I read recently about the concept of "civic databases" - someone pointed out the absurdity of the worlds scientific papers being "catalogued by one post grad on the run, but used by everyone".
Yeah. But even if you gave me access to every data set worldwide I still would have trouble making head or tail of it. but it's a start
It stuck with me too. Who's going to write the stored procs and views? Unless it's all going to be tables only.
"Software Diffusion, infer relationships about these tables and create an explorer for me."
jancsika's comment [1] in a thread on The Cypherpunk Manifesto:
> There should be a sustainable solution to bootstrapping civic databases to archive and make available/discoverable all the shits citizens care about without waiting 70+ years for it to enter the public domain.
> It's absurd as it is now. We've got a scientific database duct-taped together by a fucking grad student in hiding, and AFAICT nearly every researcher uses it.
> Who's going to write the stored procs and views? Unless it's all going to be tables only.
My upshot was: sci-hub/libgen is a civic database. It exists. Frankly, its current content is some of the most important content that could populate any database.
Given that, what are the most sensible political policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping it from burning down the way previous civic databases did?
Judging by the responses I got, there may not currently be enough public policy domain expertise on HN for such an effort to succeed. (And almost surely not enough time to organize before it burns down.) But I think it's still worth pursuing, if only to begin to generate that experience in the first place.
Whatever the case, if you're talking about which data fields ought to populate which structs, you're quite far afield from the effort I was trying to describe. That's why I started by asking: what would a cipherpunk not do? That was meant to be tongue in cheek, but let's take it seriously and call it plaintextpunk. :)
I think we are all in violent agreement - SciHub is an excellent example of a civic dataset, and frankly a great "cause celebre" for the idea of defending / funding / supoorting civic datasets.
As for having time to lobby for change, I only have optimism to fall back on. But we should try anyway.
I think we could all do more to counter and neutralise disinformation.
There was a disgraceful episode where th City Of London police allowed
themselves be mobilised as useful idiots at the behest of Elsevier
etc, against SciHub, spreading factually misleading information. I
discussed this with several leading security researchers who all
recognised it as cheap politicisation of fake-security news and
fearmongering.
So it follows that the most sensible political policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping Sci-hub from burning down are also tied to policies/processes that could stand a chance of keeping the police from being mobilized as useful idiots at the behest of any corporation big enough (whatever those processes are).
It may very well be the case that law enforcement overreach and corruption is gnawing at the very pillars of civilization.
Yeah. But even if you gave me access to every data set worldwide I still would have trouble making head or tail of it. but it's a start