[HN Gopher] Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support
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Library Genesis Desktop app, now with IPFS support
Author : janandonly
Score : 266 points
Date : 2021-11-08 13:41 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wiki.mhut.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (wiki.mhut.org)
| ajvs wrote:
| No commits in over a year, and developer has announced the next
| release will be the "final version".
| 0des wrote:
| While this is a warning sign in general, there does exist
| software that is simply 'done'.
| hbn wrote:
| Not really for programs that connect to the internet
| willmeyers wrote:
| I'm probably ignorant to how this app uses IPFS (and IPFS in
| general), but from what I remember IPFS has a fairly strict code
| of conduct on copyrighted material. I'm more curious than
| anything, but what's stopping the legal team over at Protocol
| Labs from shutting this down?
| prophesi wrote:
| It's not really feasible to remove content from IPFS. You would
| need all of the nodes hosting the content to remove it. The
| most likely scenario would be for common IPFS gateways like
| ipfs.io, cloudflare, and pinata.cloud to not host the content.
| That would make it much harder for that material's CID to
| resolve in a timely manner, if any other nodes are hosting it.
| willmeyers wrote:
| Ah, makes sense. Thanks for explaining
| nynx wrote:
| Why is this not a locally running webapp? Running an unsandboxed
| app like this would not be smart.
| lijogdfljk wrote:
| Why is this person being downvoted? I thought the same - aren't
| local webapps prone to portscanning and effective cross origin
| (for lack of a better description?)?
| capableweb wrote:
| Title is wrong, the updated configuration
| (https://wiki.mhut.org/_media/software:libgen_desktop_mirrors...)
| is using ipfs.com and cloudflare-ipfs.com, so it's still being
| fetched over HTTP(S), not IPFS.
| eminence32 wrote:
| This is an interesting point. In my experience, it's very
| common for HTTP(S) to be used for the "last mile" for content
| that originates from IPFS. Generally this is done via public or
| dedicated IPFS gateways.
|
| Even when you have a local IPFS node (which is not common), the
| "last meter" delivery is still done using HTTP too, via a local
| gateway
| capableweb wrote:
| > it's very common for HTTP(S) to be used for the "last mile"
| for content that originates from IPFS
|
| Indeed, it seems very common, but that doesn't make my
| original point less true.
|
| > the "last meter" delivery is still done using HTTP too, via
| a local gateway
|
| Yeah, that seems common too, but less "wrong" to call it
| "IPFS support" in that case, in my opinion.
|
| Running your own IPFS gateway at least makes the content
| actually fetched from the network (internet) via IPFS while
| using ipfs.com/cloudflare-ipfs.com is not any different than
| just using a CDN (except usually you have to pay for CDNs,
| IPFS gateways seems to be free (for now)).
| eminence32 wrote:
| Yup, agreed with all your points
| AgentME wrote:
| >Running your own IPFS gateway at least makes the content
| actually fetched from the network (internet) via IPFS while
| using ipfs.com/cloudflare-ipfs.com is not any different
| than just using a CDN (except usually you have to pay for
| CDNs, IPFS gateways seems to be free (for now)).
|
| I think there's still a lot of value in this way of using
| IPFS: using ipfs.com/cloudflare-ipfs.com makes it much
| easier to swap to another IPFS gateway (including your own
| local one) if those gateways ever give you issues.
| Datagenerator wrote:
| Depending on centralized CDN's with logging is not using
| native IPFS, correct if wrong
| capableweb wrote:
| I don't understand what you mean, what's the question?
| Animats wrote:
| Does IPFS really work? As I understand it, it's sort of like a
| pay version of BitTorrent. In theory, you're supposedly renting
| space on hard disks of random users. In practice, you're probably
| renting space from AWS at a markup.
|
| I was interested in IPFS as a possible asset storage system for
| assets for virtual worlds. Not for piracy, but as a way to sell
| virtual world assets with no ongoing obligation to host the
| content. You store the ownership on some blockchain and the
| content in some storage system with pre-paid "perpetual care".
| I'd seen one offer at $5/gigabyte/forever.
|
| The idea is supposed to be that Filecoin is a derivative of
| future declines in storage pricing, and profits on that
| derivative pay for the storage. Unclear if this works. There's
| one seller offering "perpetual storage" for a one-time fee. But
| their terms of service say _" Data will be stored at no cost to
| the user on IPFS for as long as Protocol Labs, Inc. continues to
| offer free storage for NFT's._" No good.
|
| (Just once, I'd like to see an application for NFTs that actually
| did something besides power a make-money-fast scheme.)
| harshreality wrote:
| IPFS is distinct from filecoin.
|
| IPFS works, although performance might be an issue for rarely-
| requested files since most of them (file blocks) will require
| multiple hops to get to. If the file's stored on some reliable
| ipfs node(s), anywhere, you'll be able to access that file
| eventually.
