerty456127 4y ago
  > The "best" format for reading books is epub Not really. Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc. As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily. I usually convert ePub to FB2 before reading just to force my PocketBook reader to use its default typesetting instead of that hardcoded in the ePub file. FB2 also is much more convenient to process programmatically and it defines more meaningful metadata than ePub.
  - iggldiggl 4y ago
    > As a format FB2 is better than ePub because it separates the content from the view while ePub mixes them heavily. Problem is that as soon as you need some typographical or layout feature beyond what is natively supported by FB2 you're out of luck. With ePub you still have a chance of manually creating some custom effects before having to give up and fall back to a PDF. Now granted, for your typical run-of-the-mill novel it's usually not a problem, because those rarely do anything non-standard with regards to layouting or typography. However some books do play around with their layouting and/or typography, sometimes quite heavily. House of Leaves e.g. would be impossible to properly reproduce in FB2, and since that particular book goes really overboard in terms of playing around with the page layout, I think even as an ePub it'd be quite a feat to successfully pull it off.
  - constantcrying 4y ago
    >Practically, for many pirate ebooks you can find in both ePub and PDF you better choose PDF because it looks and reads like the original while the ePub version probably is almost garbage with broken tables, code quotes etc. The reverse can be true as well, where the pdf is some badly compiled epub. And with the epub at least you can always read the actual text, without repeated swiping for each line.
- holibops 4y ago
  Yes but even a PDF needs downloading on mobile browsers. Whereas the Books section of the Internet Archive has a consistent format and displays them all in-browser, it's so much more convenient and user-friendly. This archive should aim for the same.
  - UncleEntity 4y ago
    > This archive should aim for the same. This archive of a project where the principal actors are currently awaiting extradition to the US for copyright infringement charges should work on making the user experience better? Think they have bigger fish to fry like making sure the archive of the project survives which, incidentally, is what this is all about.

chmike 4y ago

Z-library is used for steeling author's work. Does IPFS want to support it ? z-library is not equivalent to sci-hub.

bheadmaster 4y ago
Copying is not stealing. Stealing removes the original, copying leaves the original intact.
- numlock86 4y ago
  Taking all your fiat money technically doesn't "remove" it either, just relocation. Gets even better if we talk about virtual funds.
  - bheadmaster 4y ago
    When all my fiat money is taken, I cannot use it anymore, therefore it's removed. If you make an exact copy of my fiat money, yet I can still use it, nothing is stolen.
    - hippich 4y ago
      Let's go down the rabbit hole... When governments make exact copy of existing fiat money (i.e. engage in money printing) they increase supply of fiat money and as a result cause inflation, which decrease the value of fiat money existing before the money printer was turned on. So while such a copy did not completely eliminate your ability to use your money, it did in fact decreased its utility. And indeed can be a valid case of "stealing".
      - bheadmaster 4y ago
        > And indeed can be a valid case of "stealing". It's not stealing, government didn't steal anyone's money, they just devalued it. In a similar sense, gold miners are increasing the supply of gold and lowering its price, but they still aren't stealing anyone's gold - they're making more. The fact that fiat money is completely fictional does make it more prone to systemic abuse - but even in that case, what the government is taking away from people is value and labor, not money itself, and those two are a little more abstract and harder to reason about. The word "stealing" has a specific meaning related to physically taking something away from someone else, let's not use it in contexts where it doesn't apply. Especially when the use of the word is mostly perpetuated by copyright holders who want to persuade the public that not giving money to them is equal to stealing from them. That's bullshit, and it will always be bullshit. To me, it sounds horribly similar to narcissistic abuse: "How could you not give money to me? Do you have any idea how much that hurts me?".

8t88t8tttt8 4y ago

There is no chance that I would risk this. I would gladly donate several Terabytes of seeding if this possible in a secure and _anonymous_ network.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago
you could probably seed over clear in the first go and then actual long term seeding over tor to protect you
snvzz 4y ago
It is possible to run ipfs behind tor. And I'd argue it is the right way to do so.
- deknos 4y ago
  how? i am behind NAT for example, i tried doing it. it did not work. Is there a way for people who have just 20 mbit/s up/downstream and do not have an stable IP addres from home behind NAT? I would run a server for long for seeding if it would be over TOR.
  - xwolfi 4y ago
    Dude come on, 20mb/s who will you serve with that, forget about it and move near a backbone.
    - brokenmachine 4y ago
      If he's got the rare file that you need, who cares if he's on 20mb/s or 2mb/s? Pepperidge Farm remembers 300 baud.
    - deknos 4y ago
      Well.. do you have Money for moving and paying subscription? :D
    - _joel 4y ago
      That's the point of p2p with multiple seed though, every extra bps helps.

