I understand your questions about tablets in particular. That's kind of my bad - I should have provided a little more context. There's a move in US prisons to take away access to paper books and just give all prisoners tablets (which can be centrally administered)[1]. The high cost for accessing these devices is concerning in the context of traditional mediums of information being taken away.
Access to tablets and messaging is a key resource to decrease recidivism.
Studies have shown that continued contact with family and friends while incarcerated increases the chances of having a support network upon release.
I regularly message about a dozen people in prison on a daily basis and 95% of my communications is help with finding housing, finding jobs, education, and legal information to help fix issues with their criminal case.
I was in for 10 years myself, and I can tell you the last month where I finally had a tablet was the most productive of my time inside. The number of connections I made that helped me when I got out was life-changing.
p.s. these tablets are generally super-cheap Ali Express style junk with literally the worst software you've ever seen. Imagine going on UpWork and saying "I need some messaging software for Android. No bug fixes or support required. Just has to take $$ and occasionally work. Willing to pay US$40 for the app." -- that's probably how the thing got made. Some first time coder followed a YouTube tutorial and then deployed it to a million devices.
If you get sent to prison prison, super solitary, one of the things that can happen is that control of the toilet in your cell gets delegated to "the bubble" to prevent you from flushing the toilet continuously (which they probably won't care about) or intentionally flooding the cell (which they will).
Library Genesis is great, but it doesn't have much in terms of journal articles. sci-hub did but the attacks on them in Indian courts have made it so they haven't been able to upload new articles since Dec 2020. They only have pre-2020 articles. Anna's archive is basically just a combo of those two sources and some others things.
I really, really miss sci-hub and being able to read research papers. Before sci-hub there were a handful of forums for requesting and fulfilling full text papers. But those forums basically died because sci-hub was so easy and useful. And now that sci-hub is dead there's nothing.
sci-hub is still very much alive. It's just new papers are available under an alternate service called the Standard Template Construct. The STC uses IPFS to distribute the papers instead of hosting them themselves which mostly protects it.
I want to believe. I've never seen mention of STC but I am searching now. That said, when I try to access modern articles through sci-hub they aren't even there, there's no ipfs URI to download to start.
http://standard-template-construct.org/ just errors out with 422 unprocessable content. I assume the ipfs proxies are blocking it or the like. So... do I have to run a local IPFS client to access STC? I guess I'll try.
It sounds like you spent 4 years building a product before you even knew if anyone would use it. That's a terrible idea, but a good learning experience.
I wouldn't give up (perhaps you need to give up on your current product though).
What you need to do is evaluate _why_ the product isn't selling. Who's the ideal customer? Can you get on a call with some of them and put it in their hands and get actual feedback? Figure out if you need to abandon the product or not. Stop building. Focus entirely on marketing and sales.
Next time, don't go so deep on the building phase until you have people handing you money.
For reference, I recently came up with a new product idea. I did some searching to figure out if any competition exists and I found none. That's horrifying. I almost immediately gave up the idea entirely on the spot.
However, I randomly met someone that was an ideal customer (while dropping my kids off at school) and they immediately said they would pay $200/month for that and asked when they could try it. Not only that, they said they knew 2-3 other people that would as well. I ended up meeting two other ideal customers that said the same thing and one even asked if they could invest in it.
I'm still not entirely sure-- but those are strong signals that people will put up money for it, but it doesn't mean they will. I am still nervous but decided to go ahead and build an mvp and see if the idea has legs.
What kind of signals are your ideal customers giving you?
1. Take all of the side projects that are too niche and/or unsellable and polish up the code then open source it (add it to your portfolio/resume).
2. Take the projects that are sellable and publish them in places people can find them (app store, on the web, etc) then put it on your portfolio/resume.
3. With your beefier resume/portfolio in hand, find a job.
I believe Satoshi was a cypherpunk and a remailer dev. Cypherpunks had a history of doing things anonymously on the mailing list and even trying to out one another (a sort of game).
Furthermore, as a remailer dev Satoshi was all too familiar with what happened with the penent remailer[1]. He knew such services will become a legal target by the powers that be. This is why Satoshi even said we "kicked the hornets nest" when Wikileaks/Silkroad began accepting Bitcoin.
Meredith appears to be telling the truth. She didn't say Len wasn't Satoshi, she simply said to the best of her knowledge he wasn't. That doesn't mean he wasn't working on it covertly.
One of Len's best friends (Bram Cohen) knew Len was posting pseudonymously on the cypherpunk mailing list but never knew what handle he was using. Also, when Bram was about to release BitTorrent Len tried to convince him to do it anonymously. It's not hard to believe that Len would have done it secretly; even from his wife.
Furthermore, Meredith can't be 100% trusted. When Satoshi handed the project over to the maintainers and stopped posting to the cypherpunk mailing list in late 2010, Meredith tweeted, "Bitcoin isn't ready for prime time yet, according to its creator. Interested people can help finish it, though!"[1]
Satoshi never said those words publicly or privately-- so it's a curious thing to say.
As for the computer...
It's likely Len used university computer(s) for the development as the commit times and communication line up with an academic schedule. It's likely the university had Windows computers. Plus; it's one way to isolate the environment and reduce the chance of information leakage (could have even been a Windows VM).
The C++ coding style is also very much the way a Windows developer would write C++ code. Not the way a Unix-y C++ developer writing on Windows would write.
I always figured based on the code and the emails that it was an older Japanese developer. I've emailed 100s of them over the years and they do all typically write similar in English, they mix a lot of UK/US-ism, and often their English is really good, like I wouldn't know they weren't a native English-speaker until I just caught on to how they wrote. (Speaking is an entirely different issue, many of them cannot speak English in person very well or make obvious grammatical mistakes they don't make when typing.)
Coding is quite subjective. When I examined the early bitcoin code (the one Satoshi wrote and shared). The C++ code looked pretty sloppy and amateur-ish.
The comments were odd and not standardized (randomly using four //// sometimes, etc). The use of 4-6 random new lines between sections of code was awkward. The way the code was organized, folders named, etc.
The code itself was a mix of hungarian-isms. It felt very academic-y to me... like someone that did most of their coding in university as a teacher or phd candidate (little real-world coding).
There's a podcast (name slips my mind...) where the host asked Bram Cohen if he thought Len was Satoshi and he doesn't outright say yes... To paraphrase, he basically answered, "I can't say for sure. It seemed like he (Len) lacked the C++ knowledge.. but his programming got a lot better since I last seen it... so I don't know. It seems to be the most likely scenario would be Len doing the brain work and someone like Hal doing the coding."
But, isn't that sorta what happened? Satoshi had 169 commits and Hal basically took over and cleaned everything up. Satoshi didn't do that much coding, and the coding he did do was done over 1.5-2 years (as he stated in the cypherpunk mailing list).
Access to a tablet and messaging outside the prison is hardly a "basic resource" and it's likely an avenue for exploit.
Should we treat prisoners like humans? Sure. Should they be comfortable? Not so much.