[HN Gopher] Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub's .SE Domain Name Offline
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Domain Registry Takes Sci-Hub's .SE Domain Name Offline
Author : bigtimber
Score : 178 points
Date : 2023-01-28 16:01 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (torrentfreak.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (torrentfreak.com)
| madars wrote:
| Little known fact: your Sci-Hub downloads are not private -
| https://sci-hub.ru/stats has historic access logs with IP
| addresses, paper identifiers, and timestamps, and plans to
| publish more logs in the future.
| perihelions wrote:
| Your link seems to contradict your description,
|
| - _" To protect the privacy of Sci-Hub users, we agreed that
| she would first aggregate users' geographic locations to the
| nearest city using data from Google Maps; no identifying inter-
| net protocol (IP) addresses were given to me. (The data set and
| details on how it was analyzed are freely accessible at
| http://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.q447c.)"_
|
| https://sci-hub.ru/10.1126/science.352.6285.508 ( _" Bohannon,
| J. (2016). Who's downloading pirated_ [sic] _papers? Everyone.
| Science, 352(6285), 508-512 "_)
| corobo wrote:
| It's really handy that they keep trying to damage sci-hub.
|
| I've got no direct use but every time it comes up I have a think
| just in case I know anyone it would be useful for.
|
| Ta for the reminders!
| [deleted]
| Overtonwindow wrote:
| FYI.
|
| http://sci-hub.ee https://sci-hub.ee https://sci-hub.wf
| http://sci-hub.wf https://sci-hub.cat
| alexvoda wrote:
| Is there an onion address too?
| crazygringo wrote:
| Are any of those official mirrors?
|
| Wikipedia points to https://sci-hub.ru as the official URL, and
| that site lists all official mirrors as [1]:
|
| sci-hub.se
|
| sci-hub.st
|
| sci-hub.ru
|
| All of which are different from your list. I have no idea
| personally, I'm just wondering _how_ to know what to use.
|
| [1] https://sci-hub.ru/mirrors
| cantbeawiseman wrote:
| Legend, ty for linking
| btdmaster wrote:
| Also https://sci-hub.ru as maintained and linked by Alexandra
| Elbakyan, Sci-Hub founder.
| huggingmouth wrote:
| Any tor addresses?
| teddyh wrote:
| There used to be one at http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ but
| that short address form is now obsolete.
| idlewords wrote:
| I just wanted to take a moment to say what a lifechanging tool
| sci-hub has been for research. In doing research for a big
| writing project on Mars I ended up with a folder of maybe 800
| scientific and technical papers, some of them dating back to
| 1910. This is material it would have been hard to collect even
| with access to a major university library. Online publishers,
| meanwhile, demand extortionate per-paper fees for access,
| including to papers that started in the public domain, or are
| long out of copyright. On sci-hub you can just find nearly all
| this stuff without any fuss--there were maybe 5 or 10 papers
| total that I had to find through other channels. Alexandra
| Elbakyan is an absolute legend for creating this tool, which is
| on a par with Wikipedia for usefulness and public benefit.
| breck wrote:
| [dead]
| zzo38computer wrote:
| I agree that copyright and patents are bad. However, I live in
| Canada, not in United States.
|
| > I am not positive that if we abolished copyright and patent
| systems the world would be a better place.
|
| It doesn't, but it would be a good start to abolish
| copyright/patent laws, I think.
|
| > Just as I'm not positive that if we switch to clean energy
| the world would be a better place.
|
| Again, it doesn't, but it would be a good start to use clean
| energy, too. (However, you should still need to not need to use
| too much energy on things, etc.)
|
| > Section 2. Congress shall make no law abridging the right of
| the people to publish or peaceably implement ideas.
|
| It look like good to me, but I do not know enough about the
| U.S. Constitution to judge it properly.
| Dalewyn wrote:
| Copyrights and patents are very reasonable and necessary
| frameworks for encouraging and protecting inventors and
| creators to keep on making things.
|
| The problem, which there is, lies in the execution. Copyright
| shouldn't last multiple centuries, and patent trolls are a
| flagrant abuse of the patent system.
| breck wrote:
| > Copyrights and patents are very reasonable and necessary
| frameworks
|
| No, they are not.
|
| They are moronic. Everything they touch gets worse.
|
| (C)opywrongs and Patents gave us the Opioid Crisis and worse
| than useless mRNA vaccines.
|
| Public domain has given us 99% of life saving medicines and
| numbers and binary notation and the theory of relativity and
| the World Wide Web and SQLite.
| gruez wrote:
| >(C)opywrongs and Patents gave us the Opioid Crisis
|
| copyrights isn't even a factor when it comes to drugs, it's
| primarily patents and regulatory approval. The fact that
| you casually lump them together suggests that you don't
| understand what you're even arguing against.