|
| Filecoin, however noble it may be, doesn't seem to be taking
| off (yet). IPFS doesn't currently work very well as a storage
| service because there's no guaranteed storage by others. Even
| if filecoin achieved mass adoption, you'd have to pay someone
| to host your files to get reliable 3rd party storage, and that
| offered fee might not be adequate motivation.
|
| IPFS works perfectly well, though, for hosting file(s) yourself
| without the risk of getting your network link saturated if
| popularity of the file(s) increases a lot. As an auto-scaling
| CDN, it works great, though with poor performance for rarely
| accessed files. The solution to the file storage problem, it
| seems to me, is to integrate existing CDNs with ipfs, to allow
| fast serving of rarely-accessed files for low cost, and then
| cease serving it from the CDN once a file is popular enough
| that it's getting duplicated by a bunch of IPFS nodes for free.
| Maybe cloudflare can plug that rarely-accessed-file gap and
| offer file access, integrated with ipfs, at zero hosting cost.
| dannyobrien wrote:
| I think it's worth separating what IPFS provides from what
| Filecoin offers (note that I work at the Filecoin
| Foundation/Filecoin Foundation for the Decentralized Web, but
| I'm hopefully being sufficiently technical here that the
| description is as objective as I can be.)
|
| IFPS is a model for providing a content-addressable storage
| system -- so if you have a particular hash (the CID) of a piece
| of content, you can obtain it without having to know where or
| who (or how many people) are storing it. Obviously _one_ site
| on the IPFS network you 're using has to have stored that data,
| but it only needs to be one site. More sites make it easier and
| quicker to access. Almost all IPFS nodes are run and offered
| for free, either by volunteers, major services like Cloudflare
| or Protocol Labs' dweb.link (which act as gateways so that you
| can access that file network over http/https) or web services
| that you pay to host your content on IPFS and manage it through
| a traditional API, like Textile or Fleek, or Fission.codes.
|
| The key point here for someone with your use case, is that you
| have lots of flexibility as to _who_ is hosting your files. You
| can start off just running your own node, or pay someone else,
| or pay _lots_ of providers that are geographically diverse, or
| just do it among a bunch of volunteers. You 're not tied to a
| single provider, because wherever your data is stored, you or
| your users will be able to find it.
|
| Filecoin is a project to fix the incentive issues that can
| affected historical decentralizing projects like bittorrent,
| and can lead to decentralizing attempts like this collapse into
| just a single centralized service like AWS.
|
| Storage providers on the Filecoin network negotiate directly
| with customers to store files -- they receive payment directly
| from those customers, but they are also incentivized to offer
| storage, and also store those files over the long term, because
| Filecoin has a proof-of-storage setup where storage providers
| get utility coins in return for proving that they're either
| making space available, or storing customers' files. It's all
| very zero-knowledge-proof and fancy, but the important thing is
| that with this in place, and a flat, competitive market for
| storage, storage provides on this network have good commercial
| reasons to offer low prices, and don't care if you're not tied
| directly to them (in the way that Amazon and other traditional
| storage providers are tempted to lock you in.)
|
| Filecoin isn't so much a derivative of future declines, but a
| way to establish pricing in an environment where there actually
| is a free(r) market for online storage. And IPFS is a protocol
| that establishes one part of that freer market, which is to
| decouple _who_ is storing your files, from _how_ you might
| access them in the future. So far, this seems to be working,
| with prices being much cheaper than the alternatives, and with
| some degree of geographical and organizational diversity:
| https://file.app/
|
| Storage providers are also now also competing on other aspects,
| such as ecological impact (see
| https://github.com/protocol/FilecoinGreen-tools ), speed of
| access, etc, which is what you might expect in a flatter
| market. We also see larger storage providers providing separate
| markets for large, >1 Pebibyte customers.
|
| Happy to talk about this more, I'm danny@fil.org. Big fan of
| your work, etc, etc.
| WFHRenaissance wrote:
| LOL, I prefer to keep my acts of piracy in the browser.
| lyndons wrote:
| Can we create decentralized library (catalog) _protocol_ , so it
| can't be taken down? I'm thinking about libgen/sci-
| hub/whatcd(RIP), but entirely decentralized, protocol-based. We
| already have basically all necessary tools: BitTorrent/IPFS to
| distribute files, magnet links to link them, DHT to discover
| peers. We just need to combine them together in a smart way and
| maybe add some bits of missing functionality, like:
|
| - categorization and search;
|
| - voting for every entry;
|
| - maybe reputation system. Where peers regularly publishing good,
| high quality content get their 'karma'[1] upvoted. So when
| downloading you can choose people with higher reputation. Or when
| building catalog of materials in certain area of interest, you
| can filter only peers with certain threshold karma.
