News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by philip1209 on Thursday April 12, 2018 @04:18PM (#16824569)
What would happen if they started writing the articles to a blockchain? It would be functionally impossible to remove, right?
Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by Dylan16807 on Thursday April 12, 2018 @05:13PM (#16824989)
If you start a blockchain made of copyright violation, it's going to be legally about the same as a torrent, and you'll get hit for connecting at all.
Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by userbinator on Thursday April 12, 2018 @09:58PM (#16826597)
There's already plenty of legally questionable stuff in Bitcoin's blockchain:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16617136

Thus, it would be better (if it could be afforded --- see some of the other comments on cost estimates) to continue there, or perhaps one of the other altcoins that's already in use for monetary purposes.

Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by Dylan16807 on Thursday April 12, 2018 @11:09PM (#16826874)
It's very incidental, though, and most of it could be purged with mild effort.
Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by chroma on Friday April 13, 2018 @12:43AM (#16827174)
The whole point of a blockchain is that it's append-only. Each block has a hash of the previous block. If you wanted to modify a Bitcoin block from a year ago, you'd have to do the same computation as a year worth of all miners.
Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by Dylan16807 on Saturday April 14, 2018 @04:52PM (#16839432)
The blocks are hash trees, and you don't need to store the whole tree. Purging depends on that, not altering the block history.
Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by lovetrump on Thursday April 12, 2018 @08:33PM (#16826174)
What if all servers would hold some random bits and no one would have any whole file (only the clients would be getting whole files)
Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by dane-pgp on Thursday April 12, 2018 @08:56PM (#16826269)
The talk of holding "random bits" reminds me of the idea behind the Owner-Free File System:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OFFSystem

Basically people would be hosting random-looking blocks of data, but users could be instructed to XOR two carefully chosen blocks together, producing a meaningful file.

Because of the nature of XOR, if Alice sees that Bob is hosting a file F, she could generate and host a file G, such that F XOR G produces a banned file, providing plausible deniability for Bob (as long as he can point to a file H such that F XOR H produces an innocent file).

Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by maxerickson on Thursday April 12, 2018 @04:33PM (#16824690)
The durability would depend on how many people cared to host that particular blockchain.

For a popular blockchain like teh bitcoin, it would cost quite a lot to introduce much data.

Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by prepend on Thursday April 12, 2018 @06:38PM (#16825594)
At 30 satoshi per byte, 5 gigs would be about 50 bitcoins. At $7, that’s only$350k right?

That’s a pretty awesome Kickstarter project.

Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by gruez on Thursday April 12, 2018 @07:06PM (#16825758)
or you can host it on some offshore/for/ipfs server and pay $100
Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by prepend on Thursday April 12, 2018 @08:53PM (#16826255)
Good point. But since there’s not much usage yet, they can block ipfs. They can’t block bitcoin.
Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by 220V_USKettle on Thursday April 12, 2018 @06:47PM (#16825658)
Until somebody adds CP.
Re:Publisher Gets Carte Blanche to Seize New Sci-Hub Domains by iggg on Thursday April 12, 2018 @04:40PM (#16824737)
Namecoin