Police warn students to avoid Sci-Hub
bbc.com
bbc.com
We should strive making the law match what is morally right, but law ≠ morally right. There are lawful things that are morally wrong and conversely.
This is difficult because:
- it is difficult for the law to keep up with every aspect of things
- "morally right" is not universal. It is proper to each person.
My take is: don't use the law as a definition of what is right and keep being critical. Breaking the law might be the right thing to do in some situations (and not breaking it, the wrong thing to do!), but be aware of the consequences of doing so. Law is also a common ground to make a society work by getting people to act under the same rules, so it makes sense to abide by it if there is not a good reason not to do so. It's not perfect and does not make sense for some things. It can also evolve for the better through civil disobedience, which is a bit paradoxical because while society relies on people following the law, breaking it in this situation may be a right thing to do (depending on your views!).
(edit: I'm saying this as someone who, by default, does not much like laws and rules. I need to make sense of rules to follow them without reluctance)
When reading "libgen/scihub are of such monumental social/moral worth that their illegality delegitimizes the law as a whole", I first empathized with it, but I found it wrong on second thought.
My point is: this statement feels right to someone like me but is logically wrong and there are many complicated and subtle things to say about this, that I wanted to say to people who'd be inclined to agree with this statement for the same reasons as me.
If the statement felt wrong to you on first thought, then my comment might seem out of topic or pointless.
When I left, it left a whole in my life of the wealth of human knowledge that should be available to everyone.
If there were only a few things on earth that should be unrestricted, it would be good research.
Today, in the public domain, there is a abhorrence and abundance of fake research, driven by misguided funding and attempts to excel in the academic community or perhaps to secure competitive employment in places in the world where ethics are lacking.
I don’t stand up for hackers typically, but I support this type of ethical hacking of the last bastion of our future with the hope that humanity will see the problem in its whole and have governments that can afford it to work out a deal to somehow at arm’s length fund reputable journals and fix the scourge before we waste untold amounts of money related to basing attempts at honest and good scientific study on bad research which has evolved due to the high cost of accessing good research and attaining visibility as research that is approved and submitted for review, with each revision obvious and available, and finally take this seriously.
I can imagine that nobody is going to write books professionally anymore if copyright laws to protect intellectual property were abandoned.
They are a big part of the problem, but SciHub is not the answer. We need a free and open source platform for publishing and peer reviewing run by a non-profit organisation, financed as a public project. The big journals would still lure with fame and sell to readers with pre-selection and garnishment, but they can not be allowed exclusive rights.
See: their most important customers are not individual readers, the journals sell bulk access to the very universities they get their content from. A few generations ago they were needed to distribute knowledge, and we are thankful for that, but their technology has become outdated and ineffective. Nowadays their money engine no longer relies on providing access to scientific knowledge, but on limiting it.
They need to loose that power, so society can move forward.
The loosing ones are publishers and they kind of deserve it if you ask me. They make scientists pay with money to publish their work, and with time for unpaid reviews, and yet they make a profit out of it, which, for the record, is often paid with public money on both sides. This is quite clever when you think about it. Publishers had their use when we needed publications to be printed on papers but now their role is more arguable.
Should private publishers collapse, scientists would figure out a way to publish their papers another way and that might be for the best. (edit since you added your second paragraph: hopefully using something like the "free and open source platform for publishing and peer reviewing run by a non-profit organisation, financed as a public project" that you mention)
>If you're tricked into revealing your log-in credentials, whether it's through the use of fake emails or malware, we know that Sci-Hub will then use those details
I mean sci-hub doesn't do that. If they warn about anything it should maybe be that torrenting copyrighted stuff could make you liable for prosecution. Or that torrenting papers may be a gateway drug to torrenting MS Office which may well have malware.
That's a very thinly veiled threat
The far more interesting part of the article however is the "urged universities to block the website on their networks" part.
If they did their home work, they will probably never
> concerned that users of the "Russia-based website" could have information taken and misused online.
I mean, so many wrongs in that one line.
Not if you're just downloading papers, but where do you think they get those papers from? People giving them Shibboleth logins. Obviously they are very secretive about how they get those logins. There are claims they use phishing.
https://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2016/02/25/sci-hub-how-d...
