Talk about scaremongering. This is the best thing to happen in the academic community in eons.

https://bbc.co.uk/news/...

Is it just me or are major news channels getting dumber and cringier by the day? The Onion puts more information in a single paragraph than most real news sources put in a 10-paragraph article nowadays...

@hitko It's not just you.

The BBC in particular used to be fantastic - genuinely interesting and insightful news articles, leaving the dumb celebrity crap to other news sites.

These days it's just joined the hoard, there's very little of interest.

Careful! They might learn!

Talking about this on major news will only cause a Streisand effect

The traffic to the site probably just peaked

SciHub is a gem, but unfortunately an illegal one (that said I admire its goals and it takes serious grit to do what they do, and it's awesome). There are conferences which publish their submissions for free (like OSDI), plus the enormous amount of stuff on arXiv. Support them!

At least in my field there seems to be a growing trend of open source-ing research, which is awesome and also a fuck you to big publishers. It's helped us quite a bit too by enforcing more rigour.

@RememberMe yeah computer science is doing fairly well when it comes to open research, and I think we have to give some credit to the free software movement for that as well.

What I do find absolutely shitty is if research work that was (partially) funded by tax payers money gets locked behind a paywall from some private publisher.
Most of the time you do find a copy from the university itself or whatever but it's still annoying

How is it scaremongering if they know that they have participated in phishing?

@electrineer Blocking Sci-hub has nothing to do with phishing attacks. They don't originate from Sci-hub, they originate from disposable sites and emails, and it took a lot of research to link those attacks back to Sci-hub. Downloading PDFs from Sci-hub is no more dangerous than downloading anything else from the internet, and phishing attacks linked to Sci-hub are no different than any other phishing attacks which happen every day.

That article is the equivalent of warning people against driving powerful cars on the basis that speed limit is more often broken by people in powerful cars.

@electrineer They're making the (incorrect and deliberate) implication that by visiting the site to download a paper, all your details will be stolen.

That's completely false - the phishing emails are part of separate targeted attacks and nothing to do with actually visiting the site.