Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer • Hacker News Board

Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

#81

Post by iicc » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

TelmoMenezes wrote: post #58

iicc wrote: post #55

GDPR?

Oh come on...

EU citizens have an explicit right to a direct transfer in to Zotero.

"Right to data portability"

>The data subject shall have the right to receive the personal data concerning him or her, which he or she has provided to a controller, in a structured, commonly used and machine-readable format and have the right to transmit those data to another controller without hindrance from the controller to which the personal data have been provided, where:

> the processing is based on consent pursuant to point (a) of Article 6(1) or point (a) of Article 9(2) or on a contract pursuant to point (b) of Article 6(1); and the processing is carried out by automated means.

>In exercising his or her right to data portability pursuant to paragraph 1, the data subject shall have the right to have the personal data transmitted directly from one controller to another, where technically feasible.

Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

#82

Post by shittyadmin » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 6:00 PM UTC

Lord_Nightmare wrote: post #52

justinclift wrote: post #4

Reading through that, it seems like Mendeley uses SQLite for it's local database. There aren't that many SQLite encryption libraries around (generalising), so it's probably using either SQLCipher or SEE. https://www.zetetic.net/sqlcipher https://www.sqlite.org/see/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki There's a reasonable chance the page size and passphrase is stored or cached on the machine. If someone (not me) takes the time an…

They're using SEE, see https://eighty-twenty.org/2018/06/13/mendeley-encrypted-db

Unfortunately here's the catch - while it's probably trivial to reverse engineer enough to extract the key for the SEE database, it means that Zotero would need an SEE license to be able to handle the file still.

As an alternative it should be quite possible to produce a hook using Frida or similar that would disable database encryption on the Mendeley side so it can be imported through the usual channels. Not pretty though.

Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

#83

Post by montalbano » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 6:12 PM UTC

boyband6666 wrote: post #37

zwaps wrote: post #6

Zotero has improved a lot, while Mendeley has repeatedly regressed. Mendeley used to be quite a good program, but recently you can not export annotated PDFs meaningfully. For example, sending a folder of annotated PDFs to a co-author during a literature review is impossible. This is obviously the case since Elsevier does not want you to trade research papers, whether you have lawfull access or not. The updates that t…

Zotero has improved a lot, though sadly it still has a way to go on the user experience of Mendeley. My main gripes are - The way that it still doesn't play nice with cloud services (syncing the directory and its just a matter of time until you get database corruption. It takes a lot of wonky setting up to get it to kind of work, which just shouldn't be the case - The lack of developers and thus slow pace of improvem…

> The way that it still doesn't play nice with cloud services (syncing the directory and its just a matter of time until you get database corruption. It takes a lot of wonky setting up to get it to kind of work, which just shouldn't be the case

I'm using Zotero's $20/year for 2GB space membership and it was quick and easy to set up. Works great too.

Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

#84

Post by dstillman » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 6:18 PM UTC

boyband6666 wrote: post #37

zwaps wrote: post #6

Zotero has improved a lot, while Mendeley has repeatedly regressed. Mendeley used to be quite a good program, but recently you can not export annotated PDFs meaningfully. For example, sending a folder of annotated PDFs to a co-author during a literature review is impossible. This is obviously the case since Elsevier does not want you to trade research papers, whether you have lawfull access or not. The updates that t…

Zotero has improved a lot, though sadly it still has a way to go on the user experience of Mendeley. My main gripes are - The way that it still doesn't play nice with cloud services (syncing the directory and its just a matter of time until you get database corruption. It takes a lot of wonky setting up to get it to kind of work, which just shouldn't be the case - The lack of developers and thus slow pace of improvem…

> The lack of developers and thus slow pace of improvement [...] we are reliant on one or two volunteers to improve the product

I'm not sure why you have that impression. Zotero has amazing, invaluable volunteers, but there's a paid, full-time dev team working on Zotero every day. In the last year, we've added:

- Google Docs integration [1]

- Unpaywall integration [2]

- A new, greatly improved PDF recognition system [3]

- Faster citing in large documents [3]

- A much more powerful saving interface [4]

- Mendeley import...

- ZoteroBib, a free web service for generating bibliographies [5]

- A barcode scanner for iOS [6]

- Regular updates and bug fixes [7]

[1] https://www.zotero.org/blog/google-docs-integration/

[2] https://www.zotero.org/blog/improved-pdf-retrieval-with-unpa...

[3] https://www.zotero.org/blog/zotero-5-0-36/

[4] https://twitter.com/zotero/status/991052142717886464

[5] https://www.zotero.org/blog/introducing-zoterobib/

[6] https://www.zotero.org/blog/scan-books-into-zotero-from-your...

[7] https://www.zotero.org/support/changelog

(Disclosure: Zotero developer)

Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

#85

Post by phren0logy » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 6:55 PM UTC

veddox wrote: post #53

phren0logy wrote: post #34

To anyone looking for an alternative, I'd just throw out there that I've been very happy with ReadCube. It's proprietary subscription software, but that's a trade-off I can live with for a great browser plugin, mobile apps with good annotation, cloud storage of annotated articles, seamless syncing across devices, and a high-quality Word citation plugin that works on the Mac. This company bought Papers, the Mac app, a…

I used ReadCube several years ago when it was still really new (and free). Great program, very pretty interface - but it didn't work on Linux. When I switched from Windows, I had to let it go.

