this post was submitted on 20 Jun 2024
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Science Memes

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[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 14 points 4 months ago (3 children)

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 37 points 4 months ago (1 children)

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

[–] NeatNit@discuss.tchncs.de 11 points 4 months ago

That's true. I was actually thinking/talking about this practice in general, not specifically with regards to Elsevier.

I definitely agree that scientific journals as they are today are unacceptable.

[–] cron@feddit.de 8 points 4 months ago

Definitely better than some of the DRM-riddled proprietary eBook formats.

[–] aberrate_junior_beatnik@midwest.social 5 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Plus, if you have two people with legit access, you can pretty easily figure out what's going on and defeat it.

[–] blindsight 2 points 4 months ago

It would be pretty trivial for a script to automatically detect and delete tags like this, I would think. Diff two versions of the file and swap all diff characters to any non-display character.