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by sodality2 1938 days ago
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.

2 comments

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?

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.

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).
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.