I see that bounty at the bottom, so tossing away my chances here, but this visualization is just asking to be mapped onto a Hilbert Curve. [0] When you "stripe" the data like this, points that are sorted close together could end up pretty far apart, since a distance in the Y axis skips an entire row of data as you move down, rather than a distance in the X axis which is 1-to-1 with the source data.
If you map it onto a hilbert curve, the X and Y axis mean nothing, but visually points that are close together in the sorted list, will be visually close together in the output image.
Since the first part of an ISBN is the country, then the second part is the publisher, and the third part is the title, with a check sum at the end, I would remove the checksum and sort them each as a big number. (no hyphens)
You should end up with "islands", where you see big areas covered by big publishing countries, with these "islands" having bright spots for the publisher codes.
Bonus points for labeling these areas!
I set up something a while ago [1] for an interview that does this with weather data. It makes the seasons really obvious since they're all grouped together.
What property makes the Hilbert curve desirable compared to, say, a snake pattern, with which neighbouring ISBNs are also neighbours in the visualisation?
The worry I have with Hilbert curves is that they make the result look like there are distinct "squares" of data [0] when really this is just an artifact of how Hilbert curves work. In that sense, the current visualization is more useful, because it's straightforward to identify the location of each country in it.
The thing is, ISBNs aren't hierarchical --- they are bought in blocks (or even individually at an exorbitant markup, says the guy who bought one to reprint a single book), so this doesn't show anything really interesting/useful.
A visualization using LoC or even Dewey Decimal would be far more useful, esp. if it also linked to public domain and copyright-free repositories/lists, say an interactive and visual version of John Mark Ockerbloom's:
ISBN's are hierarchical, what do you mean? Like Gaul, ISBNs are divided into multiple parts, where one part is for the language, another is for the publisher, and the last is for the title. The last part is a checksum. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISBN#Overview
Yes, but this internal hierarchy for an issued number doesn't tell anything beyond those facts about a specific edition of a specific text.
One can't use ISBNs alone to create a hierarchical listing of texts which is useful for anything beyond browsing by language/publisher/order in which the ISBN was generated.
A visual and interactive representation of books by LoC or some other cataloging system would actually be useful.
I got into an argument with the manager of South End Press back in '94 about whether 'Futuresplash' (soon to be Macromedia Flash) had a future, he thought it did and he was right.
Years later I was working at the library and got a little bit steamed because South End Press was reusing ISBN's after books went out of print which was allowed but, I think, lame.
One of my strategies for researching a topic is looking a few up in the OPAC, finding them in the stacks, and finding more books on the topic in those areas. (In the Library of Congress system, machine vision could be under QA56 with the rest of computer science or around TA1630, thus "areas".)
From time to time I've thought about trying to replicate the feel of this with some kind of UI given that our library moved a lot of the collection into deep archives and we have a very fast 'Borrow Direct' service with other peers)
totally agree, but thats not in the data. however, since blocks are assigned to agencies associated with countries and publishers, you might find some utility in showing coverage by likely language and/or country of origin and date.
It only sort of shows that. ISBNs are issued by edition, not title, so many books would have more than one. And books published before 1970 or so might not be represented at all if they have no recent edition.
They can't even have a tiny fraction of the world's books. Each edition of the book gets a new ISBN... if a book is released as a paperback, hardback, kindle edition, pdf, and epub then there are supposed to be five ISBNs.
The vast, vast majority have only been released as dead-tree versions. They have none of those. The books they scan may have an ISBN, but the scans do not have them. Like all Project Gutenberg books, their books have no ISBNs at all. From a strict point of view, they've released new editions of these books.
Worthless semantics in the context of the mission of the project.
What you've described is that the archived content can be mapped to multiple ISBNs. It's clear the only element of concern here is the content itself. The failure to preserve a particular binding or printer's choice of typeface is irrelevant.
Failing to recognize this requires an almost malicious level of pedantry
A successful archival of one of those ISBNs will light up; four of those ISBNs remain dark. Yet they have that content archived. It means that lighting up the entire grid is not necessary to achieve their goal.
Indeed a bigger problem is that it’s much harder to know which areas of the grid are never going to light up because the ISBN has not been used.
