6 ms·

Police warn students to avoid Sci-Hub

163 points by Black101 6y ago

JumpCrisscross 6y ago
Do we have any evidence people, much less students, adhere to these warnings?
stuartbman 6y ago
This is a very strange article. No idea what City of London police has to do with this- there aren't even any universities in City of London (probably a few publishers though). Sci-hub doesn't have any logins barring captchas so why would that be an issue? You could make the same argument for YouTube being a security threat.
- carmen_sandiego 6y ago
  The City of London Police are often involved in nationwide fraud issues, consulting with other regional police forces, etc. They're a leading UK center for it just because they deal with it so often. 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.
  - vijayr02 6y ago
    Also, the City of London is (I think) the only municipal body where businesses are allowed to vote alongside residents AND outnumber residents. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation
    - corty 6y ago
      Also, the sherrifs are elected by the Common Hall. The Common Hall consists of the senior members of the Livery Companies which are the guilds and trade associations. So the police is exclusively elected by the businesses.
- ChrisKnott 6y ago
  CoLP has a national responsibility for fraud, so it has several teams that are nothing really to do with the City, the Intellectual Property Crime Unit is one of them. 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.
- corty 6y ago
  The City of London is an age-old construct by the financial and aristocratic elite to further their interests and evade a few taxes and regulations. The CoL police is more like the financial police, and therefore primarily enforces business interests and prosecutes mostly financial and business-relevant crime. The name is definitely weird, just like Scotland Yard has little to do with Scotland or units of length.
  - mnd999 6y ago
    Scotland Yard is a place where the Met just happened to be based.
  - OJFord 6y ago
    City of London is no weirder than New York City, and Scotland Yard is no weirder than Wall Street. In the UK 'city' doesn't mean 'big place', so we have some that you'd call villages, and others that you'd recognise.
    - eigenket 6y ago
      City of London is kinda weird as its the only place in the UK that companies can vote (as far as I'm aware). its got like 10k actual humans voting there and like 24k votes from companies.
    - tankenmate 6y ago
      In times of yore in the UK (and England in particular) city status was bestowed primarily by dent of there being a cathedral in the city. City status was (and I think also still is on advice of parliament) also bestowed by the Crown. These days it is largely down to population size.
    - corty 6y ago
      CoL is far weirder. First, it is not the same as "London", it is just the central part of London. CoL has a different election system from all other parts of England, corporations get a vote (actually, several, how many depends on size and kind of business, derived from the ancient guild system) and outnumber residents by far. This also includes voting the sherrifs into office, explaining the firmly pro-business stance of the police. The CoL also owns properties outside it's own domain, even public grounds in Northern Ireland (via an intermediary). Large parts of the CoL and thereby electoral votes in the CoL are owned by the Crown, the royal family and various lords. This explains the CoL escaping all attempts at reforming it into something more democratic and into a normal part of the city of London (note the non-capital 'c' in 'city'). Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London 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."
- skissane 6y ago
  > No idea what City of London police has to do with this 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?
  - dageshi 6y ago
    There's probably some law on the books that says the City has their own police force and rewriting it opens up a whole can of worms nobody wants to deal with.
    - skissane 6y ago
      > There's probably some law on the books that says the City has their own police force 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
- tome 6y ago
  > there aren't even any universities in City of London 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.
- IshKebab 6y ago
  > Sci-hub doesn't have any logins barring captchas so why would that be an issue? They need Shibboleth logins to download the papers. There have been claims that they use phishing to obtain them.
notretarded 6y ago
This is great. More publicity for sci-hub. Well crafted article from the BBC.. And as a surprise to no one Max Bruce has no qualifications whatsoever beyond further education. Completely clueless.
Bootvis 6y ago
Discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26517220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26517220
lmilcin 6y ago
Except students have already learned that misusing personal data is ok and if you are large enough company you can do it with total impunity even if you get caught (Facebook, etc.) 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.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  > 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. I fully agree this is the right approach. Unfortunately, it's really REALLY hard to make a compelling case. It seems the only way people will open their eyes is if there's some kind of privacy catastrophe that's plain to see and which has clear consequences. 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).
  - lmilcin 6y ago
    I think everybody should be paying for online services and companies should not be allowed to provide services that are free of charge. 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.
willhinsa 6y ago
Definitely do not link to it! https://sci-hub.se/ https://sci-hub.se/
- jraph 6y ago
  Which by the way should not be added to the hosts file to make it resolve on a censored connection this way: sci-hub.se 186.2.163.219
  - dan1234 6y ago
    Looks like virgin media are blocking the IP address. If only there were some kind of private, virtual network I could use…
  - kowlo 6y ago
    Blocked by my ISP https://imgur.com/a/fesNpFK https://imgur.com/a/fesNpFK
    - benjiweber 6y ago
      https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders#!:~:text=Elsevier https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders#!:~:te...
      - jraph 6y ago
        Quality list of interesting services, thanks.
      - kowlo 6y ago
        Not surprised to see Nintendo on that list...
    - mratsim 6y ago
      Tor browser
  - diarrhea 6y ago
say_it_as_it_is 6y ago
Was this article made by a machine learning algorithm? It created a false narrative with false characters. Published by the BBC, nonetheless?
- pjc50 6y ago
  It's a rephrased press release from the police. A lot of news is just rephrased press releases.
  - akadruid1 6y ago
