[HN Gopher] FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder
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FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder
Author : __debugger__
Score : 456 points
Date : 2021-05-08 11:50 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| xvilka wrote:
| Apart from the solving problem with paywall, Sci-Hub UX is 1000x
| times better than official journals. It's basically a Google of
| scientific articles today.
| [deleted]
| xNeil wrote:
| I'm not sure I understand the concept of paid access to
| scientific research, so I'd be grateful if someone with more
| knowledge of the topic could explain it to me.
|
| Governments fund universities, people donate large amounts of
| money to universities, and a large portion of the population has
| student debt because of how expensive tuition is. Why are they
| charging for access to research at these institutions then?
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| It's not nonsense, but it dates from an earlier era and we may
| not want to continue in the tradition. In the past, professors
| who wanted to preserve a report of their work sent drafts off
| to publishers who reviewed, edited, typeset, printed and
| distributed. There are still plenty of people in this chain who
| do the work and aren't paid by the government. They get their
| paychecks from the subscription revenues to the journals. These
| are still, usually, paid indirectly by the government from the
| so-called "overhead" charged on grants. You can think of this
| system as "reader pays".
|
| As more professors developed the ability to typeset their own
| work with LaTeX and email/ftp/http, the costs of the old system
| have started to become more difficult to sustain. Some
| researchers do the typesetting themselves but the richer ones
| hire their own production team to produce better LaTeX reports.
| You can think of this model as "writer pays." Either with time
| or money.
|
| I think both sides have strong points. The old system is
| expensive and slow, but it does produce a very well-curated
| record of what happened. The new system is generally cheaper,
| but only because the researchers handle much more of the
| workload. I also worry that research will disappear when people
| retire or move on. A professor's web page may be really
| convenient, but they tend to disappear or die from bitrot after
| time. I also think the "writer pays" model tends to encourage
| over-producing some basic research notes that might not be
| ready to publish yet.
| adamnemecek wrote:
| Fun fact, the current business model of science publishing is
| attributed to Robert Maxwell
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Maxwell), the father of
| Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's co-conspirator https://www
| .theguardian.com/science/2017/jun/27/profitable-b....
|
| Sounds like Ghislaine wasn't the worst whoremonger in her
| family.
| xNeil wrote:
| That's an interesting fact, thanks!
| majjgepolja wrote:
| It was that previously these publishers were printing and
| distributing journals, before the internet.
|
| Some of the journals are naturally more prestigious than
| others. Academics want to publish in these famous journals. The
| name of journals they publish in carries lot of value for an
| academic's career. (That's what matters for the big head dudes
| who manage funds / promotions, they don't understand all these
| open access stuff.)
|
| Thus, the publisher has a monopoly or oligopoly on high value
| journals, new open access free as in libre journal cannot
| establish itself.
|
| Even if you're a well meaning academic who wishes not to
| contribute to this oligopoly, when you are young you don't want
| to risk your career. When you're old there are other young
| people under you and you don't want to risk their career.
|
| The big ~~head~~ belly dudes in positions of power are ones who
| need to understand this.
| boomboomsubban wrote:
| You'd think its because peer review costs money, but they are
| largely unpaid for that work.
|
| So, there's no real answer beyond "capitalism."
| cyrksoft wrote:
| What's exactly capitalistic about this? They charge for
| something they have no property or own. In my experience (and
| every researcher I know does this) researchers have their own
| websites where they publish a free pdf version of the
| research (without the format of the published paper, just a
| simpler pdf version) or even email it to you if you ask them
| to (those without a website, for example). I am not sure what
| exactly is "capitalism" about these journals.
| 13415 wrote:
| They charge shitloads of money to universities for
| accessing their journals, these fees are so high that e.g.
| our university is very picky about which "packet" they buy
| and limit them to institutions on a case-by-case basis.
|
| The copies on the author's pages and in open repositories
| are obliged to be pre-publication drafts, so you cannot
| cite them.
|
| In fact, under control of large publishers journals have
| become fairly inventive about making pre-publication
| manuscripts unusable. For instance, I recently published in
| a prestigious journal that had an online editing system so
| that all final revisions stayed in the system - no author
| copy of any kind, every proof marked with author name and
| large watermarks -, and they made lots of small, sometimes
| unnecessary changes in the very last editing step. They
| also don't paginate the final versions that are published
| online first, so you can only know the real final
| pagination a year or so after the first version has been
| published online.
| gkya wrote:
| > They charge for something they have no property or own.
|
| A bearded man calls this "surplus". Scientific journal
| business is the pinnacle of capitalism, what every company
| strives to become, including the ones fellow HN people here
| work at and start up.
| mindslight wrote:
| > _What 's exactly capitalistic about this?_
|
| The designation that combinations of words are a form of
| property that _can be owned_ , which then become assets
| naturally funneled towards those interested in playing the
| capital _meta game_ and away from those doing the actual
| work.
|
| To a scientist, the ability to copyright their paper is a
| _vulnerability_. Get rid of the concept of imaginary
| property and there is a lot less for Elsevier to demand
| from them.
| rusk wrote:
| > What's exactly capitalistic about this?
|
| Squeezing as much profit as possible for shareholders while
| externalising costs. It's a poster child when you think
| about it!
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| >and a large portion of the population has student debt because
| of how expensive tuition is.
|
| Student tuition does not fund research (at least in STEM in the
| US). DARPA, NSF, NIH etc. fund research. Professors at research
| institutions are to some extent evaluated based on the the size
| of their research grants.
| xNeil wrote:
| I was trying to point out how high tuition for universities
| is. I'm not sure if this is a US-specific problem, so I won't
| comment on that, but my point was universities receive so
| much money to conduct research, and then put that very
| research behind extremely expensive paywalls.
|
| If what you said is correct (which I'm sure it is), it's only
| reduced my understanding (in a good way - thank you for your
| explanation). So - the government pays professors for their
| research, and then this very research is put behind a
| paywall, from which....publishers (?) make money?. I
| apologize, but it simply does not make sense to me, it seems
| extremely counter intuitive.
| anonuser123456 wrote:
| It's a mess at every level, that is definitely true. I
| would say that it does not make sense from a public policy
| perspective. Public money does pay for the research, so the
| public should benefit from the knowledge.
|
| The situation exists because it just evolved into what it
| currently is, and until recently no one seemed to care.
| Before the internet for example, it made a lot of sense for
| publishing to be handled by a private entity. There were
| real marginal costs to the production and distribution of
| journals and demand was relatively low.
|
| Today this is very much changed. Demand is high and
| marginal costs are zero. So I imagine we will move towards
| an open access model.
| refurb wrote:
| A better question to ask is - when researchers can publish
| anywhere (including open source journals) they _choose_ to
| publish in journals with paid access.
| glogla wrote:
| That's not really a question.
|
| But if you ask why they choose to, they mostly don't have
| that much choice. Often, rules say "publish in magazine with
| impact factor at least X" and that's it. The publishers are
| the gatekeepers of that.
| vaylian wrote:
| You are completely right that the current system is nonsense.
| It only exists, because back in the day there was no internet.
| Scientists needed publishers that would print and distribute
| scientific results. But publishers might deny publication in
| their journals if they thought the science is not good enough.
| Thereby the publishers established a reputation system. For
| example, it is really hard to get a scientific paper accepted
| to the journal Nature. But if you manage to do it, a lot of
| people will assume that it is good science.
|
| The current system doesn't provide much value in terms of
| printing and distribution (even though some journals still do
| printing). The thing that keeps these journals alive is their
| reputation as filters for bad science. But even that is
| questionable, as proven by a lot of bad science making it into
| top journals.
|
| And lastly, science needs funding. If you say: My science is
| published in journal X, then the funding agency will think it
| is good science/bad science without actually trying to
| understand what your science is about.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| > If you say: My science is published in journal X, then the
| funding agency will think it is good science/bad science
| without actually trying to understand what your science is
| about.
|
| Not only is this correct, but it is the origin of peer review
| as we know it today.
|
| Despite what most academics assume, _peer-review_ itself is a
| relatively new concept in science. Nearly all of the most
| incredible scientific discoveries were _not_ subject to peer
| review as we know it today.
|
| Peer review was in fact created in as a response to a
| decrease in scientific funding in the 1970s. It was a
| deliberate attempt to create credibility in order to bolster
| funding.