Lighting up the entire grid is still the goal, you're describing the problem of ensuring the right set of squares is illuminated for each piece of archived content. One is a problem of archiving the content, the other is a problem of bookkeeping.
>Worthless semantics in the context of the mission of the project.
Hardly worthless... often times, the edition of the book matters as much as the title. Steven King wrote two books named The Stand, and one isn't anything like the other. He pulled a Lucas pretty early on.
He's hardly the only author to ever do this. But it's not just authors either. Editors, collectors, translators all make their mark, and give you works that though they might be slightly different to you, the differences actually matter to the rest of us. It's not that you're ignorant that offends me, it's the arrogance about a subject you seem to know so little about that makes it difficult to tolerate.
There is no pedantry here, just a desire to actually preserve books and to organize them.
> Steven King wrote two books named The Stand, and one isn't anything like the other
Then those two texts would map to different ISBNS, or perhaps each maps to multiple different ISBNs, it doesn't matter. That some texts exist with the same title but different content is similarly irrelevant.
The content is all that matters. Two different bodies of content, two different entries in the archive. Each entry may map to one or more ISBN numbers.
> the differences actually matter to the rest of us
The only differences that matter are what matters to the archive that made the blog post. Your concerns are for entirely different things, which is fine, but don't say the OP's concerns or initiatives are impossible or ill-suited based on a criteria you're projecting onto them.
> The books they scan may have an ISBN, but the scans do not have them. Like all Project Gutenberg books, their books have no ISBNs at all. From a strict point of view, they've released new editions of these books.
Are you saying they actively remove ISBN numbers from scans? If I downloaded one of the books, it wouldn't have an ISBN?
Why? That seems like a bunch of extra processing per book, makes it harder for users to specifically identify a book, and probably does nothing for legality. Also, can people search by ISBN?
> From a strict point of view, they've released new editions of these books.
And this is clearly a semantically worthless distinction from the point of view of the archive.
When different editions have different content, archiving those differences in that content may matter (arguably not for simple typographical corrections, printing errors, etc). When different ISBNs have identical content, it is totally irrelevant to the goals of the archive.
One thing it shows is how ISBNs are allocated much faster than they are used, judging by the amount of black pixels.
The image contains 1000*800 pixels at 2500 ISBNs per pixel, so it's visualizing 2e9 ISBNs. ISBN-13 contains 12 digits plus one check digit, so we might have expected the image to be 500 times bigger/denser than the current image. The fact that it's at its current size suggests that only ISBNs with 978 and 979 prefixes are included, and since the bottom half is more sparse, that probably corresponds to the new 979 range.
Anna's archive is one of the wonders of the world. If we almost destroyed our species but Anna's archive endured, there would be hope for a relatively expedient reconstruction.
I thought it was my color blindness that made me not able to distinguish between the red and green pixels as described (i only see red and black ones), but even with a browser extension that counters color blindness i can't distinguish more colors. Is this just me, or is the graph weird?
Fwiw (not color-blind) I can see red, green and black pixels. The graph doesn't look weird to the naked eye.
Find the interactive visualiser by scrolling down, and switch it to "Files in Anna's Archive [md5]". This will highlight the location of the green pixels in grey.
element {
max-width: 100%;
margin: 0 auto;
filter: hue-rotate(-90deg);
}
Usually I use "filter: saturate(100);", but that didn't really work well for this image. You might have to adjust the rotation degree though, -90 worked best for me.
It appears that the IP of the server is blocked in the EU. I get this from my ISP (Ziggo, in the Netherlands):
Deze website is geblokkeerd
Europese sancties
De Raad van Europa heeft besloten dat de websites van RT (voorheen Russia Today) en Sputnik News niet meer mogen worden doorgegeven. De website die je probeert te bezoeken, valt onder deze Europese sanctie.
VodafoneZiggo is verplicht de sanctie uit te voeren en heeft de website geblokkeerd.
"This server couldn't prove that it's annas-archive.org; its security certificate is from *.hs.llnwd.net. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection."
Yes. A DNS request for annas-archive.org to my ISP (EE in the UK) returns an address for www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk, which also gives a security warning. If I click through the warning on either site I get an HTTP 400 error.