2Gkashmiri 4y ago

started using this and am VERY VERY excited.this comes from someone who "witnessed" takedown of megaupload, rise and fall of popcorn time, the rise of scihub and library genesis so i VERY MUCH hope this stays online.

Proven 4y ago

psychphysic 4y ago

Still no meaningful promises around the safety or effectiveness of this. Seems like this will get many people a love letter from their ISP. Not worth the hassle with no idea of if this will work in even the medium term.

sixtyfourbits 4y ago
IPFS provides the same privacy guarantees as bittorrent (i.e. none). Use a VPN.
- 8t88t8tttt8 4y ago
  A VPN does not protect you well from law enforcement.
  - sva_ 4y ago
    I think in this case a wisely picked VPN likely offers more than "good enough" protection.
ajsnigrutin 4y ago
> Seems like this will get many people a love letter from their ISP. Many countries just don't care. A few EU ones and USA might, but once you go into slightly poorer territories, noone cares about foreign copyright. So, treat it like you would treat seeding a pirate bittorrent.
- technoooooost 4y ago
  In Canada the ISPs send email threats but do absolutely nothing. I get them all the time.
  - ornornor 4y ago
    This is because the federal government had the foresight to make a law that 1. Limits maximum damages to something like 5,000$ so that it isn’t worth the copyright mafia’s time to pursue, 2. ISP get complaints from copyright mafia and forwards it to the user but the ISP isn’t allowed to share the user details with the copyright mafia. That’s why these emails always try and entice you to click a link and settle the crime for a few hundred dollars. They can’t do anything else as they don’t even know who you are but a few chumps will click and pay so it’s free money in a way. Anyway, great piece of law and I’m glad lobbies didn’t get their way with that in Canada.

pt_PT_guy 4y ago

Instructions are not easy. I want a out of the box solution to help without having to deeply dig into the internals. Something like archive team warriors: http://warrior.archiveteam.org/ http://warrior.archiveteam.org/ For example, > Bitswap vs DHT I don't care. I want to help without having to care about these details. > Launch one or multiple IPFS servers (see previous blog post; we currently use 4 servers in Docker). what? how? where? link? no out of the box deployment? > Alternatively, you can do what we did: add in offline mode first, add the files, then take the node online, peer with public gateways, and then finally run ipfs dht provide -r <root-cid>. what? lol

wwwlibra 4y ago
https://www.glagt.com/help-seed-zlibrary-on-ipfs.html https://www.glagt.com/help-seed-zlibrary-on-ipfs.html
simongr3dal 4y ago
From the article: > If this is all too involved for you, or you only want to seed a small subset of the data, then it might be easier to pin a few directories: 1. Use a VPN. 2. Install an IPFS client. 3. Google the “Pirate Library Mirror”, go to “The Z-Library Collection”, and find a list of directory CIDs at the bottom of the page. 4. Pin one or more of these CIDs. It will automatically start downloading and seeding.
- stared 4y ago
  Any instruction that involves "Google X" (or even a general term "Install Y"), is not a good instruction. It is like a maze - easy to go once you know the path. Otherwise - dozens of subtle things that can go wrong, at each step (e.g. installing a different version of Y, or to a wrong path, etc). The best instructions can have descirptions, but also contains a FULL list of command lines instructions, ideally without any placeholders.
  - boramalper 4y ago
    It's presumably deliberate: by keeping annas-blog.org clean from copyrighted content (or links to copyrighted content), they will be able to retain a public channel despite the illegal nature of their work.

zozbot234 4y ago

Does anyone know if this dataset happens to include any pre-1925 published works, that might not have made it to the Internet Archive yet? I have no idea whether the publication metadata that they have is even good enough to address such questions in the first place.

torified 4y ago
http://bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6qead.onion/ http://bookszlibb74ugqojhzhg2a63w5i2atv5bqarulgczawnbmsb6s6q... Press on Search Options under the search box, and you can filter from 1800-1925. It didn't show an exact number of matches (500+), but there were a lot of pages...

dale_glass 4y ago

Be warned that IPFS is not anonymous, and the IP addresses of the nodes serving the content are quite easily obtainable. And since the FBI already got involved and arrested people, this is quite the risky endeavor.

