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U.S. Hits Z-Library with New Domain Name Seizures
- hdhdnbd 4y agoI'm pretty sure that they would sell more books without the DRM. The books are already pirated anyway, what does the DRM do? Do the publishers not believe this? Or are they so old school they can't accept it?
- anonzzzies 4y agoUse the tor/onion ones, always fine.
- yiamvino 4y agodownloading from onion exposes your location not always advisable :)
- jwilk 4y agoHow come?
- anonymouscaller 4y agoHow? It's Tor, the Onion cannot see your IP.
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoIt stands to reason that most entry and exit points are run by the NSA. All they have to do is match streams via rate limiting games to unmask.
- anigbrowl 4y agoDo you really think the NSA gives a shit about copyright? They're looking for nuclear secrets and the next 9-11.
- snvzz 4y agoThat's some BS in a post Snowden world context.
- anigbrowl 4y agoI don't think you seriously believe the NSA is trying to trawl for copyright violations. Arguments require more than just conflating some random facts and going 'there, see'.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 4y agoThey definitely are. Snowden literally proved this. They are collecting data at a MASSIVE SCALE. They are doing this as one of the commenters noted above; To find TS leaks and to find the next 9/11. But they are logging that information in some database somewhere. So it's not a question if they care/ will enforce it now, but rather will they care or enforce it for the rest of eternity. What people don't seem to understand about privacy is that once you give it away, it is gone forever. In some dystopian future where every American is assigned a social score, you pirating things in the early '00's may harm your ability to get a house loan.
- causi 4y agoWhy would the NSA care if I pirate The Lusty Elves of Cha'lifrax Volume 5?
- stainablesteel 4y agoits a long story, but I became an NSA agent to stop piracy of that book in particular
- znpy 4y agoThank god i only pirated volume 4 and 6 /s
- ryeights 4y agoThere are no exit relays when using hidden services
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoIf they're running the hidden service or have a backdoor it's just as compromised.
- ryeights 4y agoYes… but that’s a much bigger ‘if’
- kevin_thibedeau 4y agoThe widespread adoption of TLS means that a far greater effort has been put into exploits needed to gain access to the unencrypted side of a communication channel. It's not as big an if as it was before Snowden.
- voldacar 4y agoThey can just do traffic correlation.
- ryeights 4y agoCorrelation attacks only work when you can see both ends of the traffic. When you visit an .onion address, there is no other “end”—all traffic stays within the Tor network and goes directly to the hidden service server, which is ‘just’ another relay within the network.
- voldacar 4y agoI would assume that the NSA runs enough TOR nodes to correlate traffic from one side of the network to the other side at least a decent percentage of the time. I would also assume that they have a realtime view of the number of bytes entering or leaving any datacenter.
- bandrami 4y agoAs opposed to using the clearweb?
- cik 4y agoWhat bothers me, is the degree to which Z-library becomes the only feasible way I can read books now. As I now live in Israel I run into several headaches, and it's no longer feasible to buy books. * Amazon shut off bookdepository.com * Amazon.com just won't ship many books here. * Amazon and Kobo have both clawed back ebook purchases because I don't have a US credit card. This is a frequent conversation point amongst English and French speakers living here. * Amazon shut down Kindle Unlimited accounts for those of us living here. * Libby (overdrive) shut off my grandma's Overdrive account (Canada) and sister-in-law's Overdrive account (US) because we had the nerve, to try and use the library. Frankly I'm frustrated by this cat and mouse game. I keep trying to purchase, eventually somehow do, and then have obstacles thrown on my way. All this as a massive consumer of books. The behaviour of the industry has literally driven my family, a book buying family to embrace piracy. I would conservatively say we easily spent 2-3K USD on books and ebooks annually. This behaviour has reduced it to nearly zero.
- scrum-treats 4y agoHere, try this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835656 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35835656.
- bookpeople 4y agoHi Cik If there was a service that caters to you for buying books, would you use the service?
- brink 4y agoCould be an opportunity for a business?
