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FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

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Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#231

Post by Dah00n »

bilbo0s wrote: post #45
eatbitseveryday wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Realize also that communication you have with others, for example via iMessage, may be stored at Apple if they have iCloud backup enabled.

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 no…

You would appear smarter if you dropped the fanboy-ism. Apple just as bad as Google, just in other ways.

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#232

Post by turtletontine »

xNeil wrote: post #32

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?

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.

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#233

Post by Dah00n »

breck wrote: post #116
sonicggg wrote: post #21

Are they looking for people outside Russia that may be helping her? There's not much they can do while she's living there.

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 fighti…

(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".

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#235

Post by eikenberry »

mnd999 wrote: post #68
jMyles wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

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.

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.

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#236

Post by londons_explore »

gravypod wrote: post #183
boramalper wrote: post #146

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…

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 fil…

> 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...

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#237

Post by BelenusMordred »

newacct583 wrote: post #31
BelenusMordred wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

> 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 importa…

> 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/acade...

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#238

Post by ravel-bar-foo »

danaris wrote: post #70
hollerith wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wi…

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 bei…

Couple funny stories about Elsevier. I published with them, and created an account. They started sending me spam advertising new journals. So I logged in and unsubscribed from all their mailing lists. Reliably, exactly one year after unsubscribing I get spam from them. When I go to unsubscribe I find a new category of mailing list, opted in automatically.

One might call it a mistake, but is remarkably suspicious that the spam regularly arrives exactly one year (to the day) after I most recently unsubscribed.

There are the financial aspects to their exploitation, but I guess this struck a nerve because it is scummy behavior that affects me more personally.

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#239

Post by seniorivn »

periheli0n wrote: post #164
danuker wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Note to self: if I find myself in the crosshairs of the US government, move to Russia.

Not that Snowden leads an open and tremendously free live in Russia. At least that's not what it sounded like in his autobiography.

surprisingly his life is a lot more free and open, than you would imagine, so much that russian politically involved people suspect he has some kind of a deal with KGB(FSB, etc) that he can't talk about.

Re: FBI subpoenaed Apple for data of Sci-Hub founder

#240

Post by sneak »

nichch wrote: post #182
sneak wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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 W…

It’s not anonymous, as it includes the client IP when making the requests. This uniquely identifies a subscriber.
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