rigorousintuition.ca

seems his behaviour would be consistent with having been dosed with some bad drugs

I enjoy how he tries to play it off as if there is nothing shady about meeting with Stratfor and how the email is suggestive of him earning "big bucks" for some mystery work. What a fucking asshole, Aaron Swartz would never have let this happen, and that's why they murdered him.

There’s a battle raging over whether academic research should be free, and it’s overflowing into the dark web.

Most modern scholarly work remains locked behind paywalls, and unless your computer is on the network of a university with an expensive subscription, you have to pay a fee, often around 30 dollars, to access each paper.

Many scholars say this system makes publishers rich—Elsevier, a company that controls access to more than 2,000 journals, has a market capitalization about equal to that of Delta Airlines—but does not benefit the academics that conducted the research, or the public at large. Others worry that free academic journals would have a hard time upholding the rigorous standards and peer reviews that the most prestigious paid journals are famous for.

Some years ago, a university student in Kazakhstan took it upon herself to set free the vast trove of paywalled academic research. That student, Alexandra Elbakyan, developed Sci-Hub, an online tool that allows users to easily download paywalled papers for free.

Sci-Hub uses university networks to access subscription-only academic papers, generally without the knowledge of the academic institutions. When a user asks Sci-Hub to access a paid article, the service will download it from a university that subscribes to the database that owns it. As it delivers the user a pdf of the requested article, it also saves a copy on its own server, so that next time someone requests the paper, they can download the cached version.

Unsurprisingly, Elbakyan’s project has drawn the ire of publishers. Last year, Elsevier sued Sci-Hub and an associated website called Library Genesis for violating its copyright. The two websites “operate an international network of piracy and copyright infringement by circumventing legal and authorized means of access to the ScienceDirect database,” Elsevier’s lawyers wrote in a court filing, referring to the company’s subscription database.

A judge for the New York Southern District Court ruled in favor of the publisher, and Sci-Hub’s domain, sci-hub.org, was shut down. Soon, the service popped up again under a different domain.

But even if the new domain gets shut down, too, Sci-Hub will still be accessible on the dark web, a part of the Internet often associated with drugs, weapons, and child porn. Like its seedy dark-web neighbors, the Sci-Hub site is accessible only through Tor, a network of computers that passes web requests through a randomized series of servers in order to preserve visitors’ anonymity.

Illegal activity thrives on this part of the Internet, partly because its contents aren’t visible to search engines like Google. The Tor network makes it very difficult to know where an offending server is, allowing sites like Silk Road, a prominent drug marketplace, to survive for years. (Silk Road was finally shut down in 2013 and its creator, Ross Ulbricht, was sentenced to life in prison.)

But the investigation that took down the Silk Road took up countless government resources. It’s unlikely new Sci-Hub website would attract the same amount of negative attention, so the website is likely safe behind the many layers of encryption that protect sites on the dark web.

So why go through all this trouble to provide access to pirated academic research? In a letter submitted to the New York district court where she was being sued, Elbakyan said her experience as a student in Kazakhstan drove her to set up the website. Paying upwards of 30 dollars to access a paper is “insane,” she wrote, when researcher regularly need to access tens or even hundreds of articles.

Elbakyan says free access to academic research also helps promote researchers’ independence. “Today, subscription prices are very high; an individual person cannot pay them,” she wrote to me in an email. “You need to join one of the few available research institutions, and for that you need to conform to … standards that suppress creativity.”

Websites like Sci-Hub and Library Genesis have a lot of support from the academic community, including from the authors whose work is being traded for free in shadowy corners of the Internet.

In 2012, during a large-scale academic boycott of Elsevier, even well-endowed Harvard University announced it was having trouble paying large publishers’ annual fees. “We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of our labour at outrageous prices,” the former director of the university’s library told The Guardian. Well-organized boycotts and open-access movements continue to flourish in academia.

After Elsevier’s lawsuit against Sci-Hub succeeded late last year, a group of researchers, writers, and artists created a website with an open letter in support of Sci-Hub. Likening Elsevier to the the greedy businessman in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince, a character who spends all his time mindlessly accumulating a stockpile of stars for profit, the group wrote that the lawsuit was a “big blow” to researchers around the world.

