This was demanded by Elsevier and Springer, as the copy of the order shows <a href="https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf" rel="nofollow">https://torrentfreak.com/images/scihuborder.pdf</a> . Every researcher who still is an editor of one of their journals is responsible for this. Any academic manager who supports these journals, either by buying them or by counting impact factor points, is responsible of this. People should know that all of these people who support this are paid from their pockets.
Those 2 libraries are the closest thing to the modern internet equivalent of the "Library of Alexandria".
I hope they don't manage to burn in down.<p>Yes, for now governments only caught up to DNS level blocking, but more effective measures will follow if we don't change the political willingness to withhold knowledge from the masses.
>The court order targets a total of 57 domain names, including various mirror sites. The academic publishers had asked the court for a more flexible blocklist, which they could update whenever new domains would become available, but this was denied. If the publishers want to expand the blocklist, they will have to go back to court. This ensures that there remains judicial oversight over local website blockades. Also, a request for a specific IP-address block was denied.<p>So a DNS level block... This should help to educate some French users on what a DNS is, and steer some of them away from using their ISP provided DNS servers.
Bought a book on GooglePlay once. Wanted to download it as an ePub. ePub wasn't available due to a technical error on Google's side (apparently affecting all epubs). Had to use Adobe Digital Editions to "download" it only to figure out the download wasn't available. + DRMs (i.e. can't read the ebook on a smartphone).<p>Went to libgen instead, will never buy a book on GooglePlay again.
And with this news, millions of French now become aware of these tempting sites they wouldn't otherwise even know about. (And Google methods of alternative access.) #streisandeffect
How difficult would it be to host one or more IPFS nodes with the files on Sci-Hub (and a directory thereof)? My understanding is that would be infeasible to block, and quite probably cheaper to host, as oft-requested papers would get mirrored.
Note that French universities use the public RENATER provider, which do not block, for now.
More great technical details in a blog post by Rémy Grünblatt [1]. He use the RIPE Atlas network to probe.<p>[1] <a href="https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3A%2F%2Fremy.grunblatt.org%2Fla-censure-de-sci-hub-et-libgen-vue-depuis-le-reseau-ripe-atlas.html" rel="nofollow">https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=fr&tl=en&u=https%3...</a>
Western countries are becoming increasingly like China and Russia. UK, Australia, Germany, Canada, France, Germany, New Zealand... So far, only the US still holds some resemblance to “protecting the freedom of speech” — sure, copyright violators are pursued, but at least nobody is trying to censor the Internet... yet.
I hope the Indian govt. doesn't follow suit. Libgen and Scihub serve a very great resource in a country that can't afford the absurd rates to go through the paywall; rare books that are not popular, and thus not part of the South-Asia-only reprints, are absurdly expensive.<p>Sadly, the current idiots in power think following the diktats of any and every passing foreign bureaucrat is an order from the Devas themselves. I don't think anyone who'll be coming in May will be any good either (if not worse).
More of a push to open access like this:<p><a href="https://gatesopenresearch.org/" rel="nofollow">https://gatesopenresearch.org/</a>
FYI, for anyone not in France, this site automatically checks for the latest working Sci Hub links: <a href="https://sci-hub.now.sh/" rel="nofollow">https://sci-hub.now.sh/</a>
> Also, a request for a specific IP-address block was denied. The court sided with the ISPs, who argued that they should have the freedom to choose their own blocking method, including DNS blocking. That does mean, however, that the ISPs will also have to bear the costs.<p>There are several issues that make blocking a website ineffective:<p>- if you intercept and replace DNS responses for these sites then users with DNS-over-HTTPS or DNS-over-TCP will bypass the block. So let's promote using DoH/DoT and enabling it by default instead of relying on ISP's DNS servers.<p>- if you examine the domain name in SSL Server Hello message then the site can switch to TLS 1.3 where it is encrypted.<p>- if you resolve domain names and block access to those IPs automatically without human review then the owner of the blocked site can block any other site by adding its IP address to their DNS server. This can be funny, and we had such cases in Russia.<p>- if you resolve domain names not very often, for example once every day, then the owner of the site can avoid blocking by regularly changing IP address.<p>Let me give a hint to French court: ordering the search engines and advertisement companies to stop dealing with the site is much more effective.
