Sci Hub and Citations

Posted on 2020-07-02 by jcs

Via Paul Graham he have this interesting factoid:

As some of the commenters to the original tweet point out, it may not mean what you think it does. After all, it may be that the causality runs the other way and that the papers are being downloaded from Sci Hub because they get cited a lot.

Still, this has to be terrifying for the publishers who rent seek with paywalls. It indicates that Sci Hub is an integral part of the research ecosystem and is far more than an inconsequential pest for the publishers. As the comments make clear, Sci Hub is the primary means that many—more than I thought—researchers use to read papers. That trend can only strengthen as more universities follow the lead of UC and MIT by abandoning their subscriptions with the publishers.

I keep thinking that if I say it enough it will come true but I just don’t see how the publishers can survive unless they change their business model. Otherwise university libraries will refuse to subscribe and faculty will stop offering their free labor and will prefer not to publish in journals that they view as the worst offenders. You can already see this with Elsevier, the publisher everyone loves to hate. But Elsevier publishes some of the top journals and researches are loath to pass up an opportunity to publish in them so until university departments change their tenure and promotion policies, library budgets will be the primary means of exerting pressure on Elsevier and the other publishers.

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Eshell vs. Shell

Posted on 2020-07-01 by jcs

Pierre Neidhardt (ambrevar) has a very interesting post on the relative merits of Emacs’ Eshell and Bash using Meta+x shell. Like me, he is, or was, a longtime user, adherent, and booster of Eshell. Lately, though, he’s been feeling some of its limitations and has moved to invoking Bash with Meta+x shell.

His post describes the problems he encountered with his transition and some of his solutions to them. It’s a balanced discussion that considers the case for and against Eshell. Ultimately, Neidhardt has become comfortable with switching to using Bash.

I’m still happily in the Eshell camp most of the time. I’ll use a regular shell if I want to build a pipeline with indirection or sometimes just if I have a complicated pipeline. Lately, when I want to invoke a shell from Emacs I use vterm. I find it a better experience than an Meta+x shell invocation.

If you aren’t an Eshell user, you should give it a try. If you are an Eshell user you should take a look Neidhardt’s post to see if it makes sense to switch or at least use both. Either way, it’s just another example of how Emacs lets us have it our way. Or even both ways.

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A New Take on the Emacs Tutorial

Posted on 2020-06-30 by jcs

Over at Emacs Notes there’s a post offerng a new take on the built-in Emacs Tutorial. There’s nothing special about the default tutorial. It’s merely a file describing Emacs functionality. It’s interactive, sort of, in that you can edit the file and try out the examples they describe. It’s hard to deny, though, that at least in appearance the tutorial is bland.

The new format suggested by Emacs Notes uses colors to markup the text and draw the reader’s attention to important parts. It also makes the key sequences standout by using marking them up in a manner similar to what Irreal uses.

There’s a reference implementation available that you can download and try. The post also shows the results. No one, including Emacs Notes, thinks this is a final product but it is an interesting concept. Take a look at the post and see if you think it’s something worth pursuing.

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Protecting Yourself from Surveillance

Posted on 2020-06-29 by jcs

Jesse McGraw knows a few things about black hat hacking. He was a participant himself and was convicted of corrupting industrial control systems. Over at Forklog he has an interesting article on some steps you can take to protect yourself from surveillance.

The surveillance, he says, comes from all sides. There are, of course, criminals trying to scam you or collect information they can sell but that’s by no means all. You also have to contend with the execrable adtech industry that’s vacuuming up every bit of data about you that they can. They want to know every site you visit and every advertisement you look at. Sadly, they’re pretty good at this.

Finally, there’s the government. If they want information on you in particular, you’re doomed; the NSA will open a local branch inside your computer and collect an exact record of everything you do online. Happily most of us aren’t going to excite the NSA’s interest but don’t imagine you’re safe. As Irreal has discussed many times, the NSA is busily gathering as much digital data as it can even if they can’t look at it all. They simply store it just in case.

