I came to America poor, and went straight to a public university, on scholarship and no money to even pay for food (grad seminars and special events with free sandwiches and pizza is how I learned about things like quaternions as an undergrad). But as an eastern European hacker, i had a complete disregard of copyright, I also grew up in the 90s when hacker ethos included strong anti-authoritarian elements. No way I was going to pay those ridiculous book prices.
So first thing I did was setup a DC server (direct connect, early 2000s p2p sharing protocol) with a friendly grad student on university infrastructure, where we shared books, encouraged other students to upload books, we also built a dyi book scanner (there's one popular design that comes up first on google). the bookscanner at some point had a near 24/7 utilization, and people were coordinating time slots by dc messages. the room with the scanner (which is also where the DC server was) turned into a kind of unix room/hackerspace, because there was always somebody there working on something only vaguely related to university courses as such.
reminiscing on things like that always makes me realize just how much hacker culture has changed, to a significant extent as a result of societal pressure. I was extremely lucky, because when the handful of us got inevitably discovered, what followed was a series of meetings with department dean and university heads, lots of stern talking, which basically ended after they were convinced that they put sufficient fear of god in us. I'm particularly grateful to one networking and os professor who showed up to every single one of those meetings to advocate on our behalf. said professor had a significant contribution to computing in general, was strong supporter of old school hacker ethos, and is just all around great guy.
only a few years later aaronsw was thrown to the wolves by the cowards and bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) at MIT over his JSTOR downloads, which in my personal perception of history was the end of this kind of "oh captain my captain" university hacker culture.
Oh man, back in my university it was the teachers themselves who provided the pirated materials. In Humanities it was the full scanned books, in STEM at least they always scanned at least the exercises so it wouldn't be necessary to get the specific edition.
Sometimes this is done via course pack, which is handled by the university/library/bookstore. The course packs aren't free, and the cost goes to printing the materials and also royalty payments where necessary.
Some profs may electronically distribute materials separately, which would likely sidestep both of these costs.
Yes, about 1990 one could show up at a copy shop on Rte. 1 in College Park, Maryland, mention course number and section, and get a fat stack of photocopied material. I believe that I purchased the ones I did during the last year or two such such packs were available: after that, the publishers leaned on schools to make the professors stop providing them.
I finished my undergraduate in 1998 and graduate school in 2000. Our university was still using photocopied course packets (that we purchased in the campus bookstore) that entire time.
The only course packet I can remember buying in grad school (social work at Howard) was for data (which makes me chuckle given where I'm posting this). The packet had a ton of articles and that material was in addition to a text book or two, as I recall.
A part of me really wants to see this kind of thing revived by projects like IPFS, but somehow it just isn't happening. If IPFS had been a thing in the early 2000's, the first thing to be uploaded would have been porn, followed closely by music, movies, video games and textbooks.
Indeed. Earlier on, it was definitely a thing we pie-rats were watching. I mean seriously... A bittorrent-git repo where nobody could ever kill a hashed content? Fucking hell!
And there's big problems. The biggest was that the privacy branch of 'IPFS over Tor/I2P" was dismissed outright from main branch. Handwaving aside, the biggest reason was it wouldnt make the creators money. Filecoin would. Other problems is that it's a memory and network hog. Like mucho hog.
But right now, IPFS is one of the most invasive protocols I've seen. That fucking thing will splatter your: public IP, all your private IPs, VPN IP, and any others as part of the dHT for your machine and any content hashes' associated to your machine. Even for deanonymized networks, this things nutzo.
Ananymize it better, easy support for Tor and I2P, and deemphasise the shitcoin, and it would definitely be a thing.
There are no words to express how much we are in agreement. I would argue the problem it is trying to solve is largely nonexistent, at least to the extent that data storage hasn't been a limiting factor since the early 2000's. Even more frustrating is the fact that the PL folks occasionally admit this, though it seems to be done unwittingly. I recall a keynote speech from the CEO himself in which he states that high-capacity storage is so ubiquitous as to make Filecoin a viable economic sector for developing nations. The contradiction in that statement is hopefully obvious.
So first thing I did was setup a DC server (direct connect, early 2000s p2p sharing protocol) with a friendly grad student on university infrastructure, where we shared books, encouraged other students to upload books, we also built a dyi book scanner (there's one popular design that comes up first on google). the bookscanner at some point had a near 24/7 utilization, and people were coordinating time slots by dc messages. the room with the scanner (which is also where the DC server was) turned into a kind of unix room/hackerspace, because there was always somebody there working on something only vaguely related to university courses as such.
reminiscing on things like that always makes me realize just how much hacker culture has changed, to a significant extent as a result of societal pressure. I was extremely lucky, because when the handful of us got inevitably discovered, what followed was a series of meetings with department dean and university heads, lots of stern talking, which basically ended after they were convinced that they put sufficient fear of god in us. I'm particularly grateful to one networking and os professor who showed up to every single one of those meetings to advocate on our behalf. said professor had a significant contribution to computing in general, was strong supporter of old school hacker ethos, and is just all around great guy.
only a few years later aaronsw was thrown to the wolves by the cowards and bureaucrats (but I repeat myself) at MIT over his JSTOR downloads, which in my personal perception of history was the end of this kind of "oh captain my captain" university hacker culture.