|
| I find it somewhat absurd that the current state of peer
| review is considered a pillar of "good science", when not
| only has most of the greatest science done without it, but
| double-blind peer review and a culture of publish or perish
| has lead us to things such as the reproducibility crisis. And
| in general the vast majority of publish work being
| questionable garbage that only remains unquestioned because
| of a culture of fear around question the corner stone of
| artificial credibility created solely to increase funding.
| justinpombrio wrote:
| > but double-blind peer review and a culture of publish or
| perish has lead us to things such as the reproducibility
| crisis
|
| The "reproducibility crisis" is that we recently realized
| that ~half of published results in many fields fail to
| reproduce, presumably because many of them are false. My
| impression was that this goes back as far as you care to
| look, and that old results are just as likely to fail to
| reproduce. So the only new thing is that we _noticed_ this,
| which is a step _forwards_ , not back. Is there reason to
| believe that older studies tended to be more accurate?
| arp242 wrote:
| > The current system doesn't provide much value in terms of
| printing and distribution (even though some journals still do
| printing). The thing that keeps these journals alive is their
| reputation as filters for bad science. But even that is
| questionable, as proven by a lot of bad science making it
| into top journals.
|
| Just because _some_ bad science gets in doesn 't mean it's
| 100% useless; perhaps the bad science we're seeing now is 1%
| of what we would otherwise?
|
| I have no real insight in this, so I can't really judge how
| useful it is, but it's not an on/off switch, and as you've
| stated here it strikes me as a fallacious argument.
| adrusi wrote:
| It's not common for researchers to find that no journal at
| all will accept their paper, so it's not like there's a
| bunch of bad science being done that we just never see.
|
| The result of getting rid of the reputation system of
| prestige journals isn't obvious. It's possible that without
| the incentive to get into the most prestigious journal
| possible, many researches will lower the quality of their
| research. But I think it's more likely that without the
| hope of getting into a prestigious journal, researchers
| will try other tactics to coax others into reading and
| citing their work, and one such tactic is doing better
| research.
|
| My main concern with abolishing journals is that the need
| for prestige in science wouldn't disappear overnight, and
| instead of trying to get into prestigious journals, to only
| way to get that prestige bonus will be to do the social
| climbing to associate yourself with prestigious
| researchers.
| kergonath wrote:
| > But I think it's more likely that without the hope of
| getting into a prestigious journal, researchers will try
| other tactics to coax others into reading and citing
| their work, and one such tactic is doing better research.
|
| Or clickbait and algorithm gaming. And social networks
| would be even more important. You already allude to
| getting associated with big names. It is already common
| to get one in the author list to get accepted in a "good"
| journal.
|
| There are already too many papers being published on many
| subjects, so you tend to follow closely what comes out of
| a smaller community, and recommendations from the
| bibliography databases. Honestly, the problem is more
| with how research is evaluated by institutions and
| funding bodies than with the publishers, as greedy as
| they may be.
| baron_harkonnen wrote:
| I would argue that the publish or perish culture coupled
| with a creation of funding focused peer-review system in
| the 1970s has lead to much worse science.
|
| There are plenty of cases where good researchers can't get
| published because peer reviewers either don't understand or
| misunderstand the work being done (even Geoffrey Hinton has
| complained about this).
|
| Then on top of that we have vast amount of research that
| cannot be successfully reproduced, and this has been
| happening for decades. Largely because we have created a
| culture of 'rubber stamp' science.
|
| The correct publishing paradigm has lead to blander and at
| the same time quite often garbage science.
| tomkat0789 wrote:
| You're not wrong. There was a legendary librarian named
| Jeffrey Beall who cataloged a whole little industry of
| predatory scientific publishing. Here's a quick article
| that mentions his work: https://publons.com/blog/bealls-
| list-gone-but-not-lost/
|
| It'll be a long time before the traditional journals lose
| influence, but lots of the newer journals that arose were
| scams or ways for professors to publish what they wanted.
| It's a mess.
| ehsankia wrote:
| But even compared to other publishing, like books. From my
| experience books sell for less (both paperback and e-book),
| and also a significant chunk of it goes to the author. Do
| scientist get any of the profit from paper sales?
|
| Also, as you mention, newcomers need the reputation given to
| them by journal, but I don't understand how this is a stable
| system. In theory, well established scientists, who give the
| journals its reputation, should be able to easily migrate to
| an open journal, and therefore make the whole system
| collapse, no? Do these large publication have any sort of
| deal to give big researchers on their journals?
| azalemeth wrote:
| > Do scientist get any of the profit from paper sales?
|
| No. And most of the time, if you want a paper that's behind
| a paywall, email the corresponding author and they'd be
| delighted to know that someone on the planet actually
| cares, and then email you a pdf, copyright be damned.
|
| Honestly, sci-hub is the best website of the last decade; I
| use it every day. It works better than the publishers'
| websites (that I have legitimate access to). It's just
| _excellent_. It 's founder should be made a saint.
| Shorel wrote:
| > copyright be damned
|
| What? Do the journals get copyright over the authors
| too???
| elcritch wrote:
| Often yes they do get assigned the copyright for the
| article.
| azalemeth wrote:
| Indeed. The horrible phrase is 'copyright transfer
| agreement', which is typically a condition of being
| published. My experience is that the better journals are
| more of an arse about copyright. I've just written two
| book chapters and spent maybe a day getting permissions
| to reuse published figures, sometimes including my own
| (!) in other works.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| On the other hand, publishers have very little power when
| it comes to enforcing their copyrights when the author of
| an article decides to make it available on their personal
| web page. I have never met a researcher who refused to
| provide a copy of a paper when asked, despite technically
| violating a copyright by doing so. Academic publishers
| know that if they start threatening researchers they are
| playing with fire -- their business model is already
| obsolete and is only kept alive by institutional inertia,
| and the last thing they want is for researchers to find
| the motivation needed to ditch the publishing companies
| (the technology is widely available, now it is just a
| problem of politics and of organizing a community to
| change).
| kergonath wrote:
| > But even compared to other publishing, like books. From
| my experience books sell for less (both paperback and
| e-book), and also a significant chunk of it goes to the
| author. Do scientist get any of the profit from paper
| sales?
|
| One data point: we were 3 authors who worked for several
| months on a chapter of an authoritative book in our field.
| We got EUR100 to split. Of course, we get fuck all for our
| papers.
| ghaff wrote:
| >also a significant chunk of it goes to the author.
|
| Many (most?) books through publishers don't earn out their
| advance which is probably low 4 figures in most cases. In
| practice, writing books is either a hobby or it's a
| reputational side-gig for you day job whether self-employed
| or employed by some organization.
| Vinnl wrote:
| No, scientists get paid (usually) by their institution.
| Often, they'll even have to pay to publish ("page charges",
| charges for illustrations, etc.), and also to make it
| openly accessible (although to be fair, at that point their
| works aren't sold anymore; the author's payment is the
| source of profit).
|
| Even established, tenured scientists will often need to
| obtain grants and will still be judged by where they
| publish. Though there's also, of course, quite some
| institutional inertia and people just not caring, since it
| doesn't affect them personally. And of course, there are
| also a lot of (established) academics who _do_ care.
| ehsankia wrote:
| > No, scientists get paid (usually) by their institution
|
| I didn't say they get paid, I'm talking specifically
| amount the money flow to these journals. Does the funding
| from the research/scientists come from the profit the
| journals make, or from outside funding?
| fiddlerwoaroof wrote:
| Usually grants or other funding sources: journals
| generally don't pay for articles.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Ah sorry, I misunderstood. Often they're indirectly
| government-funded - for example, in the Netherlands we
| have the NWO ("Dutch organisation for scientific
| research"), which distributes government money to
| researchers and institutions. In the US you have e.g. the
| NIH. Additionally, there are private funds like the Gates
| Foundation and the Wellcome Trust.
|
| Funding flows from those organisations to the
| researchers, and from the researchers to the publishers.
| And from the publishers to their shareholders.
| [deleted]
| jonas21 wrote:
| In addition, established scientists are rarely the first
| author on papers. It's usually a grad student or postdoc
| who does most of the work and gets first authorship. A
| publication in a top journal can literally make or break
| their career.
|
| If someone decides that their group won't publish in top
| journals, they're hurting their own students, which
| probably discourages people from doing so.
| Vinnl wrote:
| Yep, excellent addition!
| krumbie wrote:
| And this is why it's hard for newcomers to switch to open
| access journals. Because they cannot easily afford not to
| have well known journals in their publication list when
| applying for positions. Because the people in charge probably
| don't fully understand the applicant's research, but they
| think they get a good sense of quality by the names of the
| journals
| xNeil wrote:
| So if I understood correctly, it's more about using the
| name of the journal as a verification of the study the
| scientist is doing, since the person funding them probably
| won't understand the research. Am I right?