    The BBC puts unverified claims in quotes, and they are liberally sprinkled through this article. They've also given it to the family and education correspondent instead of the technology correspondent, which I think implies an unusually high level of skepticism for an establishment press release.
- jpxw 6y ago
  There’s a phenomenon, the name of which escapes me, which describes this situation. 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...
  - TeMPOraL 6y ago
    Gell-Mann Amnesia. “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-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...
AussieWog93 6y ago
The Wikipedia page for Libgen keeps an updated list of working URLs, just in case this site should go down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis
rwoerz 6y ago
Does this headline sound confusing only to non-native speakers like me? 1. "to warn someone to avoid something" sounds like "to urge someone to do that something" to me. 2. Should sci-hub be referred to as a "science website" like nature.com, quantamagazine.com etc.
- Black101 6y ago
  I understood what they meant and English is not my first language but it could be worded better.
- jraph 6y ago
  warn X to avoid Y sounds fine to me as a non native speaker. Science website sounds off to me for speaking about sci-hub. The title felt a bit like police advised students to distrust science.
- crispyambulance 6y ago
  No, I think your confusion is completely reasonable. It was a garbage article.
- OJFord 6y ago
  I'm a native (BrE) speaker, and it sounds perfectly natural to me, but I understand what you mean, I can see that. 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 If you want that more active phrasing, the unnegated infinitive 'to drive', or 'to use' rather than 'to avoid' the site, you need to say something like 'caution against' instead of 'warn'. 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]
- jamessb 6y ago
  As a native speaker of British English I did not find the title confusing: I think the confusion is that the typical meaning of "warn to" and "warn about" are different. "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")
tim333 6y ago
Odd warning. I get the impression the police have not tried using sci-hub. They should give it a go! >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.
- baybal2 6y ago
  > The City of London police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit says using the Sci-Hub website could "pose a threat" to students' personal data. That's a very thinly veiled threat
  - Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
    Given the Orwellian level of mass surveillance the UK is building, "the GCHQ collects data about anyone connecting to any any site and has a special dossier on people using Sci-Hub, so if you use it, you will be flagged by secret police and this can and will be used as kompromat against you by your own government" is a far more credible threat about misuse of students personal data than anything the aforementioned site is going to do. The far more interesting part of the article however is the "urged universities to block the website on their networks" part.
- nirui 6y ago
  They're police, they probably just followed some orders from up the chain. 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.
  - StavrosK 6y ago
    Nothing Russian is ever good, don't you know...
- 6y ago
panic 6y ago
libgen/scihub are of such monumental social/moral worth that their illegality delegitimizes the law as a whole https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/1220062740825415689 https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/1220062740825415689
- jraph 6y ago
  Well, that the law is wrong on one aspect does not mean it is wrong for every thing. 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)
  - forgotmypw17 6y ago
    I read your whole comment, up and down, yet I can't figure out what you are trying to say. Is there a point you are trying to make?
    - jraph 6y ago
      Yeah, sorry, it is a bit confusing. 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.
anon1253 6y ago
A bit of a technical tangent, but I wonder if a peer to peer version of this website would increase its chances of survival. I can easily imagine something like a reference manager that puts copies of the PDFs you've read or written on IPFS. It would still require some central node that coordinates the sharing, but if some open source ActivityPub service would fill that role it could work I think. Provided there is of course enough personal incentive to share and keep sharing these works.
- sixtyfourbits 6y ago
  There's been an ongoing effort for a bit over a year now to make sure the torrents from sci-hub's archive are sufficiently well seeded (specifically, the scimag collection from library genesis, available at libgen.rs). It's about 80TB total, so with current hard drive prices you can maintain your own local copy of all 85 million articles for under $2k. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any tools to usefully browse the collection like what you suggested but it would be great to see something like that. The 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.
  - BelenusMordred 6y ago
    What I find more amazing about libgen is that even non-IPFS users can still get access through the Cloudflare gateway. Years ago it was a slow dodgy process through regular http channels. 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.
croes 6y ago
FUD
tritritri 6y ago
This is an advertorial for Sci-Hub, british dry humor style.
kowlo 6y ago
scihub is blocked on my connection, see https://imgur.com/a/fesNpFK https://imgur.com/a/fesNpFK ...
- benjiweber 6y ago
  https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders#!:~:text=Elsevier https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders#!:~:te...
- otherme123 6y ago
  For scihub in particular, you can use their Telegram bot (@scihubot): ask for a title/DOI, get the PDF returned.
29athrowaway 6y ago
When we get hit by an asteroid and we have nothing to do about it people will finally understand that perhaps we should waste less time getting in the way of science.
terse_malvolio 6y ago
No specific details on how it could be dangerous. Either it's some zero day, or a malicious site mirror, or ads. It's probably ads.
- randomNumber7 6y ago
  Knowledge is very dangerous in itself ;)
AndyMcConachie 6y ago
"Russia-based website" 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.
- kgeist 6y ago
  More specifically, it was founded by an Armenian in Kazakhstan, who once briefly blocked access to the site to Russian IPs because of some feud with Russians. But yeah, everything to the east of Germany is Russia, right?...
nobrains 6y ago
This made me slightly emotional and remember Aaron Swartz.
scotty79 6y ago
> The City of London Police, which is the national lead for fraud [...] It's a sad state of affairs when 'national lead' is this incompetent.
cr1pablo 6y ago
Use booksc.org
JackeJR 6y ago
Just a heads up that there is a Telegram bot @scihubot that you definitely should not use.