- A4ET8a8uTh0 4y agoThe how matters. Apple was at one point able to mess with perceptions of music industry. So was Netflix. Publishing industry has a history to draw from and is unlikely to give one a sweetheart deal without a lot of tracking and god knows what other terms they can come up with. I agree that it looks like it could be, but I honestly don't know how to do it legally without forcing some market participants into submission. Sadly, that requires backing of a bigger company.
- user3939382 4y agoCorporations use lobbyists to capture and corrupt-to-the-bone every important regulatory agency we have. The laws themselves are corrupt, what meaningful laws do manage to exist are not enforced correctly due to these revolving doors. So when corporations hurt the People in major ways on a daily basis, nothing from the government, in fact the government is systemically complicit. But HEAVEN FORBID the People make the smallest transgression against corporate interests, suddenly the government is Johnny on the Spot and swings immediately into action, no stone goes unturned, no expense is spared. It's sickening to watch.
- mysterydip 4y agoAmazing how quickly the justice department works for certain interests.
- 206lol 4y agoMany people say ACAB for this specific reason - cops work for moneyed interests. To be a cop is to defend the wealthy and corporate, axiomatically. Plenty of cops are nice people, but they're working for a system that fundamentally is bad.
- CapstanRoller 4y ago>Plenty of cops are nice people, but they're working for a system that fundamentally is bad. How nice can you really be if you sign up for, and continue to work within, such a awful institution?
- mindslight 4y agoThe exact same way so many programmers can sign up for and continue to work for Surveillance Valley? If you want to say ACAB go right ahead - there's certainly truth in that. But there is also a truth in seeing that many cops got into it because they wanted to help people, and you're going to have to work with that if you ever want to fix the system.
- zlibfan 4y agozlibrary24tuxziyiyfr7zd46ytefdqbqd2axkmxm4o5374ptpc52fad.onion
- justinclift 4y agoThat's a different onion address to what they seem to be publishing on their front page.
- teddyh 4y agoRedirects to loginzlib2vrak5zzpcocc3ouizykn6k5qecgj2tzlnab5wcbqhembyd.onion
- justinclift 4y agoOuch. That's sounds potentially nefarious. :(
- jcrawfordor 4y ago"phishing" of this type is unfortunately a common problem on Tor because the design of hidden services makes it very difficult for a user to validate where they're connecting. It's totally possible that this situation is not malicious but it sure is sketchy and is similar to a lot of malicious fronting that you can find on Tor for popular services. I consider this a major defect of the hidden service design but there's only so much motivation to address it.
- snvzz 4y agoThis is the URL I have in my notes.
- Asooka 4y ago[flagged]
- unethical_ban 4y agoPaging Nathan Poe
- wing-_-nuts 4y agoOh no! Won't someone think of 'The Economy' or 'The Children'?! Sorry man, an unrestricted global 'public library' that allows those who can't afford it to access just about any published book is an unmitigated 'good thing'. I bet you also hate scihub as well. Won't someone think of the poor academic journals and their rent seeking?
- 2Gkashmiri 4y agoIf the original writer or peer reviewers who DO THE JOB of the paper itself were paid from the collections, the argument would be "well with your purchases, the author and reviewers earn enough to fund more research or pay bills but no. Its only the publishers who get paid.
- matheusmoreira 4y agoThese peer reviewers are the only reason journals even matter. Their selectivity is the whole point. They should all quit those publishers and start a literal blog.
- sbaiddn 4y agoand I hope that corporation's ability to lobby Congress to change laws against the public interest banned, and their lawyer's ability to practice law removed for ever. Free the Mouse!
- jimbob45 4y ago4chan thrives off troll comments like this. I sometimes think it's healthy for online debate because you're much less likely to viciously attack someone if you can't be sure if they're trolling or not. Also, the opposing side gets steelmanned which is less likely when every member of a group belongs to the same side or if the moderation leans heavily of one side (neither of which apply to HN).
- generalizations 4y agoSeems to me that the storage TB/$ is rising at least slightly faster than the total size of these kinds of archives. I wonder how long it will be until we can feasibly keep personal copies of zlib (and libgen, and scihub). How big is the z library archive, anyway?
