ChukGJun 25, 2024
internetarchive

More than 500,000 books have been removed from the Internet Archive's lending library due to the Hachette v. Internet Archive lawsuit, including more than 1,300 banned and challenged titles. šŸ“š Our patrons have shared powerful stories about how this loss has impacted them, and we need your help to make a change.

Sign our open letter to the publishers urging them to restore access to these books. šŸ“–āœļø #LetReadersRead

šŸ‘‰ https://blog.archive.org/2024/06/17/let-readers-read/

Let Readers Read | Internet Archive Blogs

Jun 17, 2024 at 4:22pmWeb
Show threadHi I'm SeanJun 17, 2024
@internetarchive is there a way to see the list of 500,000 books?
Show threaduisJun 17, 2024
Maybe in lawsuit material?
Show threadpinkdrunkenelephantsJun 17, 2024
@internetarchive Is there a complete list of every book affected by the ruling?
Show threadArcturax šŸ¦‡Jun 17, 2024
@internetarchive the problem with open letters is they are open to just throw them away and not care. We need fundamental change. Corps can embargo works for a century or more under current copyright law. We need a change. Anything more than 50 years should become public domain no matter what it is. To ask for longer is just pure greed.
Show threadHĆ¢lianJun 21, 2024
@arcturax @internetarchive Anything more than the terms of the Copyright Act of 1790 (14+14 years; both registration and renewal can only be done by the physical human author; registration requires depositing a physical copy with the Library of Congress; only one renewal) is far too much.
Show threadkcoyle checking the perimeterJun 17, 2024
@internetarchive There is so much variety in the thing we call "book" and what is covered (uniformly) by (c). In the Google Books project, many academic authors stated they wanted their books to be available, even for free. And in some instances, factual books have been shown to warrant less protection than fiction. We need a revision of (c) that is more realistic and also that actually promotes science and the useful arts.
Show threadšŸ¤ÆMatera the MadšŸ¤ÆJun 17, 2024
@internetarchive Server's having a bad hair day - takes a couple tries, but I got'er. šŸ˜œ
Show threadKatt HernandezJun 17, 2024
@internetarchive
Signed!
Show threadErik Uden šŸš©Jun 17, 2024

@internetarchive

https://mastodon.de/@ErikUden/110933665484508536

Erik Uden šŸ‘ (@[email protected])

Once libraries are nonexistent any modern fascist movement wouldn't even have to burn books, but flick one switch and they'd be remotely deleted from your Amazon Kindle or similar digital ā€œlibraryā€. Capitalists are already building the infrastructure to do this through DRM, so stop believing tech is apolitical - the defunding of libraries and paywalling of information are all part of this. :trantifa:

MastodonDE
Show threadEli CardosoJun 17, 2024
@internetarchive honestly sad that this happened
Show threadGreg JohnsonJun 18, 2024
@internetarchive Iā€™m sorry, but the Lending Library itself goes against the best spirit of IA. These are hundreds-year-old books in the PD.
Show threadDebbie BelairJun 18, 2024
@internetarchive šŸ¤Æ
Show threadJordan MechnerJun 19, 2024

@internetarchive I've signed and donated. As an author, I'm VERY concerned about preserving access to the vast body of work (including out-of-print and public-domain books) that is in danger of becoming unfindable.

I'm MUCH LESS concerned that having my own works be available in a nonprofit online library like the Internet Archive could somehow cost me sales or hurt my bottom line. With all respect, I believe the publishers' lawsuit is wrong, and contrary to the values we share.

Show threadJenniferJun 22, 2024
@internetarchive if you want to read one of those book, check it out from a library that actually paid the author for the book, or buy it. Authors don't write books as a charity project and deserve to be paid for their work unless they give it away for free.
Show threadMax AlmonteJun 25, 2024
@internetarchive give us the list and let's start pirating the hell outta those books!
Show threadMitex LeoJun 25, 2024
@internetarchive Torrenting is the only way.
Show threadd@nny disc@ mcĀ²Jun 25, 2024
@ml @internetarchive bittorrent (and all other current alternatives afaik) don't have any sort of anonymization, so ISPs can surveil torrent peers and cut off your access. it's not clear to me yet how to apply the consistent hashing used in most DHTs to tor's model yet, but tor may expose a sort of internal node ID that could be similarly used to achieve consistent hashing? @torproject has there been work to anonymize DHTs via tor or other alternatives?
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 25, 2024

@hipsterelectron Tor actually has a FAQ asking people to not use Tor for bittorrent because it stresses the network

IPFS has done some work in this space, we're not sure how far along that aspect is

Show threadd@nny disc@ mcĀ²Jun 25, 2024
@ireneista their website says ipfs is not private and to use something else if you want privacy i was checking it out yesterday
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 25, 2024

@hipsterelectron oh. drat.

