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Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

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Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#161

Post by anc84 »

jsilence wrote: post #144
anc84 wrote: post #36

I wish we as scientific community could make some secure, anonymous, shared hosting work for this. With sci-hub as authority and everyone else being able to allocate as much of their local disk space for this. edit: Before someone suggests IPFS: IPFS is not suitable. a) it is not anonymous and b) it duplicates everything for its block storage so you have to have twice the space...

What about I2P? https://geti2p.net/en/

Yeah, I love I2P. Tahoe-LFS is well supported with I2P and vice-versa but I think it has the same duplication annoyance like IPFS.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#162

Post by college_library »

dingoonline wrote: post #55
dotdi wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my understanding, some people have donated their academic login credentials, effectively giving Sci-hub access to their institution's subscriptions. When somebody requests an article, Sci-hub will try and see if it already has it. If not, it will attempt to use some of the donated credentials to gain access, download it and store it for further download requests.

I'm still curious as to how this system works. Don't institutions have logs that would show someone researching topics wildly outside of their field of study?

At my library (smallish US college):

We do keep logs for a period of time, but the library administration's policy is to only investigate them when a publisher contacts us with a claim of abuse (we do not proactively monitor for unusual activity, although we do take steps like limiting the number of concurrent sessions per user and blacklisting IP addresses/ranges with a history of suspicious activity).

The publisher generally supplies examples of timestamps and URLs that were part of the alleged abuse. We use that information to identify the "abusing" user in the log.

Usually there is pretty clear evidence that the user is not conducting legitimate personal research (e.g. the user is a freshman early childhood education major at the local rural branch campus, but they're downloading thousands of chemistry papers from an IP address in China or Russia). Typically the user does not seem like an information freedom warrior, or even to have a clue what is going on, so it seems most likely the credentials were phished.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#163

Post by stevemclaugh »

college_library wrote: post #162
dingoonline wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm still curious as to how this system works. Don't institutions have logs that would show someone researching topics wildly outside of their field of study?

At my library (smallish US college): We do keep logs for a period of time, but the library administration's policy is to only investigate them when a publisher contacts us with a claim of abuse (we do not proactively monitor for unusual activity, although we do take steps like limiting the number of concurrent sessions per user and blacklisting IP addresses/ranges with a history of suspicious activity). The publisher…

Thanks for this.

These cases may or may not be phishing. When corporations are hacked for their user credentials, those databases sometimes end up in dark web markets. It would be easy to extract email addresses with .edu domains ... so if a student used their university address for some service and reused the password, there's your login.

Moral of the story: Encourage students to use a password manager and 2FA.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#164

Post by dang »

saladeen wrote: post #94
fiala__ wrote: post #71

The only thing that worries me about SciHub is the fact that according to her Wikipedia article, the founder shows the exact symptoms of a freedom fighter turned Putin's mouthpiece, similar to Assange etc. I have a problem with academic freedom being preached from hotel rooms paid for by the most repressive, warmongering and manipulative regime in Europe.

Russia is not the most repressive regime in Europe. Are you forgetting Belarus? My 2c: you also show all symptoms of being a Soros/ShareBlue shill, considering how you try to weave in unrelated politically charged smear content targeting Ass-Angel, into a discussion about a site enabling academic freedom.

Please don't respond to a bad comment with an even worse one. That's exactly the wrong direction to take.

Charges of shillage against other users are not allowed here unless (in some extremely rare twist of fate) you have actual evidence thereof. Treating such accusations as a routine internet tactic is poison, so please don't do it again.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#165

Post by starbird3000 »

erikbye wrote: post #160
lawl wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Aaron Swartz's death brings tears to my eyes to this day. Even if I have never met him, or talked to him. Or actually ever really heard of him until he had to take his life. There's a great documentary about this extraordinary guy I assume most have already seen, but I'll post it again anyways: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Internet%27s_Own_Boy

A terrible and tragic loss. And not the first or last victim of zealous and overwrought prosecution. This kind of overkill-prosecution is a familiar and common tactic used to oppress and silence activists. Though not an activist, he was another hacker prosecuted by the same team as Swartz, Jonathan James. He also committed suicide, at the age of 24. When he was 17 he spent six months in a federal corrections facility…

I agree. It was a great guy. However, I think its worth pointing out that JSTOR didn't want him prosecuted and they came to a viable agreement. SciHub on the otherhand is plain theft and its not being backed by donations, it has to be more well funded than that based on its uptime and storage.

The general estimates in the community is around $1.6 million a year to run. That's not cheap.

Re: Sci-Hub: Public access to research papers

#166

Post by saladeen »

dang wrote: post #164
saladeen wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Russia is not the most repressive regime in Europe. Are you forgetting Belarus? My 2c: you also show all symptoms of being a Soros/ShareBlue shill, considering how you try to weave in unrelated politically charged smear content targeting Ass-Angel, into a discussion about a site enabling academic freedom.

Please don't respond to a bad comment with an even worse one. That's exactly the wrong direction to take. Charges of shillage against other users are not allowed here unless (in some extremely rare twist of fate) you have actual evidence thereof. Treating such accusations as a routine internet tactic is poison, so please don't do it again. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

It wasn't a real accusation and I definitely don't use it routinely, was just pointing out ridiculousness of politically charging a conversation about a very useful scientific tool which I am a great fan of. One can always find some angle to accuse someone of being someone else's agent.
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