I mostly use the web version, and that seems to function well everywhere these days. Not sure about the desktop version, but after ages and ages they are finally getting the desktop application that incorporates their Papers acquisition, so it might be worth looking again if you like it. Hopefully, that does a better job on Linux, but that's always a gamble.

Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

#86

Post by burtonator » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 8:10 PM UTC

zwaps wrote: post #6

Zotero has improved a lot, while Mendeley has repeatedly regressed. Mendeley used to be quite a good program, but recently you can not export annotated PDFs meaningfully. For example, sending a folder of annotated PDFs to a co-author during a literature review is impossible. This is obviously the case since Elsevier does not want you to trade research papers, whether you have lawfull access or not. The updates that t…

I've been looking at this too. I have a new app I've been working on which is similar to both Zotero and Mendeley.

https://getpolarized.io/

It looks like they're "encrypting" by saying that there is some sort of GDPR requirement when in reality it's more plausible that they're trying to lock in users.

Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

#87

Post by burtonator » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 8:13 PM UTC

boyband6666 wrote: post #37

zwaps wrote: post #6

Zotero has improved a lot, while Mendeley has repeatedly regressed. Mendeley used to be quite a good program, but recently you can not export annotated PDFs meaningfully. For example, sending a folder of annotated PDFs to a co-author during a literature review is impossible. This is obviously the case since Elsevier does not want you to trade research papers, whether you have lawfull access or not. The updates that t…

Zotero has improved a lot, though sadly it still has a way to go on the user experience of Mendeley. My main gripes are - The way that it still doesn't play nice with cloud services (syncing the directory and its just a matter of time until you get database corruption. It takes a lot of wonky setting up to get it to kind of work, which just shouldn't be the case - The lack of developers and thus slow pace of improvem…

I have an app similar to Zotero (Polar) and we don't sync with cloud services either.

It's a bit of an anti-feature. We can't really control the data store if you're monkeying around with it under the hood.

Polar already supports cloud sync so we encourage users to use that. Same with Zotero I imagine.

- The lack of developers and thus slow pace of improvement.

Do you mean the dev pace of Zotero is slow? I wonder if their legacy infra is slowing them down.

Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

#88

Post by boyband6666 » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 8:14 PM UTC

dstillman wrote: post #84

boyband6666 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zotero has improved a lot, though sadly it still has a way to go on the user experience of Mendeley. My main gripes are - The way that it still doesn't play nice with cloud services (syncing the directory and its just a matter of time until you get database corruption. It takes a lot of wonky setting up to get it to kind of work, which just shouldn't be the case - The lack of developers and thus slow pace of improvem…

> The lack of developers and thus slow pace of improvement [...] we are reliant on one or two volunteers to improve the product I'm not sure why you have that impression. Zotero has amazing, invaluable volunteers, but there's a paid, full-time dev team working on Zotero every day. In the last year, we've added: - Google Docs integration [1] - Unpaywall integration [2] - A new, greatly improved PDF recognition system…

I didn't realise there was a full time team as well. As I said I am grateful it exists, and advocate for Zotero to be the preferred option for nearly all opportunities.

It is fair to say though that it isn’t as well resourced as others, and is also starting from behind. As long as that momentum continues it should eventually be the de facto solution (iff Mendeley are going to make user unfriendly choices), but as yet I don't think it is comparable to the behemoths like R that have maturity and continuous development and thus are superior in every possible way to the paid alternatives (Stata, SPSS).

Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

#89

Post by boyband6666 » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 8:16 PM UTC

Libbum wrote: post #51

boyband6666 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Zotero has improved a lot, though sadly it still has a way to go on the user experience of Mendeley. My main gripes are - The way that it still doesn't play nice with cloud services (syncing the directory and its just a matter of time until you get database corruption. It takes a lot of wonky setting up to get it to kind of work, which just shouldn't be the case - The lack of developers and thus slow pace of improvem…

What cloud service are you attempting to connect to? I'm using my universities' box.com account - which generally has pretty appalling support (on linux at least). Zotero has managed this flawlessly.

So I work over a home PC, work PC, and a laptop. I'm already paying for limitless Google Drive, so want to use that. It kind of works, but is not a simple option - you have to set certain directories to sync, and not others (otherwise: corruption). I'm guessing box is similar?

Re: Mendeley encrypts users' database after Zotero provides an importer

#90

Post by burtonator » Wed, Jan 23, 2019, 8:16 PM UTC

greeneggs wrote: post #69

zwaps wrote: post #6

Zotero has improved a lot, while Mendeley has repeatedly regressed. Mendeley used to be quite a good program, but recently you can not export annotated PDFs meaningfully. For example, sending a folder of annotated PDFs to a co-author during a literature review is impossible. This is obviously the case since Elsevier does not want you to trade research papers, whether you have lawfull access or not. The updates that t…

How easy is it to leave Zotero? (Either to move to a different paper manager, e.g., Mendeley, or to leave the paper manager ecosystem entirely.) Can Zotero respect my filesystem organization (à la Lightroom)? I have thousands of papers organized, and don't want to move them all in (too much work, what if I don't like it?), but I also don't want to have two copies of some subset of the papers, which might not be in sy…

Can't comment on Zotero but in Polar we have a similar issue where we need to move over the PDFs. We're going to start using hard links so at least if it's on the same drive you can have the same copy just in two different places.