I2p is an overlay network that does support bittorrent, although that falls significantly short of true anonymization, for reasons you can probably already see

Show threadd@nny disc@ mcĀ²Jun 25, 2024
@ireneista tor's anonymity via noise addition is less interesting to me anyway; VPNs can be used to interface but i recall hearing that some VPNs don't like being used for seedboxes. the level of privacy sufficient to mask participation in a particular swarm to an ISP seems less stringent than tor's guarantees and the consistent hashing needed for a DHT seems like something that could be achieved with any other identifier, but masking identity to all other participants in the swarm seems necessary as well and may be more difficult than i'm hoping :(
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 25, 2024
@hipsterelectron yeah - well the stickiest part we see is that using an identifier for the DHT means that it is, um, an identifier. "identity" only means being able to say "these two things are, in some sense, the same". you can make it a resettable pseudonym but anything done under that pseudonym will still be possible for other participants to correlate
Show threadd@nny disc@ mcĀ²Jun 25, 2024
@ireneista yeah! can't figure out a way to cheat on that part yet. can imagine spreading out packets over other peers/etc, but since the point of p2p is p2p, it seems hard to support allowing arbitrary new nodes to join without giving them arbitrary visibility into the identifiers of other participants in the same swarm (since they need that info in order to participate). doesn't seem unsolvable yet though for some reason
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 25, 2024
@hipsterelectron notice that at the low level, bittorrent uses a notion of peer reputation to disincentivize bad behavior. this is the usual tradeoff between long-lived and short-lived identities that we see in other areas.
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 25, 2024
@hipsterelectron we'd suggest that a proper solution is something along the lines of trying to clearly bound the scope or duration of these identities, and then avoid leaks that allow users or their machines to be re-identified across that boundary.
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 25, 2024
@hipsterelectron we do note that ie. "the set of stuff I am seeding" is a very important piece of information that is highly identifying
Show threadLisPiJun 26, 2024
@ireneista @hipsterelectron Every torrent would at minimum need a key of its own.

Certainly no mix of various torrents behind one given identity.
Show threadtrystimuliJun 26, 2024

@ireneista @hipsterelectron

and even if you change the pseudonym regularly, if you advertise the same set of dht entries your pseudonyms can also be correlated with each other.

Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 26, 2024
@tryst @hipsterelectron yes, that's what we were alluding to in the next toot
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 26, 2024
@tryst @hipsterelectron oh sorry not the next one, but further down the replies
Show threadtrystimuliJun 26, 2024
@ireneista @hipsterelectron ah, yeah. thatā€™s what i get for writing a thing and waiting 90 minutes before posting it :)
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 26, 2024
@tryst @hipsterelectron oh no problem! thanks for joining the convo, regardless :)
Show threadd@nny disc@ mcĀ²Jun 25, 2024
@ireneista looking at i2p now, thanks for mentioning
Show threadbeka valentineJun 25, 2024
@hipsterelectron @ireneista veilid's probably a better option for the backbone of a private file sharing system tbh
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 25, 2024
@beka_valentine @hipsterelectron can you say more about why?
Show threadbeka valentineJun 26, 2024

@ireneista @hipsterelectron designed to support onion routing internally for all messages, and in testing it seems to be quite fast in doing so

biggest problem right now is lack of deployment

Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 26, 2024
@beka_valentine @hipsterelectron isn't that true of I2P as well?
Show threadbeka valentineJun 26, 2024
@ireneista @hipsterelectron i2p may or may not do onion routing, i dunno, but i2p is just a vpn-like infra, afaik. it doesnt have a bunch of the other important stuff required to make a file sharing system work. plus iinm i2p is also asymmetric in that the client is tunneled but the server is visible. so its like only the onion routing portion of TOR, absent the hidden sites, which veilid has built in
Show threadLisPiJun 26, 2024
@beka_valentine @hipsterelectron @ireneista The developer documentation for Veilid also seems fairly poor.

I'm not sure it supports a given program using multiple IDs at once (while I2P does), which is important to mitigate fingerprinting of shared collections of data.
Show threadtrystimuliJun 26, 2024

@lispi314 @ireneista @hipsterelectron @beka_valentine you could write a veilid node that uses multiple ids at once (or at least i didnā€™t find anything that prevented that when i was looking into it).

but veilidā€™s layering makes it significantly harder to disassociate sequential identities of the same node by what data they host - they have a DHT built in right along with the routing protocol.

iā€™m doubtful that multiple ids will actually save you though. i havenā€™t examined it in detail yet, but my intuition is that even if each person uses 100 ids youā€™ll be able to track people sharing say 1000 pieces of data randomly divided amongst the ids. (much less any sort of division optimized to improve queries like the fraction nearest by edit distance).

iā€™m vaguely hopeful about a friend network over an privately routed network. if you all rotate node identifiers such that you only send messages to an identifier of generation n from an identifier of generation n, there may be a chance of cleanly separating identifiers from each other (from anyone whoā€™s not your friend that is). then you just have the problem of how much you trust your friends and finding content in a friend networkā€¦

Show threadLisPiJun 26, 2024
@tryst @beka_valentine @hipsterelectron @ireneista I was thinking more a different ID per piece of data.

For the I2P case more on the level of "every torrent has its own ephemeral ID".

