28 ms·

How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

484 points by tmkadamcz 5y ago

Gormisdomai 5y ago
This is a useful note on using PACs to set up proxies for just one site: > Incidentally, you do not need to be running a web server to use the .pac file. You can access it via a file:// type URL. For example (note the 3 slashes): file:///Users/username/Library/proxy.pac http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040101095553265 http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2004010109555326...
- londons_explore 5y ago
  And you should... The proxy.pac file is in some cases reloaded for every single http request.
- Deathmax 5y ago
  Note that if you are using Chromium, it will refuse to load a PAC file from the file:// scheme. Here's the bug tracker issue for the change: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=839566 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=839566.
gruez 5y ago
You're probably better off using a paid VPN provider than a paid proxy provider. A VPN can be used in more places, and some VPNs provide http proxy access (the kind used in the tutorial) in additional to openvpn/wireguard. If they have a browser extension, chances are they support http proxy.
igbk 5y ago
How do the alternative domains fare in the UK? With https://sci-hub.st/ https://sci-hub.st/ I can circumvent the ISP block in Sweden successfully.
- hkt 5y ago
  Works fine here, on EE network in the UK.
- Gormisdomai 5y ago
  I'm UK based and can't hit it on home wifi
- tmkadamcz 5y ago
  https://sci-hub.st https://sci-hub.st does not work in the UK [edit: on Sky].
  - londons_explore 5y ago
    Works on BT broadband
    - weavie 5y ago
      Virgin says no. Interestingly I get this: Secure Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to sci-hub.st. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
      - AndrewDucker 5y ago
        Yeah, that's how Virgin implement their blocking
      - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
        I know by memory that is what I get when an HTTP server responsd to an HTTPS/SSL request :)
  - tonyedgecombe 5y ago
    Works on Zen.
- GordonS 5y ago
  Works for me on Plusnet in the UK, thanks!
hkt 5y ago
I'm glad this document exists but I tend to favour using TorBrowser, both on Android and (in my case) Manjaro.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- londons_explore 5y ago
  IPFS would be a perfect fit for this... It sadly isn't censorship resistant, but it should do for a few years, and as soon as censorship on IPFS starts to become an issue, hopefully the IPFS developers will evolve the design.
tmkadamcz 5y ago
By the way, Sci-Hub has stopped adding new articles to the database for a few months now (background: https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/mk46x4/scihub_v_elsevier_wiley_acs_can_scihub_be_shut/ https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/mk46x4/scihub_v_els...). It would be great to develop a truly decentralised solution. Having a database of individual torrent links for each paper might be a start.
- HideousKojima 5y ago
  Torrents are great and all but it's dependent on people seeding them, sci-hub/libgen is great because you don't have to worry about a download suddenly breaking because no one is seeding
  - kortilla 5y ago
    But they could just always be a seeder. Doesn’t that have the upsides of the existing solution plus resiliency?
    - whimsicalism 5y ago
      Isn't scihub/libgen already backed by torrents? I'm confused.
      - ta988 5y ago
        Nope it was mostly direct download for the endusers with some ipfs in some places.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- jandrese 5y ago
  Millions of individual torrents is not a great solution. Keeping them all seeded is basically impossible unless they run a seed for each one, at which point they might as well just host the files. Plus you'll never get the economy of scale that makes BitTorrent really shine. When you have a whole lot of tiny files that people will generally only want one or two of there isn't much better than a plain old website. A torrent that hosts all of the papers could be useful for people who want to make sure the data can't be lost by a single police raid.
lapinot 5y ago
Obviously another solution on linux is to install a local recursive DNS resolver and be done with it... I'm quite happy with knot-resolver (kresd).
- beermonster 5y ago
  This only works if your ISP is using/abusing/hijacking DNS to censor your connections. If they're doing that you'd be better off using D-o-T or D-o-H, to protect your DNS from interference.
  - lapinot 5y ago
    ISP rarely do anything else than DNS censoring (censoring by ip blackholing is for really grave stuff). Also i don't understand why you'd be "better off" using encrypted connection to a 3rd party DNS which can still lie to you. Just run a local resolver, it's so lightweight there's no real reason not to. (and honestly, the hypothetical delay isn't noticeable)
    - kortilla 5y ago
      A 3rd party is better because it can be hosted in some other country not subject to local fascism du jour you have to deal with from your ISP.
    - NilsIRL 5y ago
