Z-Library Aftermath Reveals the Feds Seized Dozens of Domain Names

https://torrentfreak.com/z-library-aftermath-reveals-that-the-feds-seized-dozens-of-domain-names-221107/

by mrzool • 4 years ago

131 73 4 years ago

tyingq2• 4 years ago

I've personally used sites like this as a sort of protest to what universities and authors did to the textbook market. You used to be able to buy used physical textbooks for classes at reasonable prices. They took advantage of the shift to digital by forcing arbitrary changes in edition numbers, solely to sell more books, or by requiring obscure, low-volume books, often written by the professor leading the class. With prices often exceeding $100.

psychphysic2• 4 years ago

It would have been a godsend when I was still academic. This and sci-hub.

The way they eviscerated the service makes clear that in general we need more robust web services. Tor is not ideal for this, onions are excellent and fill their niche really well.

But we need something simpler here.

boxed4• 4 years ago

What is needed is a strong government for the people, by the people. Without that, it really doesn't matter what tech you can cobble together.

synergy20• 4 years ago

aren't tor and onion pairs,why one not ideal while another excellent? confused.

DoItToMe812• 4 years ago

Eviscerated? The onion is indistinguishable from the clearnet site, with the exception that you need to log in. Disposable mail makes account creation trivial.

bombcar• 4 years ago

One professor would hand out detailed sheets covering the differences between editions for anyone who had older ones, allowing a large range to be used.

II2II• 4 years ago

Several of my professors did the same. Some went as far as saying the particular text book was not necessary, suggesting we can choose our own or recommending another. The important thing was the content of the course, with the source only being relevant for things like accuracy (which was rarely an issue for my field of study, at least for introductory texts which is what publishers tend to game).

Just after I finished my studies things started becoming more difficult though, when additional instructional materials (graded tutorials, quizzes, and such) started going online.

anxiously• 4 years ago

I used to borrow a friends book and photo copy the entire book. It wasn’t ideal but it was often an order of magnitude cheaper than buying those crappy books.

jhbadger• 4 years ago

Oh, absurd prices for textbooks is not something that came from the digital shift. I had textbooks that were over $100 when I was an undergraduate. And that was in the late 1980s!

tyingq2• 4 years ago

Right, but there was a used textbook market that usually worked for me.

wlesieutre• 4 years ago

But did it have a code for accessing online homework assignments that only worked once and made it useless to resell because next semester's students had to buy a new copy in order to submit homework?

It's been a racket for a long time, but it's gotten much worse recently.

lupire2• 4 years ago

How about boycotting colleges that are more focused on stealing your money than educating you?

banannaise• 4 years ago

Voting with your wallet loses to the tragedy of the commons.

runlevel1• 4 years ago

Isn't it mainly publishers who are responsible for that?

I think authors get a pittance. I recall a professor getting something like $600 to write a chapter in a molecular pathology textbook back in 2008.

anonomousename• 4 years ago

Now, you need an access code to do your homework. It costs more than the textbook, and cannot be shared, rented, copied, or sold when you’re done with it. The reason it is so expensive is because it comes with a “optimized” etextbook to help you when you’re stuck on homework. The average I’d say is around $120

Predatory practices all around.

musicale• 4 years ago

Used textbooks have been cleverly neutralized by the technique of bundling new copies with single-use codes for required online courseware.

Adopting and requiring such courseware is somewhat abusive to students, but instructors are probably trying to save their own time and avoid reinventing the wheel.

Personally I'd be happier if the textbooks and courseware access were sold separately.

dtx1• 4 years ago

I don't understand how zlibrary can still be up though. If the glowies can seize the domains can't they also seize the servers hosting the data?

WastingMyTime893• 4 years ago

They are outside the US jurisdiction.