According to Wikipedia, www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk used to list the blocked domains and the court orders responsible.
Kind of hard to tell what corresponds to what in these graphs, maybe if someone could point out Bookland (i.e. 978), it would be a bit easier to orient oneself?
annoying non-answer to my question. i already know all about anna's archive. i'm asking if a person can download these isbns and use them to make data visualizations without fear of breaking a law? https://software.annas-archive.li/AnnaArchivist/annas-archiv...
Seeing as nobody has provided a real answer. The question is, maybe.
Anna's Archive is getting sued currently for scraping vast amounts of essentially public metadata which was being gate-keeped by a single organisation.
Here's the longer and more complicated answer for you:
The Council of Europe has decided that the websites of RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik News may no longer be transmitted. The website you are trying to visit falls under this European sanction.
It's blocked at least in the Netherlands. Weirdly it mentions it being part of the sanctions against Russia, while from a cursory search I only found a judge ordering the site to be blocked because of copyright issues (thanks Brein). They probably just show the wrong error page?
It's blocked by my corporate networking filter for me, in the category "Illegal downloads". So the Russian sanctions message is probably incorrect indeed.
$ dig annas-archive.org @89.101.251.228
annas-archive.org. 360 IN CNAME unavailable.for.legal.reasons.
unavailable.for.legal.reasons. 339 IN A 213.46.185.10
213.46.185.10 serves a generic page mentioning Russia Today and the Pirate Bay. Not sure which one applies here.
Is that three broadband providers serving the same address?? You guys are so lucky you don’t even know. In America we generally have a choice of one if you aren’t including Starlink or legacy slow satellite. And perhaps a joke of a 1-6Mbps DSL option in some parts.
Some people in the archiving / 'data hoarding' community feel it's simpler to just back up everything. This attitude is particularly prevalent in the communities that deal with data other people have already digitised.
If you're paying $100 per book for someone to visit a major library, get the book out, scan it, check the OCR? Then you'd probably be selective, to get the most out of a limited budget.
But if you're grabbing epubs and pdfs, and a book only needs $0.002 of space on a hard drive somewhere? Grabbing the useless 41% is probably cheaper and easier than exercising editorial control.
The problem with such judgment is that they are subjective and subject to biases that change over time. Almost every scrap of information from ancient civilizations is considered priceless at this point because so few is left of it. Anything from obscene graffiti, shopping lists, personal messages, etc. All of it.
Many autocratic regimes editorialize and censure all forms of publications. But even in the US, which is nominally still a democracy you now have states like Florida forcing changes to literature works and banning books entirely for religious and ideological reasons. And this is not just a right wing thing. There have been a few publishers that took it upon themselves to editorialize literature from the 19th and 20th century to get rid of some things that are now considered sexist, racist or otherwise offensive. The whole cancel culture is not just about canceling people, but about limiting access to their work as well.
I was at a Christmas market in Berlin a few weeks ago near the Opera. There's a nice little monument there for the book burning that happened in the 1930s. Anything that was vaguely intellectual or Jewish in origin was burned right there during the Kristallnacht. Nice place for a Christmas market and a grim reminder that those calling for things to be deleted/cancelled aren't necessarily very nice people. And of course Hitler himself got cancelled. Possession or distribution of his books is still not allowed in Germany.
Anyway, imagine somebody in 5000 years finding their way to some archive of hacker news or some reddit thread might look differently at the value of some of the comments than the average moderator.
> you now have states like Florida forcing changes to literature works and banning books entirely for religious and ideological reasons.
This is not honest. They're not banning any books, they are stopping school teachers from forcing certain books on children. The difference is immense.
> Possession or distribution of his books is still not allowed in Germany.
AFAIK this has never been true in Germany (for the book Mein Kampf at least). AFAIK the German state of Bavaria inherited Hitler's copyright on the book, and did not republish it. This means that no one was allowed to print it for copyright reasons, but you could still own or trade existing copies of the book. After 2015, 70 years after Hitler's death, the book entered the public domain. Looking into Wikipedia, uncommented reprints have been forbidden: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mein_Kampf&oldid=..., which I didn't know before.
It seems you are correct and I was only half right. Lets just say that quoting the man in public is still likely to get you in trouble. More than a few AFD politicians are finding that out the hard way.
