Is the ArXiv safe from the current US Government attacks?
mathstodon.xyz
mathstodon.xyz
https://ntrl.ntis.gov/NTRL/ (This one seems particularly difficult to archive.)
All are great resources and it would be a shame if any of them were eliminated.
Is that sarcastic? arXiv is legal and mainstream, used by professionals; sci-hub is illegal.
The simple reason was that I got conditioned to doing that because the login wall to doing it legitimately was often too painful. At a certain point my workflow switched to checking scihub first, then going the legal path if scihub failed.
It saves a lot of time, and I suspect it is a lot more common than most people think.
People are making sure they have off-continent backups of everything ...
But your points are more around the legislative issues than the funding which is valid but a separate issue.
On that I’ve been unpicking the tie in mess I got myself into for 2 years now. I have got control over my data but not always things I reference which is where this problem comes in.
Recently a relative died and I’ve seen how a simple non technical person is screwed already due to iCloud dependency etc.
But if it’s in the cloud then they don’t need to beat you with a hose. They just legislate that they can take it and then do it.
My data is safer if they have to beat me with a hose to get it first.
There are just different metrics of safety - there is also safety from revealing, and that is probably most safe if you control it all yourself, even though that increases risk of destruction and loss.
See the AP News incident this week where the White House banned AP from the WH press pool for publishing the words Gulf of Mexico. Seriously.
Or the weaponization of corruption charges against NYC Mayor Eric Adams.
Private companies will not be exempt from the fascist retaliation. If Apple or Microsoft is hosting something they perceive as a threat, they will exert pressure to take it down - constitution or laws be damned.
The White House press pool thing has nothing to do with the DOJ or the justice system generally.
Dropping charges against your political opponents is not a hallmark of fascism. There is ZERO evidence of Trump putting pressure on third parties to take anything down.
On the other hand, the Twitter files proved that the Biden administration was pressuring Twitter to censor stories it didn't like, and it did the same with Facebook.
Sp what if he "alleges" that. The question is whether he is corrupt.
> Dropping charges against your political opponents is not a hallmark of fascism.
Of course not, dropping them against yourself and your movement is. As in "he who saves the country can violate no law", in the words of Trump.
AG Pam Bondi and Emil Bobe are openly admitting they are using this to pressure Eric Adams for political loyalty. It's straight up weaponization of the DOJ, don't be daft.
Read the letter from the acting prosecutor Danielle Sassoon who was pressed by the top of the DOJ to drop the charges. This is conservative, Federalist society, attorney who clerked for Scalia, by the way. Trump is using the charges for a quid pro quo. Tell me with a straight face this is not corrupt.
https://static01.nyt.com/newsgraphics/documenttools/24535586...
And I didn't say the DOJ kicked the AP out, I said other departments. But it shows you the admin wants to punish orgs for freedom of the press. There's no defending kicking out one of the most reputable news orgs for using the words Gulf of Mexico. Petty tyrants.
Same with Trump's incessant lawsuits against news orgs that report on him. Including a pollster who didn't provide him favorable numbers.
Same with their orders of to strip publicly funded research of wrongthink by removing references to race, orientation or gender.
This admin is actively suppressing speech including in private organizations at a scale we haven't seen before. And this is only in the first month
Yes, there's a general funding purge in process, causing uncertainty about outstanding NSF grants. OP mentioning DEI specifically might be in reference to e.g. https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2025/2/cruz-led-investigatio...
Some earlier discussions on that one in particular:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43048077
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43046466
Tao made some remarks on what this means in practice here: https://mastodon.social/@tao@mathstodon.xyz/1139100739588910...
Allow me to share a horror story:
I was the victim of a pretty bizarre super in-your-face academic theft. Someone snooped a half-finished paper draft of mine off GitHub and...actually got it published in ArXiv and a "real" journal: https://forbetterscience.com/2023/10/30/stephensons-alternat...
In spite of having a full commit log (with GitHub verified commits!!!) of both the code AND the paper, both ArXiv and the journal didn't seem to care or bother at all.
I went all the way to contacting Stanford, the institution that the thief falsely pretended to be affiliated with, to get them to help me with this.
Stanford contacted ArXiv, and ArXiv then: 1. Removed the thief's upload: https://arxiv.org/abs/2307.14810 2. Allowed the thief to copyright strike MY (!!!!) own research: https://arxiv.org/abs/2308.04214
How does this make any sense? You remove somebody's stolen content, and then allow the thief to copyright strike it? what the fuck...
You have no idea how many emails were exchanged, attempts at explaining them what a commit log is, what verified commits are...to just refuse to do anything until Stanford weighed in.
It is incredibly condescending to say "arXiv is not a place for a copyright strike". as if I decided to start one.
If somebody gets robbed in front of a place of worship/whatever, would you scold the victim by saying that's not the place to get robbed?
Incredible.