- anonymouscaller 4y agoI'm not sure how large z-lib is, but LibGen is ~120TB. You can pick up a 5TB external HDD on Amazon for ~$100, so it would cost a good $2400 dollars for the raw storage costs if you wanted to host it all yourself. You really have to wonder how the owners fund all of this. Edit: fixed my math
- lostmsu 4y agoYou made a mistake somewhere. 120/5*100 is only $2400 Also, there are plenty of drives with under $10/TB listed here some looking legit: https://diskprices.com/ https://diskprices.com/ So it is actually only $1200
- judge2020 4y agoThe server cost is going to be the problem here, since you'll need SAS drives and a JBOD to house these hard drives, especially if you want to run a raidx for redundancy.
- sergiomattei 4y agoLibrary Genesis seems to continue working… thankfully!
- jhbadger 4y agoI wonder why they seem to have escaped? I always thought they were better known than Z-Library (which forked off from them).
- Synaesthesia 4y agoI think Z-library attracted more.users because of its UI. I also like Libgen
- akiselev 4y agoIANAL but Z-Lib is run as a for-profit business which makes it more of an open and shut case, especially if they're hosting their own files (which I believe they were, to implement that pay gate). LibGen acts more like an archive that's hosted on IPFS which eliminates a lot of the liability and can't realistically be taken down. You can only download the books from the mirrors LibGen links to and they're often just IP addresses so there's no DNS zone to seize.
- knutzui 4y agoI believe a significant difference between the two is that Z-Library actively asks for donations in return for more features, whereas Library Genesis does no such thing AFAICT.
- rabite 4y agoThey are definitely not better known among normal people -- Z-Library was trending on TikTok massively (this is what prompted the aggressive arrests and seizures lol) It is possible that Libgen's proprietors are known to law enforcement but never stepped within reach of Western legal authorities. Certainly, had Z-Library's staff all stayed within Russia, they never would have been arrested.
- gibspaulding 4y ago
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lom 4y agoDoing my part of the streissand effect: https://annas-archive.org/ https://annas-archive.org/
- gibspaulding 4y agoThank you for this, I was not aware of this site. Bookmarked!
- 14 4y agoI wonder if future generations will see this akin to the dark ages where the churches tried to control what people could access for information and burned books or punished those who published information they did not like.
- znpy 4y agoSometimes it feels it’s already becoming like that. There always is a mob of some kind trying to censor something. I won’t make examples for obvious reasons.
- vrglvrglvrgl 4y ago[dead]
- ryan93 4y agoSad. I pirate 100% of my books. After i read them i purchase the physical copy. I buy more books when i can try them first! Its also enjoyable to have it open on your computer for when you have a moment.
- prenoob 4y agoJust dropping my 2ç here. A lot of the debate i read on this article verges on the subject of piracy as in copyrights infringement. Let's not forget that these sites also carry an enormous amount of old, uncopyrighted, obscure, impossible to find texts that would otherwise be lost forever and that is a service that they pay for and ultimately benefits all of humanity.
- is_true 4y agoBooks that don't make sense financially for bookstores
- garganzol 4y agoTo add insult to the injury, SS-Library would be another fitting name to avoid domain seizures. May be unrelated though, but they should think about rebranding as some letter combinations unfortunately became poisonous and probably became contributing factors for warrants.
- unixhero 4y agoQith zlibrary were flying to close to the sun. There are better ways to evaluate books for free
- sneak 4y agohttps://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU https://youtu.be/hn1VxaMEjRU
- jiggawatts 4y agoSomething that made me a bit sad about LLMs like ChatGPT, is that they're primarily trained on free/open data sets such as Reddit, Wikipedia, and ArXiV. Instead, we could be training LLMs on published scientific papers, textbooks, and high-quality reference materials, but we can't, because not only are they behind paywalls, they're behind thousands of individual paywalls.
- TrapLord_Rhodo 4y agoOpenAI spent millions of dollars on building the data fed into the models. No one has any idea what it's trained on. Also, with the advent of AutoGPT/llamaIndex, you can train it yourself on a massive stockpile of pirated data if you wanted.
- sneak 4y agoIf free lending libraries and search engines didn't exist as traditions already, the copyright cops would never let them be invented from scratch today.