|
| - incentive for peers to keep seeding whatever they downloaded at
| least until achieving certain ratio (say, 2:1). Maybe by
| rewarding with 'torrent tokens' that you can spend on
| downloading, commenting etc.[2]
|
| - comments to every entry (published torrent). With means to
| combat spam, insults, irrelevant stuff etc. E.g. with voting
| system, where comments with, say, -3[3] votes become collapsed.
| Or/and with aforementioned 'tokens' that you spend when comment.
|
| - personal blacklists to block people whose torrents/comments you
| don't want to see.
|
| Maybe I'm reinventing the wheel here and something similar
| already exists, but for some reason not popular (since I never
| heard of it)? In that case we need to figure out why it didn't
| shoot and fix it to make it work.
|
| [1] Your ID will be a cryptographic key a la cryptocurrency
| wallet.
|
| [2] With rare but sought after torrents rewarding you with more
| tokens.
|
| [3] Personally adjustable.
| peatmoss wrote:
| The file sharing aspect of this seems to be the least difficult
| portion of the problem. I'd love to see something that passes
| muster, to a librarian, on the catalog front. Sort of a
| wikipedia or open street map of library catalogs.
|
| The resources themselves might be found anywhere (physically at
| a library, in digital form for purchase, downloadable via
| torrent, etc.). A true library of babel.
|
| If I knew more about library science, I suspect catalog
| federation protocols all exist, but there is probably work to
| be done in making such a thing resilient.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > Sort of a wikipedia or open street map of library catalogs.
|
| Wikidata has this in their scope (and it makes sense to keep
| the data there, since a book catalog needs to cross-reference
| entries for authors, topics etc.), and the Internet Archive
| OpenLibrary leverages their data.
| tribler wrote:
| Yes, this is exactly what we are working on for 16 years now.
| Longest running torrent, trust and Tor-fork project:
| https://github.com/Tribler/tribler/wiki
|
| Its as hard as making a decentralised Google and decentralised
| YouTube at the same time. Over 75 master students and PhDs put
| their coding efforts in it at Delft University.
| CuriouslyC wrote:
| I think a lot of the social stuff is unnecessary and getting
| ahead of things.
|
| The core product IMO is just a resource database, with a nice
| resource description interface, peer syncing, and the ability
| to search and aggregate results from multiple databases
| together. A resource could be a web page blob, or a file, or
| plain text (e.g. a comment). All the social stuff, file
| viewers, blacklists, etc can be built on top of that, ideally
| by third parties in an open ecosystem.
| kleer001 wrote:
| I honestly know nothing about the space.
|
| Is this what you're talking about? At least as an MVP. :
|
| https://libgen.fun/dweb.html
|
| ?
| hagbard_c wrote:
| The 'Books' tool [1] has been doing the same for a long time as
| well, can be used anywhere where Bash runs and - given its shell-
| based nature - is eminently hackable. It comes with a CLI (named
| 'books'), TUI ('nbook' and 'nfiction') and GUI ('xbook' and
| 'xfiction') and supports both IPFS, Bittorrent as well as direct
| download. It can search on all fields.
|
| Source: I wrote this about 6 years ago and maintain it every now
| and then
|
| [1] https://github.com/Yetangitu/books
|
| [2] https://forum.mhut.org/viewtopic.php?f=34&t=7816
| agilob wrote:
| That is really cool project, but I can't give this to non
| technical people
| ruined wrote:
| have you heard about Libgen Desktop, a Windows application
| for browsing a local copy of LibGen catalog
| Samin100 wrote:
| Alexandria [1] is pretty much a UI-based Mac app version of
| Books. I've been maintaining it for a while now and whenever
| I share it with someone non-technical Libgen's breadth blows
| their mind.
|
| [1]https://github.com/Samin100/Alexandria/releases
| fao_ wrote:
| Why do you advertise it as a mac-based app, when it's
| Electron based and should therefore be cross-platform?
| Samin100 wrote:
| I just don't have a Windows PC to test on. There are also
| a few Mac-specific quirks like opening the epubs in Apple
| Books.
| fao_ wrote:
| Linux support should be extremely simple to test and
| deploy. It'd be like an hour's task to write up a github
| action for it so you don't even need to have a local
| linux deploy or whatever.
|
| I _was_ going to do it myself but the build scripts you
| made are incompatible with node 17.x.x (it requires
| exporting `NODE_OPTIONS=--openssl-legacy-provider`), and
| they also seem to assume that `react-scripts`, etc. are
| in the local environment, rather than including them
| portably as a yarn package dependency and then doing
| `yarn exec <xyz>`. There's too much weirdness here and
| I'm not familiar enough with the systems involved to even
| begin looking into making it compatible (I started, and
| then realised that I'm supposed to be relaxing from my
| fulltime job, not dealing with more weird new tech
| systems that don't behave sensibly).
