Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time? • Hacker News Board

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#351

Post by faeyanpiraat » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

cf141q5325 wrote: post #329

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can only get guaranteed protection from malware infections through the internet if you turn off your machine. Even then there might be some remote management exploits which would work on turned off machines, so unplug the cables aswell.

Thats not a reason to fudge with the definitions. The existence of sandboxes doesnt mean there are no more pdf exploits. There still are and sandboxes dont mitigate it entirely. There is also more ways then just turning off your machine. Its needlessly oversimplifying complex topics. Topics that are very interesting and have severe implications. Especially if we are talking about state level espionage. So in short, n…

I only confirmed what you said.

The best way to reduce the number of bugs (exploits) in a system is to get rid of it.

Since you've brought up state level espionage, this might be the reason why states are run by hordes of bureocrats processing physical paperwork (this is an oversimplification of course).

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#352

Post by subroutine » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:56 PM UTC

krastanov wrote: post #343

subroutine wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion what would constitute a small fee? $10? $100? $3000? https://www.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees

In a sibling comment I mentioned. If they do professional typsetting, around 3000 is not crazy. If I do the typesetting, then ≤500 is what I would expect.

Roughly how long does it take to typeset a 5 page manuscript?

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#353

Post by Y_Y » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 2:59 PM UTC

krastanov wrote: post #343

subroutine wrote: post #315

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In your opinion what would constitute a small fee? $10? $100? $3000? https://www.frontiersin.org/about/publishing-fees

In a sibling comment I mentioned. If they do professional typsetting, around 3000 is not crazy. If I do the typesetting, then ≤500 is what I would expect.

Haha, can I get a few thousand dollars for typesetting my paper? That's absurd. Sure you can spend a month setting it in your printing press or illustrator or whatever, but just using the journal's template along with LaTeX is perfectly good nowadays, and the hardest part is getting to it to compile.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#354

Post by pvaldes » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 3:04 PM UTC

kirillzubovsky wrote: post #238

Could someone with knowledge of the matter explain why scientists still publish to these journals, and still sign up for access? It seems like as long as every university in the world can just switch to a blog a do away with publications, they'd save a lot of money, improve science, and reduce complexity overnight. Why are paid journals still a thing?

Because a high Impact Index value is required to obtain grants later.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Impact_factor

Therefore is a captive customer case. And captive here has the same meaning as slave. If you don't work for free for some journals, basically you can't have a scientist career. In higher levels articles are not enough and you need to consider seriously to write a book for Elsevier or somebody else.

And this cut both ways. Acta Vertebrata, the journal of the Doñana's Biological Station since 1974, have to be closed in 1997 after decades trying unsuccessfully to achieve a higher impact index as journal. Low impact index means that you obtain less and less of the researchers effort and that interesting articles fly away your radar. Researchers deciding to publish in Acta Vertebrata had a competitive disadvantage. It was a terrific journal, the problem is that they did science in the latinosphere, period. Nowadays science means do politics or go home

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#355

Post by markus92 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 3:10 PM UTC

IshKebab wrote: post #264

jacobolus wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If sci-hub goes down it will significantly disrupt nearly every scientific researcher, in every field, all over the world. After getting used to a world where every paper is obtainable, it would be very difficult for people to go back. I’m not really a scholar or academic per se, but the independent research I do (which involves skimming thousands of papers per year, 99% of which are irrelevant or useless) would be a…

For researchers in most universities almost every paper is obtainable without scihub.

I’m a researcher at a first world university. I used sci-hub to pirate my own papers cus we did not have a subscription to the journal anymore. I’m not paying $39 to read my own work!

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#356

Post by cf141q5325 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 3:38 PM UTC

faeyanpiraat wrote: post #351

cf141q5325 wrote: post #329

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thats not a reason to fudge with the definitions. The existence of sandboxes doesnt mean there are no more pdf exploits. There still are and sandboxes dont mitigate it entirely. There is also more ways then just turning off your machine. Its needlessly oversimplifying complex topics. Topics that are very interesting and have severe implications. Especially if we are talking about state level espionage. So in short, n…

I only confirmed what you said. The best way to reduce the number of bugs (exploits) in a system is to get rid of it. Since you've brought up state level espionage, this might be the reason why states are run by hordes of bureocrats processing physical paperwork (this is an oversimplification of course).

>this might be the reason why states are run by hordes of bureocrats processing physical paperwork (this is an oversimplification of course).

Nice point, thanks for bringing it up. Reminded me of https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/jul/11/russia-reverts... >Russian guard service reverts to typewriters after NSA leaks

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#357

Post by krastanov » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 3:59 PM UTC

subroutine wrote: post #352

krastanov wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sibling comment I mentioned. If they do professional typsetting, around 3000 is not crazy. If I do the typesetting, then ≤500 is what I would expect.

Roughly how long does it take to typeset a 5 page manuscript?

If you go for high quality and work on the figures is performed, my (unreliable) guess is half a day for a professional designer. It takes me much more, because my latex skills are limited and because I insist on using the most standard and reproducible tools/packages in latex.

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#358

Post by krastanov » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:02 PM UTC

Y_Y wrote: post #353

krastanov wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In a sibling comment I mentioned. If they do professional typsetting, around 3000 is not crazy. If I do the typesetting, then ≤500 is what I would expect.

Haha, can I get a few thousand dollars for typesetting my paper? That's absurd. Sure you can spend a month setting it in your printing press or illustrator or whatever, but just using the journal's template along with LaTeX is perfectly good nowadays, and the hardest part is getting to it to compile.

Just using the journal template and looking only for compilation errors does not produce particularly good results. If I am preparing something for a journal like Quantum, where I am in charge of typesetting my work, it would take me a day or so to ensure figures are well placed and margins are not weird (in other words, not simply make it compile, but make it compile without warnings (not errors)). Most scientists do not care about the warnings latex emits as long as it compiles, and the results are ugly papers. I find it reasonable to pay $1000 to someone to take care of that processing (if they do a good job at it, which APS's and Nature's journals do).

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#359

Post by wolverine876 » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:09 PM UTC

pjerem wrote: post #281

wolverine876 wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's copying, not theft. > The latter deprives someone of an item ... It's depriving people of money, which is not a trivial asset.

It’s depriving journals from money they could make from publications when they have already charged the authors to publish them. There is no moral dilemma here : accessing an article thru Sci-Hub deprives nobody from getting its due money. Scientists unfortunately continues not being paid for the paper, journals continues being paid by universities to review the paper, but nobody wants to pay just to read a paper fro…

So you agree that it is theft from publishers?

Re: Is Alexandra Elbakyan in real trouble this time?

#360

Post by Naracion » Mon, Jul 05, 2021, 4:59 PM UTC

qiqitori wrote: post #271

mkl wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Only the existing bits. New publications wouldn't be included, so eventually the archive would become less relevant and stop being shared. There's significant cost for the required storage (currently 77TB according to andyxor's comment).

77TB (or 104 TB) sounds expensive, but many people reading this could buy that kind of storage with just one month's salary. (SeaGate IronWolf Pro 16 TB, currently $521 on Amazon)

You can get amazing deals on storage at different points in the year. I have a Seagate 16TB external hard disk that I bought during Black Friday sales of 2020 for about $270, half of your quoted price. Currently, it is $450 new.

At the reduced cost, we'd only need 7 of those for 112TB of storage, and that's $1890 + taxes, close to $2000. Not a lot of money for a backup of humanity's knowledge.