> [logins] are apparently ‘donated’ by academics. It’s not clear whether the academics who have donated such information are aware of what they have done. According to Edward Sanchez, head of library information technology at Marquette University, academics there have been targeted by a phishing campaign specifically aimed at obtaining university access credentials. These have subsequently been used by Sci-Hub. Sci-Hub contests this.
This is all a bit "you wouldn't download a car" of course, but it's not that unusual for them to comment on these things.
From the Wikipedia article:
> As it has not been affected by other municipal legislation over the period of time since then, its electoral practice has become increasingly anomalous.
Therefore, the non-residential vote (or business vote), abolished in the rest of the country in 1969, became an increasingly large part of the electorate. The non-residential vote system used disfavoured incorporated companies. The City of London (Ward Elections) Act 2002 greatly increased the business franchise, allowing many more businesses to be represented. In 2009, the business vote was about 24,000, greatly exceeding residential voters.
As for the article they are clearly scraping the bottom of barrel trying to come up with ways to dissuade users. If they have grounds to enforce it as an IP crime, they should enforce a block. Either way they should stop this embarrassing nonsense trying to spin it as a cyber threat.
The name is definitely weird, just like Scotland Yard has little to do with Scotland or units of length.
In the UK 'city' doesn't mean 'big place', so we have some that you'd call villages, and others that you'd recognise.
Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London if you are interested.
If you want to know how ancient and ingrained the weirdness of the CoL is, look no further than to one of three clauses of the Magna Carta still in effect: "IX. THE City of London shall have all the old Liberties and Customs which it hath been used to have. Moreover We will and grant, that all other Cities, Boroughs, Towns, and the Barons of the Five Ports, as with all other Ports, shall have all their Liberties and free Customs."
really, not weird? compared to what? the Vatican?
It's arguably the financial (offshore) capital of the world and home to over eleven thousand people.
The City of London lives inside of the city named London but the two Londons have separate city halls and elect separate mayors, who collect separate taxes to fund separate police who enforce separate laws.
The Mayor of the City of London is called 'The Right Honourable Lord Mayor of London' to match his fancy outfit. He gets to ride in a golden carriage and work in a Guildhall while the mayor of London has to wear a suit, ride a bike and work in an office building.
The City of London also has its own flag and its own crest and gets to act more like one of the countries in the UK than just an oddly located city. The corporation that runs the city of London is older than the United Kingdom by several hundred years.
It was created by Romans in 43 CE as "Londonimium" with their temples, public baths, roads, bridges and a wall to defend their work. It's this wall which is why the current City of London exists - for though the Romans came and the Romans went and kingdoms rose and kingdoms fell, the wall endured protecting the city within. After the Romans William the Conqueror came to Great Britain to begin modern British history he found the City of London, with its sturdy walls more challenging to defeat than farmers on open fields. So he agreed to recognize the rights and privileges City of Londoners were used to in return for the them recognizing him as the new King. Though after the negotiation, William quickly built towers around the City of London which were just as much about protecting William from the locals within as defending against the Vikings from without.
This started a thousand-year long tradition whereby Monarchs always reconfirmed that 'yes' the City of London is a special, unique place best left to its own business, while simultaneously distrusting it. Many a monarch thought the City of London was too powerful and rich. And one even built a new Capital city nearby, named Westminster, to compete with the City of London and hopefully, suck power and wealth away from it. This was the start of the second London.
As the centuries passed, Westminster grew and merged with nearby towns eventually surrounding the walled-in, and still separate City of London. But, people began to call the whole urban collection 'London' and the name became official when Parliament joined towns together under a single municipal government with a mayor. But, the mayor of London still doesn't have power over the tiny City of London which has rules and traditions like nowhere else in the country and possibly the world.
For example, the ruling monarch doesn't just enter the City of London on a whim, but instead asks for permission from the Lord Mayor at a ceremony. While it's not required by law, the ceremony is, unusual to say the least.
The City of London also has a representative in Parliament, the "Remembrancer", whose job it is to protects the City's special rights. Because of this, laws passed by Parliament sometimes don't apply to the City of London: most notably voting reforms ...
I don't know why City of London police even exists. Is there any good reason for them not to be absorbed by the Metropolitan Police Service?
City of London Police Act 1839
> and rewriting it opens up a whole can of worms nobody wants to deal with.