|
| >and worse than useless mRNA vaccines.
|
| Alright I'll bite. Can you elaborate on how they're "worse
| than useless"? The clinical trials at least show they're
| pretty effective.
|
| >Public domain has given us 99% of life saving medicines
|
| And how many of those were patented at one point?
|
| >numbers and binary notation and the theory of relativity
|
| not patentable. From wikipedia:
|
| "To be patent eligible subject matter, an invention must
| meet two criteria. First, it must fall within one of the
| four statutory categories of acceptable subject matter:
| process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.
| Second, it must not be directed to subject matter
| encompassing a judicially recognized exception: laws of
| nature, physical phenomena, and abstract ideas. "
| idlewords wrote:
| You don't need to amend the constitution to change or abolish
| copyright law.
| glerk wrote:
| These laws have already been made obsolete by technology.
| Trying to play politics is a waste of time and money.
| arp242 wrote:
| Complete political non-starter. Might as well argue for the
| moon to be painted blue. Not only is it a complete waste of
| time, any effort spent on this is also detrimental to any
| proposals that actually _can_ be enacted.
| breck wrote:
| We are going to do it. Just watch.
| politician wrote:
| If there's an area where a decentralized blockchain has
| application, it is surely DNS and the rent-seeking certificate
| infrastructure.
| kragen wrote:
| You're looking for the Ethereum Name Service.
| tptacek wrote:
| Certificates are free, and all certificates are surveilled with
| a cryptographically secure append-only log. Meanwhile, if you
| think the biggest problem with the DNS infrastructure we have
| now is rent-seeking, take a look at the blockchain alternatives
| that have been proposed. There might be no modern analog to
| "attempting to sell the Brooklyn Bridge" more fitting than
| blockchain DNS.
| Nuzzerino wrote:
| Can you name some examples?
| Yeahsureok wrote:
| > attempting to sell the Brooklyn Bridge
|
| Handshake reserved the top 100,000 Alexa domains and allowed
| all trademark name holders to claim theirs.
|
| Not to mention the ten million in FOSS grants for developers
| to build tooling
|
| Sadly the ideologues will somehow decry their attempts for an
| alternative while defending the indefensible ICAAN.
| verdverm wrote:
| What about everyone else after the 100k? What recourse are
| they left with when their domain is/was taken by another
| party? Which party should own the domain? How would doubly
| registered domains be resolved?
| kelthuzad wrote:
| They will remain on their original tld, so brand.com will
| remain brand.com, they just won't automatically receive
| their own brand tld, unless they manually start the
| auction themselves.
| politician wrote:
| Thomas, I'm not sure what you mean when you say that
| certificates are free. Self-signed certs are free, but only
| situationally useful in a business context. Let's Encrypt
| certs are free, but not usable in all contexts. GoDaddy,
| Namecheap, and Verisign will still gladly charge $50-$1500
| for certs will various features like $50/SAN, and extended
| validation. If you want to terminate TLS at an AWS managed
| edge resource, the happy path is ACM. These are "free", but
| arguably you're paying for the cert with the load balancer or
| edge resource.
|
| There's no difference between a blockchain and a
| cryptographically secure write ahead log, indeed that is how
| blockchains are defined. Perhaps you assumed that I meant
| cryptocurrency when I said blockchain? I did not.
|
| (Sorry for the delayed reply.)
| teddyh wrote:
| The "rent-seeking certificate infrastructure" could be solved
| if web browsers used the DNS (and DNSSEC) to validate
| certificates. The DNS, on the other hand, is more tricky. If
| you want _human-readable_ and globally distinct (and stable)
| names, you have to have a centralized structure to keep track
| of who has what name. The best we could come up with was the
| DNS, which is at least hierarchical instead of completely
| monolithic. And then it becomes a question of: do you want name
| holders to continually pay for names in some way, or do you
| want a land grab model where the person who snagged a name 30
| years ago now owns it forever for free? With DNS, that question
| is decided by each node in the tree of the hierarchy.
| DennisP wrote:
| > If you want human-readable and globally distinct (and
| stable) names, you have to have a centralized structure to
| keep track of who has what name.
|
| Apps on blockchains already play the role of that centralized
| structure. The most successful I'm aware of is ENS on
| Ethereum. Whatever economic model you prefer can be
| implemented this way.
| kelthuzad wrote:
| >land grab model where the person who snagged a name 30 years
| ago now owns it forever for free?
|
| This is already the case with the current dns, since paying
| $10 per year is pretty much nothing to any middle class
| investor, so they do in fact "own" it forever for "free",
| relatively speaking.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Human-readable names can potentially be pseudo-random, and
| thus securely generated. What's hard (indeed, considered
| largely infeasible) is _meaningful_ , decentralized, secure
| names.
