![]() When you have stuff that you don't want other people to give away for free, you want some way of finding out who is giving it away, right?" "Those breaches/ransoms are really a pretext for saying 'universities need to lock down accounts so people can't skim PDFs. "The subtext there is pretty loud to me," Saunders told Motherboard in an online chat. Jonny Saunders, a neuroscience PhD candidate at University of Oregon, who discovered the practice, said he believes Elsevier is trying to surveil its users and prevent people from sharing research without paying the company. It's unclear exactly how fingerprinting every PDF downloaded could actually prevent ransomware. However, Elsevier has a long history of pursuing people who pirate or share its paywalled academic articles. ![]() When asked what risks he was referring to, the spokesperson sent a list of links to news articles about ransomware. ![]() This approach is commonly used across the academic publishing industry." "Fingerprinting in PDFs allows us to identify potential sources of threats so we can inform our customers for them to act upon. "The identifier in the PDF helps to prevent cybersecurity risks to our systems and to those of our customers - there is no metadata, PII or personal data captured by these," an Elsevier spokesperson said in an email to Motherboard. ![]() Elsevier defended the practice after an independent researcher discovered the existence of the unique fingerprints and shared their findings on Twitter last week. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: One of the world's largest publishers of academic papers said it adds a unique fingerprint to every PDF users download in an attempt to prevent ransomware, not to prevent piracy. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
December 2022
Categories |