But plagiarism is a serious academic misconduct, that gets papers retracted, people fired from academic positions, PhDs rescinded, etc. It's not at all a copyright issue and would remain a gross misconduct even if copyright were abolished today
For your question, fraudulent copyright infringement claims are plaguing most services hosting content (GitHub, YouTube, etc). Haven't seen it again on ArXiv so chances are it's a rare occurrence. So the admins probably weren't sure what to do. At least in the comments, they make it clear, it wasn't due to policy (as mentioned in the stolen paper) that yours was removed but essentially due to being forced by the claims.
What surprised me was that a journal in MDPI garbage land, published an expression of concern.
I’m pointing out that a legitimate discussion about the vulnerability of scientific repositories (arXiv) to policy/funding pressures was flagged on HN. This is ironic given HN's own guidelines state they welcome content that "gratifies intellectual curiosity" and represents "interesting new phenomena."
The fact that a discussion about potential threats to open scientific repositories could be flagged/censored on HN effectively proves the very point being discussed - how platforms meant for technical and scientific discourse can be compromised by non-technical factors.
For dang (HN's moderator): This kind of moderation appears to contradict HN's core mission. A discussion about safeguarding scientific repositories like arXiv is exactly the kind of substantive, technically-relevant content that should be welcome on HN. When even discussions about protecting scientific discourse get suppressed, it validates the original concern about vulnerability to censorship and control. It doesn’t matter what rationalization was used for censorship. If the threat exists to technical achievements, it must not be censored. Rules be damned.
The irony is particularly sharp given that HN and arXiv share similar goals of fostering intellectual discourse and technical/scientific advancement.
"Reality has a well-proven bias leaning towards whatever I so happen to believe"
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/?title=Reality_has_a_well_known_lib...
This lack of respect sums it all up and why it should be flagged. Can't put the bare minimum in so why bother having a discussion to hear more brain farts we can read on Reddit?
[Edit] Surprisingly the comments other than this one are not bad for a change. There is a question why ArXiv would be affected that's not clear.
You should also known, that some of the accounts who posted some of these links who get flagged within seconds, got throttles set on them, that included how many stories they can post every 24 hours and that include actual number of comments or replies on threads, sometimes causing them to being unable to reply to an actual question from somebody. Some of these accounts have years here, and never had similar throttles put on them.
Moderating HN is a task I don't envy, and appreciate @dang work immensely...But like they say, transparency is the best disinfectant. Or maybe the usual mods are being overruled?
The guidelines have this at the top:
What to Submit
On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.
Off-Topic: Most stories about politics, or crime, or sports, or celebrities, unless they're evidence of some interesting new phenomenon. Videos of pratfalls or disasters, or cute animal pictures. If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.
--
Please note the part about politics.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43051836
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42978389
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42911011
If you (or anyone) take a look at those and the links they point to, and still have a question that isn't answered there, I'd be happy to take a crack at it.
Massive layoffs will hit the US Defense industry as no sane nation ever will buy again a US weapon.
Cloud vendors will have to split hard their operations or see revenue cut in half.
Basically, she got enough of Windows, mostly due to subscriptions, that there was news being shown in the browser, and some other related issues and she was incredibly happy with Ubuntu (which is of course American, but since it's free and gratis, it doesn't really matter, and there's always SUSE).
She liked the cleanness, the absence of distractors, how it was clearer what was in the cloud and what was on the local machine, that she wasn't paying any continuous fee for LibreOffice and the happiness this switch brought was huge.
The only reason people are still using Windows is gaming and that it's a default on the machines at computer- and electronics stores. They'd be happy with Linux, they'd be more productive with Linux and they'd be calmer with Linux.
Also, almost every corporation and similar large-scale deployment, for management and compatibility purposes.
Also, in many ways, Windows management components (Active Directory, Group Policy, etc.) have no competition:
First, you must have management systems: imagine you are deploying, configuring and managing a new application on 10,000 desktops, or just 1,000. You can't manually go to each desktop (just add up the time spent walking between desks!); you must automate it.
Second, most user applications provide management components for Windows and for no other platform. If they have something else, it's often an afterthought (and goodness forbid they stop developing it and you are left 'to your own devices').
Finally, there's usually no reason not to use Windows. Why create these risks and costs? The users care only about the applications - these aren't their home computers; the IT department handles the OS, etc. The network effect of the Windows standard is hard to beat.
There are exceptions: Some deployments are very simple and can be done on Linux, for example POS cash registers. Many applications now depend on web browsers, though even then you can have DRM and other issues, and you don't know what new application a user may need tomorrow. Macs are a standard in some places.
Another directory services / management system that does the same thing as - or likely worse then - the original. All that work and at best you haven't moved an inch forward, you haven't helped the business' bottom line ... what did you do? How do you explain that to the CEO?
Heh.
I ran Linux as my desktop since... approximately the turn off the millennium, with a brief downgrade to Windows from when the Rift S came out until I finally got around to switching back last year.
I should probably see about finding time to upgrade my laptop away from the os it came with as well as some point...
I don’t think the US defense industry is worried. Do you know any sane nations around here?
In general it’s not like war is about who’s right or moral. It’s more about who can bring more and better weapons to the fight.