All action is "subjective and subject to biases that change over time". This would then imply I could never take any action, because it's just subjective and biased. Maybe that's an exaggeration of your position, but you do seem to be suggesting inaction or the impossibility of judgement. I reject this position 100%.
I would suggest that judgement is a critical part of our civilization, and it's judgement that says those bits of obscene graffiti in Pompeii that makes it so.
Or else they could say "well, we can't claim ancient cave art is priceless, because we're biased and our biases will change over time. Maybe in a thousand years we'll discover that ancient cave art is worthless, so we'll do nothing".
In fact you have judged my opinions and shared your judgement with me. Good job!
Your characterization of regimes as autocratic is judgmental, biased and will change over time. But right now that's your judgement and I applaud it, even if I disagree.
Gosh, book burning. Not backing up a romance novel or cookbook is definitely analogous to book burning, but I'll play along.
It was a symbolic act to show a rejection of ideas, not an attempt to eradicate the books, much in the same way Gandhi encouraged the burning of foreign made clothing and products. He wasn't going to rid the world of British cloth nor were the Germans going to rid the world of non-German ideas.
So yeah, when all the badly written cook books, romance novels, and children's books are in a huge bonfire, you can blame me, personally.
> All action is "subjective and subject to biases that change over time".
This is poppycock. Backing up all books -- the very action discussed by the person you're answering -- is by definition neither subjective nor subject to biases.
> This would then imply I could never take any action, because it's just subjective and biased.
And even if the first quoted claim were true, this, too, clearly isn't. Nowhere does the comment you're answering imply that the bias or subjective rationale of an action should, ipso facto, discourage a person from taking it.
Your comment is replete with similar reasoning, so warped that it's difficult to characterize as anything other than in bad faith. Indeed, this is the snottiest, rudest, least constructive comment I've seen on HN in quite some time -- excepting a couple of my snotty remarks on language or the quality of someone's writing.
I have no idea what response you expect, but the only one you deserve, I think, is one that just points out your dismissiveness, sarcasm, and breathtaking contempt. What an awful way to move through the world, let alone through HN.
I don't think you're doing it on purpose, but this is Holocaust denial. The Nazis did destroy all extant copies of several works – for example, research of the Institut für Sexualwissenschaft. (Edit: Some Judaica were sent to Prague instead of being destroyed – though apparently Hitler's planned Judaism Museum is an urban myth.) They absolutely were trying to utterly destroy – not just symbolically reject – vast swathes of culture.
Please don't make stuff up about the Holocaust. It's the sort of mistake you shouldn't make even once.
This thread should've really summoned Jason Scott, I remember him causally mentioning that he has a backup of every single 4chan post ever made (99% crap in that case, but probably invaluable for future generations of sociologists/historians who want to piece back together where it all went wrong).
There's a schlocky Victorian pulp novel that's of no use to anyone - except that it happens to contain a fantastically detailed description of an abandoned saltings in my hometown that nobody ever thought to record in any way. For me, those two paragraphs are gold.
If the novel hadn't been digitised as part of Google's Books Archive Project, I wouldn't have been able to find those two paragraphs. Digitisation not only creates backups, it enables completely new ways of interacting with those texts (eg Google's Ngram Viewer).
Well I guess your one valuable paragraph that matters only to you justifies backing up millions (billions?) of human and soon to be AI generated books, because someone, somewhere, at some time will find a line or two valuable. Maybe.
I think that's the case. IIRC The British Library has copies of all published material in the UK, including flyers and such.
What seems banal and useless to you, might be extremely important for future historians, and to be honest, books are pretty compressible and storage is cheap.
I think its a law in almost all nations in fact that forces publishers to sent a copy of everything they publish to a national archive like that (the US equivalent is the Library of Congress). If you bring up the topic of preservation, most people won't understand why, or even be opposed to the idea, goes to show that sometimes its a good idea to ignore the ignorant public.
Let’s say there are ten billion such marginally-useful books published by the time the next few decades. Many epub books are like a couple MB. So 30 petabytes total. That’s something you could fit in one room. One rich guy could buy enough hard drives to do that today. Why not?