McGraw’s article recommends some applications that can help. The first is Signal. It’s the gold standard of secure messaging apps but everybody you want to communicate with also has to be using it. Tor and Tails can help you maintain anonymity and browse securely. McGraw describes Tails as “government censorships’ worst nightmare.” Other suggestions are a VPN, Firefox, ProtonMail, Sandboxie, DuckDuckGo, and Startpage. See McGraw’s article for the details.

There’s no magic bullet, of course, but McGraw’s suggestions can help keep all but the most determined Nosy Parkers out of your business.

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Selective Display

Posted on 2020-06-28 by jcs

Marcin Borkowski (mbork) has a post that reminds me of a useful command that I always forget about: selective-display. Borkowski uses it to make working with some large JSON files easier. Take a look at his post for the details.

I first wrote about selective-display back in 2012 and thought it would be very handy. Of course, I promptly forgot about it until 2015 when John Wiegley demonstrated it in a video discussion with Sacha Chua. I don’t think I remembered writing about it before but I did think that it would be useful and resolved to integrate it into my workflow. I didn’t manage to do that but at least I remembered it.

Borkowski’s post gives me a third chance to start using it. The problem, of course, is that it’s not something you need very often so it’s hard to remember to use it. Still, when you want to hide part of a file based on indentation, it’s just what you need. If you want to see it in action, it comes near the end of the Wiegley/Chua video at the 31:04 point. Actually, it’s a great video (on use-package) so you should watch it all.

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Facebook and Whois

Posted on 2020-06-27 by jcs

I don’t write about Facebook very often because many people that I care about are—inexplicably—Facebook devotees and if I wrote about Facebook to the extent warranted, I would likely alienate my friends and loved ones. Still, sometimes Facebook’s behavior is so outrageous that it’s hard not to agree with John Gruber of Daring Fireball that Facebook is a criminal enterprise as he often says.

Facebook’s latest example of sketchy behavior is their attempt to gain access to whois data in contravention of GDPR rules. Their contention is that it’s okay because they only want to identify the domain owners who are masquerading as Facebook in order to scam unsuspecting users. That sounds reasonable until you discover that some of the domain names they’re concerned about are letsfacethebook.com, zharfambook.com, addictedtofacebook.org, banned-by-facebook.com, divestfacebook.com, facebooksucks.org, and protestfacebook.org.

Does anyone here know someone dumb enough that they’d think any of these are legitimate Facebook domains? Even my Aunt Millie isn’t going to credit that. Facebook, as it always does, simply wants the data and they’re not going to stop until they get it. As I’ve said before, Facebook, Google, and the others will continue with this type of behavior until their executives start going to jail. We already have ample evidence that fines are not going to stop them. The DOJ or one of the EU enforcement agencies spend years building a case and the result is a fine, seemingly large, that amounts to a day’s profit.

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Some Org Table Examples

Posted on 2020-06-26 by jcs

John Herrlin has another nice post. This time it’s on using Org-mode tables. Like his post on Org source blocks, he concentrates on examples of how he, himself, uses Org tables. Both of his posts take, I think, an intermediate point of view. For example, the Table post is more than the usual beginner explanation of how to input and edit tables; it covers how to make calculations in those tables. It’s a nice follow on to his previous post that considered how to do essentially the same thing using source blocks and some external language.

The exposition isn’t advanced but he does take up the subject of clock tables, which can be a bit confusing for beginners. What I like about this post is that it shows how useful Org mode can be even if your aren’t a programmer. There’s nothing in Herrlin’s examples that couldn’t apply to any worker familiar with using a computer or even to someone like, say, a writer or journalist who wants to keep track of their time or work with data in a systematic way using tables.

If you’re an experience Org table user, you probably won’t find anything new in the post but beginner or intermediate users are very likely to find something useful in it.