I suspect, though I'm not sure, that the point was more that a nation that rejects science in favor of a different kind of ideological purity (lack of virtue signaling as its own kind of virtue signaling) is a nation whose weapons are no longer likely to be the better ones.
In fact, the latest news is that Trump is expanding our circle of friends when it comes to advanced weapons, offering India the opportunity to purchase F-35s.
This is an exaggeration. The larger European military powers spent enough on defence to be able to operate without US assistance in a range of circumstances (e.g. the Falklands war). But Europe did not anticipate having to defend itself against Soviet aggression without US assistance.
In fairness, it would have seemed crazy, not so long ago, to think that the POTUS would be on friendlier terms with the leader of a Russian dictatorship than with the democratically elected leaders of France and Germany. But here we are.
The Falklands conflict was almost half a century ago. It is doubtful that the UK could respond today like they did in 1982.
The video "The Navy With More Admirals Than Warships"[1] addresses that exact scenario, and talks about the current woeful state of the British Navy today.
You are right to question who your allies are.
"You have the watches. We have the time." There are many ways to win a war.
A change of administration in the next few years, will not mitigate the taboo that has been broken.
The US sells 120 billion dollars a year of weapons: https://www.state.gov/fiscal-year-2024-u-s-arms-transfers-an...
European nations switching entirely to domestic military production within 4 years is as realistic as Trump's plan to make the US auto industry fully domestic within a few months, which is not very.
Cloud vendors already offer ways to ensure your data never leaves the EU, for larger enterprises.
Which Linux distro is Europe going to be on, top-to-bottom? The one controlled by Google?
The real shift may be to move closer to China.
I think that one thing we’ll see that is common with manipulative people, is that we’ll see an argument formed that talking about things like this at any level will be considered pushing back on the manipulation and then it will be rationalized to “cut off” the critical thinkers by swamping the signal. When that happens here, perhaps sooner than later, you’ll jnow things are fixin’ to get interesting.
Having worked with that agency, they have a fair number of people who don't directly have much to do with the nuclear weapons enterprise at all. Those include their social media team, recruiters who try to push going into the weapons community, and the like. There are also the normal administrative paper-pushers that flourish in Federal and state agencies.
Getting rid of some of those people seems like a bad idea when NNSA is a black box that says "scary nukes here", but really isn't once you look inside a little bit. The job of recruiting people should be left to the companies that run the Labs. We don't need a social media team to publicize a statutorily-required agency. We could probably prune a bunch of admins and have little impact on the enterprise after a little bit of shakeup. Etc.
The loss of institutional knowledge for managing an arsenal of nuclear weapons has serious consequences for security.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/14/climate/nuclear-nnsa-firings-...
> Some of the fired employees included NNSA staff who are on the ground at facilities where nuclear weapons are built. These staff oversee the contractors who build nuclear weapons, and they inspect these weapons.
> It also included employees at NNSA headquarters who write requirements and guidelines for contractors who build nuclear weapons. A source told CNN they believe these individuals were fired because “no one has taken anytime to understand what we do and the importance of our work to he nation’s national security.”
https://www.npr.org/2025/02/14/nx-s1-5298190/nuclear-agency-...
> Just days before, officials in leadership had scrambled to write descriptions for the roughly 300 probationary employees at the agency who had joined the federal workforce less than two years ago.
> Managers were given just 200 characters to explain why the jobs these workers did mattered.
Edit: my mistake. I’ve always heard it referred to as a “state school” which is true given its land grant status and SUNY affiliation, but it is private.
"Cornell is a privately endowed research university and a partner of the State University of New York."
Engineering, Arts and Science, Architecture, Hotel Administration
are private, while:
Industrial & Labor Relations, Agriculture and Life Sciences, Human Ecology
accept public funding. That info might be ~20 years out of date though.
"In 2023, arXiv received a $5 million grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF Grant 2311521 | “Frameworks: arXiv as an accessible open access research platform”). Distributed over five years (performance conclusion: 2028) this grant’s goal is to create a more discoverable and accessible arXiv to advance scientific innovation."
That's $1 million/year.
Total revenue in 2023 was $2,690,592.
Like they’ve done more damage to businesses with the tariff threats to Canada and Mexico than they’ll ever save in these “cuts”. Republicans first budget under “Trump priorities” is 4.5 trillion dollars of DEFICIT spending. None of the proposed tax plans balance anything, 100% in the red. They’ve left our networks open to foreign adversaries and weakened NATO.
…but there’s always somebody who says “yeah, but that’s not what they MEANT”. I don’t get it.
It is crazy. It is completely reckless. I’m not saying it’s ok or that I agree. I’m simply pointing out that this is a clear and obvious negotiation tactic. It’s a pattern that Trump and Musk have both followed over and over in their career.
I’m saying, if you don’t want the cuts, DON’T FALL FOR IT. DON’T LET THEM ANCHOR HERE. Congress has the power of the purse, not DOGE. These 50% cuts will be as real as self driving Teslas.