>There is much to explore here, so we’re announcing a bounty for improving the visualization above. Unlike most of our bounties, this one is time-bound. You have to submit your open source code by 2025-01-31 (23:59 UTC).
>The best submission will get $6,000, second place is $3,000, and third place is $1,000.
>All bounties will be awarded using Monero (XMR).
? Why are they using crypto, and, weirdly enough, specifically the crypto people use for buying drugs, to award this?
Because the efforts of Anna's Archive are unfortunately currently very much illegal, and XMR is one of the few cryptocurrencies that can actually offer some privacy to its users.
They use monero because what they are doing (copyright infringement) will get you in to big trouble anywhere in the western world. Without cryptocurrencies much of the modern large scale archival efforts wouldn't be possible, or at the very least would significantly increase risks for the people participating in it. For me this alone is a good enough reason to admit that there are valid reasons for existence of privacy coins.
The harm they may cause in the short term via tax avoidance or being used to buy drugs is minimal, but the possibility that because of them archivists are able to fund servers for data that future historians wouldn't have otherwise been able to get their hands on? Priceless.
Because it is a book download site, which is illegal in every country that has copyright, and revealing one's identity with a bank transfer would be a stupid way to go to jail.
Major efforts at creating "everything" libraries are usually looked upon as a positive effort that benefits all of humanity, and we generally mourn the loss of any such effort, regardless of whether the effort is against the laws of the state at the time the effort was undertaken, or even if the collection was created in a morally reprehensible way.
See: Library of Alexandria, Library of Congress, GenBank, the Svalbard seed vault, Google Books, Internet Archive and all its efforts, ...the Louvre, and most major museums.
In general, we collectively recognize - without having to be told - that preservation of knowledge is a noble and worthy effort that transcends the fleeting whims of a population at a point in time.
All that to say, people probably don't need to be tricked into liking such efforts. They're popular because of what they are.
> Reasonable people are objecting to copyright law violation, for the simple reason that it disincentivizes further knowledge creation.
Do you honestly believe that our current copyright framework is mainly aligned at maximizing incentives for knowledge creation?
This sounds absurd to me. From my point of view, the copyright framework has been shaped (by continous lobbying efforts) into a system to maximize extraction of profits from existing IPs.
That is very different from incentivizing "knowledge creation", because the lions share of income is spent on overhead or distributed to shareholders, with the "knowledge creator" (i.e. author), getting <20% of each sale. Furthermore, the mechanisms to balance income are ALSO abysmal (to maximize knowledge creation incentives, it would be necessary to "overspend" significantly on "young" writers, enabling them to feed themselves at the start of their careers).
> weaponizing copyright law violation on behalf of the vilest dictatorship on the planet.
How is Annas archive weaponizing copyright violation? How is it furthering Putins interests?
If you map it onto a hilbert curve, the X and Y axis mean nothing, but visually points that are close together in the sorted list, will be visually close together in the output image.
Since the first part of an ISBN is the country, then the second part is the publisher, and the third part is the title, with a check sum at the end, I would remove the checksum and sort them each as a big number. (no hyphens)
You should end up with "islands", where you see big areas covered by big publishing countries, with these "islands" having bright spots for the publisher codes.
Bonus points for labeling these areas!
I set up something a while ago [1] for an interview that does this with weather data. It makes the seasons really obvious since they're all grouped together.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hilbert_curve
[1] https://graypegg.com/hilbert (https://github.com/graypegg/hilbertcurveplayground code if anyone wants to go for the prize using this! Please at least mention me if you decide to reuse this code, but I can't stop ya lol)
The worry I have with Hilbert curves is that they make the result look like there are distinct "squares" of data [0] when really this is just an artifact of how Hilbert curves work. In that sense, the current visualization is more useful, because it's straightforward to identify the location of each country in it.
[0] https://raw.githubusercontent.com/jakubcerveny/gilbert/maste...
[0] https://github.com/jakubcerveny/gilbert
[1] https://jakubcerveny.github.io/gilbert/demo/
A visualization using LoC or even Dewey Decimal would be far more useful, esp. if it also linked to public domain and copyright-free repositories/lists, say an interactive and visual version of John Mark Ockerbloom's:
https://onlinebooks.library.upenn.edu/
One can't use ISBNs alone to create a hierarchical listing of texts which is useful for anything beyond browsing by language/publisher/order in which the ISBN was generated.
