5 ms·

Sci-Hub: the Internet’s second most censored publication. (And altogether easier to support morally, ethically, aesthetically than the first one.) Boycotting A

by rdl 9y ago

Sci-Hub: the Internet’s second most censored publication. (And altogether easier to support morally, ethically, aesthetically than the first one.) Boycotting ACS seems like a nice idea, but it would be challenging for professional chemists.

arkades 9y ago
Wait, what’s the first?
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
- rdl 9y ago
  Daily Stormer, which has gone through 20+ domains in the past 18 months, was the first site to get kicked off Cloudflare for content/no court order, constant attacks on hosting facilities, etc.
  - StavrosK 9y ago
    SciHub isn't the second, CloudFlare is obeying a court order on this one. The DS incident was one where they didn't have a warrant.
    - rdl 9y ago
      Yes, but the “any domain with sci-hub in it can be taken down without further legal action” is not standard for actions against domains; usually it is seizure or other action against specific domains. Cloudflare isn’t a monopoly/chokepoint to the extent that actions against domain registries (via registrars) are.
      - 220V_USKettle 9y ago
        Taken down or siezed?
      - oh_sigh 9y ago
        Does this bode poorly for my go-to site to talk about my favorite celebrity, pesci-hubbub.com ?
        dane-pgp 9y ago
        This is an important point, although in practice the publisher would not go after your talk site, even if they are seemingly given the legal power to do so, meaning that the legal system never corrects itself from issuing these overly broad injunctions (until it's too late and someone deliberately abuses this weakness). What's more worrying is what happens when the publishers go back to court to complain that Sci-Hub are changing their name to avoid the block, from sci-hub -> sky-hab -> psy-hob -> buy-tub -> fly-tab -> ... At what point does the court just empower the publisher to shut down any site they choose, like a DMCA takedown request?
        gruez 9y ago
        > At what point does the court just empower the publisher to shut down any site they choose, like a DMCA takedown request? It's not that big of a problem as you think. even if there's no stipulation that it can only be used to shut down the science paper sharing site operated by Alexandra Elbakyan, it's the intent that matters. using it to shut down [unrelated site] will likely land them in hot waters with the judge.
        tinus_hn 9y ago
        If they shut down a competitors site and then claim it was just a mistake they will probably not be in trouble at all but they would cause a lot of trouble for their competitor.
        Sacho 9y ago
        Of course, the Plaintiffs have no reason to do this to a random joe - it's more interesting when it happens to someone the ACS would be legitimately interested in pursuing. Reading the language of the injuction and amendment, it seems that the focus isn't even so much on sci-hub itself, but rather protecting the copyrighted material of the ACS. It seems like Ebalkyan could host a sci-hub-sans-acs.org with materials not copyrighted by the ACS. It also seems that you can't really trick it by having say, Ms Janina Kowalska registering centrum-nauki.org and serving all the content that appears on sci-hub. I'm also not clear on the specific mechanics behind the injunction. Let's say that Ebalkyan does create sci-hub-sans-acs.org and claims all the copyrighted works are removed, can they still block it preemptively? Does Ebalkyan have to submit evidence that she's removed the copyrighted works? Can they demand action against anyone else that "seems" to be sci-hub? Is there a level of evidence they must meet? It kinda sucks to be ignorant of a legal system which can have so much impact in your life...
  - forgotmypw 9y ago
    I would have guessed Pirate Bay...
  - ratsmack 9y ago
    And this is why Daily Stormer stays permanently available on TOR... which is the direction Sci-Hub should go.
    - maeln 9y ago
      Sci-Hub already has an onion service : http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/
    - smoyer 9y ago
      Two of the domains the judge ordered to be disabled are "sci-hub.onion, scihub22266oqcxt.onion" - I kind of laughed when I read that.
  - ashleyn 9y ago
    Is it truly "censorship" though, if one is so aggressively distasteful and difficult to deal with that nobody wants to do business with them? Daily Stormer was taken down as a result of 0 court orders. If I'm on someone's platform and I either break their rules repeatedly or invite attacks on them, it's not exactly censorship if they get tired of putting up with my shit and remove me. VPS operators repeatedly warn me that if I invite frequent DDoS attacks, they will remove me from the service. They have a say in how their own platform operates. White national socialists/identitarians sell themselves as the most censored people on the Internet as if they hold information just begging to be released and practiced. Only, there's no redeeming value to the content of their information; it ranges from callous disregard of people based on race, to the outright extermination of anyone who disagrees with the cause. All of these "beliefs" effectively incite people to attack them, regardless of how well you may articulate them. It's little different from me repeatedly challenging blackhats to disable my VPS. The only thing they really succeed in doing, is being the Internet's biggest pain in the ass to do business with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with what Cloudflare did.
    - apotheothesomai 9y ago
      Removing something perfectly legal, because public opinion is against them is cowardly. Being a company that advertises DDoS mitigation and then drops a customer, because they get attacked a lot, is a cop out. Being a company that will argue that they are not responsible for what their customers post legally, while by contrast dropping customers based on their content is pretty much censorship. Don't think for a minute that dropping Daily Stormer wasn't just about public opinion and turning bad PR into good PR.
      - andreareina 9y ago
        Cloudflare didn't drop Daily Stormer because of public opinion, but because of claims by Daily Stormer that Cloudflare supported Daily Stormer: Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.[1] Dropping them for that is 100% justified in my book. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
  - cabalamat 9y ago
    I thought the reference was to The Pirate Bay.
allenz 9y ago
That's not true--the most censored websites are actually inaccessible.
- tambre 9y ago
  He did say "the most censored publication", not website.
  - allenz 9y ago
    I'm not sure how Sci-Hub qualifies as a publication, but many publications are inaccessible due to censorship.