| malshe wrote:
| This looks great! Thanks for making it
| hagbard_c wrote:
| The tools are meant for those who live on the command line,
| this more or less excludes 'non-technical people'. For those
| non-technical people there is always the multitude of web
| things, the Windows tool which started this thread and the
| plain ol' Library, the which the Library Genesis project -
| that is, the original version as headed by _Bookwarrior_ -
| aims /aimed to be.
|
| Let there always be tools tailored to specific group's needs,
| the one-size-fits-all approach nearly always ends up dumbing
| down the interface by removing 'difficult to use' functions
| and 'complicated' options to present a Fisher-prize interface
| with big happy buttons and lots of open space.
|
| Also notice that the _Books_ tools weigh in at 47K
| compressed, there is something to be said for light and
| nimble tools.
| [deleted]
| anshumankmr wrote:
| Non technical people aren't the ones who use LibGen though,
| right? There are things like PDFDrive that has found some
| popularity in my country.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| Not a "technical" person. Use LibGen all the time.
| selectodude wrote:
| Sure they do. College students become highly technical when
| it's paying for textbooks vs beer.
| davidivadavid wrote:
| I mean, using LibGen requires all of knowing how to visit
| a website and type words in a text input field. Not
| exactly technical?
| AnthonyMouse wrote:
| The way this works is that if you're in a highly
| competitive market where all the products are equally
| capable and one of them is at all easier to use, that one
| wins. Then people get the impression that everyone is a
| dunce because the slightest inconvenience causes them to
| give up and use something else.
|
| But then you come to something where there is only one
| way to do that thing, or the competition has some
| countervailing disadvantage, and suddenly Bob from
| accounts knows how to use AS/400.
| bigbillheck wrote:
| My mother is one of the least technical people I know and
| also a regular libgen user.
| jrm4 wrote:
| So lets work on making the people around us more technical.
| dredmorbius wrote:
| Whilst I appreciate the sentiment, most plans based on the
| premise that "all the children are above average" can be
| true will fail.
|
| The Internet, WWW, and Google were once power-user tools.
| Global education has increased only modestly. The biggest
| change has been in lowering barriers to ease of use,
| including but not limited to the cost of tools.
|
| This isn't an unalloyed blessing --- the minimum viable
| user is both a blessing and curse:
|
| https://old.reddit.com/r/dredmorbius/comments/69wk8y/the_ty
| r...
| jrm4 wrote:
| Hacker news is mostly a nice forum; but the fact that the
| above got downvotes is a _perfect_ representation of
| exactly what 's wrong with it.
| agilob wrote:
| Will not support linux or Mac.
| burtness wrote:
| Ive had luck running it in wine on linux
| nine_k wrote:
| If it's not open source, how can one trust it in such a
| sensitive question as accessing libgen?
|
| If it is open source, then the support may eventually
| materialize.
| tkot wrote:
| I think it uses WPF for the interface, so Linux support would
| pretty much require a fork unless WPF starts supporting
| Linux.
| margalabargala wrote:
| The source is available:
| https://github.com/libgenapps/LibgenDesktop
|
| However, the repo has no license, and therefore is not free
| and open source. Technically that code is still proprietary.
| How much someone writing a libgen app would care if you
| forked their proprietary app is left as an exercise for the
| reader.
| Samin100 wrote:
| I wanted a dead-simple Library Genesis Mac app so I released one
| called Alexandria (https://github.com/Samin100/Alexandria) a
| while ago, and recently just updated it to use IPFS via the
| Cloudflare gateway. Compared to the previous Libgen servers, book
| downloads are nearly instant. When IPFS works, it works really
| well.
| amiantos wrote:
| This is cool but "loading sources..." never seems to complete
| on my machine. Great icon.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| It works, sometimes the LibGen servers take a while to
| respond
| Samin100 wrote:
| Which book did you search for? Sometimes the Library Genesis
| servers take a while to respond.
| amiantos wrote:
| For my test searches I did "Donnie Darko" and clicked on
| the first result, and then "Diana Spencer" and tried a few
| results. Doesn't seem like sources ever load for me. I have
| a much better experience just going to whatever libgen URL
| Safari auto-completes for me.
| Samin100 wrote:
| Ah, I figured out what went wrong. Libgen has two
| different databases, a fiction and non-fiction one, and
| right now Alexandria only queries Libgen's non-fiction
| DB. I'll update it to search both databases later this
| week. Thanks for bringing this to my attention!
| sva_ wrote:
| Does somebody know of a plugin for Zotero to automatically fetch
| a file from LibGen?
|
| I tried writing one but it seems like libgen does something weird
| to not show the download link... s.t. I gave up.
| ohbleek wrote:
| Just commenting to say how great site to is and I'm always
| surprised at how little I hear about it in the wild.
| sva_ wrote:
| Not sure what you mean? Typo?
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