| Spooky23 wrote:
| It's a prestige halo. People will answer calls from 212
| or from 5th Ave addresses in NYC, because, prestigious.
| cordite wrote:
| With regard to your last point, that sounds like poor due
| diligence.
|
| But they're not expecting monetary reward with risk for
| issuing a grant like a VC.
| edwardwatson wrote:
| But there are significant sums invested to fund research.
| In many ways it's a similar transaction to the VC. An
| investment into 'bad' research does not help the university
| or funding council reach their goals e.g. to raise their
| own funding or contribute impactful research to science.
| Hopefully, they are diversified enough for the bad eggs not
| to matter
| fighterpilot wrote:
| Journals have network effects and prestige. Its moat is a
| purely social one.
| breck wrote:
| Imagine if the tobacco industry convinced the world to call
| cigarettes "Cancer Reducers", even though they're literally the
| exact opposite. Now imagine the tobacco industry also bought
| every single newspaper, tv network, book publisher and media
| publisher in the world.
|
| That's exactly what has happened with the Copyright/Patent
| industry. They convinced the world that these should be called
| "Intellectual Property", even though they are the opposite of
| property rights.
|
| It's rotten to the very core (like slavery, there is no
| reasonable term limit--the whole idea should be abolished).
| About 1% of the population understands the truth (like
| SciHubs), but the rest go along with what they are told.
| Understandable, the brainwashing begins young and is pervasive
| (all Disney children's movies, for example, start with an FBI
| Warning threatening jail time if you go against the system).
| [deleted]
| hollerith wrote:
| The universities aren't the ones collecting the money. In fact,
| they the main targets of the extortion.
|
| Most professors care mostly about prestige (reputation for
| being smart, wise or innovative) and would prefer to ignore or
| disdain the economic and legal aspects of life. OK, that is a
| little unfair: most profs want to focus on their specialty and
| sometimes don't pay enough attention to how their actions
| interact with the law and the economy to affect university
| libraries far away.
|
| Academic publishers, e.g., Elsevier, give professors prestige
| in exchange for the professors' assigning copyright (legal
| ownership) of the professor's writings to the publishers with
| the result that a university library (which is typically far
| away from the publishing professor's own university) must pay
| the publishers to give its students and faculty access the
| academic literature without constantly running into the
| paywalls that people who are not students or faculty run into.
| setr wrote:
| I think prestige is a very unfair characterization. It's my
| belief that most people just want their research to be _seen_
| and _engaged with_ by their peers (it is, of course, the
| fundamental purpose of producing a paper). Universities
| however want prestige, and enforce the policy "publish or
| perish".
|
| The problem is still as you say -- the only way to do so
| reliably is to give up your ownership to a prestigious
| journal (because prestigious journals are widely read by the
| relevant folk).
|
| Ultimately the fix is up to the top universities. If Stanford
| suddenly says all CS papers are now being published on SciHub
| first (or through some new filter), who's going to argue?
| Every CS researcher will immediately add it to their reading
| list... because they want the good shit
| rland wrote:
| I wonder if this could be solved by a sort of collective
| contract:
|
| A university (and its faculty) sign a contract to publish
| only in open-access journals. But the contract doesn't
| actually go into effect until it has signatories of n% of
| top universities (ivies, UCs, etc).
|
| Therefore, the awful transition (of an individual
| university being disadvantaged) can be alleviated. Once the
| contract goes into effect, the pressure is directed towards
| the other party: those who _don 't_ publish open access
| will need to justify it.
| hollerith wrote:
| I agree that it was harsh for me to focus on the desire for
| prestige. It would've been kinder of me to focus on the
| need for the professor or apprentice professor to remain
| employed and, like you say, to have a positive influence on
| the community of professors.
| impendia wrote:
| I am an academic researcher (math). Unfortunately, prestige
| hits the mark.
|
| Whenever I am being compared with my peers -- for raises,
| for possible grant funding, if I apply for a job at another
| university -- people will look at publication lists and see
| who has published in "good" journals.
|
| And when you say that "prestigious journals are widely
| read" -- honestly, journals aren't really ever read as
| such. Researchers will look for individual papers they're
| interested in. The choice of journal is a signaling
| mechanism and little else.
|
| It is true that universities want prestige... but,
| honestly, tenured faculty don't often care too much about
| what their employers want. What a panel at a granting
| agency thinks of my record, is more important than what my
| department chair and dean think.
|
| Your idea that e.g. Stanford should order their faculty to
| publish on SciHub is an interesting one. For better or
| worse, university administrators don't tend to have or
| exercise much authority, and any attempt to order faculty
| to do _anything_ is likely to be met with fierce
| resistance.
| BeetleB wrote:
| > It's my belief that most people just want their research
| to be seen and engaged with by their peers (it is, of
| course, the fundamental purpose of producing a paper).
| Universities however want prestige, and enforce the policy
| "publish or perish".
|
| The two are one and the same. What you call "Universities"
| is simply "professors at the universities". Department
| policies for tenure are set by a bunch of professors. The
| dean of the college is always a professor. There's no "us"
| vs "them".
| setr wrote:
| Sure there is. Developers have very different goals and
| responsibilities than their managers (regardless of
| whether they were once developers themselves).
|
| The dean serves a different master than the
| researching/teaching professor. It would be absurd to
| assume their incentives and goals are always the same, or
| even aligned.
| [deleted]
| BeetleB wrote:
| The difference is that managers ultimately have to answer
| to a different type of crowd (consumers, shareholders,
| whatever). External pressures play a role. At
| universities, it is professors all the way. The people
| who are on NSF grant committees are professors. Journal
| editors are research professors.
|
| There is no _external_ pressure on these people. NSF
| grantors don 't value Nature publications because they
| have to answer to the public. They value it because _they
| value it_.
|
| If a professor becomes a dean or head of NSF, and they
| decide to make changes to what is considered prestigious,
| the only opposition they'll get is from their peers.
| Vinnl wrote:
| > Ultimately the fix is up to the top universities. If
| Stanford suddenly says all CS papers are now being
| published on SciHub first (or through some new filter),
| who's going to argue?
|
| Unfortunately, if they have staff that also intend to, or
| should prepare for, working somewhere else after Stanford
| (which is very common in an academic career), then those
| are likely to revolt.
|
| You could see this happen with the introduction of "Plan S"
| in many European countries, where researchers were afraid
| that "top" journals were no longer accessible to them and
| that that would hurt their standing in the field and future
| opportunities in, primarily, the US.
| xhkkffbf wrote:
| I think it's extraordinarily unfair to think of this as
| extortion. The professors have always been free to publish
| wherever they like and they each chose the copyrighted
| journals. Do we say that a fancy hotel "extorted" the fees
| from the guests who chose to book a room?
|
| Some young researchers often claim that they feel pressured
| by the system to choose the so-called prestige journals. This
| pressure is coming from older researchers who are making a
| decision from their experience. They don't need to reward
| journal writers but they do. Indeed, the open access
| professors could announce that they will penalize the tenure
| reviews for those who publish in copyrighted journals. But
| they don't, and I think it's because they realize that, for
| all of the costs, the copyrighted journals do a good job
| curating the information.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| The copyrighted journals do a terrible job curating
| articles, something which has been demonstrated repeatedly
| by people who managed to get utter nonsense through the
| peer-review process. I have seen Springer editors introduce
| spelling, grammar, and factual errors into published
| papers. Never in my career have I seen an academic
| publisher add any positive value to any part of the
| research process or community -- at best all they do is put
| their own worthless name on a journal, and at worst they
| have negative value.
|
| University administrators, grant-writing bodies, and others
| pressure professors and graduate students to publish with
| specific publishers. It is not because those publishers are
| more trustworthy; it is simply inertia, institutional
| tradition, and credentialism. It is the same attitude that
| leads some companies to turn away candidates who never
| completed a bachelor's degree. To give an example of just
| how bad this situation is, we sometimes hear complaints
| about people citing the IACR eprint version of a paper
| rather than the "officially published" version -- not
| because they are any different, nor because there is
| something better about the official version (in fact the
| eprint version typically includes details that are absent
| from the official copy), but simply because European
| universities use citation counts to judge professors and
| only consider citations of articles published by specific
| publishing companies.