163 points by Black101 6y ago

Do we have any evidence people, much less students, adhere to these warnings?

This is a very strange article. No idea what City of London police has to do with this- there aren't even any universities in City of London (probably a few publishers though). Sci-hub doesn't have any logins barring captchas so why would that be an issue? You could make the same argument for YouTube being a security threat.

carmen_sandiego 6y ago
The City of London Police are often involved in nationwide fraud issues, consulting with other regional police forces, etc. They're a leading UK center for it just because they deal with it so often. 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.
- vijayr02 6y ago
  Also, the City of London is (I think) the only municipal body where businesses are allowed to vote alongside residents AND outnumber residents. 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. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London_Corporation
  - corty 6y ago
    Also, the sherrifs are elected by the Common Hall. The Common Hall consists of the senior members of the Livery Companies which are the guilds and trade associations. So the police is exclusively elected by the businesses.
ChrisKnott 6y ago
CoLP has a national responsibility for fraud, so it has several teams that are nothing really to do with the City, the Intellectual Property Crime Unit is one of them. 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.
corty 6y ago
The City of London is an age-old construct by the financial and aristocratic elite to further their interests and evade a few taxes and regulations. The CoL police is more like the financial police, and therefore primarily enforces business interests and prosecutes mostly financial and business-relevant crime. The name is definitely weird, just like Scotland Yard has little to do with Scotland or units of length.
- mnd999 6y ago
  Scotland Yard is a place where the Met just happened to be based.
- OJFord 6y ago
  City of London is no weirder than New York City, and Scotland Yard is no weirder than Wall Street. In the UK 'city' doesn't mean 'big place', so we have some that you'd call villages, and others that you'd recognise.
  - eigenket 6y ago
    City of London is kinda weird as its the only place in the UK that companies can vote (as far as I'm aware). its got like 10k actual humans voting there and like 24k votes from companies.
  - tankenmate 6y ago
    In times of yore in the UK (and England in particular) city status was bestowed primarily by dent of there being a cathedral in the city. City status was (and I think also still is on advice of parliament) also bestowed by the Crown. These days it is largely down to population size.
  - corty 6y ago
    CoL is far weirder. First, it is not the same as "London", it is just the central part of London. CoL has a different election system from all other parts of England, corporations get a vote (actually, several, how many depends on size and kind of business, derived from the ancient guild system) and outnumber residents by far. This also includes voting the sherrifs into office, explaining the firmly pro-business stance of the police. The CoL also owns properties outside it's own domain, even public grounds in Northern Ireland (via an intermediary). Large parts of the CoL and thereby electoral votes in the CoL are owned by the Crown, the royal family and various lords. This explains the CoL escaping all attempts at reforming it into something more democratic and into a normal part of the city of London (note the non-capital 'c' in 'city'). Read https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/City_of_London 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."
skissane 6y ago
> No idea what City of London police has to do with this 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?
- dageshi 6y ago
  There's probably some law on the books that says the City has their own police force and rewriting it opens up a whole can of worms nobody wants to deal with.
  - skissane 6y ago
    > There's probably some law on the books that says the City has their own police force 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
tome 6y ago
> there aren't even any universities in City of London 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.
IshKebab 6y ago
> Sci-hub doesn't have any logins barring captchas so why would that be an issue? They need Shibboleth logins to download the papers. There have been claims that they use phishing to obtain them.