| gruez wrote:
| >Human-readable names can potentially be pseudo-random
|
| No matter how you dice it, getting humans to remember 128
| bits of entropy is going to be a non-starter. Encoding
| those 128 bits using words doesn't really solve the
| problem.
| cdev_gl wrote:
| I was going to argue that remembering
| "CorrectBatteryHorseStaple.com" is leagues easier than
| remembering an 128 bit number, but then I did the math
| and using the 20k most common english words to encode
| 128bits you'd need an 8 word phrase, which pretty much
| solidifies the point you've made.
|
| I mean, people can recite poetry far longer, even
| nonsense poetry ("Twas brillig, and the slithy toves /
| did gyre and gimble in the wabe") so it's not impossible.
| But generally speaking, yeah. Nobody wants to navigate to
| that bit of jabberwocky instead of google.com
|
| It does kind of make me long for the days of the HOSTS
| file, where anyone might alias a hard-to-remember address
| as something locally meaningful.
| kragen wrote:
| it was considered infeasible until bitcoin demonstrated
| that it was feasible, as zooko agreed:
| http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/squarezooko
|
| http://web.archive.org/web/20210118172102/https://squaretri
| a...
| px43 wrote:
| What part of ENS doesn't meet your expectations?
|
| It wasn't designed to replace DNS, but there are an
| increasing number of people using it for that.
| verdverm wrote:
| It is not always about what something is not doing, but
| rather the unintended (often malicious) use cases it
| enables without any way to prevent or mitigate.
| viksit wrote:
| curious what "malicious" use cases a decentralized name
| registry enables that dns doesn't?
| politician wrote:
| I think something that is overlooked in this discussion is
| the idea that names must be unique. If we relax this
| constraint, the solution space opens up significantly. I
| don't believe uniqueness is a fundamental requirement of a
| name service because I don't believe that a human-readable
| string itself carries sufficient information to be
| trustworthy in and of itself.
|
| (Sorry for the delayed reply, my account is heavily rate
| limited, so I don't get to post more than 5 times per hour
| and less when someone with high karma like downvotes a post
| and leaves a comment.)
| dimmke wrote:
| You know what? You're right. That's literally the only proposed
| blockchain application I think I've ever read that I think
| would actually work.
| [deleted]
| MrOwnPut wrote:
| It's been working... for awhile now. But no traction here
| because... crypto = bad.
|
| There's Handshake, ENS, and UnstoppableDomains.
|
| Brave supports .eth domains out-of-the-box, hopefully
| Handshake soon.
|
| For Handshake you can use a local resolver that reads the
| blockchain or use NextDNS.
|
| NFTs aren't just for art, y'know. They have real [digital]
| world use cases for ownership, like DNS.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| I don't think it would. The moment the blockchain would start
| getting any traction, the big blockchain companies would use
| their capital to get their hands on every recognizable domain
| name and within days the only remaining "domains" would look
| like passwords. You could then probably buy readable domains
| for exorbitant amounts of cryptocoins.
|
| I prefer the current registrar setup over anarchist
| blockchain hellscapes. You can sue Verisign, you can't sue
| 0xEf1c6E67703c7BD7107eed8303Fbe6EC2554BF6B.
| dimmke wrote:
| Good points, but I have to point out that what you're
| describing is literally what happened with our current
| system, just less extreme.
|
| I was recently quoted $250,000 to buy a .com that is not
| being used and as far as I can tell has never been used but
| some guy bought in the 90s when I was a young child. Aside
| from the level of extreme is that really different from
| "You could then probably buy readable domains for
| exorbitant amounts of cryptocoins."
|
| You touch on what I think the core issue is with domains
| when you talk about suing Verisign. In some very limited
| cases, it's possible through litigation to get a domain you
| feel like you should have. But therein lies the crux of the
| whole issue: What standard needs to be met before you
| qualify for a domain name, especially one that is in
| contention?
|
| In cryptocurrency, the criteria to receive the currency was
| originally solving problems with computing power because
| they needed some arbitrary measure. In the world of domain
| names, it's been a lot of different things but _mostly_
| just money and time.
|
| That standard - what "qualifies" you to own a domain over
| someone else I think would have to be decided before truly
| effective regulation can be made or enforced, blockchain or
| not. Right now it's basically temporal, with some carveouts
| from lawsuits for trademarks.
|
| The current regulations around how domain names work is
| woefully inadequate (like most regulation around
| technology) and gives outsized power to private entities.
| This is something that I think people don't talk about
| enough when they criticize blockchains.
|
| If there was a better job being done with public policy,
| you'd likely have less people who think a system where
| there's no way of imposing real regulation is desirable.
|
| It's especially bad with technology. My go to example is
| Apple's App Store, but this area is a good topic too.
|
| To me, a happy mix of public/private policy would be best.
| The government allowing private TLDs, but regulating them.
