6 ms·

The publishers now encode their papers with individual identifiers, that generationP calls UUIDs on all pdf's. That means they can trace it back to the institut

The publishers now encode their papers with individual identifiers, that generationP calls UUIDs on all pdf's. That means they can trace it back to the institution(and perhaps the actual prof?) They have then sent nastygrams to threaten them with fees or loss of access to the institution - potentially serious punishment. What is needed is a way to run the papers through an OCR recognition program to create renewed text and to further process to randomly vary a large number of adjacent letter spacings. (this is called 'micro kerning' and it allowed a second order of unique document recognition where the document is scanned by the journal to look for these fractional kerning gaps in the letter spacing which can lead back to the institution). I suppose a program flow could be made to OCR + random micro kerning changes - it would take time, but once set up it would be a rapid computer based document flow process. Photos/charts could be sanitised as well, but legends etc on them would also need OCR and micro kerning adjustments. With 25 words of text, each with 6 letters, micro kerning can easily create 10,000 unique ID's, easily enough to cope with all subscribed institutions - and that is on one chart/photo. I suspect the subscribing institutions have acted with firm words to their profs and grad students to block this. This can easily be told to us if a few people in assorted institutions let us know if they have been read firm words about this? I am not sure how Sci-hub can get past this, unless they get a good Indian court ruling and can use Indian friends to scan printed copies of journals - if they exist in this online age?

robwwilliams 5y ago
No “firm words” that I heard in my neck of the USA woods. I was struck by very low number of German downloads. Did I miss something?
- aurizon 5y ago
  No idea about Germany, but they may well be more law abiding?
  - medstrom 5y ago
    No, that's absurd. More likely a different factor. Some googling and lo and behold: starting with Germany, the universities of several European countries cancelled their agreements with Elsevier, pressuring Elsevier to give them better deals, including open access by default. I imagine it lessens the need for Sci-Hub.
    - aurizon 5y ago
      A good beginning
lucb1e 5y ago
Makes me wonder how much they'd have to offer me to accept the task of implementing such tracking algorithms to modify other people's scientific papers for the purpose. Certainly I won't be the cheapest, but still. Either some developer is very vested in the idea of keeping science a secret or someone got a very nice bonus. Edit: also the sysadmin that keeps this database safe without 'accidental' data loss on UUID to downloader mappings.
- aurizon 5y ago
  It seems to me that this type of tracking, under the guise of guarding rights is against the GDPR = unlawful tracking that they are harassing Google and FB with? Is not justice's sword 2 edged?
  - lucb1e 5y ago
    (Note that this is all written from a European perspective, applies European Economic Area law and human rights as defined by the Council of Europe (which includes Russia, to everyone's surprise). I know that in the USA everyone is much more pro frontier justice, for example when it comes to pervasive and continual monitoring of employees while at work.) I think it's very arguable that they have a legitimate interest here. Privacy has always been a weighing of interests, at least that's how I've always heard it explained by the Netherlands' face of digital law (Arnoud Engelfriet) also back in the days of WBP (the law from ~1995 that is 97% the same thing as GDPR), also in light of the European Convention of Human Rights (article 8 is a right to privacy). A common example is filming the road: illegal, but if you park your car in front of your house and there have been car fires in your neighborhood lately, then it can be justified. Filming employees inside a warehouse: invasion of privacy (illegal) but if there have recently been thefts from a certain part of the building then it's justified to hang up a camera there, introduce a lock that registers who went there at what time, or some such. (With adequate security measures so only authorized people can use it for the intended purpose.) Personal example: monitoring everything I do on the company network is illegal, but because I work in a business where secrecy is important (security consultancy) it was considered justified to do spot checks, tell every employee upon entering into the employment contract that spot checks are a thing, and inform the subjects of spot checks after they were part of one. Transparent but still effective. The two things to consider (iirc) are: - Do my rights weigh heavier than the other party's right to privacy? (e.g. car fire is a fairly big impact on your right to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions) - Is there any other way in which I could achieve this goal with a lesser impact on the right to privacy? In the case of Elsevier, from what I heard this whole scheme is a big mafia-like practice (wouldn't want to be published in a niche corner nobody reads now would you?) and so in my opinion it's entirely unethical to support (work for) them in the first place, at least in any role except one where you think you might be able to nudge things in the right direction. But I could see how a judge says: well, that's how today's law works, that you have moral objections is something you can take to your favorite religious leader and lament about, not a court of law. If I'm being fair, there isn't even really an invasion of privacy because PDFs don't have executable code (usually) that can track you. Rather, they need to hide it somewhere so that, if it appears on the pirate bay, they can read out the ID and see who the perpetrator is. More like a criminal investigation using a fingerprint on a glass, and less like a cookie actively sent with every action you perform on a website. TL;DR: GDPR applies, but it probably doesn't make this database illegal. It's not a loophole by which a person can say no to literally everything. (Would be cool if you could require the police to stop using your fingerprint in a legitimate investigation.) Still, if I were that sysadmin... I probably wouldn't 'drop table elsevier', but I'd rather live off government benefits than support that scheme.
hda2 5y ago
> I am not sure how Sci-hub can get past this Quite trivially, actually, thanks to the good old analogue hole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30084193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30084193 All sci-hub would have to do in this case is download the same paper through three or more accounts (different institutions, networks, countries?) at three different times, rasterize them and keep the common denominator. If a pixel has no common denominator, they'd have to fall back to a default value. This is by no means a perfect method and it has its weaknesses and pitfalls, but the resulting PDF will be far less useful as a means to de-anonymize accounts using information from the PDF itself. Publishers still have other sources of information to de-anonymize accounts if the multiple accounts/downloads aren't truly isolated from one another.
- aurizon 5y ago
  Yes, that would mush their secret sauce...
pishpash 5y ago
Do a reflow of the entire document? As long as it's semantically recognizable it can be done. Figures are harder. ML can really help here: someone make a pdf2tex!
trasz 5y ago
Does this mean it is trivially easy for any student or employee to make their institution stop paying publishers by getting it banned?
- aurizon 5y ago
  LOL, student sabotage!. I think the paywalls would extract a penance that maintains their cash flow - remember, Greed is their mantra, may it never ever cease.

