4 ms·

I don't believe it is particularly pristine. At least in my corner of academia, everyone generally knows that it is black market as hell but they need to get th

by dylz 7y ago

I don't believe it is particularly pristine. At least in my corner of academia, everyone generally knows that it is black market as hell but they need to get their work done... I would be somewhat unsurprised if they (probably not directly) (or people contributing logins to them) were buying hacked or compromised credentials for university VPNs, and culturally this seems to be kind of a norm in a few CIS countries - there are giant craigslist/ebay-like markets where people sell credentials like this, hacked game/google ads/twitch/google accounts "with warranty" for a dollar (the warranty is that they just give you another user/pass pair if the original owner resets it), etc., that are just considered normal to use -- they aren't on Tor or anything, just a regular site with regular payment processing, cards, PayPal, somehow for 99% stolen goods (crypto not required)

nyolfen 7y ago
there are an awful lot of academics and students that think sci-hub is not only useful but ideologically agreeable. i deeply doubt they would need to resort to hacked credentials.
- dylz 7y ago
  To be clear, I don't particularly believe that the founder(s) of scihub are the ones purchasing hacked credentials nor do they really know or condone that they are. However I do expect that quite a lot of the ones in use for scraping are hacked credentials, maybe from people wanting to "help out" purchasing them as an easy to access method instead of putting their own graduation at risk, etc.
  - nyolfen 7y ago
    i suppose it's possible but it seems unlikely to me. i've never heard of anyone being disciplined or expelled for this, and in fact this link is the first time i've ever seen any indication that a publisher has tried taking active measures against people exporting content (as opposed to going after sci-hub itself)
    - dylz 7y ago
      I see things where PDFs are watermarked with their school email and IP - would you consider that active or passive?
      - nyolfen 7y ago
        seems passive to me unless they are actually going after students etc or encouraging the schools to. what i was trying to say was that there is little personal risk to sharing files with SH, or was until this IP blocking was added to the mix
    - ryanlol 7y ago
      https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz

by dylz 7y ago

nyolfen 7y ago

there are an awful lot of academics and students that think sci-hub is not only useful but ideologically agreeable. i deeply doubt they would need to resort to hacked credentials.

dylz 7y ago
To be clear, I don't particularly believe that the founder(s) of scihub are the ones purchasing hacked credentials nor do they really know or condone that they are. However I do expect that quite a lot of the ones in use for scraping are hacked credentials, maybe from people wanting to "help out" purchasing them as an easy to access method instead of putting their own graduation at risk, etc.
- nyolfen 7y ago
  i suppose it's possible but it seems unlikely to me. i've never heard of anyone being disciplined or expelled for this, and in fact this link is the first time i've ever seen any indication that a publisher has tried taking active measures against people exporting content (as opposed to going after sci-hub itself)
  - dylz 7y ago
    I see things where PDFs are watermarked with their school email and IP - would you consider that active or passive?
    - nyolfen 7y ago
      seems passive to me unless they are actually going after students etc or encouraging the schools to. what i was trying to say was that there is little personal risk to sharing files with SH, or was until this IP blocking was added to the mix
  - ryanlol 7y ago
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Swartz