The issue is political. Business interests want to retain the City of London as independent from Greater London because while the rest of London is a one-person-one-vote democracy, the City of London is not. Most of the votes in the City of London are controlled by businesses not residents. The City of London having its own police force is a sign of its independence. Merging City of London Police into the Metropolitan Police Service would be seen as a potential steppingstone to making the City of London part of Greater London, and hence introducing to it genuine democracy
This is tangential to the main discussion, but London Metropolitan University has a campus in the City, the Guildhall School of Music is there, and there seems to be a campus of Chicago Business School too.
They need Shibboleth logins to download the papers. There have been claims that they use phishing to obtain them.
Having to stay online is a must for most people and being constantly conned or abused practically everywhere makes people used to that new normal. People learn to ignore signs of dishonesty and extract value from services despite.
Better tell tell people to never reuse credentials and assume that every company may have malicious intent. Tell people there is always price attached to services. If you don't pay for it explicitly it most likely means the company extracts it some other way -- ask yourselves how exactly.
> Tell people there is always price attached to services. If you don't pay for it explicitly it most likely means the company extracts it some other way -- ask yourselves how exactly.
The Cambridge Analytica scandal is as close to an example of what a privacy catastrophe looks like as I can imagine right now. Many people separated themselves from Facebook as a result. I just wonder how many more incidents like that have to occur before people get wise to surveillance capitalism.
I'm not hopeful that the truth is ever going to be clear given the cacophony of non-stop disinformation campaigns (like the OP "news" article).
The simple truth is that all companies are for profit or at the very least have running costs that need to be covered.
As long as people expect services to be free of charge there isn't much that can be done. Companies will work hard to monetize you as a product because there isn't much else that can be done.
We can always try to create more law or precedents, but companies will put their billions to exploit every single bit of information about you that can be exploited in any possible way.
I believe the explicit price is needed to have healthy competition and for the companies to focus on services they render to their customers and not on the customers as a product packaged for other companies to use for some shady business.
sci-hub.se 186.2.163.219If only there were some kind of private, virtual network I could use…
javascript:window.location='http:/'+'/sci-hub.se/'+window.locationThe main library genesis book collection is already available via IPFS (see freeread.org), so I wouldn't be surprised to see all the sci-hub articles available similarly at some point.
Hats off to them for fighting the good fight here. IPFS has a bright future and I have massive respect for these large companies that get behind it.
It's based in Kazakhstan. The US and the UK establishment have so internalized their hatred of the Russian people it's apparently now spilling over onto the Kazakhs. It's ignorance all the way down.
And the BBC doesn't correct this obvious lie. They quote it to absolve themselves of blame, but they don't correct it.
But yeah, everything to the east of Germany is Russia, right?...
Science website sounds off to me for speaking about sci-hub. The title felt a bit like police advised students to distrust science.
Say you're about to drive over a cliff edge, the obvious thing I can do is 'warn you about it', but I can also 'warn you not to do it' because it's dangerous, etc.
If I instead 'warned you to drive over the cliff':
- something else needs to follow - 'or else I will do something worse to you' for example
- it means that you should (IMO - my *fictional* O!) do it
It could have been:
> Police caution students against using science website
A warning is either about a bad thing:
> Science website considered harmful, police warn
Or a strong suggestion for corrective action:
> Don't use science website, police warn
> Police warn students not to use science website
> [The submission]
"warning someone to avoid something" suggests that there is a risk associated with the thing itself - they should avoid the thing
"warning someone about avoiding something" suggests that there is a risk associated with avoiding the thing - they should not avoid the thing
(e.g., "HMRC warns people about avoiding paying income tax")
It's a sad state of affairs when 'national lead' is this incompetent.
Either it's some zero day, or a malicious site mirror, or ads.
It's probably ads.
Essentially, whenever people see the media report an issue that they have a deep knowledge of, they see that the media get it wrong/lie/have no idea what they are talking about.
Yet when the media talk about other subjects, people still trust them...
“Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents the story backward—reversing cause and effect. I call these the "wet streets cause rain" stories. Paper's full of them. In any case, you read with exasperation or amusement the multiple errors in a story, and then turn the page to national or international affairs, and read as if the rest of the newspaper was somehow more accurate about Palestine than the baloney you just read. You turn the page, and forget what you know."
https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...