robwwilliams 5y ago

No “firm words” that I heard in my neck of the USA woods. I was struck by very low number of German downloads. Did I miss something?

aurizon 5y ago
No idea about Germany, but they may well be more law abiding?
- medstrom 5y ago
  No, that's absurd. More likely a different factor. Some googling and lo and behold: starting with Germany, the universities of several European countries cancelled their agreements with Elsevier, pressuring Elsevier to give them better deals, including open access by default. I imagine it lessens the need for Sci-Hub.
  - aurizon 5y ago
    A good beginning

lucb1e 5y ago

Makes me wonder how much they'd have to offer me to accept the task of implementing such tracking algorithms to modify other people's scientific papers for the purpose. Certainly I won't be the cheapest, but still. Either some developer is very vested in the idea of keeping science a secret or someone got a very nice bonus. Edit: also the sysadmin that keeps this database safe without 'accidental' data loss on UUID to downloader mappings.

aurizon 5y ago
It seems to me that this type of tracking, under the guise of guarding rights is against the GDPR = unlawful tracking that they are harassing Google and FB with? Is not justice's sword 2 edged?
- lucb1e 5y ago
  (Note that this is all written from a European perspective, applies European Economic Area law and human rights as defined by the Council of Europe (which includes Russia, to everyone's surprise). I know that in the USA everyone is much more pro frontier justice, for example when it comes to pervasive and continual monitoring of employees while at work.) I think it's very arguable that they have a legitimate interest here. Privacy has always been a weighing of interests, at least that's how I've always heard it explained by the Netherlands' face of digital law (Arnoud Engelfriet) also back in the days of WBP (the law from ~1995 that is 97% the same thing as GDPR), also in light of the European Convention of Human Rights (article 8 is a right to privacy). A common example is filming the road: illegal, but if you park your car in front of your house and there have been car fires in your neighborhood lately, then it can be justified. Filming employees inside a warehouse: invasion of privacy (illegal) but if there have recently been thefts from a certain part of the building then it's justified to hang up a camera there, introduce a lock that registers who went there at what time, or some such. (With adequate security measures so only authorized people can use it for the intended purpose.) Personal example: monitoring everything I do on the company network is illegal, but because I work in a business where secrecy is important (security consultancy) it was considered justified to do spot checks, tell every employee upon entering into the employment contract that spot checks are a thing, and inform the subjects of spot checks after they were part of one. Transparent but still effective. The two things to consider (iirc) are: - Do my rights weigh heavier than the other party's right to privacy? (e.g. car fire is a fairly big impact on your right to the peaceful enjoyment of his possessions) - Is there any other way in which I could achieve this goal with a lesser impact on the right to privacy? In the case of Elsevier, from what I heard this whole scheme is a big mafia-like practice (wouldn't want to be published in a niche corner nobody reads now would you?) and so in my opinion it's entirely unethical to support (work for) them in the first place, at least in any role except one where you think you might be able to nudge things in the right direction. But I could see how a judge says: well, that's how today's law works, that you have moral objections is something you can take to your favorite religious leader and lament about, not a court of law. If I'm being fair, there isn't even really an invasion of privacy because PDFs don't have executable code (usually) that can track you. Rather, they need to hide it somewhere so that, if it appears on the pirate bay, they can read out the ID and see who the perpetrator is. More like a criminal investigation using a fingerprint on a glass, and less like a cookie actively sent with every action you perform on a website. TL;DR: GDPR applies, but it probably doesn't make this database illegal. It's not a loophole by which a person can say no to literally everything. (Would be cool if you could require the police to stop using your fingerprint in a legitimate investigation.) Still, if I were that sysadmin... I probably wouldn't 'drop table elsevier', but I'd rather live off government benefits than support that scheme.

hda2 5y ago

> I am not sure how Sci-hub can get past this Quite trivially, actually, thanks to the good old analogue hole: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30084193 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30084193 All sci-hub would have to do in this case is download the same paper through three or more accounts (different institutions, networks, countries?) at three different times, rasterize them and keep the common denominator. If a pixel has no common denominator, they'd have to fall back to a default value. This is by no means a perfect method and it has its weaknesses and pitfalls, but the resulting PDF will be far less useful as a means to de-anonymize accounts using information from the PDF itself. Publishers still have other sources of information to de-anonymize accounts if the multiple accounts/downloads aren't truly isolated from one another.

aurizon 5y ago
Yes, that would mush their secret sauce...

pishpash 5y ago

Do a reflow of the entire document? As long as it's semantically recognizable it can be done. Figures are harder. ML can really help here: someone make a pdf2tex!

trasz 5y ago

Does this mean it is trivially easy for any student or employee to make their institution stop paying publishers by getting it banned?

aurizon 5y ago
LOL, student sabotage!. I think the paywalls would extract a penance that maintains their cash flow - remember, Greed is their mantra, may it never ever cease.