notretarded 6y ago

This is great. More publicity for sci-hub. Well crafted article from the BBC.. And as a surprise to no one Max Bruce has no qualifications whatsoever beyond further education. Completely clueless.

Bootvis 6y ago

Discussed before: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26517220 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26517220

lmilcin 6y ago

Except students have already learned that misusing personal data is ok and if you are large enough company you can do it with total impunity even if you get caught (Facebook, etc.) 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.

crispyambulance 6y ago
> 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. I fully agree this is the right approach. Unfortunately, it's really REALLY hard to make a compelling case. It seems the only way people will open their eyes is if there's some kind of privacy catastrophe that's plain to see and which has clear consequences. 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).
- lmilcin 6y ago
  I think everybody should be paying for online services and companies should not be allowed to provide services that are free of charge. 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.

willhinsa 6y ago

Definitely do not link to it! https://sci-hub.se/ https://sci-hub.se/

jraph 6y ago
Which by the way should not be added to the hosts file to make it resolve on a censored connection this way: sci-hub.se 186.2.163.219
- dan1234 6y ago
  Looks like virgin media are blocking the IP address. If only there were some kind of private, virtual network I could use…
- kowlo 6y ago
  Blocked by my ISP https://imgur.com/a/fesNpFK https://imgur.com/a/fesNpFK
  - benjiweber 6y ago
    https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders#!:~:text=Elsevier https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders#!:~:te...
    - jraph 6y ago
      Quality list of interesting services, thanks.
    - kowlo 6y ago
      Not surprised to see Nintendo on that list...
  - mratsim 6y ago
    Tor browser
- diarrhea 6y ago

say_it_as_it_is 6y ago

Was this article made by a machine learning algorithm? It created a false narrative with false characters. Published by the BBC, nonetheless?

pjc50 6y ago
It's a rephrased press release from the police. A lot of news is just rephrased press releases.
- akadruid1 6y ago
  The BBC puts unverified claims in quotes, and they are liberally sprinkled through this article. They've also given it to the family and education correspondent instead of the technology correspondent, which I think implies an unusually high level of skepticism for an establishment press release.
jpxw 6y ago
There’s a phenomenon, the name of which escapes me, which describes this situation. 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...
- TeMPOraL 6y ago
  Gell-Mann Amnesia. “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-gell-mann-amnesia-effect-is-as-follows-you https://www.goodreads.com/quotes/65213-briefly-stated-the-ge...

AussieWog93 6y ago

The Wikipedia page for Libgen keeps an updated list of working URLs, just in case this site should go down: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis

rwoerz 6y ago

Does this headline sound confusing only to non-native speakers like me? 1. "to warn someone to avoid something" sounds like "to urge someone to do that something" to me. 2. Should sci-hub be referred to as a "science website" like nature.com, quantamagazine.com etc.

