• maegul (he/they)@lemmy.ml
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    5 months ago

    Yea, academics need to just shut the publication system down. The more they keep pandering to it the more they look like fools.

  • tuna@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 months ago

    Imagine they have an internal tool to check if the hash exists in their database, something like

    "SELECT user FROM downloads WHERE hash = '" + hash + "';"
    

    You set the pdf hash to be 1'; DROP TABLE books;-- they scan it, and it effectively deletes their entire business lmfaoo.

    Another idea might be to duplicate the PDF many times and insert bogus metadata for each. Then submit requests saying that you found an illegal distribution of the PDF. If their process isn’t automated it would waste a lot of time on their part to find the culprit Lol

    I think it’s more interesting to think of how to weaponize their own hash rather than deleting it

  • Rayspekt@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    When will scientists just self-publish? I mean seriously, nowadays there is nothing between a researcher and publishing their stuff on the web. Only thing would be peer-reviewing, if you want that, but then just organize it without Elsevier. Reviewers get paid jack shit so you can just do a peer-reviewing fediverse instance where only the mods know the people so it’s still double-blind.

    This system is just to dangle carrots in front of young researchers chasing their PhD

    • GingaNinga@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Because of “impact score” the journal your work gets placed in has a huge impact on future funding. Its a very frustrating process and trying to go around it is like suicide for your lab so it has to be more of a top-down fix because the bottom up is never going to happen.

      Thats why everyone uses sci hub. These publishers are terrible companies up there with EA in unpopularity.

  • Passerby6497@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    That’s where you print the downloaded PDF to a new PDF. New hash and same content, good luck tracing it back to me fucko.

    • Syn_Attck@lemmy.today
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      5 months ago

      Unfortunately that wouldn’t work as this is information inside the PDF itself so it has nothing to do with the file hash (although that is one way to track.)

      Now that this is known, It’s not enough to remove metadata from the PDF itself. Each image inside a PDF, for example, can contain metadata. I say this because they’re apparently starting a game of whack-a-mole because this won’t stop here.

      There are multiple ways of removing ALL metadata from a PDF, here are most of them.

      It will be slow-ish and probably make the file larger, but if you’re sharing a PDF that only you are supposed to have access to, it’s worth it. MAT or exiftool should work.

      Edit: as spoken about in another comment thread here, there is also pdf/image steganography as a technique they can use.

        • sandbox@lemmy.world
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          5 months ago

          it’s possible using steganographic techniques to embed digital watermarks which would not be stripped by simply printing to pdf.

  • NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de
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    5 months ago

    I kind of assume this with any digital media. Games, music, ebooks, stock videos, whatever - embedding a tiny unique ID is very easy and can allow publishers to track down leakers/pirates.

    Honestly, even though as a consumer I don’t like it, I don’t mind it that much. Doesn’t seem right to take the extreme position of “publishers should not be allowed to have ANY way of finding out who is leaking things”. There needs to be a balance.

    Online phone-home DRM is a huge fuck no, but a benign little piece of metadata that doesn’t interact with anything and can’t be used to spy on me? Whatever, I can accept it.

    • henfredemars@infosec.pub
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      5 months ago

      I object because my public funds were used to pay for most of these papers. Publishers shouldn’t behave as if they own it.