“The system is broken,” the essay read. “It devalues us, authors, editors, and readers alike. It parasites on our labor, it thwarts our service to the public, it denies us access.”

There will always be techniques for accessing paywalled research for free, even without services like Sci-Hub. Some of them are much less complex than Elbakyan’s website: Researchers and scholars often use the hashtag #icanhazpdf on Twitter to ask fellow academics for paywalled articles. (There’s even been scholarly work published that analyzes the phenomenon—appropriately, the research is free online.)

But Sci-Hub’s ingenious methods automate the process, cut out middle men on Twitter, and don’t advertise the request for, essentially, pirated research. And Elbakyan says her website’s presence on the dark web will help keep it accessible even if legal action dismantles Sci-Hub’s new home on the easily accessible surface web.

Aaron Swartz is Dead — But Not His Work
Kevin Carson | @KevinCarson1 | Support this author on Patreon | February 17th, 2016
Despite everything the academic power structure and its allies in the U.S. Justice Department could do to Aaron Swartz — including driving him to suicide — the enemies of information freedom in academia have been in steady retreat ever since.

Back in 2011, in his Guerrilla Open Access Manifesto, Swartz defined his revolutionary goal as nothing short of total information freedom in academia.

“We need to take information, wherever it is stored, make our copies and share them with the world. We need to take stuff that’s out of copyright and add it to the archive. We need to buy secret databases and put them on the Web. We need to download scientific journals and upload them to file sharing networks. We need to fight for Guerrilla Open Access.”

These weren’t just words for Swartz. He was arrested for secretly connecting a computer in a storage closet to the M.I.T. network and using a guest password to systematically download several million paywalled academic articles from JSTOR with the intent of making them freely available online. For this he was arrested and charged with the nonexistent crime of “data theft” (every single article Swartz copied remained available at JSTOR just as before), and eventually bullied into suicide by an ambitious prosecutor.

But today, three years after his death, thanks to those continuing his struggle we are closer than ever before to realizing his goal of breaking the paywalls of all academic journals and distributing free versions of overpriced books from academic publishers.

Scientist Andrea Kuszewski created the #ICanHazPdf Twitter hashtag all the way back in 2011 as a way of soliciting jailbroken pdf files of paywalled academic journal articles, but it attracted widespread social media attention for the first time last October following a high-profile Atlantic article. Someone needing a free version of a paywalled article simply tweets the author, title and other bibliographic data along with the hashtag and their own email address; anyone who sees the tweet and has a copy can email it to them as an attachment.

Neuroscientist Alexandra Elbakyan created the website Sci-Hub, also in 2011, to host jailbroken science articles. She was motivated by her anger at access fees of $30 per article, which basically made research and literature reviews prohibitively expensive for anyone without privileged institutional access. According to Fiona MacDonald (“Researcher illegally shares millions of science papers free online to spread knowledge,” Science Alert, Feb. 12), this “Pirate Bay of Science” has made 48 million articles — “almost every single peer-reviewed paper ever published” — freely available online. Hundreds of thousands of papers are downloaded from the site daily. Late last year, in a lawsuit against Sci-Hub by the academic publisher Elsevier — notorious for its abuse of the paywall business model — a U.S. court issued an injunction against Sci-Hub. Elbakyan is ignoring the injunction and keeping the site up; and even if she loses the suit, she and the site’s hosting are both in Russia and she has no assets in the U.S. Reportedly anyone can access most paywalled science articles online simply by adding “.sci-hub.io” to the URL after the .com.

Meanwhile, 15,000 scientists have pledged to boycott Elsevier because of its indefensible paywall policies.

Pretty much anyone under 30 has grown up taking for granted that moral strictures on file-sharing (or “song-lifting,” as the music industry’s widely mocked propaganda classes in the public schools call it) are nothing but hogwash. If they use proprietary services like iTunes, it is only because the fees are low enough to be worth paying to circumvent the inconvenience of illegal pirate sites. Likewise, the academic publishing industry’s “intellectual property” claims are approaching a near-total collapse of legitimacy among scholars. Academic culture is near the tipping point at which using file-sharing sites to access jailbroken journal articles is just an accepted part of research.