|
| Academic publishers have raised their fees even as their
| costs have greatly declined. The number of journals that
| are actually printed and distributed on paper has been
| shrinking, and the cost of distributing over the Internet
| is almost a rounding error. Yet in that same period of time
| the publishers have increased subscription fees to the
| point where some university systems could not justify
| paying for the subscription. These companies have outlived
| their usefulness and they know it -- now they are trying to
| extract as much money as they can before the business model
| completely fails.
| Vinnl wrote:
| If I give you the choice between a bullet through the head
| or a slap in the face, it'd be ridiculous for me to claim
| that you were free not to choose the slap in the face.
|
| Sure, it's not the publishers themselves that are de facto
| forcing researchers to publish with them, but they do make
| use of the fact that they're being put in a position of
| being a rent-seeker, and they lobby a lot to keep it that
| way.
|
| Of course, the question is not "who's to blame?", but "how
| to change this"? And indeed, the publishers aren't too
| relevant to that question - it's the incentive structures
| that should change.
|
| (Disclosure: I contribute to https://plaudit.pub, which
| aims to change these incentive structures.)
| hollerith wrote:
| I agree that it is unfair to call it extortion. I'll try to
| be more careful in the future.
|
| >But they don't, and I think it's because they realize that
| . . .
|
| They don't realize any such thing: they're just doing what
| benefits them personally (e.g., surviving as a professor or
| apprentice professor) at the expense of the broader
| ecosystem.
|
| It is a problem of coordination: if the professors,
| students and the governments and foundations that fund
| research acted in unison (and were sufficiently informed
| and clear-thinking), then the entire academic literature
| would probably be available without restriction (like,
| e.g., Wikipedia is) on the internet by now.
|
| Such an arrangement would satisfy the values of the
| professor, students, etc, better than the current system
| does. But it is hard to get there because it is hard for
| 10s of 1000s to act in unison.
| danaris wrote:
| I can't speak for "most" professors, since I haven't done any
| kind of scientific survey. However, I work in academia, and
| every professor I personally know _hates_ Elsevier, and wants
| to get away from them in any reasonable way.
|
| But when the journals that literally define their field are
| monopolized by Elsevier, there's only so much they can do for
| the time being. To avoid them, they'd have to accept their
| research being ignored, their careers stagnating, and their
| ability to continue to do their jobs properly being
| threatened.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| SciHub is missing an opportunity by not providing a
| platform for researchers to self organize and run the peer
| review process directly on SciHub (or a new sister domain
| safe from interference). That would give them immediate
| legitimacy.
| amelius wrote:
| Meanwhile BigPharma uses science developed using funds
| collected from citizens, and charges insane prices for some
| drugs to those same citizens. The system is really crazy.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| Historically scientific articles were distributed by printing
| many copies and sending those copies to university libraries,
| which acted as repositories of human knowledge. Early on
| scientists realized that it made sense to collect high-quality
| articles and publish them as bundles (journals) at regular
| intervals; the peer review process was developed to determine
| which articles would make the cut. Printing is an expensive and
| was historically a labor-intensive process, and someone had to
| pay for it. The arrangement that was ultimately settled on was
| that the publishing companies, which were often operated by a
| particular university library, would charge subscription fees
| to those who received copies of scientific journals.
|
| TLDR: it made sense as recently as 50 years ago.
| turtletontine wrote:
| I'd also like to add that journals are becoming less and less
| relevant in some ways. Most of the journal clubs I have
| attended don't discuss the latest e.g. Nature, Science papers,
| they talk about the new stuff on arXiv that week. Add to that
| the fact that increasingly often the code used is on GitHub,
| and the data (if available) is hosted somewhere else, journals
| look less and less important to the process.
|
| Of course the bar is lower for arXiv, and the papers are often
| a little shoddier. But my point is that journals are no longer
| central to process of keeping up with science.
| 13415 wrote:
| It's how it has evolved. Journals with good reputations have
| been taken over gradually since the 1970s by a few larger
| publishing companies such as Springer, Oxford Journals, Wiley,
| etc. There are only very few independent journals left in my
| area. I think it's similar to what the record industry did with
| record labels. Large publishers did this by luring the journal
| editors in chief with "free" offers of all kind such as access
| to editorial systems.
|
| Now for these publishers journals are basically constant cash-
| cow. Typesetting is done in India (nothing against that) for
| the lowest possible rate (lots against that). The rest of the
| work is done by academic volunteers.
|
| The EU has launched a huge open access initiative to the extent
| that in the future no funding will be available for research
| published in closed journals, but this doesn't help researchers
| like me when in their area almost all reputable journals put
| their articles behind expensive paywall.
|
| You can buy yourself out of this extortion by paying 2000 -
| 3000 USD per article, but only universities from rich countries
| can afford it. In a sense, the current situation makes it worse
| because it increases the imbalance between research in rich and
| poor countries and sometimes even between privileged and
| disadvantaged researchers in one and the same country. (For
| example, some of the researchers at our institute get open
| access fees paid because they know the right people. The system
| is not based on merits of the researcher or publication.)
|
| I live and work in Portugal. We have some paid access to a way
| to small selection of journals. To be honest, I don't even know
| how to access them from home during Covid times, our IT
| department doesn't know how to setup a VPN. Even at work it
| often fails to work, and the accessible journals change from
| year to year. Everybody uses Sci-Hub for everything anyway.
|
| Without Sci-Hub I could just give up my research - currently on
| explainable AI, metaethics, nontraditional decision making -
| and become a waiter.
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| In a way, you are lucky if the journal has outsourced
| typesetting to some low-quality shop. Some for-profit
| publishers demand that the unpaid editors do all the
| copyediting, proofreading, and typesetting, and just provide
| the publisher with a camera-ready PDF. The for-profit
| publisher no longer provides any of the added value it once
| did. (Only distribution is left, and that isn't a big deal,
| because even old-school non-profit learned societies manage
| to distribute their journals to libraries around the world.)
| 13415 wrote:
| I know, I have myself provided camera-ready copies set in
| LaTeX to for-profit publishers - all of this for free, done
| in my spare time. I was referring to the end-control of the
| typsetting, which they still provide, and if it's only in
| the form of outdated LaTeX templates.
|
| Sometimes it's crazy how incompetent reputable publishers
| are in academic publishing. The for-profit publisher of my
| forthcoming book has agreed to accept a LaTeX manuscript.
| It's written and almost camera-ready. But now they told me
| they don't really know how this works yet, and so the
| typesetter has to "open it and convert it" to something
| else, which will be "time-consuming." After three years,
| they suddenly changed their mind and want me to provide the
| manuscript in Word!
| Mediterraneo10 wrote:
| FWIW, I wasn't talking about providing a manuscript in
| LaTeX and the publisher providing "end-control of the
| typesetting". (LaTeX is generally used for journal
| publications only in certain STEM fields, and not in my
| own field.) Rather, I was referring to cases where the
| for-profit publisher expects e.g. a Word document already
| fully typeset, and then the publisher does not contribute
| anything at all to typesetting except its own copyright
| page.
| egberts1 wrote:
| Surely Apple Legal team uses "gmail.com"?
| acebarry wrote:
| The screenshot is from the person who received the email. It's
| unlikely an Apple lawyer would screenshot something like this.
| kome wrote:
| Alexandra Elbakyan is a hero. Nothing less than that. Let's
| celebrate her and the memory of Aaron Swartz.
|
| Swartz was pushed to suicide because this oppressive system.
| Let's fight against this. Let's put our money and time to sustain
| Elbakyan's effort to open science.
| yonaguska wrote:
| The FBI are the good guys now, didn't you hear? They started
| spying on Trump and Rudy's iCloud communications the day Trump
| hired him. At least they had the balls to recognize that
| attorney-client privilege isn't for Nazis.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| A short term problem with long term benefits. The great gift
| of Trump to the world was to, at least partly, flush out the
| substrate that actually runs things. If at least part of the
| population becomes sensitive to that it was all worthwhile.
|
| Given our mutual swirling down the drain of a total
| surveillance society any hesitation in the process is a
| godsend.
| boramalper wrote:
| What I find the most fascinating is that a single person,
| possibly with the help of a few select others, is able to curate,
| index, host, and serve 85% of scholarly literature[0] which
| otherwise would be inaccessible to many.
|
| 80 million papers are available on Sci-Hub to its half a million
| daily users.[1] That is around 80 TB of data, and 2 TB of daily
| outbound traffic.[2]
|
| Given the fact that Sci-Hub has achieved all those whilst being
| forced to operate under the radar, I have massive respect for
| Elbakyan first and then all the others that have helped it
| survive. Not only Sci-Hub is an undeniable disruption, but also
| an amazing technical feat that many startups would envy.