A visual and interactive representation of books by LoC or some other cataloging system would actually be useful.
Years later I was working at the library and got a little bit steamed because South End Press was reusing ISBN's after books went out of print which was allowed but, I think, lame.
One of my strategies for researching a topic is looking a few up in the OPAC, finding them in the stacks, and finding more books on the topic in those areas. (In the Library of Congress system, machine vision could be under QA56 with the rest of computer science or around TA1630, thus "areas".)
From time to time I've thought about trying to replicate the feel of this with some kind of UI given that our library moved a lot of the collection into deep archives and we have a very fast 'Borrow Direct' service with other peers)
The vast, vast majority have only been released as dead-tree versions. They have none of those. The books they scan may have an ISBN, but the scans do not have them. Like all Project Gutenberg books, their books have no ISBNs at all. From a strict point of view, they've released new editions of these books.
What you've described is that the archived content can be mapped to multiple ISBNs. It's clear the only element of concern here is the content itself. The failure to preserve a particular binding or printer's choice of typeface is irrelevant.
Failing to recognize this requires an almost malicious level of pedantry
Indeed a bigger problem is that it’s much harder to know which areas of the grid are never going to light up because the ISBN has not been used.
Lighting up the entire grid is still the goal, you're describing the problem of ensuring the right set of squares is illuminated for each piece of archived content. One is a problem of archiving the content, the other is a problem of bookkeeping.
Hardly worthless... often times, the edition of the book matters as much as the title. Steven King wrote two books named The Stand, and one isn't anything like the other. He pulled a Lucas pretty early on.
He's hardly the only author to ever do this. But it's not just authors either. Editors, collectors, translators all make their mark, and give you works that though they might be slightly different to you, the differences actually matter to the rest of us. It's not that you're ignorant that offends me, it's the arrogance about a subject you seem to know so little about that makes it difficult to tolerate.
There is no pedantry here, just a desire to actually preserve books and to organize them.
Then those two texts would map to different ISBNS, or perhaps each maps to multiple different ISBNs, it doesn't matter. That some texts exist with the same title but different content is similarly irrelevant.
The content is all that matters. Two different bodies of content, two different entries in the archive. Each entry may map to one or more ISBN numbers.
> the differences actually matter to the rest of us
The only differences that matter are what matters to the archive that made the blog post. Your concerns are for entirely different things, which is fine, but don't say the OP's concerns or initiatives are impossible or ill-suited based on a criteria you're projecting onto them.
Are you saying they actively remove ISBN numbers from scans? If I downloaded one of the books, it wouldn't have an ISBN?
Why? That seems like a bunch of extra processing per book, makes it harder for users to specifically identify a book, and probably does nothing for legality. Also, can people search by ISBN?
No, he‘s playing the pointless „well, actually a scan of a book is a different thing from the book itself“ game.
> From a strict point of view, they've released new editions of these books.
And this is clearly a semantically worthless distinction from the point of view of the archive.
When different editions have different content, archiving those differences in that content may matter (arguably not for simple typographical corrections, printing errors, etc). When different ISBNs have identical content, it is totally irrelevant to the goals of the archive.
The image contains 1000*800 pixels at 2500 ISBNs per pixel, so it's visualizing 2e9 ISBNs. ISBN-13 contains 12 digits plus one check digit, so we might have expected the image to be 500 times bigger/denser than the current image. The fact that it's at its current size suggests that only ISBNs with 978 and 979 prefixes are included, and since the bottom half is more sparse, that probably corresponds to the new 979 range.
Find the interactive visualiser by scrolling down, and switch it to "Files in Anna's Archive [md5]". This will highlight the location of the green pixels in grey.
- Right-click the image and select "Inspect".
- Add a new CSS hue-rotate filter to the element:
Usually I use "filter: saturate(100);", but that didn't really work well for this image. You might have to adjust the rotation degree though, -90 worked best for me.Can you change the green channel to blue to better view it?
Deze website is geblokkeerd
Europese sancties
De Raad van Europa heeft besloten dat de websites van RT (voorheen Russia Today) en Sputnik News niet meer mogen worden doorgegeven. De website die je probeert te bezoeken, valt onder deze Europese sanctie.