SciHub and LibGen seems like very different things. They're both extremely useful. However, surely the ethical situation is very different? For SciHub I see little ethical problem: the authors of scientific papers never expect royalties and will almost universally welcome free access to their publications. No-one's going to shed tears on behalf of scientific publishing companies; they had their time, in the era of type-writers, but nowadays we can create our own PDFs, thanks very much.<p>LibGen on the other hand I'm fascinated by. Most people I meet have absolutely no idea that a vast proportion of all commercially-produced (more or less technical) books are available for convenient free download. And while I would love for that human knowledge to be freely available to everyone on the planet, we do have to concede that many of those books were written by authors on the understanding that it was a commercial project and they would receive income for it.<p>Do people generally agree with the above distinction? I feel that this thread (and perhaps the French government / courts) should be making it more clearly.
As Western countries are all slowly drifting towards what amounts to government-sanctionned censorship by ISPs - especially after the adoption by the EU Parliement of the copyright directive, but it's just one more step in the general movement towards controlling who can publish what on the web -, we need more initiatives that bypass those ISPs, which are currently in the Western world the only ones capable of enforcing censorship.<p>I'm no expert on this and the ways of achieving it, but as a citizen I feel more and more concerned about this - in particular as my (French) government seems eager to move in the not-right direction.
I don't understand why many people here seems to agree blocking is a bad thing. If some content is illegal in the country, isn't it normal that the state is enforcing the law? I'm mean that's one of the things it is supposed to do I believe<p>On the other hand, I understand disagreements with the law exist, but that's a normal thing and we (in France) are still able to vote for some parties with different point of view on copyright, so I'm not sure why some people are speaking of "authoritarian" or "censorship"
Scientists etc are probably smart enough to find ways around this (or already have access). For example, there was a Twitter convention to request journal articles, and researchers with free access would retrieve them and send them via email as PDFs. Of course, I am not suggesting you do this if it contravenes the law.<p>On a brighter note: cosmic rays are coming at you; and Elsevier and Springer are making bank.
wonder why SciHub was not already moved to distributed hosting system like <a href="https://ipfs.io/" rel="nofollow">https://ipfs.io/</a> or <a href="https://zeronet.io/" rel="nofollow">https://zeronet.io/</a>
I'd really recommend the Sci-Hub Button script. It places buttons for the open paper on Sci-Hub just about anywhere you encounter a science paywall:<p><a href="https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/370246-sci-hub-button" rel="nofollow">https://greasyfork.org/en/scripts/370246-sci-hub-button</a>
These paywall bypassers are revealing a problem and offering a temporary solution. However this situation wherein scientists are both providers and consumers of editors, and forced to go to pirate websites in order to work is not sustainable. I feel like a permanent solution needs to be found.<p>I'm not a scientist myself, and would be happy to hear anyone else's opinion, but alternatives like peercommunityin.org look more promising.<p>All in all, this ban can be easily be circumvented (it's just a DNS block), so I'm not really sure it will help editors. It may cause an opposite effect, helping people to move to different solutions. But maybe I'm over optimistic.
Why do researchers publish with these companies that lock their papers behind paywalls? Do the researchers get a part of the paywall profits? Are there not any alternative publishers that have free academic journals or release papers for free?
I wonder what exactly they will be blocking?<p>$ nslookup <a href="http://sci-hub.tw/" rel="nofollow">http://sci-hub.tw/</a><p>Server: 127.0.0.53<p>Address: 127.0.0.53#53<p>Non-authoritative answer:<p>Name: <a href="http://sci-hub.tw/" rel="nofollow">http://sci-hub.tw/</a><p>Address: 36.37.242.94<p>It is trivial for the user to appoint another DNS server, or even to add the site to his /etc/hosts file manually, if they try to block at that level. It is also trivial to tunnel over another ip address to reach the one wanted. How is "blocking" supposed to work?<p>In the court document, they asked for an injunction against a list of domain names. Therefore, I assume the "block" will be limited to blocking them at the DNS level.<p>"Toutes mesures propres à empêcher l'accès" ("All appropriate measures to prevent access"), means everything and nothing, especially, when it is most likely impossible to do. What they really want is to block particular content. In my opinion, it is not possible for an ISP to support that.
How long would it take the cryptocurrency miners to use all their hashing power to find the deterministic key that generates the content of libgen?<p>That might be an easier solution than trying to achieve minimally sane copyright reform.