Like the Iron Curtain of the old Soviet bloc, which depended on tightly restricting the movement of information, the DRM Curtain — a global corporate system depending on proprietary control of information — is falling everywhere. Aaron Swartz was one of the pioneers in the struggle to tear down that wall in academia. And the job he did so much to help start is now nearing completion.

FourthBase » 25 Apr 2013 17:43 wrote:

September 2010.

The month of my...errr...walkabout. Every day, every night, back and forth, shuffling between and within the campuses of Harvard and MIT. I must have been quite a sight, "that husky unshaven white dude in sandals wearing the Sox cap with the backpack and a wild thousand-yard stare", is how I imagine being seen. But, thousand-year stare is more like it. I haunted a few other campuses around town, too, and a multitude of other neighborhoods. But it was at Harvard and MIT where my hours and miles added up the most, where I endlessly paced the sidewalks and corridors, where I conspicuously read Camus and Weil for attention I never got, where I used the few publicly-accessible computers with an internet connection and many a publicly-accessible restroom, where I pestered a few professors and loitered in several bookstores, where I crashed a Hare Krishna Q&A and a Korean student film festival for the free vegetarian grub, where I even found a couch or chair to sleep some nights and where I occasionally stole brief naps in the daytime, one of which was interrupted by a gathering of world-class black-history scholars, whom I still owe a gratitude for introducing me to a now-forgotten hero named Julian Mayfield. I even bumped into a BLS classmate on one of those afternoons.

There were two other people, though, whose paths I now wish would've intersected with mine that month. Actually, we might have inadvertently crossed paths at some point, and I would never know because I passed thousands and thousands and thousands of people that month, and none of the three of us were recognizable people then, and only one is now, and the other seems only barely-known to a subset of philosophy-junkies, and I am still a total nobody, lol. On the bright side, though, I'm still alive. And those two aren't. I think about it now, what might have been.

Maybe I see Mitchell Heisman walking across Harvard Yard that morning in late September, on Yom Kippur, all dressed in white, and I say, "Hey dude, looking sharp!" and maybe we strike up a conversation, and after several uninterrupted hours of hardcore philosophizing, after finally persuading him, "No dude, you're wrong, and that is a terrible idea", I head back out to Mass. Ave. to pound the pavement all night, and maybe he heads home to write a new chapter and re-title his book to something a shade more uplifting than Suicide Note.

Maybe one night that late September in the wee hours I notice Aaron Swartz sneaking around MIT, and maybe I follow him inconspicuously, and maybe he notices me because I suck at spying, and he asks me what the hell my deal is, and I tell him, and I ask him what his deal is, and maybe he tells me because I'm both thoroughly harmless and hip enough to his agenda to share his plan with, and after an hour of trading ideas I finally persuade him, "Yes dude, you're right, but that is a terrible idea", and then I depart to take the scenic route back to Central Square, and maybe he rides home to re-think his strategy and to imagine a less-illegal way to unlock the world's secret knowledge.

Maybe I also get each of their numbers and, once my walkabout is over, I call them up, and maybe later that fall, in some shabby apartment, sitting around a bong, there would be the trio of Paul Chandler, Mitchell Heisman, and Aaron Swartz enjoying life and trying to figure out how to maybe make it even easier, even better, even freer.

[Someone asks if Heisman's book is worth reading.]

He concludes that life is meaningless. So, no: Not worth reading. At all. Not saying it's rubbish, he seems to have been an excellent thinker. Just an atrocious judge. It's funny, I think I might be the exact mirror image of Heisman. I, too, have probably written about 2000-3000 pages' worth of intense, life-evaluating thought. But poor Mitchell wrote his million words secretly, for himself only, sinking deeper and deeper into a life-negating pessimism. I've written my million words publicly, for the sole purpose of communicating with others, rising higher and higher out of a long-term existential crisis into a life-affirming optimism. He punctuated his moment of trespassing on elite college grounds with a gunshot to his head. I punctuated mine by filling a chalkboard at the front of an architectural school's auditorium with a rant explaining why it was unethical for the budding architects present to construct useless prototypes of theoretical housing when just 50 feet away homeless folks slept on granite.