VodafoneZiggo is verplicht de sanctie uit te voeren en heeft de website geblokkeerd.
https://web.archive.org/web/20250106112552/https://annas-arc...
"This server couldn't prove that it's annas-archive.org; its security certificate is from *.hs.llnwd.net. This may be caused by a misconfiguration or an attacker intercepting your connection."
According to Wikipedia, www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk used to list the blocked domains and the court orders responsible.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_websites_blocked_in_th...
Anna's Archive is getting sued currently for scraping vast amounts of essentially public metadata which was being gate-keeped by a single organisation.
Here's the longer and more complicated answer for you:
https://libraries.emory.edu/research/copyright/copyright-dat...
already asked LLMs so please don't copy/paste an LLM response.
What do you mean by "more green"? I don't see any shaded green.
And I presume the black pixels are unregistered ISBNs?
"...
European sanctions
The Council of Europe has decided that the websites of RT (formerly Russia Today) and Sputnik News may no longer be transmitted. The website you are trying to visit falls under this European sanction.
..."
In Italy it just errors out with a NS_ERROR_CONNECTION_REFUSED.
Flipping DNS to 8.8.4.4 fixed it for now but I really need to move this connection to A&A.
Not really standards compliant, but an interesting use of DNS.
http://195.121.82.125/
Would Tweak have blocked this? Most households in the Netherlands currently have the choice of Ziggo, KPN, and Odido. Long live VPNs…
If you're paying $100 per book for someone to visit a major library, get the book out, scan it, check the OCR? Then you'd probably be selective, to get the most out of a limited budget.
But if you're grabbing epubs and pdfs, and a book only needs $0.002 of space on a hard drive somewhere? Grabbing the useless 41% is probably cheaper and easier than exercising editorial control.
Many autocratic regimes editorialize and censure all forms of publications. But even in the US, which is nominally still a democracy you now have states like Florida forcing changes to literature works and banning books entirely for religious and ideological reasons. And this is not just a right wing thing. There have been a few publishers that took it upon themselves to editorialize literature from the 19th and 20th century to get rid of some things that are now considered sexist, racist or otherwise offensive. The whole cancel culture is not just about canceling people, but about limiting access to their work as well.
I was at a Christmas market in Berlin a few weeks ago near the Opera. There's a nice little monument there for the book burning that happened in the 1930s. Anything that was vaguely intellectual or Jewish in origin was burned right there during the Kristallnacht. Nice place for a Christmas market and a grim reminder that those calling for things to be deleted/cancelled aren't necessarily very nice people. And of course Hitler himself got cancelled. Possession or distribution of his books is still not allowed in Germany.
Anyway, imagine somebody in 5000 years finding their way to some archive of hacker news or some reddit thread might look differently at the value of some of the comments than the average moderator.
This is not honest. They're not banning any books, they are stopping school teachers from forcing certain books on children. The difference is immense.
AFAIK this has never been true in Germany (for the book Mein Kampf at least). AFAIK the German state of Bavaria inherited Hitler's copyright on the book, and did not republish it. This means that no one was allowed to print it for copyright reasons, but you could still own or trade existing copies of the book. After 2015, 70 years after Hitler's death, the book entered the public domain. Looking into Wikipedia, uncommented reprints have been forbidden: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Mein_Kampf&oldid=..., which I didn't know before.
I would suggest that judgement is a critical part of our civilization, and it's judgement that says those bits of obscene graffiti in Pompeii that makes it so.
Or else they could say "well, we can't claim ancient cave art is priceless, because we're biased and our biases will change over time. Maybe in a thousand years we'll discover that ancient cave art is worthless, so we'll do nothing".
In fact you have judged my opinions and shared your judgement with me. Good job!
Your characterization of regimes as autocratic is judgmental, biased and will change over time. But right now that's your judgement and I applaud it, even if I disagree.
Gosh, book burning. Not backing up a romance novel or cookbook is definitely analogous to book burning, but I'll play along.
It was a symbolic act to show a rejection of ideas, not an attempt to eradicate the books, much in the same way Gandhi encouraged the burning of foreign made clothing and products. He wasn't going to rid the world of British cloth nor were the Germans going to rid the world of non-German ideas.
