201–210 of 280 posts
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> Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Sci-Hub can pull PDF's on demand from academic databases, using credentials that have been secretly donated to them. Once the file is acquired, it could be distributed with a magnet link, but getting it out from behind the paywall in the first place is the tricky part.
IPFS would be perfect for distributing this, if it worked well.
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> 55 TB ... > smallish What a time to be alive
55 TB fits comfortably on 4 16TB HDDs. You can fit around 8 drives in a single tabletop NAS before you have to go either to multiple enclosures or rack mounting. Using that as a metric I would call anything below 100TB smallish. Storage is indeed progressing a lot.
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55 TB fits comfortably on 4 16TB HDDs. You can fit around 8 drives in a single tabletop NAS before you have to go either to multiple enclosures or rack mounting. Using that as a metric I would call anything below 100TB smallish. Storage is indeed progressing a lot.
That much storage would still cost somewhere around $1500-$2000. Impressively low, but still in the range of a very dedicated hobbyist.
Have a tiny online donation setup and you could get full sponsorship or half easily.
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Could/has SciHub been replicated with a database of magnet links to torrents of papers, or similar? Or does it have features that rely on centralisation at this point? Can this be remedied so that SciHub can be operational in a truly decentralized, Bitcoin-like manner, where governments can't interfere short of blocking entire networking protocols? This is not really my area of expertise, but I'd like to understand t…
Torrents are available here: http://gen.lib.rus.ec/scimag/repository_torrent/ Apparently it was 55TB two years ago. It's probably still somewhere in the realm of a smallish NAS and I bet a couple people on /r/datahoarders have it all downloaded. Hosting is a different matter. I'm not sure if there's some effort to have it available on IPFS or DAT
Rights holders have been trying to get rid of sites like the pirate bay for more than a decade, and if anything PB is easier to find and more reliable to use than ever before. If they really want change, it's time for them to dispassionately consider their situation. The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor, which it is. When I was a kid, everyone downloaded raw mp3s and now that number is a fractio…
When our daughter was born with a rare life threatening condition my wife used SciHub to read articles about her condition. While the doctors had merely skimmed the pages, my wife pored over them and found a suggestion of using a particular drug. After asking five different doctors about it, one finally agreed to prescribe it. It was strange how reticent doctors were to prescribe something and instead just told us sh…
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SciHub is quite valuable for independent researchers like me. But there are other ways to get free copies of articles: https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
Once of the reasons SciHub exists is for the same reason torrent websites and DDLs exist: ease of access. Not everybody wants to go through 5 different options to get access to an article when a single step (aka SciHub) would do.
sci-hub has more ergonomics and uptime than all the others.
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> The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor... I hope it's not too tangential, but I think of economics and politics the same way: XYZ-ism is good you say? ABC-ism is bad? Sure, grow your XYZ-ism naturally, go for the bootstraps. If it's more awesome it should be more efficient and productive, people should choose it naturally, happily, and calmly in their own best interest without coercion or propag…
https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/
laisez faire is no way to solve the tragedy of the commons
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> The way to "beat" piracy is to consider it as a competitor... I hope it's not too tangential, but I think of economics and politics the same way: XYZ-ism is good you say? ABC-ism is bad? Sure, grow your XYZ-ism naturally, go for the bootstraps. If it's more awesome it should be more efficient and productive, people should choose it naturally, happily, and calmly in their own best interest without coercion or propag…
One problem with this idea is that collective action problems exist. I truly want this new world, but my employment and promotion decisions are based on the old one (closed journals are older, and most of the prestigious journals are old and closed, and to get a job that's where I need to publish). Critically, the same is also true of all of my colleagues. So we all submit to the old journals, which thereby retain th…
if awesome = neither effective nor productive then we're going to get mass starvation and mass death, or at the very least feudalism, and that doesn't sound nice
I know of no competitive natural system that's more wasteful than its competitors
Moreover, most academic research in the US is government funded, so citizens deserve access to publications.