      Sorry, am I missing something because I'm pretty sure the whole point of the article is that ISPs do block more than just DNS
      - lapinot 5y ago
        Is it? I didn't understand that. It's just a random tutorial on using a proxy for a specific domain.
beermonster 5y ago
Just setup a VPN on some cheap cloud provider. There are lots of sites UK ISPs block even though the sites themselves are not illegal or host illegal content. For e.g. torrent indexing services (the content itself may be illegal but purely providing a search across that content is basically doing what Google do). The UK internet is heavily filtered/censored and so doing this is useful anyway. Business ISP connections don't seem to be restricted. And neither do most cloud providers I've tried. Might be better than using temporary proxies.
- Quarrel 5y ago
  I travelled last week, and was horrified by how much is blocked by the mainstream ISPs in the UK. Afaik, my (London) ISP does not block anything. No idea why, as all the others quote high court orders.
  - Reason077 5y ago
    Many UK ISPs have "adult content" filters, which tend to be wide-reaching and block a lot more than just porn sites. But these are optional and can be turned off very easily. There's a smaller set of non-optional blocks (pirate/torrent sites) which you need a VPN to get around.
    - sabjut 5y ago
      This seems to be just another small step towards a future where only pre-approved websites are accessible via the method most people will use. It will not be called banning, this is just a measure to "ensure that the content we are serving to our users is held against our high quality standards" or the classic "it's to protect the children" or to "condemn terrorism". Porn is not really Illegal, just unwanted, which is apparently reason enough to block it. Does this mean any content which is "unwanted" can be blocked just like that?
    - regularfry 5y ago
      I have a theory that the ISPs over-block with their adult content filters, so you've got plausible deniability and don't have to ring up and say "I want porn please." Because the alternative is that they lose a customer to an ISP who doesn't embarrass them.
tpmx 5y ago
What is forcing these UK ISPs to block these IP ranges?
- dijit 5y ago
  The UK Government passed a few legislations to this effect and have been doing so since 2015~ Also: all data is required to be logged, and those logs are searchable by civil servants without a warrant.
- beermonster 5y ago
  The government have passed quite a few bills this year aimed at locking down on this kind of thing whilst people were pre-occupied with COVID.
- Quarrel 5y ago
  I don't know. Virgin Media quote High Court orders saying they have to block several I tried, but my home ISP does not block any of them. These seems weird to me, that the court orders would cover a few specific ISPs, but I haven't looked in to it further.
  - tpmx 5y ago
    Are those High Court orders secret? Is there any journalism happening?
    - Quarrel 5y ago
      Someone else linked this: https://www.blocked.org.uk/ https://www.blocked.org.uk/ Which includes info on the orders: https://www.blocked.org.uk/legal-blocks https://www.blocked.org.uk/legal-blocks Occasionally there is a small amount of reporting on it, but it tends to be fairly misdirected and naive.
- tialaramex 5y ago
  Many years ago, Hollywood and the Music Industry argued in court in the UK that since most UK ISPs have a mechanism to block stuff like child pornography, they ought to be compelled by the court to use this same mechanism to protect the interests of these commercial entities. The courts agreed. If your ISP has such a capability the court will cheerfully give rights holders authority to demand the ISP blocks stuff that they claim rights over. The ISPs could choose to just not block stuff. I am looking at Sci-Hub right now, because my UK ISP (Andrews & Arnold) doesn't block anything. From time to time, parliamentarians get vexed about this, but there is a cultural memory in the place that passing laws intended to stop people from saying things doesn't work. Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned, because, the government argued, it was obscene but it turns out that a court didn't buy this argument, and instead Penguin made piles of money because everybody wanted to read the banned book. But most UK ISPs have decided that it is in their better interests to block things. Their options for attempting to do this have narrowed over time, once upon a time DNS blocking was pretty effective, I assume that by now they're mostly relying on IP blocking, which of course means they run the risk of exciting collateral attacks...
dijit 5y ago
Seems like this is a really good service to add some legitimacy to Tor browsing. Having SciHub as a hidden service would bring a lot of people to Tor. EDIT: apparently I'm a bit stupid; it exists: https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion But it would be cool to promote the hell out of the onion address and tor browser, rather than trying to bypass ISP restrictions.
- livueta 5y ago