Tepix 4y ago
If you run an IPFS server, you don't know what's on it, do you?
- dale_glass 4y ago
  You do. IPFS isn't Freenet, you're not contributing to some global pool of amorphous storage. It's just like running a webserver, but with content-based addressing, the possibility of having multiple machines provide the same content and much more convenient mirroring than over HTTP. If you start an IPFS node, it'll remain empty until you upload something, or pin (copy) somebody else's content. I think your node might also cache requests you make to it for some time, but that's also something that's a result of you asking for it.
- danwee 4y ago
  So, if the FBI comes to arrest me can I just get away with that? "Sorry guys, I do have an IPFS server but I had no idea it was distributing illegal content to the world. Can I go now?"
  - sdze 4y ago
    Who wants to deal with that? In the best case they confiscate all tech stuff from my home (including my employer’s laptop).
  - dale_glass 4y ago
    Some systems have tried that approach, yes! In Freenet you contribute to a global pool of storage, and end up storing and transmitting whatever the network happens to need. Freenet is intentionally obscure about it. The archive is encrypted, there are no logs, there's no way to list what your node contains, and storage is probabilistic making it hard to determine if something is there because you asked for it, or it passed through your node. Tor also tries something similar, and has premade explanations to give to authorities if they ask about your exit node. But those are specifically built to try to work with that case. Stuff happens behind your back that you have zero involvement in besides providing a piece of infrastructure for the network. In IPFS on the other hand you make a personal, intentional choice to mirror or upload something.

imhoguy 4y ago

I just wonder why all that can't be uploaded into Library Genesis? They already have the distribution part sorted out (IPFS, Torrent, even ed2k!).

t-3 4y ago
Most of it probably is on libgen. Putting all the eggs into one basket doesn't seem like a good move when booksharing sites keep getting shut down.
- DoItToMe81 4y ago
  From what I've heard, about 5% of it isn't on Libgen. Assuming that's accurate, that's still several hundred thousand books and several million articles.
- aftbit 4y ago
  Not according to the author: We are happy to announce that we have gotten all books that were added to the Z-Library between our last mirror and August 2022. We have also gone back and scraped some books that we missed the first time around. All in all, this new collection is about 24TB, which is much bigger than the last one (7TB). Our mirror is now 31TB in total. Again, we deduplicated against Library Genesis, since there are already torrents available for that collection. http://annas-blog.org/blog-3x-new-books.html http://annas-blog.org/blog-3x-new-books.html
nisegami 4y ago
Z-Library was essentially a clone of LibGen with a more accessible UX and monetization. Though I believe they eventually solicited new material that was not fed back into LibGen.
eulgro 4y ago
Anna had a post about this. Basically libgen has more strict requirements on metadata, fiction/non fiction split, so it makes meeting difficult.

sneak 4y ago

> Be sure to use these exact hash and chunker values, otherwise you will get a different CID! It might be good to do a quick test run and make sure your CIDs match with ours (we also posted a CSV file with our CIDs in one of the torrents). This can take a long time — multiple weeks for everything, if you use a single IPFS instance! IPFS devs, take heed. This is a very dedicated and determined user. You should make this very obvious hot path a lot easier for users who are not this determined.

hellfish 4y ago

Why the hell is this site not https? Note the first blog post was in 2022. No https in 2022? Red flag. This looks like a honeypot to me And for the record, z library gets its books from libgen? Correct me if I'm wrong, but it was just a frontend?

wilsongoode 4y ago
Z library extended the libgen collection (apparently without contributing back to it).
- deleted 4y ago
  [deleted]
thinkmcfly 4y ago
Also it requires a login to do anything with. Add another check mark on the Honeypot theory
capableweb 4y ago
> Why the hell is this site not https? This looks like a honeypot to me How does TLS vs No TLS weight in on your suspicious if something is a honeypot or not? It's as trivial for three-letter agencies/black hats to setup as for trusty individuals/corporations.
- hellfish 4y ago
  We're talking about seeding a library full of copyrighted content. The person who made this site couldn't take 2 seconds to set up HTTPS? They're either incompetent or part of a honeypot. In either case, it's best to steer clear Keep in mind, the first post on this site was in 2022. 2022, and no https... is this some kind of joke? And in this case the adversary isn't necessarily the three letters, it's the copyright holders and legal system. No https makes ISP logs even more useful
  - capableweb 4y ago

encryptluks2 4y ago

Even if sharing behind Tor, doesn't IPFS expose all your interfaces bu default? This should also be done in network namespaces preferably so that you're only sending specific traffic. I believe having users subscribe to Mullvad would offer much better performance as I don't think IPFS does any sort of bandwidth optimization to find peers that have better speeds.

api 4y ago

Trend I’m spotting: things like Mastodon / ActivityPub and IPFS are having a moment.

michelb 4y ago
and the usability/UX is horrible.
- api 4y ago
  I use Mastodon a lot now. It has greatly improved vs years ago but yes it still lags behind what closed silos can do. The main reason for this is lack of an economic model to fund polish. Same is true for all the other FOSS decentralized things.
  - dane-pgp 4y ago
    Maybe Mastodon/Fediverse instances need to start giving out blue checkmarks to accounts that pay them $8 per month to fund development/design work. Then if enough brands and celebrities move away from Twitter, their followers could bully them into paying this fee to support the ecosystem.
  - deleted 4y ago
    [deleted]

dang 4y ago

Recent and related: Putting Z-Library on IPFS - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675224 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33675224 - Nov 2022 (129 comments)