I'm not quite sure if Veilid's block-based structuring of data sharing should be the level of granularity for ID separation, because after a few thousand blocks, the overhead probably becomes considerable. So maybe ID separation at a higher level similarly to torrents (they do have reference blocks) would work.

> iā€™m vaguely hopeful about a friend network over an privately routed network. if you all rotate node identifiers such that you only send messages to an identifier of generation n from an identifier of generation n, there may be a chance of cleanly separating identifiers from each other (from anyone whoā€™s not your friend that is). then you just have the problem of how much you trust your friends and finding content in a friend networkā€¦

My concern with friend-to-friend networks is that their security tends to fail catastrophically the second someone gets compromised and an infiltrator is substituted onto the network.

It's somewhat similar to the failure mode of Hyphanet/Freenet's with the trackability of particular file transfers with known/leaked/guessed metadata.
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 26, 2024
@lispi314 @hipsterelectron @tryst @beka_valentine these are all good thoughts, fwiw. we agree about that risk being significant, but really any of these schemes needs to be sketched out in more detail to figure out what it actually accomplishes. we definitely encourage playing around with all this
Show threadtrystimuliJun 26, 2024

@lispi314 @ireneista @hipsterelectron @beka_valentine yeah, once you get to each top-level item on a node gets its own overlay network identifier that certainly prevents correlating content. iā€™m hesitant that giving each node that many identifiers wouldnā€™t lead to being able to correlate address on the same node though. (and any answer to means digging deep into the protocol and its assumptions :/)

My concern with friend-to-friend networks is that their security tends to fail catastrophically the second someone gets compromised and an infiltrator is substituted onto the network.

so this broadly falls under ā€œhow much you trust your friendsā€, but iā€™m not clear that your friend being compromised is much worse in a friend net situation than a not friend net situation (assuming communication over an overlay network and not directly like freenet/hyphanet). the most informative data flows from friend to friend anyway. the link to decrypt and verify data is far more sensitive than the ciphertext.

unfortunately (for anyone hoping for this to have a reasonable UI) i think we probably need both for different circumstances :/

Show threadLisPiJun 26, 2024
@tryst @beka_valentine @hipsterelectron @ireneista
> (and any answer to means digging deep into the protocol and its assumptions :/)

Yeah, project for a later time.

> so this broadly falls under ā€œhow much you trust your friendsā€, but iā€™m not clear that your friend being compromised is much worse in a friend net situation than a not friend net situation (assuming communication over an overlay network and not directly like freenet/hyphanet). the most informative data flows from friend to friend anyway. the link to decrypt and verify data is far more sensitive than the ciphertext.

I mostly expect my friends not to be able to outgun or meaningfully resist their government's enforcers.

I didn't mean to imply voluntary compromise.

Building a pseudonymous friend-to-friend network atop an overlay network that takes the basic stance "every node and observer can be adversarial" does help. Though f2f interactions may also lead to the incidental accumulation of other deanonymizing information.
Show threadCassandrichJun 26, 2024
@hipsterelectron @ireneista Getting a VPS anonymously in a jurisdiction that you DGAF about to run your torrents and logging into it over Tor seems like the safest option that's currently practical.
Show threadLisPiJun 26, 2024
@dalias @ireneista @hipsterelectron Anonymous payment to those has kept getting more complicated.

It also puts a hard limit on participation for those that can't justify the overhead of anonymous payments.
Show thread2Ā¢Jun 26, 2024
@lispi314 @ireneista @hipsterelectron @dalias recommendations?
Show threadLisPiJun 26, 2024
@Qbitzerre @dalias @ireneista For anonymous payment?

Zcash (which practically no one takes nor uses, so even just acquiring it will be a flag), Monero (I'm doubtful its security won't be compromised in the long term, I don't think anything is backed by proofs) or GNU Taler (which last I checked no one supports, but it otherwise also benefits from sound mathematical background like Zcash's zk-snark and doesn't have any of the cryptocurrency environment concerns).

So in practical terms you're basically left with money in a security enveloppe or Monero.

Privately acquiring Monero is itself a shitshow, and the best option at this point is peer-to-peer exchanges and a few intermediate transfers thereafter for obfuscation (which is subject to Monero's eventual failure, of course).

You certainly could say the situation is disappointing.
Show threadCassandrichJun 26, 2024
@lispi314 @ireneista @Qbitzerre Visa gift card purchased with cash?
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 26, 2024
@dalias @lispi314 @Qbitzerre if you take drug-dealer-level precautions around acquiring it, sure, but that's difficult for a reason
Show threadCassandrichJun 26, 2024
@ireneista @lispi314 @Qbitzerre I really don't think pigs are going to go hunting for old grocery store surveillance footage or whatever over a vps halfway around the world that's torrenting. Am I wrong about this?
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 26, 2024
@dalias @lispi314 @Qbitzerre over torrents? you're probably right, but it's not anonymous, and there are automated, centralized systems that process that footage these days
Show threadLisPiJun 26, 2024
@ireneista @Qbitzerre @dalias Automation sure has made mass surveillance more convenient.
Show threadIrenes (many)Jun 26, 2024
@lispi314 @dalias @Qbitzerre no kidding