Re:I'm a programmer – how can I help SciHub?
by viraptor on Sunday July 11, 2021 @03:50PM
(#27804052)
Unfortunately that's not practical. When you download from a uni gateway, pdfs are often auto-watermarked with the source. That way the authors have no idea what checksum you see. And the places which don't do that yet could easily start padding the end of the pdf with a random number of spaces to stop verification efforts.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
It would be kind of neat if that could be layered so that one could not only verify that their source-provided copy is legit, but also that the underlying paper itself has also not been modified.
Re:I'm a programmer – how can I help SciHub?
by johnisgood on Sunday July 11, 2021 @11:07PM
(#27806520)
It should be pretty easy to do, to be fair. There are many ways. The easiest would be to have a compressed file (or whatever) that is signed with the source you downloaded it from (and the digest published), and the PDF itself would be signed with the authors' private key. It is not the best way to do it, but it could work.