position:activist and author

’The Pirate Bay of Science’ Continues to Get Attacked Around the World
After publishers sued #Sci-Hub, Russian ISPs are now preventing users from accessing the valuable scientific data repository and paywall killer.

▻https://motherboard.vice.com/amp/en_us/article/gy7d7j/sci-hub-and-lib-gen-continue-to-get-attacked-around-the-world

Sci-Hub has shown time and again that it’s better at cat-and-mouse than the giant science publishing monopolies it undermines,” activist and author Cory Doctorow said in an email exchange with Motherboard.

“That said, unless your science is public, it’s not science, it’s just alchemy,” Doctorow added. “With the major science funders around the world declaring war on the likes of Springer, it’s bizarre that they’re focused on Sci-Hub, rather than addressing the fact that the entire world of science practitioners and funders thinks that they’re useless and greedy parasites.”

▻https://telegram.me/scihubot

October by China Miéville
►https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/may/17/october-china-mieville-russian-revolution

https://cdn-ed.versobooks.com/images/000012/440/October-1050st-84d97ecafb3e60696152f5a45ca43887.jpg

China Miéville’s contribution in October is to get away from ideological battles and go back to the dazzling reality of events. There is no schadenfreude here about the revolution’s bloody aftermath, nor patronising talk of experiments that failed because they were doomed to fail. Known as a left-wing activist and author of fantasy or what he himself calls weird fiction, Miéville writes with the brio and excitement of an enthusiast who would have wanted the revolution to succeed. But he is primarily interested in the dramatic narrative – the weird facts – of the most turbulent year in Russia’s history: strikes, protests, riots, looting, mass desertions from the army, land occupations by hungry peasants and pitched battles between workers and Cossacks, not just in Petrograd but along the length and breadth of a vast country.

He is equally fascinated by the verbal fisticuffs, the debates and arguments at the epicentre between Socialist Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Kadets, Kerenskyites and Bolsheviks.

#livre #histoire #révolution #russie #soviets

#Environmental activist Ma Jun wins Goldman Prize
►http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2012/04/15/MNP21O2EJK.DTL

In October, the activist and author met with senior #Apple executives in San Francisco and Cupertino to discuss his report, published a month earlier, on health hazards caused by pollution in the company’s Chinese supply chain.

Ma will be at the War Memorial Opera House in San Francisco on Monday to receive the Goldman Environmental Prize for “bringing unprecedented environmental transparency and empowering Chinese citizens to demand justice.” His work has prompted the Chinese government and multinational corporations, including Apple, to more seriously confront the issues