| An anti squatting law, price capping new TLD name
| registrations, an enshrined "specificity system" to
| claiming an unused (or even used) domain would make the
| situation so much better, but it'll never happen.
| DennisP wrote:
| I don't think that's happened on ENS so far, though there
| is _some_ domain squatting just like there is on DNS.
|
| Though ENS doesn't implement this, it'd be possible to add
| paid arbitration by humans for resolving trademark
| disputes. You couldn't get damages but you could get the
| domain.
| detrites wrote:
| There's a simple solution for that: to buy a domain on-
| chain that has an equivalent off-chain, the existing owner
| first needs to prove ownership of that equivalent domain.
| After, it can be sold freely (as uniques could already).
|
| The on-chain contract could be written such that a buyer
| generates a token, supplied to an on-chain verification
| oracle that checks token.owned-domain.TLD exists, and if it
| does grants issuance of the new on-chain version.
|
| This essentially allows for a fair transition from the old
| system to the new system, while eliminating squatting.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| What happens to these domains when the "legacy" domain
| expires and gets re-bought? Do you lose access when you
| stop paying? What if someone managed to hack your DNS,
| does it and its integration with TLS then break the
| supposed security guarantees?
|
| This system just seems to be traditional DNS with extra
| steps and a lack of manual recourse against bad actors,
| to be honest.
| detrites wrote:
| The first question is irrelevant and affects nothing -
| the same owner proves ownership of both at the outset, if
| they choose to let the legacy version expire, well they
| chose that - so who cares what happens to it?
|
| I suppose it could be configurable at purchase to allow
| it to be a recurring verification, if that was desired,
| but it would seem to overcomplicate for no reason.
| "Subscribing" to domains each year is legacy
| inefficiency.
|
| I'm not sure what you mean about DNS, any chain-based
| system would be... chain-based, and therefore
| cryptographically-assured that a domain points where the
| owner chooses. "Not your keys, not your domain" applies.
| [deleted]
| from wrote:
| You know domain sniping already happens right? There is
| extensive auctioning infrastructure. And most of the good
| names were claimed a long time ago. The only way to get an
| existing domain name without paying the owner for it is to
| sue over trademark violations or stuff like that which
| often will cost more than just buying it.
| jeroenhd wrote:
| Domain sniping already happens, sure. However, squatters
| need to invest time and energy into registering these
| domains whereas a cryptographic system can do all that
| offline inside the data centers of the cryptosquatter.
|
| Some TLDs have provisions against domain squatters and in
| case of copyright disputes, you can sue the squatters (or
| request ICANN to release the domain if that isn't
| possible for some reason). If you have a good reason to
| demand a domain currently unused, there are ways to get
| it.
|
| With crypto-TLDs, nike.com and microsoft.com would be
| registered by a malicious player without any kind of
| recourse. The lack of enforceability makes the entire
| system pretty useless the moment it takes off.
| agilob wrote:
| Literally one of the first applications of a blockchain tech
|
| https://www.namecoin.org/
| 88stacks wrote:
| I mentioned here before, but how can we stop these domains from
| dying like this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34541672
| from wrote:
| Register them with cnobin or some other Chinese registrar with
| an abuse mail that doesn't exist, don't use any TLD owned by
| Verisign, and you will be able to delay domain seizure for a
| long amount of time. There's nothing you can do to stop it
| forever other than keep making more mirrors - see what fmovies
| and sites like that do.
| disadvantage wrote:
| A domain is just a pointer to a resource, it is not the 'thing'
| in itself. If they want to take the actual resource offline, they
| need to find the VPS in question and confiscate that, not the
| domains.
|
| Another thing, SH used to be accessible as a Tor hidden service,
| located here[0], which needs a v3 address since the older short
| .onions are now obsolete. Tor should have been the rightful home
| of SH since its inception. .Onions/hidden services are more
| resistant to censorship.
|
| And since the admin has been doxxed, it's too late, unless the
| project is forked to new (anonymous) owners with good opsec and
| starts its new home in the dark web, unless it has new owners. I
| don't know, I don't follow all the latest news on SH.
|
| [0] http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/
| Kukumber wrote:
| they should just mention that the content is only available for
| people to train their ML model
|
| Microsoft can get away with it, we might as well do the same
| Kukumber wrote:
| [flagged]
| counttheforks wrote:
| What is this referencing? Just ChatGPT et al illegally slurping
| up everything they can get their hands on, or something more
| specific?
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| [dead]
| swagmoney1606 wrote:
| I think this is referencing GitHub's slurping of code for
| Copilot
| NetOpWibby wrote:
| Handshake solves this.
|
| https://blog.neuenet.com/post/why-get-a-tld
| verdverm wrote:
| [flagged]
| belter wrote:
| Is the pause mentioned here still in place?
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement...
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(page generated 2023-01-28 23:01 UTC)