|
| [0]: https://greenelab.github.io/scihub-manuscript/
|
| [1]:
| https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=https...
|
| [2]: 3 articles x each 2 MB x per 400k users ~ 2.4 TB.
|
| P.S. Seed its torrents!
| turtletontine wrote:
| I'd love to help spread knowledge, but frankly I'm not
| knowledgeable enough about the risks of seeding to be
| comfortable with it.
| warent wrote:
| I have a NAS which I could probably open up and seed a lot of
| Scihub content from. But what are the odds that something bad
| would happen to me, and how bad? Like, a fine? or a raid and
| jail time?
| jjtheblunt wrote:
| Or a massive cable bill :)
| gravypod wrote:
| Something that came up often when talking to people at my
| college was that our extremely expensive contracts with
| publishers/journals were to support the complex infrastructure
| required to maintain a service like that. We're talking multi
| million dollars per year per university per journal contracts.
|
| Reviewers are volunteers. Hosting costs, as shown by Sci-Hub,
| are negligible. How much does it cost to replicate a file
| system across 5 to 10 data centers, have a 10G link to each
| data center, and run a few nodes to serve web traffic?
|
| Probably a small fraction of the budgets we pay for journals.
|
| > P.S. Seed its torrents!
|
| I know no one will give legal advice here but: is this legal to
| do?
| whimsicalism wrote:
| Seeding copyrighted content? No, not legal.
| Jiocus wrote:
| Without the copyright holders permission, that is.
|
| There are many things available through e.g bittorrent
| because the author made it so.
| superkuh wrote:
| That's true. Putting tax funded research studies behind
| corporate paywalls also is in many contexts and
| jurisdictions. But it's funny how that one doesn't ever get
| prosecuted.
| jamiek88 wrote:
| Eyes wide open and all that but civil disobedience is a
| thing.
| PoignardAzur wrote:
| Oh come on. Obviously GP was answering the question about
| legality, not talking about ethics.
| HomeDeLaPot wrote:
| Do what's right, whether it's legal or not.
| londons_explore wrote:
| > Probably a small fraction of the budgets we pay for
| journals.
|
| Well motivated enthusiasts in their free time can achieve
| 100x what middle-grade 'digital consultants' can do in the
| same time...
|
| Building sci-hub in a corporate world, even leaving out the
| legal issues, would be very expensive. Begin by thinking how
| many 30 person meetings you're going to need to have to
| decide how to arrange the tender process...
| huijzer wrote:
| "A reminder that Elsevier made $6 BILLION selling your
| academic journals and articles behind paywalls, and made more
| profit than Amazon, Google and Apple every year for YEARS...
|
| And paid the academics who wrote the articles $0 And paid the
| reviewers of the articles $0"
|
| Source: https://twitter.com/DrJessTaylor/status/1390798132632
| 596488?...
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| > our extremely expensive contracts with publishers/journals
| were to support the complex infrastructure required to
| maintain a service like that
|
| > Hosting costs, as shown by Sci-Hub, are negligible
|
| Yes. The truth is these problems and costs are created by the
| copyright industry. Since copying is illegal, they have set
| themselves up as the only legal source for this material and
| that requires a lot of storage and bandwidth.
|
| All they have to do is place their copyrighted works in the
| public domain. The storage and distribution problems will
| solve themselves immediately and at zero cost to them. People
| will literally do their work for them.
| ytch wrote:
| That's why I decided dropping iCloud backup and enable locally
| iPhone encrypted backup.
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| Realize also that communication you have with others, for
| example via iMessage, may be stored at Apple if they have
| iCloud backup enabled.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Only if you have it enabled.
|
| But it wouldn't matter anyway, that other party in the
| communication could easily be somewhere with phone service
| but no data. Or someone in the group sms could be on a non
| apple device. Boom, Just like that, your communications have
| been sent to multiple carriers, including your own. Those
| carriers all pinky swear that they won't do anything bad with
| your sms though. So I suppose it's not that much of a
| problem. /s
|
| Why would anyone use a public network to communicate in
| secret? If you have a need for stealth communication with
| another individual, (maybe you're a dissident or what have
| you), then you should use the proper techniques. And, yes,
| keep your data encrypted on your own iPhone. Do not back it
| up to iCloud. Or Amazon Photos. Or Backblaze. Or Dropbox. Or
| etc etc etc.
|
| Oh, and never, ever, use Android. You likely don't have the
| technical know how to make a commercially available android
| device private.
| nichch wrote:
| > Only if you have it enabled.
|
| This is untrue. I just restored an iCloud backup from my
| girlfriends account to an old iPhone. Our messages _are_
| included.
|
| On my personal iCloud I have iMessage sync disabled and
| iCloud backups disabled. She has both enabled.
| modeless wrote:
| > Only if you have it enabled.
|
| No. If the other person has it enabled then your messages
| with them are stored by and readable by Apple no matter
| what your settings are.
| Dah00n wrote:
| You would appear smarter if you dropped the fanboy-ism.
| Apple just as bad as Google, just in other ways.
| danuker wrote:
| > Only if you have it enabled.
|
| What? If you back up your messages, don't you get the
| messages from your contacts? Why wouldn't they get yours?
| tyingq wrote:
| I imagine Kazakhstan will be less than cooperative with similar
| requests. Though I'd be terrified to travel if I were her now.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| 15-20 years and science still hasn't solved the publishing
| problem. Shameful, or a sign of times
| periheli0n wrote:
| Publishing is not the problem since we have the internet.
|
| The problem is the botched science career system, how
| performance of academics/researchers is evaluated, how anybody
| beneath the tenured academic is exploited.
|
| Publishing is just a decoy from this much larger problem.
| wellthisisgreat wrote:
| She deserves a Nobel Prize, it's that simple
| libeclipse wrote:
| Apparently Sci-Hub has paused uploading new papers to the site:
| https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement...
| sonicggg wrote:
| Are they looking for people outside Russia that may be helping
| her? There's not much they can do while she's living there.
| breck wrote:
| Hey FBI, I've emailed her my support. And I'm a U.S. Citizen. I
| have great respect for the FBI and law enforcement in general,
| but on this particular issue you can go fuck yourselves.
|
| Going after a woman fighting to ensure all people, rich and
| poor, have access to the world's scientific information. That
| is a slap in the face to the American ideals of liberty and the
| sacrifices that tens of millions of freedom fighting Americans
| have made for centuries. Open your eyes.
| Dah00n wrote:
| (Sorry this sounds harsh but im using your words here.)
|
| If you believe America have true "ideals of liberty" and the
| million of Americans who have died in wars "fought for
| freedom" I think it is yourself that need to "open your
| eyes".
| periheli0n wrote:
| I'm somewhat positively surprised that there was a notice at all.
| This means that even non-US citizens enjoy some rights for being
| informed about data sharing. Silver lining.
| rusk wrote:
| A nice side benefit of Europeans insisting on theirs!
| aerovistae wrote:
| How do they have nothing better to do than this???? Who is
| directing them to put resources towards this? How is protecting
| entrenched academic journal profits a priority for the FBI?
| periheli0n wrote:
| I don't really get this whole frenzy about copyrighted papers.
| Why not just ask the authors for a copy? Most will happily share.
| Dah00n wrote:
| Because the authors are not allowed to share. If they do they
| are in breach of contract.
| ur-whale wrote:
| Your tax dollar at work.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| For some reason I thought iCloud was encrypted in such a way that
| only the user could gain access. Apparently this is not the case.
|
| FBI was able to access even Rudy Giuliani's iCloud for over a
| year, while he defended Trump as his lawyer. With no
| repercussions for doing so.
|
| https://ca.finance.yahoo.com/news/lawyer-feds-got-rudy-iclou...
| rtx wrote:
| Who are they loyal too.
| [deleted]
| haxiomic wrote:
| Science Publisher Elsevier's reported profit margin is 38%,
| compared to Apple's 21% - there's lot of cash at stake for them
| and a big warchest to defend it
|
| For anyone looking to understand the background on the science
| publishing industry, how it ended up this way and why they will
| fight Sci-Hub so aggressively, I found this discussion really
| informative:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PriwCi6SzLo&t=8s&ab_channel=...
| ma2rten wrote:
| I'm wondering why it's only 38%. They charge a lot and mostly
| work with volunteers. It should not cost 62% of what they
| charge to run a website to host some pdfs.