So yeah, when all the badly written cook books, romance novels, and children's books are in a huge bonfire, you can blame me, personally.
This is poppycock. Backing up all books -- the very action discussed by the person you're answering -- is by definition neither subjective nor subject to biases.
> This would then imply I could never take any action, because it's just subjective and biased.
And even if the first quoted claim were true, this, too, clearly isn't. Nowhere does the comment you're answering imply that the bias or subjective rationale of an action should, ipso facto, discourage a person from taking it.
Your comment is replete with similar reasoning, so warped that it's difficult to characterize as anything other than in bad faith. Indeed, this is the snottiest, rudest, least constructive comment I've seen on HN in quite some time -- excepting a couple of my snotty remarks on language or the quality of someone's writing.
I have no idea what response you expect, but the only one you deserve, I think, is one that just points out your dismissiveness, sarcasm, and breathtaking contempt. What an awful way to move through the world, let alone through HN.
But we should still archive it. Some day it might be useful to someone ;)
> this is the snottiest, rudest, least constructive comment I've seen on HN in quite some time
I wish ;-). I see a lot worse here regularly. But it's certainly not nice behavior. Luckily, I have a thick skin.
Please don't make stuff up about the Holocaust. It's the sort of mistake you shouldn't make even once.
There's a schlocky Victorian pulp novel that's of no use to anyone - except that it happens to contain a fantastically detailed description of an abandoned saltings in my hometown that nobody ever thought to record in any way. For me, those two paragraphs are gold.
If the novel hadn't been digitised as part of Google's Books Archive Project, I wouldn't have been able to find those two paragraphs. Digitisation not only creates backups, it enables completely new ways of interacting with those texts (eg Google's Ngram Viewer).
I retract my position, let's back up everything!
What seems banal and useless to you, might be extremely important for future historians, and to be honest, books are pretty compressible and storage is cheap.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit
>There is much to explore here, so we’re announcing a bounty for improving the visualization above. Unlike most of our bounties, this one is time-bound. You have to submit your open source code by 2025-01-31 (23:59 UTC).
>The best submission will get $6,000, second place is $3,000, and third place is $1,000.
>All bounties will be awarded using Monero (XMR).
? Why are they using crypto, and, weirdly enough, specifically the crypto people use for buying drugs, to award this?
Is it some kind of scam?
I see, that makes sense
Hmmmmmm
/s
The harm they may cause in the short term via tax avoidance or being used to buy drugs is minimal, but the possibility that because of them archivists are able to fund servers for data that future historians wouldn't have otherwise been able to get their hands on? Priceless.
You really have to ask why a illegal/grey site is using currency that is build to protect privacy and anonymity?
is this some kind of sarcasm?
See: Library of Alexandria, Library of Congress, GenBank, the Svalbard seed vault, Google Books, Internet Archive and all its efforts, ...the Louvre, and most major museums.
In general, we collectively recognize - without having to be told - that preservation of knowledge is a noble and worthy effort that transcends the fleeting whims of a population at a point in time.
All that to say, people probably don't need to be tricked into liking such efforts. They're popular because of what they are.
Reasonable people are objecting to copyright law violation, for the simple reason that it disincentivizes further knowledge creation.
Even more reasonable people are objecting to weaponizing copyright law violation on behalf of the vilest dictatorship on the planet.
Do you honestly believe that our current copyright framework is mainly aligned at maximizing incentives for knowledge creation?
This sounds absurd to me. From my point of view, the copyright framework has been shaped (by continous lobbying efforts) into a system to maximize extraction of profits from existing IPs.
That is very different from incentivizing "knowledge creation", because the lions share of income is spent on overhead or distributed to shareholders, with the "knowledge creator" (i.e. author), getting <20% of each sale. Furthermore, the mechanisms to balance income are ALSO abysmal (to maximize knowledge creation incentives, it would be necessary to "overspend" significantly on "young" writers, enabling them to feed themselves at the start of their careers).
> weaponizing copyright law violation on behalf of the vilest dictatorship on the planet.
How is Annas archive weaponizing copyright violation? How is it furthering Putins interests?
how?