FourthBase » 07 Mar 2013 19:17 wrote:Interesting personal coincidence re: Swartz.

As anyone who read my "For Old Time's Sake" thread knows, I was homeless once. For about two months. Not too long ago, actually. 2010. Instead of resorting to a shelter (I tried one for a week, carefully picked it out of all the shitty options, managed my way to Western Mass. just to get to it, and it was still the most miserable place I've ever been -- edit: with even the psych ward coming in second as far as an environment, although situationally the psych ward was the worst ever by far) I bounced my way around any friends and family who hadn't yet disowned me (it isn't easy being an asshole who had surrounded himself with other assholes and comes from a long line of assholes, lol) throughout August, and then spent nearly the entire month of September on the streets. But, not really on the streets. Because, you know, I'm smart, or at least not retarded...not that retarded anyway. What I did was haunt the campuses of just about every major college in Boston/Cambridge/Newton. Normal days of book window-shopping, hitting up the Hare Krishnas for free food and the opportunity to subtly fuck with the mind of a "guru" for fun, lots and lots and lots of walking (I lost about 30 pounds, and were it not for being a bum-in-exile, I was in the best shape of my life), had an iPod shuffle I'd charge in restaurants and libraries, got some pocket money via Western Union from a lionhearted high school buddy who lived hundreds of miles away so that helped immensely, regularly did the whole Starbucks whore's bath (but don't worry I was immaculate about leaving things as they were and not getting pubes and stubble anywhere), discovered every single publicly-accessible useable free internet portal I could find, and generally conducted myself like a normal post-grad out for an urban hike, every day. The biggest pain in the ass was sleep. I wish I hadn't needed to sleep. I found a few spots. Even though you'd think there'd be shitloads in a college town, there are actually very few places open for coffee or whatever all-night. Boston does kind of suck, in that regard. Might even only be one such spot, if I remember correctly, other than a sketchy diner near South Station. And I found it, in Harvard Square, and I would drink some soda and whip out a book and catch some winks just like any exhausted Harvard student. Eventually, I had to resort to just burying my head in my backpack on the Red Line once the first train came, riding like that for a couple hours in the midst of the increasing rush-hour bustle. That sucked. Again, inconspicuous and, so, dignified. Still fucking sucked. I much preferred the few nights I made my bed so to speak in Newton in a BC student lounge couch, sitting, sleeping, open book in lap, just like any other student who drifts offs mid-cram, albeit a little older.

But my favorite spot was MIT. There was something reassuring and pride-preserving about wandering around MIT's campus, roaming corridors, reading bulletin boards, soaking in the atmosphere, feeling like I somehow fit right in, even though I was a fucking hobo, lol. My favorite time was attending a Korean student group's screening of the movie "Like a Virgin", which I highly recommend, as well as the rice goodies they served. I slept in one spot there, at MIT, several times. A mini-cafe section of their architecture department, adjacent to their SIGUS program, which I have to praise as a fountain of world-class ideas for sustainable living that one day may save the world, based on the presentations lining the walls. Check it out online. So, I would saunter in late at night, when the place was almost empty, sit at a cafe table, open my bookbag, rest my head on a notebook of my own geodesic dome drawings that I imagined an MIT architecture student would plausibly draw, as a sort of disguise, a sort of "cover", and sleep. The best rest I had that month. I later made the mistake of trying out a busy all-night officially-designated MIT student lounge elsewhere, from which I was unceremoniously kicked out.

At almost exactly the same time, late September of 2010, Aaron Swartz was also sneaking around MIT, also trespassing. Somewhere in the MIT security office archives, probably in close proximity time-wise to a report on Swartz, is a report of a Harvard punk who arrogantly slept like a slob in an MIT student lounge and had to be woken up by a security guard and removed. See, they thought I was a Harvard student because I had a bunch of Harvard pamphlets on me from wandering around that campus also, and they figured I was just disrespecting MIT by hoisting my feet up on their student lounge couch, a little like Rick James in that Dave Chappelle sketch.