Black101 6y ago
I understood what they meant and English is not my first language but it could be worded better.
jraph 6y ago
warn X to avoid Y sounds fine to me as a non native speaker. Science website sounds off to me for speaking about sci-hub. The title felt a bit like police advised students to distrust science.
crispyambulance 6y ago
No, I think your confusion is completely reasonable. It was a garbage article.
OJFord 6y ago
I'm a native (BrE) speaker, and it sounds perfectly natural to me, but I understand what you mean, I can see that. 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 If you want that more active phrasing, the unnegated infinitive 'to drive', or 'to use' rather than 'to avoid' the site, you need to say something like 'caution against' instead of 'warn'. 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]
jamessb 6y ago
As a native speaker of British English I did not find the title confusing: I think the confusion is that the typical meaning of "warn to" and "warn about" are different. "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")

tim333 6y ago

Odd warning. I get the impression the police have not tried using sci-hub. They should give it a go! >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.

baybal2 6y ago
> The City of London police's Intellectual Property Crime Unit says using the Sci-Hub website could "pose a threat" to students' personal data. That's a very thinly veiled threat
- Jon_Lowtek 6y ago
  Given the Orwellian level of mass surveillance the UK is building, "the GCHQ collects data about anyone connecting to any any site and has a special dossier on people using Sci-Hub, so if you use it, you will be flagged by secret police and this can and will be used as kompromat against you by your own government" is a far more credible threat about misuse of students personal data than anything the aforementioned site is going to do. The far more interesting part of the article however is the "urged universities to block the website on their networks" part.
nirui 6y ago
They're police, they probably just followed some orders from up the chain. 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.
- StavrosK 6y ago
  Nothing Russian is ever good, don't you know...
6y ago

panic 6y ago

libgen/scihub are of such monumental social/moral worth that their illegality delegitimizes the law as a whole https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/1220062740825415689 https://twitter.com/alicemazzy/status/1220062740825415689

jraph 6y ago
Well, that the law is wrong on one aspect does not mean it is wrong for every thing. 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)
- forgotmypw17 6y ago
  I read your whole comment, up and down, yet I can't figure out what you are trying to say. Is there a point you are trying to make?
  - jraph 6y ago
    Yeah, sorry, it is a bit confusing. 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.

anon1253 6y ago

A bit of a technical tangent, but I wonder if a peer to peer version of this website would increase its chances of survival. I can easily imagine something like a reference manager that puts copies of the PDFs you've read or written on IPFS. It would still require some central node that coordinates the sharing, but if some open source ActivityPub service would fill that role it could work I think. Provided there is of course enough personal incentive to share and keep sharing these works.

sixtyfourbits 6y ago
There's been an ongoing effort for a bit over a year now to make sure the torrents from sci-hub's archive are sufficiently well seeded (specifically, the scimag collection from library genesis, available at libgen.rs). It's about 80TB total, so with current hard drive prices you can maintain your own local copy of all 85 million articles for under $2k. Unfortunately I'm not aware of any tools to usefully browse the collection like what you suggested but it would be great to see something like that. The 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.
- BelenusMordred 6y ago
  What I find more amazing about libgen is that even non-IPFS users can still get access through the Cloudflare gateway. Years ago it was a slow dodgy process through regular http channels. 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.

croes 6y ago

FUD

tritritri 6y ago

This is an advertorial for Sci-Hub, british dry humor style.

kowlo 6y ago

scihub is blocked on my connection, see https://imgur.com/a/fesNpFK https://imgur.com/a/fesNpFK ...

benjiweber 6y ago
https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders#!:~:text=Elsevier https://www.virginmedia.com/help/list-of-court-orders#!:~:te...
otherme123 6y ago
For scihub in particular, you can use their Telegram bot (@scihubot): ask for a title/DOI, get the PDF returned.

29athrowaway 6y ago

When we get hit by an asteroid and we have nothing to do about it people will finally understand that perhaps we should waste less time getting in the way of science.

terse_malvolio 6y ago

No specific details on how it could be dangerous. Either it's some zero day, or a malicious site mirror, or ads. It's probably ads.

randomNumber7 6y ago
Knowledge is very dangerous in itself ;)

AndyMcConachie 6y ago

"Russia-based website" 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.

kgeist 6y ago
More specifically, it was founded by an Armenian in Kazakhstan, who once briefly blocked access to the site to Russian IPs because of some feud with Russians. But yeah, everything to the east of Germany is Russia, right?...

nobrains 6y ago

This made me slightly emotional and remember Aaron Swartz.

scotty79 6y ago

> The City of London Police, which is the national lead for fraud [...] It's a sad state of affairs when 'national lead' is this incompetent.

cr1pablo 6y ago

Use booksc.org

JackeJR 6y ago

Just a heads up that there is a Telegram bot @scihubot that you definitely should not use.