  Possibly also a path to greater decentralization. Relying on jurisdictional stuff isn't going to cut it forever (see the current pause on new uploads), but it's also hard to ask people to host data that'll get them sued without offering mitigations. Private torrent trackers do that through, well, being private, but I'm sure as hell not serving springer_catalogue_2020.tar.xz to the whole internet from an address linked to me in any way. Maybe an index of independently operated hidden services, each serving a (redundant) shard of the collection?
- GordonS 5y ago
  I use SciHub a lot, and just this week have been having problems accessing it on the internet (in the UK) - I don't use Tor, but I also never even thought of it. Totally agree it would be a good idea to promote the Onion address!
joelthelion 5y ago
There's a telegram bot that sends you the papers you ask for. It's by far the most convenient way to use scihub.
- paufernandez 5y ago
  Agreed, that's the one I use, so fast!
- kickout 5y ago
  Do you have a link or example for, uh, science? Lol
  - vbezhenar 5y ago
    Google sci hub telegram bot returns me @scihubbot as the first results. You might want to try it out.
    - burundi_coffee 5y ago
      Actually, it's @scihubot. You can send it links to the paper from the journal webpage or the doi link, for example: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.432563 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.432563
      - ta988 5y ago
        But it doesnt have any recent papers does it?
deadalus 5y ago
GreenTunnel is another alternative to evade ISP blocking without using a VPN: https://github.com/SadeghHayeri/GreenTunnel https://github.com/SadeghHayeri/GreenTunnel
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- addingnumbers 5y ago
  Splitting the request packet into two TCP fragments right down the middle of the offending pattern in the Host or SNI field, that's adorable
Jcowell 5y ago
Can anyone in Europe with IOS 15 see if Private Relay is able to bypass this? We have a similar situation over here in the States with Verizon and some piracy sites and It’s able to bypass.
brumar 5y ago
Tor works well for me so far
sneak 5y ago
Another option is to simply configure your workstation to use DoH. Then your ISP can't fuck with your address resolution. I recommend using NextDNS, and then setting up a provisioning profile at https://apple.nextdns.io https://apple.nextdns.io to set it as your revolver on your macs and ios devices. The ad-blocking features are a nice bonus, too. NextDNS also has a cool free software CLI local DoH proxy resolver which works a charm.
- MaxBarraclough 5y ago
  From the page's footnotes: > Changing your DNS resolver to a public one like Google’s instead of your ISP’s is not sufficient as of 2021, for two ISPs I’ve tested, and I suspect for all UK ISPs that implement blocking.
  - sneak 5y ago
    I read the article in full. Changing your non-DoH resolver (such as using Google Public DNS) means requests and responses can still be edited by your ISP. This is what the article is talking about. I suggested DoH (encrypted DNS) because this is not subject to such tampering. DoH (DNS-over-HTTPS) is not the same as traditional unencrypted port 53 DNS. Really, anyone who gives a shit about privacy should be using DoH exclusively, otherwise you are basically uploading your web history in real-time to your ISP for mining and resale.
    - o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
      I have been testing a large number of DoH servers. I have noticed that some names are not available across all (supposedly unfiltered) DoH servers. For example, there are some DoH servers that had no A record for webshare.io, the domain mentioned in the OP.
AlexandrB 5y ago
The way SciHub is being treated by governments is pretty infuriating. There's a tiny minority of people who have an interest in keeping SciHub off the internet, and they're generally neither the researchers who write the papers, nor those who want to read them. Despite this, the power of the state has been used repeatedly to keep SciHub inaccessible and limit their ability to get funding.
- tomrod 5y ago
  Yes, due to allocation of property rights. Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors.
  - Mediterraneo10 5y ago
    > Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors. Historically academics have felt forced to support this system, because for-profit journals are the high-prestige ones they must publish in in order to get tenure. This has changed for certain fields, but it isn’t as simple as just suggesting that one publish elsewhere.
    - divbzero 5y ago
      It’s up to not only academics who publish articles, but also organizations that issue grants and tenure. Public policies to adjust their definitions of “prestige” or “quality” would help.
      - ta988 5y ago
        And these are mostly run by people that have not even heard of scihub, openaccess etc
        a_bonobo 5y ago
        Case in point: The ARC, the biggest Australian Research funding body, recently explicitly banned the mention of preprints in grants. You can't include your own arxiv/biorxiv/etc. preprints in your grants to show your work! To the ARC, that's unpublished work. I know a few mathematicians who exclusively publish on arxiv who were bitten by this change, the whole grant got rejected.
leephillips 5y ago
