On the modern internet, you don't need to know who runs it in order to shut it down. They already have a court order to pull down all of the known domains and the registrars have 20 days to comply.
If that doesn't work, many countries have systems in place where copyright holders can tell ISPs not to let their customers access certain links. (Either via blocking DNS requests or null-routing the IP/netblock.)
Serious question: Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?
They're not on TOR because normal people aren't on TOR. We've had various ways to distribute files with almost no way of getting caught for decades, but they're all a pain in the ass to use, requiring at the very least a native client program to access, so most people won't ever use them.
Tor is part of the problem. It pretends to be an anti-censorship/privacy tool, which is kind of true but mostly in the sense that it let's you surf the clear-web, which is a design flaw that three-letter agencies explout all the time. Hidden services are a second class citizen that has a high enough barrier of entry that only pirates and pedophiles remember they are even a thing most of the time. If it really believed in its mission, it would radically redesign itself.
That aside, there really isn't anything stopping apps from building in Tor, or ideally I2P, to lower the barrier of entry to a truly anonymous network. The end user shouldn't even have to know about it. But the profit motive is to not even bother because it might make apps slower and 99 percent of users don't care.
We can't enumerate these things (for obvious reasons), but I would be shocked if the overwhelming majority of onion services active any any given moment were anything other than nerds who need quick and easy NAT punching. By traffic volume, we already know the majority is just Facebook's onion services, then presumably followed by the NYT, BBC, etc.
I agree that more applications should make (transparent) use of them, but the whole "darkweb" aspect has always been overstated.
Anna doesn't have any advertising. Their income is purely driven off donations, most of which are part of subscription packages that offer faster downloads.
The sites are ON Tor. They were not exclusively on Tor for reasons others have stated: most people don't have Tor or know how to use it, though I suspect that situation may evolve.
"The Web" requires a native client program to access, yet over time has gained ever wider adoption as "most people" come to see the value and realize it's in their interest to do what it takes to gain access. We need to be evangelizing secure protocols in the same manner, especially as the insecure/centralizing protocols become ever more censored.
The Web hasn't required anything beyond what's installed for nearly the entirety of my life, and when it wasn't already there, someone would toss a CD at me in the parking lot and I'd be golden
Is this [0] not exclusively for the Tor browser? It states immediately below (on this [1] page) to "Make sure you're using Tor", and will only open in the Tor browser. I've actually used LibGen with Tor before, and treat it like the library not making ones borrowing history public knowledge
We're are talking about PDFs. A few mb usually. The speed hit of tor is probably fine. Also its a text book. Most users probably find some download latency acceptable.
I imagine the real reason is normies dont have tor installed.
Not a fan of the term “normies” but as a Tor “normie” isn’t Tor traffic identifiable and wouldn’t using it make it easier for authorities to focus on you?
For now. Right now DNS blocking is used because it works for 95% of people. Once it doesn't, they'll start demanding more serious means of blocking.
I'm surprised that didn't happen yet because DNS blocking is so ineffective. It's basically just akin to removing a business from the phone book or yellow pages.
Technologically? Maybe. Practically? I'm posting this while using uncensored Internet from within China, and not because I'm going out of my way to evade any blocking.
The GFW is more like the government put out an umbrella, but nothing is really forcing anyone to stand under it. Five steps and you're out. No doubt they could change that tomorrow if they so wished, but there are hurdles other than technical ones.
In my case I'm simply roaming using my German SIM-card, but plenty of VPNs would work too. They can detect and block these and do with certain ones, but for many they just... don't.
Isn't it the case that foreigners can just apply to be exempted from the GFW? I remember people mentioning that to me online in the 2010s who were semi-long term living in China.
The way I heard it was individuals could apply too with a valid reason and one guy I knew online several years ago said “I’m a foreigner who wants to access my own country’s internet” was a valid reason. May have changed since Covid for all I know he left around that time.
We already see mass censorship of legal speech via centralization and deplatforming, particularly via Cloudflare (which continues to happily host CSAM, animal SAM, and various other genuinely illegal websites). It is the unfortunate reality that the Internet will become various internets.
I don't think that's necessary as app stores are already regional and easy to put additional restrictions on, and desktop internet usage is slowly being overtaken by app usage. And who knows, maybe even Windows 15 will only allow software downloaded through Safe and Verified(tm) app stores.
Their datadump strategy is questionable. You end up needing perhaps 1 book for each shard. I guess they are made by sorting the ISBN or some other numerical field and then grouped until they reach a certain size. It is a bit annoying to put the shard of interest to download in your torrent client, pause it, figure out which book is the one you are after by looking at the ids, instruct your torrent client to only download that book.
My understanding was that's meant to be a way "ordinary people" () can contribute to the project by seeding one or more torrents with a part of their archive contents, to try and achieve a sort of "distributed backup", and it's not meant as a way for final users to get that one book they need.
() that is, people that can't run a IPFS node or other advanced options due to their limited space/network/skills/money.
If that doesn't work, many countries have systems in place where copyright holders can tell ISPs not to let their customers access certain links. (Either via blocking DNS requests or null-routing the IP/netblock.)
Serious question: Why aren't Libgen, Annas-Archive, and others operating solely as an onion service on TOR?