One of Colonization's sad effects (fairly sure all the Indian bureaucrats are helping with this to "settle" out their children in US/Europe with kickback "scholarships").
clicks the link
blocked
Oh right, France government is shameful too.
At this point, it is a global phenomenon (and there's been discussions at the UN General Assembly on carving up interwebs for "security"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_sovereignty
I'm currently reaching it from Spain after a certificate warning. We have our own disgraceful internet access thing going on nationally at the moment, but it doesn't really depend on domains.
In the early days of the IWF blocklist I had trouble with a Joomla install timing out when using my own ISP but it was fine if I used a proxy. It turned out to be because the Joomla install was on cheap GoDaddy hosting, and something on the IWF list was in the same IP block as my hosting - so my ISP was directing traffic through a filtering proxy which was causing problems with Joomla.
(IP address alone isn't enough to identify a particular site, filtering everything for target websie was too expensive, so IP-based filtering was used to decide which traffic went through the filtering proxy.)
The site seems to be blocked for me in the UK, too, by the way.
Depends. It seems Spain is doing interception on the data going from/to IPs, as resolving sci-hub.se with my ISP resolver gives me the same IP as I get when doing it externally (186.2.163.219), but when I visit https://sci-hub.se I see a "Certificate not correct" warning, since the certificate belongs to allot.com, which seems to be the party actually implementing the block here.
If you're on Android you can use Intra from google https://getintra.org/intl/en-GB/#!/
Or if you're on Windows you can use GoodbyeDPI https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI
Both will split up your dns requests into chunks so the ISPs filter won't catch it.
These tools obfuscates your headers as well.
# poison the DNS: you can use another unaffected DNS to bypass.
# ISP level or country level content filtering (similar to the GFW of China): you need a VPN that won't be blocked, and make sure the exit node is unaffected. (also the police won't care?)
# take down the server: finger cross that they serve the content from safe location.
If you had any doubt…
Then we meet the question again: how to protect children/copyright owner without censorship?
or how to censor content while keeping freedom of speech?
I wonder if a french researcher (or a French student in a university/engineering school) could check if it's still the case.
Sadly, most of the Europe is in favour of various kind of censorship and https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1e1l3qk/country_st..., vide https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1n22e8s/stances_on...
Maybe I'm in a certain type of bubble, but I kind of feel like that's a secondary goal (for many of them), while the first is finding and keeping a position that lets them earn enough money to survive. Some of them are lucky to be able to do both, but quite a lot of them are sacrificing the "pursuit of truth" because otherwise they wouldn't be able to feed themselves by working as a researcher.
Are you aware that you're not paying the authors, but paying the journal, who usually don't pay the authors anything and even demand payment FROM the author to publish their article in the first place? This is not like buying a book, journals are leeches with morally indefensible business models.
There's a long list of researchers who have done horrible things in pursuit of truth. Research ethics exist to remind us that, yes, other things matter.
What happened in University of Oxford v. Rameshwari Photocopy Service is pretty rare.[1] I doubt if we will see a repeat of that one.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/University_of_Oxford_v._Ramesh...
There’s one particularly notorious character whose rate card has been published online. He charges INR 1.5 million per appearance in court.
The reality is of course that then the appropriate judges will hear the case.
Rarely, if ever, will a judge recuse themselves. Strangely, this happened last week.
https://www.livelaw.in/news-updates/nclat-judge-chennai-recu...
> However, the Court stated that Elbakyan, in her first written statement, admitted that the publishers were owners of copyrighted works. It also noted that Sci-Hub were rejected by the Court when they attempted to amend the statement in 2023. Further, it accused Sci-Hub of partaking in “online piracy” and LibGen “by unauthorized means, circumventing technological measures put in place by Plaintiffs to protect copyright in their literary works.” Thus, they rejected the plea.
[1] https://www.medianama.com/2024/05/223-delhi-hc-lawsuit-sci-h...
This is tangential, but deference to precedent has become a huge problem in US and UK Commmon Law. So much case law has built up over the centuries that you can find a precedent to support almost any position! The "legal research" battle -- like the "discovery" battle -- just adds tremendous time, expense, and complexity, and rarely or indeed almost never benefits the litigants or the court.
