One big reason: pirates, including Kazakh neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan. Her (illegal) website Sci-Hub sees more than 500,000 visitors daily, and hosts more than 50 million academic papers.
Definitely citation needed on the “(illegal)”.
FYI, this site is very useful and keeps track of the ever-changing sci hub links: https://sci-hub.now.sh/
Ha, that's interesting - the concept and execution seems almost identical a the project I shared [1] here more than a year ago: https://whereisscihub.now.sh/
Question - what makes sci-hub.now.sh, which is essentially acting as a kind of manual DNS, more resilient to censorship than the actual DNS system that necessitates all these ever-changing links? And can we automate it?
So you can't censor sci-hub.now.sh (at least in the US, where linking is typically protected speech). So that's one thing.
Also, the actual DNS system doesn't have a way of redirecting you to another site when the record has been censored, so it's not very resilient in the first place.
I'd guess it's the same as what makes Wikipedia resilient: they're just links. As long as Wikipedia and Wikidata can link to the current location of Sci-Hub, why can't other sites?
Comments
Definitely citation needed on the “(illegal)”.
FYI, this site is very useful and keeps track of the ever-changing sci hub links: https://sci-hub.now.sh/
Ha, that's interesting - the concept and execution seems almost identical a the project I shared [1] here more than a year ago: https://whereisscihub.now.sh/
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16591962
Looks like it’s based on the same code?
Question - what makes sci-hub.now.sh, which is essentially acting as a kind of manual DNS, more resilient to censorship than the actual DNS system that necessitates all these ever-changing links? And can we automate it?
So you can't censor sci-hub.now.sh (at least in the US, where linking is typically protected speech). So that's one thing.
Also, the actual DNS system doesn't have a way of redirecting you to another site when the record has been censored, so it's not very resilient in the first place.
Relevant similar site: https://dark.fail
I'd guess it's the same as what makes Wikipedia resilient: they're just links. As long as Wikipedia and Wikidata can link to the current location of Sci-Hub, why can't other sites?
The actual DNS system is vulnerable to domain registrar takedown requests.
namecoin tried to work around DNS centralized failure modes such as this. sad it hasn't taken off.