Anyway, nothing relevant to note. Never saw him, that I know of, or anything suspicious. Had no clue who Swartz was until he died. Just my story of how I happened to be an unwitting comrade of sorts of Swartz's, in so far as trespassing on the exact same campus at the exact same time. Felt like sharing, for whatever it's worth.

FourthBase » Sun Dec 18, 2016 6:04 am wrote:

FourthBase » 07 Mar 2013 19:17 wrote:Interesting personal coincidence re: Swartz.

As anyone who read my "For Old Time's Sake" thread knows, I was homeless once. For about two months. Not too long ago, actually. 2010. Instead of resorting to a shelter (I tried one for a week, carefully picked it out of all the shitty options, managed my way to Western Mass. just to get to it, and it was still the most miserable place I've ever been -- edit: with even the psych ward coming in second as far as an environment, although situationally the psych ward was the worst ever by far) I bounced my way around any friends and family who hadn't yet disowned me (it isn't easy being an asshole who had surrounded himself with other assholes and comes from a long line of assholes, lol) throughout August, and then spent nearly the entire month of September on the streets. But, not really on the streets. Because, you know, I'm smart, or at least not retarded...not that retarded anyway. What I did was haunt the campuses of just about every major college in Boston/Cambridge/Newton. Normal days of book window-shopping, hitting up the Hare Krishnas for free food and the opportunity to subtly fuck with the mind of a "guru" for fun, lots and lots and lots of walking (I lost about 30 pounds, and were it not for being a bum-in-exile, I was in the best shape of my life), had an iPod shuffle I'd charge in restaurants and libraries, got some pocket money via Western Union from a lionhearted high school buddy who lived hundreds of miles away so that helped immensely, regularly did the whole Starbucks whore's bath (but don't worry I was immaculate about leaving things as they were and not getting pubes and stubble anywhere), discovered every single publicly-accessible useable free internet portal I could find, and generally conducted myself like a normal post-grad out for an urban hike, every day. The biggest pain in the ass was sleep. I wish I hadn't needed to sleep. I found a few spots. Even though you'd think there'd be shitloads in a college town, there are actually very few places open for coffee or whatever all-night. Boston does kind of suck, in that regard. Might even only be one such spot, if I remember correctly, other than a sketchy diner near South Station. And I found it, in Harvard Square, and I would drink some soda and whip out a book and catch some winks just like any exhausted Harvard student. Eventually, I had to resort to just burying my head in my backpack on the Red Line once the first train came, riding like that for a couple hours in the midst of the increasing rush-hour bustle. That sucked. Again, inconspicuous and, so, dignified. Still fucking sucked. I much preferred the few nights I made my bed so to speak in Newton in a BC student lounge couch, sitting, sleeping, open book in lap, just like any other student who drifts offs mid-cram, albeit a little older.

But my favorite spot was MIT. There was something reassuring and pride-preserving about wandering around MIT's campus, roaming corridors, reading bulletin boards, soaking in the atmosphere, feeling like I somehow fit right in, even though I was a fucking hobo, lol. My favorite time was attending a Korean student group's screening of the movie "Like a Virgin", which I highly recommend, as well as the rice goodies they served. I slept in one spot there, at MIT, several times. A mini-cafe section of their architecture department, adjacent to their SIGUS program, which I have to praise as a fountain of world-class ideas for sustainable living that one day may save the world, based on the presentations lining the walls. Check it out online. So, I would saunter in late at night, when the place was almost empty, sit at a cafe table, open my bookbag, rest my head on a notebook of my own geodesic dome drawings that I imagined an MIT architecture student would plausibly draw, as a sort of disguise, a sort of "cover", and sleep. The best rest I had that month. I later made the mistake of trying out a busy all-night officially-designated MIT student lounge elsewhere, from which I was unceremoniously kicked out.