If you can’t get to sci-hub and you need a (free) copy of a paper, there are several other ways to get it: https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/ https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/
emsal 5y ago
I once attempted to make something like ProxySwitchy for DNS[1], but I didn't work on it long enough to get off the ground. This article made me think about it again. Is there actually a use case for that kind of thing? [1]: https://github.com/emsal0/resolvplox https://github.com/emsal0/resolvplox
dredmorbius 5y ago
A few years back, frustrated with increasaed DNS blocking of Sci-Hub, I wrote a quick DNSMasq hack (haq?) to return Sci-Hub IPs for any "sci-hub.<domain>" possible. The shins-n-grits factor of surfing "scihub.elsevier.com" were palpable. https://old.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/7m3uin/meta_if_you_cant_remember_what_domains_scihub_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/7m3uin/meta_if_you... As others have mentioned, Sci-Hub also maintains a Tor presence, and you can access the Onion link using the Tor browser (provided you can install that on your desktop or device). https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion
- crtasm 5y ago
  Unfortunately the .onion is currently timing out. Love the haq!
  - teeray 5y ago
    I’ve never had success with their .onion link. I suspect something may be wrong there.
    - Aachen 5y ago
      Aside from Facebook and my own onion services, that has been my experience with all onion domains somehow. Since my own onion services work (from unrelated networks and no special config), I'm pretty sure it's on the hosters' end. Quite frustrating; I'd love to use this more but it doesn't seem like people can get this stuff together.
- lapsis_beeftech 5y ago
  scihub22266oqcxt.onion is a v2 onion address which are deprecated for security reasons and no longer supported in Tor. For more information see https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline
xvector 5y ago
This is the reason Tor exists.
StavrosK 5y ago
Too bad the Handshake domain donation to SciHub didn't pan out.
tingletech 5y ago
once upon a time I wrote a script that took a MARC file from the library catalog as input, and output a PAC file for the group that ran the campus proxy server.
RedComet 5y ago
Do they have an official .onion, by chance?
xtat 5y ago
TIL that the UK has gone down a slippery slope
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
valprop1 5y ago
I still cannot get my head around on to why the world is not embracing open sourcing of data. One way or other people get what the want so you might as well give open access and reinvent the entire business model altogether. Harnessing the power of community could be the key for this reinvention.
- qwerty456127 5y ago
  I also could never understand why software companies like Microsoft invest into software activation stuff. They constantly try to improve protection of their apps, run activation servers and probably have already spent huge lots of money on this and I have never seen anybody willing to use pirated software facing any real difficulty. Whoever wants it gets it anyway. Those who can afford a license easily and those (mostly businesses) who care about the legal aspect buy anyway. A simple (even easily crackable from the technical point of view) low-tech "enter a serial" dialog is enough to stop the rest (lazy/stupid people). I understand how does this work in games and movies (the publisher gets most of the profit in the first hours after the release, before it gets cracked) but can't understand what's the point with business/utility apps.
  - valprop1 5y ago
    Interesting point, I guess it is just be a marketing gimmick so as to show the customer that "security" is our priority.
edeion 5y ago
A very easy one: Firefox > Preferences > General > Network settings > Enable DNS overs HTTPS
- zeepzeep 5y ago
  This is a good step, but afaik you can still identify and block a website using onyl the TLS traffic, even without the DNS.
  - edeion 5y ago
    Sure. I'm just saying it's been working for the last years. Let's hope it lasts. The good thing is that, so far (in France), the blockings only affect the most mainstream providers.
generationP 5y ago
Dear authors: Just post your papers (before they have been formatted by the journal, but after they have been refereed at the latest) on the arXiv (maths, cs, physics) and similar repositories. Including the old ones you still have. Once a critical mass does this, the problem will be solved, whatever the Indian courts decide.
lobocinza 5y ago
Wikimedia should start publishing science articles (legally). It has the infrastructure, money and culture to become a non-profit world-scale publisher with decentralized curation.
- jwilk 5y ago
  https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal
  - lobocinza 5y ago
    That's cool.
ptspts 5y ago
No need to use a .pac file for configuring site-based HTTP(S) proxy selection in modern browsers. I've just installed the FoxyProxy extension (works in Chrome and Firefox), and I was able to specify regexps for the URL, and select the HTTP(S) proxy based on which regexp matches.
bouh 5y ago
The best way imo is the telegram bot

