COVID-19: A Tale of Two Mindsets
by Captain Crackham
It's sometimes said that you can only see the true characteristics of a person or body when they're reacting to a crisis. Assuming that's true, the 2020 global pandemic has shone a strikingly polarizing light on the priorities, nature, and mindsets of pirates, hackers, and technologists on one side, and governments and corporate bodies on the other.
At the beginning of the year, even though deaths due to the coronavirus were still fewer than a thousand in number, it was clear that what was developing was nothing less than a worldwide pandemic. The international scientific community needed reliable information on this new virus, but the majority of it was locked up behind publisher paywalls.
Like with the other academic fields, any scientist who writes up the results of research they carry out is encouraged to submit them to one of a relatively small number of academic publishers who will peer review and publish their work. The publisher takes the copyright to the article, and charges anyone who wants to access it - such as universities or other scientists - a small fortune for the privilege. The scientist who wrote the paper receives no payment from the publisher, nor do the academics who peer reviewed it on their behalf. Scandalously, in some cases academic authors are actually expected to pay a fee to the academic publisher.
Very slowly, this situation is changing. Leading the push for open access to academic research are institutions such as Library Genesis (Libgen) and Sci-Hub, which host huge numbers of scientific articles that have been unlawfully but ethically liberated from this paywall.
While governments and international bodies were responding to the growing threat of the virus at their characteristically glacial pace, an enthusiastic user of these repositories called shrine took it upon himself to collate every piece of published research regarding the China COVID-19 virus and make it freely available online. This was made possible by the collective efforts of Libgen and Sci-Hub themselves, thanks to their willingness to flout the law in order to free academic papers from paywalls; Archivist at The-Eye.eu who stepped up to host the resulting repository; and the organizations and individuals who gave their spare storage space and bandwidth to host the torrent.
Not only did this huge collaborative effort make the world's collective knowledge on the virus freely available to every scientist and researcher with an Internet connection, but it also managed to shame a number of the parasitical publishers into making some of their own pay-to-view libraries temporarily free to access. It took the best part of a month, but we should take these small victories as we get them.
Similar success has been achieved by distributed cloud computing projects. Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC) is a project managed by the University of California at Berkeley which has spawned a wealth of science projects that use its model. Scientific research that requires a huge amount of processing power that wouldn't normally be available to researchers is split up into chunks and distributed to the thousands of PC owners who are willing to donate their idle CPU and GPU cycles. Scientists seeking to develop treatments or a vaccine for China COVID-19 have been submitting their workloads to several projects including Folding@home and Quarantine@home. In response, technologists, including the hacking community, have responded en masse, prompting a huge surge in the pool of active participants that have actually led to some of the projects briefly running out of data to be crunched by the community.
Also stepping up to the plate to do their part during the first lockdown was the Internet Archive, which offers a virtual library of books that can be "borrowed" online. To maintain an artificial parity of sorts with physical libraries, the Internet Archive usually places restrictions on their books by limiting the number of users who can have access to a scanned book and the amount of time that they can maintain this access.
Recognizing the impact that the closure of physical libraries was having on students and researchers now unable to easily borrow physical books to support their studies, the Internet Archive launched the National Emergency Library. This contained a collection of texts commonly used in research and teaching, and could be accessed internationally without the usual waitlist restrictions. With a sickening degree of inevitability, it wasn't long until several academic publishers were lining up to accuse the Internet Archive of engaging in piracy, claiming the authors from whom these obsolete spongers had been grifting for years were somehow endangered by this short-term measure.
These same publishers quickly pooled their considerable vat of leeched money so they could sue the Internet Archive, forcing them to end the National Emergency Library before their intended date of the end of the academic year. In their incredibly narrow minds, this cartel of publishers presumably imagined this would lead to a sudden upsurge of screwed-over students and researchers buying the publishers' overpriced books instead. What it did in reality is highlight the value of projects such as the likes of the aforementioned Libgen and Sci-Hub in providing academic texts for free without limitations, and the benefits of donating directly to and purchasing directly from authors.
If this ongoing crisis has afforded us a glimpse at the true characteristics of those affected by it, what have we learned? On the one hand, hackers and pirates have given their time, skills and knowledge to transcend immoral laws in order to directly assist researchers looking for treatments and a vaccine, and to aid students and learners affected by the lockdowns.
On the other hand, we've got blundering and bureaucratic backside-covering inaction from world leaders whilst the usual mega-corporations have busily clubbed together to pervert laws that, once upon a time, were enacted to encourage the progress of science, arts, and knowledge. And all to the ends of propping up outmoded business models, with the sole intention of fattening their bank accounts. Where governments and corporate bloodsuckers have let us down, thank goodness our hardware, networks, data, and minds remain free.
Links
Library Genesis: http://libgen.rs
Sci-Hub: sci-hub.st
BOINC: boinc.berkeley.edu
Folding@Home: foldingathome.org
Internet Archive: archive.org
Ongoing updates from TorrentFreak: torrentfreak.com