At almost exactly the same time, late September of 2010, Aaron Swartz was also sneaking around MIT, also trespassing. Somewhere in the MIT security office archives, probably in close proximity time-wise to a report on Swartz, is a report of a Harvard punk who arrogantly slept like a slob in an MIT student lounge and had to be woken up by a security guard and removed. See, they thought I was a Harvard student because I had a bunch of Harvard pamphlets on me from wandering around that campus also, and they figured I was just disrespecting MIT by hoisting my feet up on their student lounge couch, a little like Rick James in that Dave Chappelle sketch.

Anyway, nothing relevant to note. Never saw him, that I know of, or anything suspicious. Had no clue who Swartz was until he died. Just my story of how I happened to be an unwitting comrade of sorts of Swartz's, in so far as trespassing on the exact same campus at the exact same time. Felt like sharing, for whatever it's worth.

Bump.

I think the security guard mistook me for Swartz.

FourthBase » Sun Dec 18, 2016 8:40 am wrote:I've been hearing that a lot lately, lol.

https://youtu.be/gpvcc9C8SbM
-

… This film follows the story of programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz. From Swartz's help in the development of the basic internet protocol RSS to his co-founding of Reddit, his fingerprints are all over the internet. But it was Swartz's groundbreaking work in social justice and political organizing combined with his aggressive approach to information access that ensnared him in a two-year legal nightmare. It was a battle that ended with the taking of his own life at the age of 26. Aaron's story touched a nerve with people far beyond the online communities in which he was a celebrity. This film is a personal story about what we lose when we are tone deaf about technology and its relationship to our civil liberties…

Barrett Brown and Trevor Timm at Aaron Swartz Day 2018’s Evening Event
December 29, 2018 lisa
Link to YouTube video — Link to Internet Archive Video


Trevor Timm and Barrett Brown
Partial transcription:

Trevor Timm: Could you tell us a little bit about what the theme is of your memoir…What are you trying to get across to readers?

Barrett Brown: There are a couple sort of overlapping issues. One is that, these institutions that we’ve inherited. We should not be surprised when they fail. They weren’t invented by philosopher kings with unlimited resources and the ability to implement their vision. They grew up haphazardly by very imperfect people and are frequented and designed and maintained by certain subsets of people that sometimes are outright psychotic. And other times, when they are noble, have their hands tied.

So, we have these institutions crumbling and proving themselves to be less solid than we once assumed them to be. That’s important.

The other important aspect of our age is that we can no longer look back on the 80s and 90s or 60s or anytime prior to determine what’s possible. To determine what’s viable or probable. The framework, the environment in which human collaboration occurs has changed so fundamentally and drastically in a historically short period of time that we cannot base our course of action, or the experiments we undertake, or the things we do on what others were able to pull off. We just can’t. What we can do, is always keep in mind that all human collaboration; Human collaboration is where all this comes from. All of our states. All of our laws. All of our problems. And so when the means change, and the possibilities suddenly increase in ways that we can’t understand yet, we have to explore all of these options. And I think it’s viable to really be able to do that in an effective way in the next decade or so, with Pursuance and all of these other things that are coming out.

Trevor Timm: Absolutely. (pause) With this being Aaron Swartz Day, I’d love to hear from you; Did you actually know Aaron personally? If you did or if you didn’t: How do you think about his legacy?

Barrett Brown: I didn’t really know him. I think I encountered him once or twice online.

He (Aaron) once offered to do an FOI request on persona management. One of my interests back then. One of these disinformation propaganda methodologies that have come out of the intelligence contract industries, and had been encouraged by various states. Something that I think is very dangerous. So he offered to do his thing on that. To explore the possibilities and see if we could get some information on it. And the interesting thing about that is that I’d sort of forgotten about it until very recently. I’m not sure where that was left. I’m not sure if he got some results back. Someone asked me about it.

But it showed Aaron Swartz knew what was important. He agreed with me on this one aspect of these propaganda methodologies being important, and he also anticipated all of us in envisioning a different kind of internet that we didn’t accept from last year, that we’d actually build from the ground up according to our values…

(Yes, the sound mysteriously goes out for 15 seconds at the end, but probably it was just operator error as there were many errors throughout the broadcast – many apologies and I PROMISE we’ll have a professional webcaster next year :,-(
https://www.aaronswartzday.org/barrett- ... timm-2018/