484 points by tmkadamcz 5y ago

This is a useful note on using PACs to set up proxies for just one site: > Incidentally, you do not need to be running a web server to use the .pac file. You can access it via a file:// type URL. For example (note the 3 slashes): file:///Users/username/Library/proxy.pac http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=20040101095553265 http://hints.macworld.com/article.php?story=2004010109555326...

londons_explore 5y ago
And you should... The proxy.pac file is in some cases reloaded for every single http request.
Deathmax 5y ago
Note that if you are using Chromium, it will refuse to load a PAC file from the file:// scheme. Here's the bug tracker issue for the change: https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=839566 https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=839566.

gruez 5y ago

You're probably better off using a paid VPN provider than a paid proxy provider. A VPN can be used in more places, and some VPNs provide http proxy access (the kind used in the tutorial) in additional to openvpn/wireguard. If they have a browser extension, chances are they support http proxy.

igbk 5y ago

How do the alternative domains fare in the UK? With https://sci-hub.st/ https://sci-hub.st/ I can circumvent the ISP block in Sweden successfully.

hkt 5y ago
Works fine here, on EE network in the UK.
Gormisdomai 5y ago
I'm UK based and can't hit it on home wifi
tmkadamcz 5y ago
https://sci-hub.st https://sci-hub.st does not work in the UK [edit: on Sky].
- londons_explore 5y ago
  Works on BT broadband
  - weavie 5y ago
    Virgin says no. Interestingly I get this: Secure Connection Failed An error occurred during a connection to sci-hub.st. SSL received a record that exceeded the maximum permissible length. Error code: SSL_ERROR_RX_RECORD_TOO_LONG
    - AndrewDucker 5y ago
      Yeah, that's how Virgin implement their blocking
    - AshamedCaptain 5y ago
      I know by memory that is what I get when an HTTP server responsd to an HTTPS/SSL request :)
- tonyedgecombe 5y ago
  Works on Zen.
GordonS 5y ago
Works for me on Plusnet in the UK, thanks!

hkt 5y ago

I'm glad this document exists but I tend to favour using TorBrowser, both on Android and (in my case) Manjaro.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

londons_explore 5y ago
IPFS would be a perfect fit for this... It sadly isn't censorship resistant, but it should do for a few years, and as soon as censorship on IPFS starts to become an issue, hopefully the IPFS developers will evolve the design.

tmkadamcz 5y ago

By the way, Sci-Hub has stopped adding new articles to the database for a few months now (background: https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/mk46x4/scihub_v_elsevier_wiley_acs_can_scihub_be_shut/ https://www.reddit.com/r/scihub/comments/mk46x4/scihub_v_els...). It would be great to develop a truly decentralised solution. Having a database of individual torrent links for each paper might be a start.

HideousKojima 5y ago
Torrents are great and all but it's dependent on people seeding them, sci-hub/libgen is great because you don't have to worry about a download suddenly breaking because no one is seeding
- kortilla 5y ago
  But they could just always be a seeder. Doesn’t that have the upsides of the existing solution plus resiliency?
  - whimsicalism 5y ago
    Isn't scihub/libgen already backed by torrents? I'm confused.
    - ta988 5y ago
      Nope it was mostly direct download for the endusers with some ipfs in some places.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jandrese 5y ago
Millions of individual torrents is not a great solution. Keeping them all seeded is basically impossible unless they run a seed for each one, at which point they might as well just host the files. Plus you'll never get the economy of scale that makes BitTorrent really shine. When you have a whole lot of tiny files that people will generally only want one or two of there isn't much better than a plain old website. A torrent that hosts all of the papers could be useful for people who want to make sure the data can't be lost by a single police raid.

lapinot 5y ago

Obviously another solution on linux is to install a local recursive DNS resolver and be done with it... I'm quite happy with knot-resolver (kresd).

beermonster 5y ago
This only works if your ISP is using/abusing/hijacking DNS to censor your connections. If they're doing that you'd be better off using D-o-T or D-o-H, to protect your DNS from interference.
- lapinot 5y ago
  ISP rarely do anything else than DNS censoring (censoring by ip blackholing is for really grave stuff). Also i don't understand why you'd be "better off" using encrypted connection to a 3rd party DNS which can still lie to you. Just run a local resolver, it's so lightweight there's no real reason not to. (and honestly, the hypothetical delay isn't noticeable)
  - kortilla 5y ago
    A 3rd party is better because it can be hosted in some other country not subject to local fascism du jour you have to deal with from your ISP.
  - NilsIRL 5y ago
    Sorry, am I missing something because I'm pretty sure the whole point of the article is that ISPs do block more than just DNS
    - lapinot 5y ago
      Is it? I didn't understand that. It's just a random tutorial on using a proxy for a specific domain.

