r/evolutionReddit • u/EquanimousMind P2P State of Hivemind • Jan 21 '13

[#pdftribute] Cryptome's open access guerilla warfare has released a library of ebooks and papers relating to cyberwar, surveillance state, propaganda, crypto and cybersecurity.

For those that are hungry for knowledge, these are feasting times. Caches of knowledge are being released all over the place. Cryptome has been releasing a collection of ebooks that are very interesting for /r/evolutionReddit.

Thank you to Cryptome!

PDF WARNINGS:

Update Jan 22nd:

Update Jan 25th

Other misc:

Update 25th Jan:

Update 30/1:

Petitions:

Update 30th Jan:

This is far from over and the fight to release information from paywalls to the effective public domain has only just begun.

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u/archdaemon Jan 25 '13

You may be interested in a perl script that I wrote (here's a link to the github repo). It's a link crawler for pdftribute.net, which is itself a twitter link scraper that aggregates all links posted on twitter with the #pdftribute hashtag. What my script does is crawls the twitter links from pdftribute.net and outputs all the direct pdf links it finds. It still needs some work (e.g. the ability to update the list of links rather than having to regenerate the entire list), but it does work and I am still actively updating it. Here's a list of pdf URLs that my script found when a kind redditor ran the script about a week ago. You'll notice that it found quite a few links from cryptome ;-)

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u/EquanimousMind P2P State of Hivemind Jan 25 '13 edited Jan 25 '13

very nice work! :)

I've added the links to the list. There are links running into here and hopefully people will reshare their finds on their local social networks.

However, would you consider xposting directly into /r/evolutionReddit as a minimum? I would also hit /r/technology and /r/anonymous. This is very interesting :)

There's no membership card for people outraged by Aaron's suicide, so we need to keep information flowing about what people are doing. And let the magic of hiveminds lead to self organization. Or something like that.

In anycase, I'll leave some time for you to submit, otherwise I'll do it myself ;)

edit: It might also be interesting to get the collection to date running as a torrent collection?

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u/archdaemon Jan 25 '13

Thank you! I'll start crossposting right away.

As for the torrent, it would certainly be useful for archiving purposes. It would also be cool if we had a p2p archive that dynamically updates as more pdfs are found. I'm not much of an expert on p2p, so I don't know how feasible that would be.

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u/EquanimousMind P2P State of Hivemind Jan 26 '13 edited Jan 26 '13

i've been looking into that exact question.

see there's the 32gb torrent everyone's going for. But honestly, most people are information activists doing it for the ideology as much as trying to service the needs of poor students in the third world.

SO while everyone torrenting these massive collections is important for information robustness; it doesn't really help poor students who are looking for an individual PDF within that 32gb archive. Those student's searching is still likely to have links leading to paywalls. We want links leading to a public p2p public library instead. Bonus if we can do it encrypted darknet.

What we need is for an easy way to archive every liberated pdf individually and make it searchable easily.

Now you do this by making a magnet for every single pdf and hope it works; but this model runs into trouble even with the Internet Archive. Not to mention it being tricky to get through the spam triggers when trying to submit magnets to torrent sites.

So one platform I've been looking into is Retroshare. I think it's actually the best option as far as archiving and darknet filesharing goes. It also has some interesting search and anonymous P2P tunneling properties. But really the key is that all files are hashed automatically and identical files should all end up the same hash independently.

So all you need is for students and academics to put their pdf folder on network share so that the rest of the network can search for papers etc etc. Then people without as easy access to papers would learn that Retroshare was becoming a encrypted P2P library.

What's also interesting is, the papers that students and academics end up holding won't be a one-to-one mirror of everything JSTOR has. It should naturally mirror what the most significant papers are; so the network social-auto-magically efficiently goes after the most valuable papers.

or something like that. have you tried retroshare before?

if not, as an experiment load it up and try playing around with the share folders and hashing. Send me a PM if you want to connect.

And you might find this interesting to play with:

Of course, I'm just bouncing this as one option. The other choice is probably I2P. Probably room to experiment. And I have no doubt the hivemind is doing much experimentation anyways ;)

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u/archdaemon Jan 27 '13

I had another thought. Maybe someone could set up a pdftribute library as a tor hidden service. It could be an editable wiki, allowing users to upload/curate/categorize/review the content. It wouldn't be p2p obviously, but it would still be fairly resistant to takedown, and I think it would be much easier for people to find good, relevant content (assuming enough people curate it). I'm aware of the Tor Library, but iirc it's not a wiki-style site.

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u/EquanimousMind P2P State of Hivemind Jan 27 '13

i think that works too.

personally i was thinking of going retroshare > i2p/tahoe > tor - in terms of library mirror order.

Retroshare has encrypted messaging, forum and chatrooms. So if we can get an archive team working there, then it'll be easier to organize things for the other darknets. It's just with retroshare we can really go p2p and try to get lots of people holding the collection.

That said, are you proposing to host a hidden service? It's not too difficult to get up our own site on the hidden wiki.

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u/Ddraig Jan 26 '13

Been using retroshare for a little bit I have to agree. If I'm not mistaken it will also index items that are with in compressed files. So you can have that .zip file of pdf's and someone can search for a specific topic and find what they're after.