Yoda: Death of Elsevier & Thomson Reuters…

This student put 50 million stolen research articles online. And they’re free. Alexandra Elbakyan is a highbrow pirate in hiding. The 27-year-old graduate student from Kazakhstan is operating a searchable online database of nearly 50 million stolen scholarly journal articles, shattering the $10 billion-per-year paywall of academic publishers. . . . . . “While we …

Robert Steele: Can Thomson Reuters [or Bloomberg] Be a $20B+ per Year World Brain?

Can TR Be a $20B+ per Year World Brain? As delivered to TR executives on 18 February 2016. There is no evidence anyone brought this memorandum to the attention of the TR CEO. It merits comment that when Michael Bloomberg was Mayor of New York, he answered my letter and hence got it — all …

Robert Steele: Should Open Source Code Have a PayPal Address & AON Sliding Scale Rate Sheet? UPDATE 2

Robert Steele: Should Open Source Code Have a PayPal Address & AON Sliding Scale Rate Sheet? UPDATE 2 Creative Commons remains the single most brilliant contribution to the licensing conversation surrounding open source code, but it is not good enough. Anything that requires direct reach-back from a user to a coder will not scale, and …

Stephen E. Arnold: Dark Web Gets Reputable — ProPublica Shifts to DarkWeb to Avoid Censorship and Monitoring

Reputable News Site Now on the Dark Web Does the presence of a major news site lend an air of legitimacy to the Dark Web? Wired announces, “ProPublica Launches the Dark Web’s First Major News Site.” Reporter Andy Greenberg tells us that ProPublica recently introduced a version of their site running on the Tor network. …

Chuck Spinney: Deadly Blowback from Neo-Imperial Wars (Terrorism and Illegal Immigration) Place Europe at Risk

Last September 11, I posted an essay that argued the refugee flows triggered by the aftermath of our interventions in the Middle East were mutating, whether by design or by accident, into grand strategic weapon of mass destruction.  My argument was limited to the flows within the Middle East, but as I implied, they were …