| 8note wrote:
| Likely some other company in the Cayman islands owns their
| intellectual property, and they they pay a good portion of
| their revenue to license it.
| haxiomic wrote:
| It's certainly more tax efficient to reduce your reported
| profits by finding ways to bury revenue
|
| This is the best breakdown I can find on their parent company
| RELX:
| https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/RELX/relx/cash-
| flo...
| r_singh wrote:
| They invest in making clinic decision support software to
| make research accessible to doctors, etc (it's practically
| also making decisions for them at times).
|
| Source - have attended an Elsevier CDSS Sales presentation
| for HCPs
| cblconfederate wrote:
| The rest might be laundered somehow.
| dagw wrote:
| Elsevier is a pretty big company offering lots of different
| products and services[1]. I suspect even Elsevier is smart
| enough to see that the current publishing business isn't
| sustainable and are trying to pivot into something else. The
| profits from their publishing arm (which is undoubtedly a lot
| more than 38%) is no doubt financing a lot of that pivoting
|
| [1] https://www.elsevier.com/solutions
| cbkeller wrote:
| Distribution costs are negligible when you just make the PDFs
| free to everyone, but publishers spend a bunch of money on
| access control, security, and web interfaces that make you
| jump through hoops to download the actual PDF while doing
| everything possible to convince you to read the papers
| through their (possibly "social"/"collaborative") online
| platform instead.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Where can I file for my damages as a reviewer? I have lost more
| than 2000 hours reviewing papers for for-profit publishers and
| they never gave me a single penny.
|
| edit: Heck many of them they did not even give me free access to
| their journal to check references from the papers I was reviewing
| for them. I had to rely on SciHub to do so.
| libeclipse wrote:
| I just learned that Sci-Hub has currently "temporarily" paused
| uploading new papers to the site.
|
| https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/lofj0r/announcement...
| michaf wrote:
| Your comment brings focus to the question of why reviewers
| agree to do these unpaid reviews in the first place. I assume
| your comment is in jest, and you were fully aware of the unpaid
| nature of the work. But what was your motivation to do it
| anyway and spend 2000 hours on it?
| matthewdgreen wrote:
| This is like asking an open source maintainer what their
| motive was to contribute to an important piece of software,
| since it's going to be hosted on a for-profit entity like
| GitHub. The motive is that reviewing is necessary to make
| science work (and secondarily it's required for promotions
| etc.) The problem in this setting is that Elsevier is part of
| the equation and demands copyright ownership, which makes it
| much worse than hosting on something GitHub. Unfortunately
| "just stop contributing" isn't a good answer, because that
| would throw out the baby with the bath water, and scientists
| care very deeply about the baby.
| whatever1 wrote:
| Which was kinda ok, until the moment they started going
| after the people who are creating the Journals' IP and
| value / reputation.
| betterunix2 wrote:
| I personally do peer review because I am part of a research
| community that requires it -- 9 of every 10 articles I review
| are absolute crap, and the community is better off if only
| 3-5 reviewers waste time reading those articles. The only way
| to avoid a free rider problem is if everyone agrees to
| participate, so I participate. It is also a good way to build
| a career in research -- reliable peer reviewers will
| eventually be asked to do more visible things like chair
| conference sessions.
|
| Would it be nice to be paid? Maybe, although to be honest I
| would rather keep money out of the process entirely -- I
| would like to continue having peer review be voluntary, and
| go further by also scrapping the publishing companies (who
| add nothing of value to any article I have written or seen in
| my entire career). In my field (cryptography) we run a
| preprint archive on a volunteer basis and it would not be a
| huge step to introduce a formal peer review process (there is
| already a minimal review process where the eprint vounteers
| reject papers that are obviously crap). We only bother with
| Springer because the European professors demand it (more
| precisely, their universities demand one of a handful of
| publishers, and Springer is least bad of the bunch).
| jhrmnn wrote:
| When I do peer review, I don't think of it as providing free
| service to the publisher, but as providing free service to
| the scientific community. I'm indirectly paid to do so by my
| employer. IMO employers of scientists should strike deals
| with publishers to get compensation for peer review from
| them.
| refurb wrote:
| Why did you volunteer you time for these for-profit entities?
| Couldn't you refuse?
| periheli0n wrote:
| Reviews are being done for peers and the (mostly unpaid)
| editors, not for the publisher. It's academic service for the
| scientific community.
|
| Although it's the publisher who ultimately creates profit
| from the work.
|
| However, would reviewers be paid, then the publisher would
| certainly charge the authors for this. No gain.
| kingsuper20 wrote:
| Given the provenance of most (all?) of the material on Sci-Hub,
| the copyright issues here seem laughable to me.
|
| Fruitless speculation about the FBI aside, you do have to wonder
| about the future of IP generally in the world. There's a sort of
| evolutionary pressure going on right now between different
| countries' approach to the matter and I can't say that the US-
| style rules will hold (or more realistically, be imposed).
| jMyles wrote:
| It seems so absolutely obvious that a jurisdiction adopting a
| "there is no such thing as IP" approach will have a huge
| advantage. What's the reason this hasn't happened?
| fabianhjr wrote:
| WTO and Trade/Economic Warfare. For example: https://www.wiki
| wand.com/en/United_States_embargo_against_Cu...
| layoutIfNeeded wrote:
| Have you heard about a country called "China"?
| SirSourdough wrote:
| I mean, that's pretty much China's position with regards to
| other countries IP as I understand it. There's just a lot of
| power still held by the nations that do support a US-style
| approach to IP, so many countries have incentive not to
| ignore IP laws.
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| IIRC, even they have been forced to increase enforcement of
| western IP rights over the last decade, because US has been
| pressuring them to (back before Trump and the whole trade
| war thing).
|
| This is a generally applicable answer: IP rights hold power
| worldwide mostly because the no.1 country that wants them
| has military and economic dominance over most of the
| planet.
| arp242 wrote:
| Chinese companies file a huge amount of patents at the US
| patent office; 20 years ago, when they didn't have many
| of their own patents, it didn't make much sense to
| enforce foreign patents in their own country. But now
| that China has its own large patent portfolio abroad, it
| makes a lot more sense to cooperate so they can enforce
| these patents, too.
| periheli0n wrote:
| IP was created to incentivize innovation and publication
| thereof. No point in publicising innovation when everyone can
| just go copy it. Some innovations will be kept secret
| forever, some will never happen.
| refurb wrote:
| Go to most undeveloped countries and see how well having no
| IP works.
| Shorel wrote:
| I think China secretly believes this.
| mnd999 wrote:
| The original purpose of copyright was to encourage people to
| create works. The theory being that of others can simply copy
| something where is the incentive to do it at all.
|
| IMHO, there's something in that for some classes of works, so
| I don't think no-IP is a good idea universally. It's
| certainly questionably for scientific papers though.
| jMyles wrote:
| I think it's very possible that this approach was
| historically important for promoting creativity, but I
| think it's more likely, on balance, to have the opposite
| effect as the internet matures.
| eikenberry wrote:
| Copyright was done primarily to make money for distributors
| with the secondary effect being that they can then afford
| to pay the creators. The copyright compromise was that we
| would give up our right to copy in order to enable copies,
| that cost money to make and move, to be available. Take
| away the cost of copying and distributing and the primary
| reason for copyright disappears.
|
| That leaves the secondary function of encouraging creation.
| But turns out creation is not 'original' as people thought
| and having others works freely available encourages new
| works much more than promises of monetary gains.
| danuker wrote:
| Especially ones funded by public money.
| croes wrote:
| You mean initial claim, the purpose was always money.
| rozab wrote:
| Here's my naive take: Tax havens, flags of convenience, etc.
| are allowed to exist by the international community because
| they benefit the powerful. A jurisdiction doing this would
| likely benefit the weak, rather than the powerful.
|
| China have managed it to an extent only because they have the
| economic clout to resist international pressure.
| rusk wrote:
| Trade agreements. You can play ball by whatever rules you
| like, but in order for it to be meaningful you'll have to get
| people to play with you.
| crazypython wrote:
| Finally, news about a hacker on Hacker News!
|
| If you are a hacker, you:
|
| - Mistrust authority
|
| - Promote decentralization
|
| - Share knowledge
|
| - Write open-source software
|
| - Maintain the infrastructure
|
| - Serve humanity
|
| - Are curious
|
| http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/hacker-howto.html
| notjes wrote:
| I like how the word "truth" is nowhere to be found in this
| pamphlet.
