[kick]

That link is transparently pushing something, and what it's pushing definitely isn't "the truth."

The only thing, and I repeat: the only thing that absolutely ridiculous, fearmongering, slanderous article even says outright that they do, rather than just blatant speculation, is PDF downloading.

Then, over a weekend (when spikes in usage are less likely to come to the attention of publishers or library technical departments) they accessed 350 publisher websites and made 45,092 PDF requests.

What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs. The article insinuates murder but doesn't even try to substantiate their claims of "Oh maybe they're doing something, just maybe, maybe maybe maybe they're doing something evil, yes indeed, maybe they are!"

They aren't even trying at this point.

[sodality2]

No, they say that hackers "not only broke into their database; they changed the names and passwords of profiles" but they admittedly do not attribute that to the group.

>What's the harm in this? There's none! They're literally just requesting PDFs

Via stolen, cracked, or phished credentials, though. I'm not arguing against this, I wholeheartedly believe in the Guerrilla open access manifesto and its beliefs, and it is admittedly not proven to be Sci-hub, just a random attack.

[kick]

No, they say that hackers "not only broke into their database; they changed the names and passwords of profiles" but they admittedly do not attribute that to the group.

You can't negate "They don't accuse Sci-Hub of actually doing anything!" with "They accused hackers of Doing Evil, but admittedly they don't attribute this to Sci-Hub."

Via stolen, cracked, or phished credentials, though. I'm not arguing against this, I wholeheartedly believe in the Guerrilla open access manifesto and its beliefs, and it is admittedly not proven to be Sci-hub, just a random attack.

So if there's no proof, and you'd agree with it even if there was, then why bother posting this awful article?

[sodality2]

I suppose to see what others thought about it. I specifically mentioned in the parent comment that I was on the fence and that "This might just be a hit piece by the same companies who are losing money". I did mention the proof in the article, which is real. I'll admit my initial judgement of the article was off, but not entirely wrong given that I never said I wholly agreed with it. Or maybe I'm moving goalposts or whatever. Anyway, I thank you for pointing out what I did not realize.

>You can't negate "They don't accuse Sci-Hub of actually doing anything!" with "They accused hackers of Doing Evil, but admittedly they don't attribute this to Sci-Hub."

I am not negating it, I am admitting that I am wrong.

[nicoburns]

My guess would be that Sci-hub probably isn't doing this because my guess is that they don't need to. Given how widespread support and usage of Sci-hub is within academia, I suspect they have access voluntarily donated credentials on the order of hundreds if not thousands (remember that it's not only faculty staff that have access to journal articles: students do too).

[sodality2]

Now that I agree with; the article specifically avoids attributing it to them, and if they could, you can bet they would. So I'm assuming they're taking a mostly unrelated incident and pushing an agenda with it.