Where “hands out” means “responds to a legal warrant from the FBI.”

I have no love for Google, but even I am not going to blame them for not defying an FBI warrant.

What matters is whether they fought it in court, or just folded.

If they fought it and lost, they could pledge her legal services. They can trivially afford it, so should.

They designed their systems to maximize the damage such warrants do to their users.

Right but using softer, more accurate language like "Google responds to legal warrant" doesn't cause a frenzy of social media anger.

That's ambiguous because the response could be anything including a refusal. I'd prefer "forced to hand over" to succinctly describe the situation.

She should be championed as a hero. I hope the scientific publishing industry collapses as soon as possible.

imagine a world where enabling free access to knowledge makes you a most-wanted criminal

Reminds me of one of the more memorable Max Headroom episodes.

We're living its least believable preductions today, and it aired before the Internet caught on.

That show is hugely underrated.

We don't have to imagine very hard

Pour one out for Aaron Swartz, the brother who cannot be here today, may he rest in peace.

Sounds like a good time to donate to sci-hub to cover attorney fees. They are able to accept several popular cryptocurrencies.

She was a top 10 scientist in 2016 - https://www.nature.com/articles/540507a. I am flummoxed by this since Nature is one of these journals

You mean "Google complies with federal warrant"

This wipes out all the good Google has done in my eyes (and there's plenty of it, e.g. Project Gutenberg). They could have at least issued a statement of support.

Please do what you can to help Alexandra and the Sci-Hub crew. https://sci-hub.se/donate

How is Google related to Project Gutenberg?

She’s doing too much good, let’s investigate her with taxpayer dollars.

Seriously, misplaced law enforcement priorities have got to be up there with religion for doing damage to society.

If this post is downvoted, what is a better question to ask in this case?

Downvoting should cost points, or require a response explaining the downvote in lieu of points.

As far as i read on HN you cannot authenticate to google via VPN. They want to know who you are.

With an account? I hears (Re)Vanced is a thing.. But it's a gamble whether its been broken by Google updating APIs at this point.

NewPipe is great for using YouTube without an account. I much prefer having my subs and playlists stored locally instead of by Google (restoring the exported backup file if I have to move devices).

Free protonvpn accounts work fine, though I'm not logged in, and don't intend to be.

anti-american? As far as I see it responding to a government entity's request is pro-american.

Anti-Human, yes. But Google is the American dream

Much of the US Federal Government is anti-American at this point.

That's fair enough actually.

We have to solve the research paywall problem legally. We need some sort of disruption but pirating is not the way.

Until we have solid open access mandates, pirating seems to be the way.

Google scholar with automatic PDF lookup is of course another part of the way.

As a legal stopgap measure, someone could create journal-matic which scrapes the table of contents of each journal issue (or set of conference proceedings) and links it to PDFs from the authors' personal web sites.

I note that USENIX has had open access for years. It's disappointing that ACM and IEEE still view their digital libraries as cash cows to be milked to pay for unrelated expenses.

Why is pirating not the way if the system is making no effort to change it and any change the system would try to make would be solely to the benefit of companies like Elsevier?

Pirating is the way. Because nothing will ever change.

By "Google" do you mean "the USA's legal processes"?

I'm pleasantly suprised the founder of Sci-Hub is a woman, she should be recognized as one of the most impactful scientific woman on earth then.

Impactful scientists.

[removed due to misunderstanding]

Your comment suggests that women are so fragile that even a comment that suggests that it’s somehow impossible/unconventional for women to achieve what Sci-Hub did will suddenly discourage women from building projects like this.

Comments like this are a part of the problem.