| crumbshot wrote:
| By her own words, in creating and maintaining Sci-Hub, Elbakyan
| was driven by communist ideals:
| https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc850001
| https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc920674
|
| Interesting to observe how it overlaps with this conception of
| the hacker spirit.
|
| If only the world had many more Alexandra Elbakyans, and fewer
| Elseviers. Humanity as a whole would be a lot better off
| without the capitalists ruining everything with their
| insatiable greed.
| generalizations wrote:
| Yeah, like that horrible capitalist company that funded the
| research lab which invented the transistor, Unix and C. We'd
| be so much better off without it out its 'capitalist, profit-
| driven creations'. (AT&T, Bell labs)
|
| /s
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Bell Labs was the beneficiary of a government-enforced
| monopoly on telephone service, but never mind that.
| argvargc wrote:
| Yeah, because unlike everything else ever invented in
| history, if AT&T and Bell hadn't done it, no one else ever
| would have, and there's also zero chance another wouldn't
| have done it any better.
|
| /s
| crumbshot wrote:
| Despite your unnecessary sarcasm, this is actually a good
| example, seeing as the company was eventually destroyed by
| the US government for abusing its monopoly position.
|
| They did indeed fund a highly successful research centre,
| but - importantly to its success - one that wasn't run with
| the same ideals as its parent. It wasn't Bell Labs itself
| that endeavoured to monopolise an entire industry to the
| point where the government had to intervene.
| Rochus wrote:
| > _interesting to observe how it overlaps with this
| conception of the hacker spirit_
|
| There is quite a difference between giving voluntarily and
| being expropriated.
|
| > _would be a lot better off without the capitalists_
|
| That's less capitalism, but rather monopolism and nepotism
| (actually a "government failure" in the view of public
| economics). If there were real competition, these publishers
| could not afford to charge such margins.
| arp242 wrote:
| That "hacker HOWTO" is horrible, and infused with ESR's
| ridiculous political ideas. I can think for myself; I don't
| need and certainly don't want a document which tells me what I
| should be like, especially not one written by some guy who is
| advocating for the literal execution of politicians by armed
| citizens.
| Dah00n wrote:
| But are you a hacker or just trying to stir up the pot?
| zozbot234 wrote:
| > I can think for myself; I don't need and certainly don't
| want a document which tells me what I should be like
|
| That document is not meant for _you_ ; it's meant to give
| prospective hackers an overview of the field. With respect to
| politics, the document explicitly says:
|
| > The hacker community has some specific, primarily defensive
| political interests -- two of them are defending free-speech
| rights and fending off "intellectual-property" power grabs
| that would make open source illegal. Some of those long-term
| projects are civil-liberties organizations like the
| Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the outward attitude
| properly includes support of them. But beyond that, most
| hackers view attempts to systematize the hacker attitude into
| an explicit political program with suspicion; we've learned,
| the hard way, that these attempts are divisive and
| distracting. _If someone tries to recruit you to march on
| your capitol in the name of the hacker attitude, they 've
| missed the point. The right response is probably "Shut up and
| show them the code."_
|
| (emphasis has been added for ease of reference)
| arp242 wrote:
| That's even worse; hijacking a community to indoctrinate
| people on how they _Ought To be(tm)_.
| danuker wrote:
| Thank you for linking the classic catb pages!
| o_p wrote:
| Lets rename it to Wageslave News
| [deleted]
| Iv wrote:
| Alexandra Elbakyan is a perfect example of someone who deserves a
| presidential pardon.
| slimsag wrote:
| Sounds like she's been in hiding since 2015[0]:
|
| > Following a 2015 lawsuit brought in the US by the publisher
| Elsevier, Elbakyan remains in hiding due to the risk of
| extradition; Elsevier was granted an injunction against her and
| $15 million in damages. Elbakyan and Sci-Hub were again involved
| in a US lawsuit in 2017, this time with the American Chemical
| Society. ACS sued the site for copyright and trademark
| violations, and conversion. Later that year, the court ruled in
| favor of ACS, fining Sci-Hub $4,800,000 in damages, enjoining
| further infringement, and prohibiting search engines and domain
| name registries from "facilitating access" to Sci-Hub.
|
| [0]
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexandra_Elbakyan#Creating_Sc...
| ehsankia wrote:
| > In 2016, Nature included her in their top ten people that
| mattered in science list
|
| Heh
| wolverine876 wrote:
| > Following a 2015 lawsuit brought in the US by the publisher
| Elsevier, Elbakyan remains in hiding due to the risk of
| extradition ...
|
| The perils of Wikipedia: That statement is cited to a Science
| article from 2016. If the citation is accurate (never a sure
| thing), Science's writer probably would have taken her word for
| it - it's not a investigative journalism organization - and
| even if that's all true, it's from 5 years ago.
| hirundo wrote:
| > and prohibiting search engines and domain name registries
| from "facilitating access" to Sci-Hub.
|
| I just searched for "sci-hub" on DDG, Google and Bing, and the
| sci-hub.st or sci-hub.se domain was the top result on each. I
| wonder what happened to the prohibition.
| concordDance wrote:
| Here in the UK the main sci-hub domains are blocked at the
| ISP level.
|
| We're a very censorous country.
| justincormack wrote:
| Not by all ISPs, eg my ISP is Andrews and Arnold that does
| not censor the internet.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| Does using DNS over HTTPS avoid this block?
|
| Edit: Thank you for the replies.
| beermonster wrote:
| DNS-o-TLS and bouncing from a UK-region cloud-provider
| endpoint works for me. Any ISP blocking (internet
| censorship in the UK is more rife than you'd expect) is
| either done via hijacking DNS (which D-o-T mitigates) or
| if you've a consumer ISP connection.
| scarygliders wrote:
| Nope. Just tried.
|
| Hard redirect to
| http://www.ukispcourtorders.co.uk/?JNI_URL=sci-
| hub.st/&JNI_R...
| lanerobertlane wrote:
| It's very nice of the UK Government to give a nice
| ordered list of pirate sites to use, as long as you take
| the 30 seconds required to change your DNS or use a VPN.
| notjes wrote:
| Now finally a tax payer funded service by the UK
| Government that we all can appreciate.
| arp242 wrote:
| The URL contains
| "JNI_DSTIP=186.2.163.201&JNI_DSTPORT=80"; so maybe
| they're intercepting connections to this IP? Does
| explicitly adding https:// work?
|
| Otherwise there's always Opera where you can just click
| the "VPN" button.
| scarygliders wrote:
| And I can't reply to myself above, but after starting
| ExpressVPN I can access the sites fine.
| dannyw wrote:
| Just changing your dns is fine.
| f311a wrote:
| She lives in Russia and attends some local events. There is no
| reason to hide if you don't travel outside of Russia.
| cblconfederate wrote:
| In Kazakhstan
| f311a wrote:
| No, she lives in Russia. She also studied in Russia and
| tried to get Russian citizenship in 2016.
| [deleted]
| guerrilla wrote:
| I know Russia has no extradition treaty with the US, but do
| they never extradite for any reason? Hmm, from what I'm
| reading on Quora "The Russian Constitution protects its own
| citizens from extradition to a foreign country." Interesting,
| I didn't know that.
| hiq wrote:
| According to Wikipedia she's a Kazakhstani citizen, not
| Russian.
| jessriedel wrote:
| That's true, but she has spent lots of time living in
| Russia. At least as of 2019, she refused to tell
| reporters where exactly she was living.
| poilcn wrote:
| Sounds offensive that one's compatriots could be given to
| another country to be put on trial.
| staticman2 wrote:
| Not really. If I murder someone while visiting another
| country it makes sense I'd face justice in the foreign
| country, where all the witnesses are. Especially if the
| legal systems are similar.
|
| It becomes more of an issue where one country doesn't
| trust the legal system of another country.
| shill4humanity wrote:
| Brings up a memory of a recent event of an American DUI
| murder in the UK and leaving before their untrustworthy
| legal system kicked in.
| lrhegeba wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_of_Harry_Dunn
| MeinBlutIstBlau wrote:
| Well you just need to marry a via operative and you can
| get away with it too.
| Dah00n wrote:
| You mean like not extraditing that diplomats wife who
| killed someone in traffic (DUI) and then ran home to the
| US?
| ok123456 wrote:
| There's an MLAT treaty. It's unlikely she would be
| extradited, but it's not impossible.
| viktorcode wrote:
| Sometimes they do. There was a scandal some years ago when
| they extradited an ex-banker, who is a Russian citizen,
| which was illegal.