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Org Source Blocks

Posted on 2020-06-25 by jcs

One of the great things about Emacs is Org-mode. One of the great things about Org-mode is source blocks. They enable literate programming, of course, but are also a great way of taking notes with code examples and a really great way for writing dynamic documents that stay consistent when some item changes.

John Herrlin has a post that serves as a nice introduction to using source blocks. I hadn’t seen awk used in a code block before and was pleased to learn about the :stdin and :in-file parameters as way to direct input to awk. And although it’s obvious in retrospect, he also shows how you can put data in an EXAMPLE block and use it as input to a code block.

Even if you know a bit about Org source blocks, it’s definitely worthwhile taking a look at Herrlin’s post. If you’re trying to come to speed with source blocks, I’d read Herrlin’s post, followed by Abrams’ Literate Devops post, and then watch Mike Hamrick’s video on consistent technical documents. They cover different aspects of source blocks and together serve as a splendid overview on ways to use them.

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Privacy Pirates

Posted on 2020-06-24 by jcs

Everybody—especially readers of Irreal—knows that our browsing habits and Web activities are being vacuumed up by the malignant Adtech industry but you probably have no idea of how out of control they are. Techcrunch has a terrifying and infuriating article on Oracle’s BlueKai and how they track what you’re doing on the Web.

If you’re like me you probably thought that meant they put some tracking cookies on your machine when you visit certain sites but it’s much more than that. BlueKai has a massive database and, of course, they lost control of the data and it leaked. Leaked billions of records. Here’s a couple of things they know:

  1. A German man placed a €10 bet with a prepaid credit card. The entry had his name, address, email address, and phone number.
  2. A person unsubscribed from a mailing list. The database entry showed the person was interested in a car dash-cam and even knew what model of iPhone he was using and that its iOS was out of date.

The trick BlueKai uses to gather their data is to drop a tracking cookie on your browser and also put a tracking pixel in the site’s HTML so that they can tie your identity to where you browse. This should be illegal but of course it isn’t. The Hey email service that I wrote about before, disables tracking pixels. It would be nice if the major browsers would follow their example.

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On Amazon and Walmart

Posted on 2020-06-23 by jcs

I like Walmart. They have a wide selection of products that are easy to find and have prices that are lower than many other stores such as the local supermarket. But I hate going there. The aisles are crowded usually with rude people who stop their carts in the middle of the aisle so you can’t get by. The service at the Deli is excruciatingly slow and they mostly don’t bother with the take-a-number so if you daydream, someone will jump in front of you. The checkout process is horrible, and, of course, they stubbornly refuse to enable Apple Pay, preferring to make the risible claim that the non-starter Walmart Pay is more popular than Apple Pay.

Still, I found that I went to Walmart more often than other stores with similar merchandise. That changed with COVID-19. Now I don’t go to Walmart—or any other large stores—at all. I order my groceries from the local supermarket and have them delivered by Instatcart. Almost everything else I buy from Amazon. I can get virtually anything I used to buy from Walmart from Amazon, usually at a lower cost. I’ve realized that there was no reason to drag myself to Walmart when I could simply order the same thing from Amazon and have it brought to my door.

To get to the point of this post, having to rely on having food and other goods delivered has made me wonder whether other folks will reach the same conclusion that I did and just stop going to Walmart and other walk-in stores. Yes, yes, our Aunt Millies will always want to try on that dress before they buy it but Aunt Millie is literally a dying breed. Younger people and even some of us who aren’t so young have no problem ordering clothes on-line and sending them back if there’s a problem. And yes, even I like to poke around the Apple store just looking at things but I also just ordered a couple sets of AirPods from Apple’s Website.

Much has been written about how COVID-19 has probably changed how we work forever. I think it’s likely—or at least possible—that it has also changed how we shop. Some people, to be sure, will prefer to go to an actual store—especially grocery stores—but there will probably be fewer of them and if the number is low enough, chain stores will find it more economical to move completely on-line.

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