As for precedent, yes, things accumulate over time, but by-and-large precedent = predictability. And that is completely missing from our system.
As someone who works in the UK system, I can point to two things I don't like about the US system. Firstly, the inability to recover costs in most cases. This leads to an abundance of litigation (because a party with a weak case has little to lose by trying anyway). It also produces unfair results (because the principle of justice should put the winner in the position they would have been if they hadn't been wronged, but it doesn't because they have to bear their litigation costs). Secondly, the politicisation (and in my view corruption) of the judicial system. We don't have "Conservative" or "Labour" judges here, and it's extremely weird to me that you can have "Republican" or "Democrat" judges given that a judge is supposed to just interpret the law in an unbiased way without regard to their political opinion. To me it seems that Supreme Court decisions are openly corrupt given how often the opinions are divided straight down party lines: statistically you should expect a random mix of Republican and Democrat judges adopting each side.
Common law is great. I'm much more uneasy about the alternative - i.e. legal systems where people become judges not long out of law school, with little real world experience, and proceed to make decisions that profoundly affect people's lives and livelihoods without feeling bound by precedent or being expected to explain their reasoning in any great amount of detail.
Also, word note, precedence means 'which things have priority over others?', whereas a precedent is 'something that has happened before'. A car at a green light has precedence, but the common law has precedents.
I've seen cases where Side A has 10 examples of case law that support their position, which they use in their motions and filings -- and Side B has 10 counterexamples of caselaw that support the opposite position, which they also use. The Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail, so de facto isn't "bound by precedent" -- he rules in favor of the side he's inclined to support. (Posner was briefly derided for laying this bare.)
It's a major problem. When you have literal mountains of case law (IIRC all US court decisions in plaintext come out to something like 1.5TB) just about any litigant can find case law to support almost any position. You end up with a system that's much like the Civil Law, but with the added burden of "research."
Sure, and there are people who can array thousands of pages of evidence that vaccines cause space reptilism and chronic nosehair. Doesn't mean it's good evidence.
The basic tradecraft of a lawyer is to figure out what the weight of the precedent on a given question is. Your argument seems to be that the very existence of any doubt, no matter how implausible or infrequent, means we might as well all give up on the rule of law and return to monkey. Which seems a rather nihilistic take for a system that works quite well, despite the difficult trade-offs inherent in it.
> The Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail
That's what clerks are for. A judge has staff! And usually a solid intuition for what the law is, built on decades of experience practicing in the field. That's why we tend to appoint our judges from experienced practitioners, and not fresh law school grads.
This is admittedly a much worse issue at the lowest levels - magistrates who deal with petty theft and the like. Those people are often fairly incompetent, sadly, but I'm not aware of any legal system that's managed to systematically solve this issue.
> It's a major problem. When you have literal mountains of case law (IIRC all US court decisions in plaintext come out to something like 200TB)
The vast majority of this is lower court decisions that won't be binding precedent almost anywhere.
But what if the citations are valid? What if they are, at least, credible? That's how it tends to be. Flippancy doesn't correct this.
> Your argument seems to be that the very existence of any doubt, no matter how implausible or infrequent, means we might as well all give up on the rule of law and return to monkey. Which seems a rather nihilistic take for a system that works quite well, despite the difficult trade-offs inherent in it.
Nobody said anything about "returning to monkey" -- the claim is that systems of binding precedent tend to collapse under their own weight, and eventually come to burden courts more than they help those courts. In the end, you're no better off than you are with Civil Law that isn't bound by precedent. This isn't exactly "monkey" -- it's just a different way of administrating the law, and I think time is showing that it is a superior way of administrating non-criminal law.
> The vast majority of this is lower court decisions that won't be binding precedent almost anywhere.
All the same, I think you'd be surprised how often lower court decisions are cited when they can help a case.
But here's the thing, even 9/11 truthers tend to make claims that, on surface level, might appear 'credible' to a layman. But only to someone who doesn't know very much about the underlying subjects and is easily overwhelmed by trivialities. Lawyers and judges do actually know a lot about the law. They know how to sift through those precedents. They know what argument is taken from a binding precedent and which is from obiter dicta, and what that means for the case at hand.