| tandav wrote:
| "What Happens on your iPhone, Stays on your iPhone" - they said
|
| https://i.imgur.com/Dfk34yM.jpg
| daemoon wrote:
| Thats why they said that and not "What is on your iCloud, stays
| on your iCloud"
| beermonster wrote:
| I said, "Hey, you, get off of my cloud Hey, you, get off of
| my cloud Hey, you, get off of my cloud Don't hang around
| 'cause two's a crowd On my cloud, baby"
| laurent92 wrote:
| A lot of people have porn on their phone, and none would be
| able to prove its provenance. I wonder if one day Apple will
| be required to detect all underage model photos and delete
| the person's entire Apple account.
| Dah00n wrote:
| I think it more likely Apple would ban porn "to protect the
| user" if anti-porn became more normal.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| it does.
|
| Unless you tell your iPhone to send everything you have to
| Amazon, or Dropbox, or iCloud, or Google, or Facebook, or
| Backblaze, or [insert cloud service subject to Chinese, EU, or
| US law here].
| hu3 wrote:
| or iCloud
| uo21tp5hoyg wrote:
| I think it's important to note that for Backblaze personal
| backup you can set your own private keys for end to end
| encryption[0].
|
| [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/backblaze/comments/mncrsn/-/gu0d
| vf7...
| designium wrote:
| Unless if you have a backup in iCloud. Anyone with access to
| your iCloud account could pull that backup.
| Krasnol wrote:
| I wonder how many of those who fell for the ad know that.
| ksec wrote:
| And that is why I want iOS Time Capsule. I want my own Data
| to stay in my property. Right now you have to buy a Mac to do
| backup if you want that. Since iTunes on Windows somehow has
| a much higher chance of creating corrupted iTunes Backup.
| nojito wrote:
| Not with the new windows store version of iTunes.
| machello13 wrote:
| What's the difference between that and the standard
| version distributed by Apple? They seem the same -- why
| is one more reliable for backups?
| sneak wrote:
| Location Services being on systemwide sends your location 24/7
| to Apple. It's not just GPS reception, it also uploads the list
| of wifi MAC addresses it can see, with signal strengths, to
| improve its location fix.
| nichch wrote:
| Is this confirmed or are you just saying it because it's
| technically possible?
|
| Edit: Yes, this is confirmed in Apple's privacy policy for
| location services.
|
| "If Location Services is on, your iPhone will periodically
| send the geo-tagged locations of nearby Wi-Fi hotspots and
| cell towers (where supported by a device) in an anonymous and
| encrypted form to Apple, to be used for augmenting this
| crowd-sourced database of Wi-Fi hotspot and cell tower
| locations."
|
| [0] https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT207056
| hu3 wrote:
| Interestingly, FBI sent the request on 2019-02-06 and only two
| years later was Apple allowed to notify her.
| slim wrote:
| So FBI was spying on her for two years?
| taormina wrote:
| You think its only been for two years?
| slothtrop wrote:
| Shows you where their priorities lie, protecting wealthy
| interests.
| dukeofdoom wrote:
| Common people on the right now distrust the justice department
| and the courts as much as the people on the left.
| seniorivn wrote:
| there is a recent interview with her(she rarely gives any)
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nG_I2QQc9Ww SVTV channel, it's in
| Russian, youtube automatic subtitles are not bad, so if you must
| you can use them.
| mariuolo wrote:
| Not much they can do to her in Russia. I also assume she's smart
| enough not to keep anything important in her iCloud.
| brjfkgkrnr wrote:
| But then again there is a lot Russia can do to her, for example
| use her as a token in exchange for some US favour at some
| convenient time.
| mariuolo wrote:
| It would have to be a /very/ big favour to sell out a CIS
| citizen.
| dartharva wrote:
| Doesn't seem very likely. What exactly would the US gain
| except some face value before "Science Journal" oligarchs
| (which in itself, doesn't seem valuable)? Sounds like a bad
| deal if the US ever did any favor for them in exchange of one
| relatively harmless individual.
|
| Sci-hub likely won't even be hurt if they somehow get
| Elbakyan. She must have had other people to fall back on for
| the project, who'll continue to keep the website online.
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| > Not much they can do to her in X
|
| I think you really underestimate the power of smear/ blackmail
| campaigns and how effectively they have worked in the last
| century for the intelligence services. This has nothing to do
| with upholding the law.
| lostlogin wrote:
| > This has nothing to do with upholding the law.
|
| It had everything to do with New Zealand politicians trying
| to impress the powerful. It's was embarrassing.
|
| Said as a New Zealander.
| ipaddr wrote:
| It definity made New Zealand look like a place where the
| rule law doesn't necessarily apply fairly. Ironically the
| rule of law would prevent the US from doing the same thing
| if New Zealand made a similiar request.
| that_guy_iain wrote:
| But this isn't a intelligence agency matter. Just standard
| law enforcement.
| imglorp wrote:
| Look what happened to Kim Dotcom over US copyright at the
| behest of the corporate content owners: swat team,
| extradition hearings, the works. The US penalties are greater
| than murder.
| guerrilla wrote:
| He wasn't in Russia though, Snowden is in Russia.
| danuker wrote:
| Note to self: if I find myself in the crosshairs of the
| US government, move to Russia.
| periheli0n wrote:
| Not that Snowden leads an open and tremendously free live
| in Russia. At least that's not what it sounded like in
| his autobiography.
| matheusmoreira wrote:
| Yeah, it's insanity. That guy somehow got worse treatment
| than violent drug traffickers.
| erikpukinskis wrote:
| As far as I can tell he didn't do anything illegal
| either? Same business model as YouTube, which didn't have
| any SWAT teams on it.
| nurgasemetey wrote:
| I don't understand one thing. Why Germany didn't interfere
| extradiction? (I assume that he held Germany citizenship)
| ryanlol wrote:
| Why would they?
| periheli0n wrote:
| Because Schmitz was in New Zealand at the time. Not much
| Germany can do to overturn NZ law. Germany is not the US
| after all...
| ryanlol wrote:
| Germany could interfere if they wanted to, Kimble just
| isn't worth the trouble (few people would be).
|
| There are things you can do, see how Russia is handling
| these things when their VIPs are targeted for
| extradition.
|
| Ordinary citizens with no high up political or IC
| connections never receive any significant state aid in
| extradition cases no matter what passport they hold. At
| best your embassy might refer you to a lawyer or help you
| arrange money transfer from your home country.
| janeroe wrote:
| > you really underestimate the power of smear ... campaigns
|
| Not much they can do really. Elbakyan is a Stalinist who
| thinks the mass killer was a saint sent by God. She
| discredits herself at interviews and on her personal web-site
| just fine. None of that matters. People are using sci-hub
| because it's useful, crazyness of its author is irrelevant.
| newacct583 wrote:
| > This has nothing to do with upholding the law.
|
| No, the law is actually very clear here. What sci-hub does is
| clear copyright violation. There's no real debate to be had.
|
| Civil cases where damages get into the tens of millions of
| dollars routinely involve law enforcement. It's no different
| from a big insider trading case as far as the FBI is
| concerned.
|
| The fundamental truth behind the protest (and again it's
| important to realize: _sci-hub is an act of protest_ ) is
| that the law is _unjust_. Rosa Parks was in clear violation
| of the written law too.
|
| The reason for the pedantry is that if you imagine this as
| solely an act of an unrestrained state actor, you won't be
| incentivized to work for the _actual solution_ , which
| involves passing laws and otherwise working with the same
| state you're complaining about.
| BelenusMordred wrote:
| > What sci-hub does is clear copyright violation.
|
| Think you've misunderstood my point, this is without a
| doubt a fishing expedition for no real purpose.
|
| Alexandra Elbakyan is already convicted and will be
| extradited the moment she steps outside the country,
| there's very likely sealed indictments waiting in the
| shadows too, the evidence for her crimes are overwhelming
| and without dispute by anyone.
|
| Things like this are just another chance at a smear
| campaign, they really don't care about what laws have been
| broken now, that part is over, all they want is leverage.
|
| Flashback 2 years:
|
| > A former senior U.S. intelligence official said he
| believes Elbakyan is working with Russia's military
| intelligence arm, the GRU, the same organization that stole
| emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary
| Clinton's campaign chairman and then provided them to
| WikiLeaks in 2016.
|
| As reported in the Washington Post and others. See how
| conveniently these two seemingly unrelated matters are
| being connected? Why would a respected newspaper go off on
| a segue like that?
|
| https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20191226/14393243638/acad
| e...
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