by rdl 9y ago

arkades 9y ago

Wait, what’s the first?

deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
rdl 9y ago
Daily Stormer, which has gone through 20+ domains in the past 18 months, was the first site to get kicked off Cloudflare for content/no court order, constant attacks on hosting facilities, etc.
- StavrosK 9y ago
  SciHub isn't the second, CloudFlare is obeying a court order on this one. The DS incident was one where they didn't have a warrant.
  - rdl 9y ago
    Yes, but the “any domain with sci-hub in it can be taken down without further legal action” is not standard for actions against domains; usually it is seizure or other action against specific domains. Cloudflare isn’t a monopoly/chokepoint to the extent that actions against domain registries (via registrars) are.
    - 220V_USKettle 9y ago
      Taken down or siezed?
    - oh_sigh 9y ago
      Does this bode poorly for my go-to site to talk about my favorite celebrity, pesci-hubbub.com ?
      - dane-pgp 9y ago
        This is an important point, although in practice the publisher would not go after your talk site, even if they are seemingly given the legal power to do so, meaning that the legal system never corrects itself from issuing these overly broad injunctions (until it's too late and someone deliberately abuses this weakness). What's more worrying is what happens when the publishers go back to court to complain that Sci-Hub are changing their name to avoid the block, from sci-hub -> sky-hab -> psy-hob -> buy-tub -> fly-tab -> ... At what point does the court just empower the publisher to shut down any site they choose, like a DMCA takedown request?
        gruez 9y ago
        > At what point does the court just empower the publisher to shut down any site they choose, like a DMCA takedown request? It's not that big of a problem as you think. even if there's no stipulation that it can only be used to shut down the science paper sharing site operated by Alexandra Elbakyan, it's the intent that matters. using it to shut down [unrelated site] will likely land them in hot waters with the judge.
        tinus_hn 9y ago
        If they shut down a competitors site and then claim it was just a mistake they will probably not be in trouble at all but they would cause a lot of trouble for their competitor.
        Sacho 9y ago
        Of course, the Plaintiffs have no reason to do this to a random joe - it's more interesting when it happens to someone the ACS would be legitimately interested in pursuing. Reading the language of the injuction and amendment, it seems that the focus isn't even so much on sci-hub itself, but rather protecting the copyrighted material of the ACS. It seems like Ebalkyan could host a sci-hub-sans-acs.org with materials not copyrighted by the ACS. It also seems that you can't really trick it by having say, Ms Janina Kowalska registering centrum-nauki.org and serving all the content that appears on sci-hub. I'm also not clear on the specific mechanics behind the injunction. Let's say that Ebalkyan does create sci-hub-sans-acs.org and claims all the copyrighted works are removed, can they still block it preemptively? Does Ebalkyan have to submit evidence that she's removed the copyrighted works? Can they demand action against anyone else that "seems" to be sci-hub? Is there a level of evidence they must meet? It kinda sucks to be ignorant of a legal system which can have so much impact in your life...
- forgotmypw 9y ago
  I would have guessed Pirate Bay...
- ratsmack 9y ago
  And this is why Daily Stormer stays permanently available on TOR... which is the direction Sci-Hub should go.
  - maeln 9y ago
    Sci-Hub already has an onion service : http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/ http://scihub22266oqcxt.onion/
  - smoyer 9y ago
    Two of the domains the judge ordered to be disabled are "sci-hub.onion, scihub22266oqcxt.onion" - I kind of laughed when I read that.
- ashleyn 9y ago
  Is it truly "censorship" though, if one is so aggressively distasteful and difficult to deal with that nobody wants to do business with them? Daily Stormer was taken down as a result of 0 court orders. If I'm on someone's platform and I either break their rules repeatedly or invite attacks on them, it's not exactly censorship if they get tired of putting up with my shit and remove me. VPS operators repeatedly warn me that if I invite frequent DDoS attacks, they will remove me from the service. They have a say in how their own platform operates. White national socialists/identitarians sell themselves as the most censored people on the Internet as if they hold information just begging to be released and practiced. Only, there's no redeeming value to the content of their information; it ranges from callous disregard of people based on race, to the outright extermination of anyone who disagrees with the cause. All of these "beliefs" effectively incite people to attack them, regardless of how well you may articulate them. It's little different from me repeatedly challenging blackhats to disable my VPS. The only thing they really succeed in doing, is being the Internet's biggest pain in the ass to do business with. There is absolutely nothing wrong with what Cloudflare did.
  - apotheothesomai 9y ago
    Removing something perfectly legal, because public opinion is against them is cowardly. Being a company that advertises DDoS mitigation and then drops a customer, because they get attacked a lot, is a cop out. Being a company that will argue that they are not responsible for what their customers post legally, while by contrast dropping customers based on their content is pretty much censorship. Don't think for a minute that dropping Daily Stormer wasn't just about public opinion and turning bad PR into good PR.
    - andreareina 9y ago
      Cloudflare didn't drop Daily Stormer because of public opinion, but because of claims by Daily Stormer that Cloudflare supported Daily Stormer: Our team has been thorough and have had thoughtful discussions for years about what the right policy was on censoring. Like a lot of people, we’ve felt angry at these hateful people for a long time but we have followed the law and remained content neutral as a network. We could not remain neutral after these claims of secret support by Cloudflare.[1] Dropping them for that is 100% justified in my book. [1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/why-we-terminated-daily-stormer/
- cabalamat 9y ago
  I thought the reference was to The Pirate Bay.

allenz 9y ago

That's not true--the most censored websites are actually inaccessible.

tambre 9y ago
He did say "the most censored publication", not website.
- allenz 9y ago
  I'm not sure how Sci-Hub qualifies as a publication, but many publications are inaccessible due to censorship.