TorrentFreak Email Update

Wrongly Blocked Websites to Be Added to ISP Whitelist, UK Govt Says

Posted: 01 Feb 2014 02:29 AM PST

Once it became evident that Prime Minister David Cameron was dead set on the introduction of a “think of the children” approach to web censorship in the UK, those who understand the Internet knew there would be problems.

Filters of most kinds are incredibly blunt instruments that lack the finesse to deal with the complex nature of the online world. Sadly, it didn’t take long for them to live up to that billing.

During the past few months dozens of innocent sites have been blocked – TorrentFreak included – a situation that really hits the credibility of what the government has been trying to achieve.

Blocking entities such as charities and drug advice sites obviously leads to terribly bad publicity, so the government has been looking at ways to deal with the problem. According to the BBC a working group has been looking into accidental blocking with a view to finding a solution. They believe one has been found.

The idea is that some kind of master white-list will be drawn up containing sites that have already been wrongly blocked or might find themselves subjected to wrongful blocking in the future. That list would then be passed around Internet service providers so that filters could be tweaked to avoid the censorship of innocent domains. Charities are involved in the creation of the list so it appears public service sites may be a priority.

Also under discussion is the creation of a mechanism which would allow the owners of regular but wrongly-blocked websites to contact ISPs in order to have their sites added to the white-list.

“There’s a feeling that some sites sit in a gray area and more needs to be done for them,” a spokesman for the Internet Service Providers Association told the BBC.

While it is commendable that the government is looking into the problem of over-blocking, one has to question why the filtering mechanisms being put in place aren’t erring on the side of caution. If some sites are in a “gray area” then they should be given the benefit of the doubt, not found guilty until proven innocent.

If a system can’t tell the difference between a sex education charity and a porn site there must be something seriously wrong. A white-list is probably just a Band-Aid.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.

Academics Launch Torrent Site to Share Papers and Datasets

Posted: 31 Jan 2014 01:14 PM PST

One of the core pillars of academic research is sharing. By letting other researchers know what you do, ideas are criticized, improved upon and extended. Unfortunately it’s not always easy for academics to share their work, for a variety of reasons.

AcademicTorrents, a new torrent site by and for academics, hope to change this status quo.

The site was launched by Joseph Cohen and Henry Lo, two PhD students working at the University of Massachusetts in Boston. The torrent site aims to provide academics with a cheap and decentralized platform to share their work and data with the rest of the world.

“Sharing data is hard. Emails have size limits, and setting up servers is too much work. We’ve designed a distributed system for sharing enormous datasets – for researchers, by researchers. The result is a scalable, secure, and fault-tolerant repository for data, with blazing fast download speeds,” Cohen and Lo explain.

AcademicTorrents allows researchers to upload datasets, articles and other research material. The site runs it own tracker and supports web-seeds as well, which guarantee that files are available at all times.

One of the goals of the project is to give research back to the researchers, instead of having it locked away behind paywalls. Currently most of the top publications are being monetized by publishers, but with AcademicTorrents any journal can distribute papers for free.

“One aim of this site is to create the infrastructure to allow open access journals to operate at low cost. By facilitating file transfers, the journal can focus on it’s core mission of providing world class research. After peer review the paper can be indexed on this site and disseminated throughout our system,” the site’s founders note.

The site supports “collections” where torrents can be grouped by interest, source, author and so forth. These collections can be followed through RSS feeds, so users are automatically notified when new content is added.

Besides supporting the free availability of research, AcademicTorrents also has a more practical use. Since all files are shared by peers, it’s possible to share very large datasets at minimal cost.

“Large dataset delivery can be supported by researchers in the field that have the dataset on their machine. A popular large dataset doesn’t need to be housed centrally. Researchers can have part of the dataset they are working on and they can help host it together,” the founders explain.

Academics, or anyone else who’s interested can join the site and start sharing. NASA’s 42 gigabyte map of Mars may be a good start, and a recent copy of Wikipedia might come in handy too.

Source: TorrentFreak, for the latest info on copyright, file-sharing and VPN services.