by hazeii on 3/19/21, 7:13 PM with 68 comments
by ajsnigrutin on 3/19/21, 7:46 PM
by hn_throwaway_99 on 3/19/21, 8:00 PM
> The police are concerned that users of the "Russia-based website" could have information taken and misused online.
Police (and politicians in general) should be careful about the fire they're playing with. There are some valid reasons to be concerned about hacking based out of Russia, but if every time they want to try to cast aspersions on things they don't like by highlighting connections to Russian they run he risk of people just totally discounting that warning in all cases.
by albertgoeswoof on 3/19/21, 8:12 PM
https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/news/city-of-london/news/...
> Sci-Hub is a series of websites that enable free access to over 70 million published scientific papers of all disciplines. It is estimated that it includes 80% or more of the world’s currently published scientific papers, with the volume of data being roughly two and a half times the size of Wikipedia.
Fantastic!
> Sci-Hub obtains the papers through a variety of malicious means, such as the use of phishing emails to trick university staff and students into divulging their login credentials. Sci Hub then use this to compromise the university’s network and download the research papers.
A) Is this true?
B) If so, is it a bad thing?
by lol768 on 3/19/21, 8:23 PM
by leephillips on 3/19/21, 8:24 PM
by solarkraft on 3/19/21, 9:33 PM
by DanBC on 3/19/21, 8:51 PM
Compare
https://www.cityoflondon.police.uk/police-forces/city-of-lon...
https://www.met.police.uk/police-forces/metropolitan-police/...
And it's weird that the police are advising people not to use Sci-Hub. In England copyright violation is a civil matter, not a criminal offence, unless you're doing it as part of business or you're doing so much of it you're distorting trade. It's simply not a police matter.
by Kim_Bruning on 3/20/21, 2:44 AM
It seems clear that Sci-Hub is a great boon to the promotion of the arts and sciences.
It wouldn't even be unprecedented to have laws that "encourage" contributions. Think of the old library of Alexandria, or even the modern library of Congress.
by bschne on 3/19/21, 7:50 PM
The writing follows no thread, the article contains no more information than interleaving parts of two press releases would give you, it's a complete mess. This would not pass for a decent writing assignment at the high-school level — and yet it's published by the BBC somehow. Even the subheadings are weirdly chosen.
Was this even touched by a human?
by aritmo on 3/19/21, 7:56 PM
by leoh on 3/19/21, 8:33 PM
by cybert00th on 3/21/21, 9:03 PM
Until we actually understand what's being done to us, we're all just blowing in the wind.
by Silhouette on 3/19/21, 8:01 PM
That's the first I've heard about this, and it would represent a very different perspective on Sci-Hub to the traditional anti-copyright Robin Hood styling.
That said, even though CoLP is a rather strange police force within system here, it would be surprising for it to make a definitive public statement like that without being reasonably confident that it was correct. Is there any truth to that allegation?
by bioinformatics on 3/19/21, 7:55 PM
by nikkwong on 3/19/21, 8:10 PM
I think I remember the Indian government proposing something similar to this current sci-hub initiative.
Obviously I don't know if sci-hub is the right way to go about these things, and I wonder how this would change the incentivization behind research. From my understanding though the main gatekeepers here like elsevier act as more of a financial leech on the system rather than providing any real value; since they aren't the ones funding the research to begin with. Would be interested to hear other's take on this.
by pmiller2 on 3/19/21, 7:47 PM
by tpmx on 3/19/21, 8:06 PM