Take the Supreme Court, which gets trotted about as an example of extreme partisanship. In the 2024 term (the one just finished), a plurality of cases - 42.4% - were decided completely unanimously, 9-0. 66.7% of all cases had no more than one or two dissents. In only 16.7% of cases did the decision rest on a single vote. And in only 9.09% of cases did the judges align on 'ideological lines' - 90.91% did not follow any such split.
And that's of the cases that reach the Supreme Court, which tend to be those rare cases where there is some disagreement over the law. The vast, vast majority of court decisions are by lower courts, and usually unanimous, because most things to come up before courts have a settled answer in law and precedent. A court case is not an Internet discussion where you can strip mine Wikipedia for cites and refs for some epic dunk. That approach tends to crash very fast and very hard against reality in a court.
Most law is not contentious in the way laymen tend to imagine it to be. Experts are usually in agreement about the state of the law, because most law is reasonably settled, built upon stable and well-understood precedent.
Every now and then, something interesting and unique comes before the courts and then you might see a bigger variety of arguments as each side tries to control the narrative. The court will decide the outcome and, if it's a sufficiently high level court, that decision becomes the new precedent and you don't need to refer to the earlier ones again because the issue is no longer novel.
Yes. Then you figure out in what respects the current case resembles the precedent and which is more unique. There are not twenty cases where the facts and circumstances are identical to the present one because that’s not how reality works.
> Judge, who is a very busy man, simply cannot research the issue in exhaustive detail
Literally the lawyers’ jobs to do this.
I don’t think it’s a coïncidence that the oldest continuous legal systems in the world are precedent-based.
Here's recent news about another free vpn that took screengrabs of users' sessions: https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cyber-security/a-...
As the saying goes, if you're not paying for the product, the product is you.
But yes, not a good look to bend down to foreign publishing companies. They should have told them to f off.
That being said Govt. of India did an en mass subscription for many journals for most research institutes, under the One Nation One Subscription scheme
And requiring open access publication is not the solution. The journals demands couple of thousands at least in fees if you opt on this option which is a waste of money that could be spent better.
The scientific publications industry profit margin is the highest in the world. Higher even than the High tech companies for a reason [1].
[1] https://theconversation.com/academic-publishing-is-a-multibi...
Fair use was not explained and the plaintiffs took an argument that since alexandria is not an indian citizen or not in india, she does not fear indian laws and that somehow might have tipped the scales.
I am sure this would be appealed and i would like to join in, i already tried to contact people few years ago but life got in the way.
btw, i am a licensed indian lawyer
> Why Sci-Hub stopped
> The court order was not the main reason Sci-Hub stopped releasing new papers: by 2022 most university libraries implemented two-factor authentication, and as a result, Sci-Hub could not automatically login to libraries using student / researcher username and password to download new papers. Those paywall-circumvention methods that worked well in 2011-2015 became useless in 2022.
I hope this gets overturned, but then again, if you're using the internet without a privacy-first VPN like mullvad, GG.
Because they’re used to serving the interests of large companies (domestic and international) as well as bowing to any executive comments or opinions. Indian judges rule first with their own opinions and moral views, then maybe look at the law, and then maybe consider the constitution (in that order).
As the article notes, people will just use a VPN or Tor to access the sites. The courts in India do not understand technology (like in many other countries). They just acquiesce to the demands from large companies.
With the indirect pressure through US tariffs, I wouldn’t rule out the executive finding ways to not annoy the US even more through some means.
I have a longstanding pet peeve with it (the judiciary): the entire validity and legality of the Aadhaar biometric identity program has been in limbo, pending hearing by a constitutional bench (the conclusion of “Rojer Mathew v. South Indian Bank”). This bench hasn’t been constituted for several years. Chief Justice after Chief Justice in the Supreme Court has ignored it and let the executive bulldoze everyone to submit, get this “voluntary” (that’s the official definition) number and link it in more and more databases.
Long story short, depending on the Indian judiciary for justice on large enough matters that affect the entire country and its future is futile. If it’s a simpler matter affecting one or two companies or a political party, the justice will be swift.
That's ridiculous. Thankfully someone is breaking down these barriers to science.
faangguyindia•6h ago
Currently, many LLM services only provide stuff from the study abstract.