The full archive is also not that big (~30TB) so they are plenty of mirrors.

roel_v4• 4 years ago

"The full archive is also not that big (~30TB) so they are plenty of mirrors. "

Like where? Zlibrary wasn't open for 'official' mirrors in the first place, and the 'unofficial mirror' hasn't had any seeders for its torrents since at least the seizure of the domains last week.

jbotz• 4 years ago

They are located in territories that are not friendly to US "glowies". Also, they tried that with Pirate Bay which was on glowie-friendly territory (Sweden, ever happy to lick US jack-boots) but it just became a game of whack-a-mole they couldn't win.

viron• 4 years ago

Such a need for a service like z-library, the outside world sales prices does not make sense in my country, where the price of an ebook is equal to my half a month salary.

tiahura• 4 years ago

When you want somethin’ And you don’t want to pay for it…

Cthulhu_• 4 years ago

It's not that people don't want to pay for it, it's that they can't.

0x0000000• 4 years ago

I mean, we should probably acknowledge it's a bit of both.

ahelwer2• 4 years ago

So since this was done at the DNS level, not the hosting level, does this mean if you're running a pi-hole or AdGuardHome you can add some extra redirects for zlib to its actual IPs? I guess you could also just hardcode these in your computer's host file but then you have to do it for every device on your LAN. Assuming their IPs change somewhat frequently, is there any way to do this in an auto-updating way?

malermeister• 4 years ago

Even more interestingly, could somebody set up a "pirate DNS" for public use that would still resolve these (and other domains seized for similar reasons) while deferring to a "regular" DNS for everything else?

ahelwer2• 4 years ago

I guess in a way the Pirate Bay is just a pirate DNS for magnet links.

lupire2• 4 years ago

This is common https://www.lifewire.com/free-and-public-dns-servers-2626062 But obviously any one that gets known for publicly providing banned domains would also get banned.

So you need to maintain your own address tables, and get updates through private communications.

RobotToaster• 4 years ago

OpenNIC is an alternative DNS root server that already has a .pirate domain.

https://www.opennic.org/

phyzome• 4 years ago

But the site's still up, still available over Tor, and still has domain names (in other jurisdictions) that point to it.

chris_wot• 4 years ago

I hate to say this, but the DNS system is the problem here. What are the alternatives?

2kwatts• 4 years ago

So far I've seen OpenNIC[1] mentioned in this thread. I have it bookmarked because I think it's a really neat project. If there are others I'd like to know about them.

1: https://www.opennic.org/

ilrwbwrkhv• 4 years ago

Not all known Z-Library domains are currently offline. The login portal ‘singlelogin.me’ and booksc.me, for example, remain online. These domains are registered through the Finnish company Sarek Oy, which is affiliated with Pirate Bay co-founder Peter Sunde.

Nice. Long fly the pirate flags.

timmg• 4 years ago

I had been using z-lib as a way of "format shifting" some of my books. I live in a small apartment. My books take up too much space. For some, I've found the PDF on z-lib and thrown out the hardcopy.

I don't think that is immoral in any way. (And I'm pretty sure it's not illegal -- but IANAL).

LorenPechtel• 4 years ago

Yup, I've got a bunch of old books that have become an allergy issue for me. Replacing them with e-versions is not piracy no matter how I get the file.

peterweyand• 4 years ago

The servers hosting the data haven't been seized. Within a week there will be a dozen new domains for this information hosted out of Mozambique and Luxemburg or something. What a stupid waste of taxpayers money.

airstrike2• 4 years ago

I understand IP laws, rewarding the authors, incentivizing future research, etc. etc.

But intuitively and conceptually, there is a hypothetical scenario in which all of humanity's knowledge is ~free for anyone to access instantaneously and from anywhere.

The current scenario in which every meaningful piece of academic output is heavily paywalled makes for a disheartening comparison.

oxff• 4 years ago

And now only libgen and archive.org remain, sad

user3939382• 4 years ago

Making no comment on ethics, it's amazing that we're able to create a multi-billion dollar industry over gatekeeping 30 TB of data.

Obviously there are more books than that but I'm sure it's a long-tail situation.

newfonewhodis• 4 years ago

Wait till they find out about credit agencies.

frontrowseat• 4 years ago

I heard there were backup / archives. Are they already backup under a new domain?

1MachineElf• 4 years ago

Perhaps Z-Library would benefit by incorporating censotrship-resistant running via Rosen, which someone submitted here not long ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33541351

Z-Library Aftermath Reveals the Feds Seized Dozens of Domain Names

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