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Comment by mooseburger | Hacker News Reader

She? Is there someone publicly affiliated with the project?

Yes, Alexandra Elbakyan, a researcher from Kazakhstan.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub

>Despite seizure of the websites as ordered by a New York district court on October 28, 2015, the site is still accessible through alternative domains as of December 2015.

So a court in the United States could seize a site just because the plaintiff was based there?

Or because the .org domain registry (PIR) is based in the US?

A little bit of both. A US citizen can sue foreign nationals in US courts, but a judgement can't be enforced unless the foreign national steps foot in the US or has a US based asset. In this case, the .org domain is controlled on US soil, so that's about all the court can do unless some crazy extradition arrangement is made or she accidentally forgets and comes to the US for a conference or something.

The US says it can seize all domains whose registrars are based in the US, so .com, .org, .net, etc are all vulnerable.

It's amazing that retaliations following this initiative would make it close to impossible to do for anyone in the United States. Kudos to her.

Yes, Russian neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan.

Kazakh.

Ethnic Russian from Kazakhstan.

Attributing the correct ethnicity seems to matter a lot more outside of the US, Canada, and Commonwealth.

I got an earful (screenful?) for calling a historical ethnic Russian painter Ukrainian, just because he was born in current-day Ukraine. This all predates the current conflict, and was from someone I'd consider educated, too.

In my experience US, Canada and Commonwealth are the ones obsessed with (positively or negatively) ethnicity and race.

Race, yes, but nobody born here asks me "where are you from?" upon first meeting, whereas I get this a lot from europeans and people from more tribal societies.

I'm an American, and I get asked "where are you from?" almost every time I meet a new person here (in America). I look very non-American and have an accent most people find hard to pin down, so I'm thinking that the question is just not posed to people who look and 'speak' very American.

Well, I'm Canadian, so we can't really compare. I look brown, but have a basically Toronto / SF accent.