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ants_everywhere

I wonder what Aaron Swartz would think if he lived to see the era of libgen.

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He died (2013) after libgen was created (2008).

Yeah but did he die before anybody actually knew about it?

Is lib still around anymore. I can't find any functioning urls

There are mirrors on its' wikipedia page: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

I believe that there's a reddit sub that keeps people up to date with what URLs are, or are not, functioning at any given point in time

libgen.help is frequently updated

Recent MEGATHREAD on status of libgen and alternatives

https://www.reddit.com/r/libgen/comments/1n4vjud/megathread_...

It's in the megathread linked in this comment, but I want to specifically point to https://open-slum.org/ which is basically a status page for different sites dedicated to this purpose, and which I've found helpful.

Lol. I opened that link and was like "hmmm, that UI looks familiar".

I'm pretty sure that's just a frontend for Uptime Kuma https://github.com/louislam/uptime-kuma

Anna's Archive includes all of libgen and a lot more: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anna%27s_Archive

Life pro tip: the Wikipedia pages for Libgen and Scihub contain up-to-date current links in the right sidebar. Only for the purpose of information and documentation, of course.

I knew about library genesis by 2012. It was at least 10 TiB large by then, IIRC. With the amount of Russian language content I got the impression it was more popular in that sphere, but an impressive collection for anyone and not especially secret.

To be fair, he might have been rather preoccupied at that time.

I had no idea libgen was that old, thanks!

Didn't he get in trouble for contributing to sci-hub before he died?

He got into trouble for breaking into an unsecured network closet at MIT and using MIT credentials to download a bunch of copyrighted content.

The whole incident is written up in detail, https://swartz-report.mit.edu/ by Hal Abelson (who wrote SICP among other things). It is a well-researched document.

I think the parent may be getting at why he was downloading the content. I don't know the answer to this. Maybe someone here does. What was he intending to do with the articles?

The report speculates to his motivations on page 31, but it seems to be unknown with any certainty.

Swartz, like many of us, see pay-for-access journals as an affront. I believe he wanted to "liberate" the content of these articles so that more people could read them.

Information may want to be free, but sometimes it takes a revolutionary to liberate it.

I think legally nobody knows why he was downloading the content to the point where he had to come to his hidden laptop to swap out hard drives of papers.

but also prior to that he had written the guerilla open access manifesto so it wasn't great optics to be caught doing that

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