beermonster 5y ago

Just setup a VPN on some cheap cloud provider. There are lots of sites UK ISPs block even though the sites themselves are not illegal or host illegal content. For e.g. torrent indexing services (the content itself may be illegal but purely providing a search across that content is basically doing what Google do). The UK internet is heavily filtered/censored and so doing this is useful anyway. Business ISP connections don't seem to be restricted. And neither do most cloud providers I've tried. Might be better than using temporary proxies.

Quarrel 5y ago
I travelled last week, and was horrified by how much is blocked by the mainstream ISPs in the UK. Afaik, my (London) ISP does not block anything. No idea why, as all the others quote high court orders.
- Reason077 5y ago
  Many UK ISPs have "adult content" filters, which tend to be wide-reaching and block a lot more than just porn sites. But these are optional and can be turned off very easily. There's a smaller set of non-optional blocks (pirate/torrent sites) which you need a VPN to get around.
  - sabjut 5y ago
    This seems to be just another small step towards a future where only pre-approved websites are accessible via the method most people will use. It will not be called banning, this is just a measure to "ensure that the content we are serving to our users is held against our high quality standards" or the classic "it's to protect the children" or to "condemn terrorism". Porn is not really Illegal, just unwanted, which is apparently reason enough to block it. Does this mean any content which is "unwanted" can be blocked just like that?
  - regularfry 5y ago
    I have a theory that the ISPs over-block with their adult content filters, so you've got plausible deniability and don't have to ring up and say "I want porn please." Because the alternative is that they lose a customer to an ISP who doesn't embarrass them.

tpmx 5y ago

What is forcing these UK ISPs to block these IP ranges?

dijit 5y ago
The UK Government passed a few legislations to this effect and have been doing so since 2015~ Also: all data is required to be logged, and those logs are searchable by civil servants without a warrant.
beermonster 5y ago
The government have passed quite a few bills this year aimed at locking down on this kind of thing whilst people were pre-occupied with COVID.
Quarrel 5y ago
I don't know. Virgin Media quote High Court orders saying they have to block several I tried, but my home ISP does not block any of them. These seems weird to me, that the court orders would cover a few specific ISPs, but I haven't looked in to it further.
- tpmx 5y ago
  Are those High Court orders secret? Is there any journalism happening?
  - Quarrel 5y ago
    Someone else linked this: https://www.blocked.org.uk/ https://www.blocked.org.uk/ Which includes info on the orders: https://www.blocked.org.uk/legal-blocks https://www.blocked.org.uk/legal-blocks Occasionally there is a small amount of reporting on it, but it tends to be fairly misdirected and naive.
tialaramex 5y ago
Many years ago, Hollywood and the Music Industry argued in court in the UK that since most UK ISPs have a mechanism to block stuff like child pornography, they ought to be compelled by the court to use this same mechanism to protect the interests of these commercial entities. The courts agreed. If your ISP has such a capability the court will cheerfully give rights holders authority to demand the ISP blocks stuff that they claim rights over. The ISPs could choose to just not block stuff. I am looking at Sci-Hub right now, because my UK ISP (Andrews & Arnold) doesn't block anything. From time to time, parliamentarians get vexed about this, but there is a cultural memory in the place that passing laws intended to stop people from saying things doesn't work. Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned, because, the government argued, it was obscene but it turns out that a court didn't buy this argument, and instead Penguin made piles of money because everybody wanted to read the banned book. But most UK ISPs have decided that it is in their better interests to block things. Their options for attempting to do this have narrowed over time, once upon a time DNS blocking was pretty effective, I assume that by now they're mostly relying on IP blocking, which of course means they run the risk of exciting collateral attacks...

dijit 5y ago

Seems like this is a really good service to add some legitimacy to Tor browsing. Having SciHub as a hidden service would bring a lot of people to Tor. EDIT: apparently I'm a bit stupid; it exists: https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion But it would be cool to promote the hell out of the onion address and tor browser, rather than trying to bypass ISP restrictions.

livueta 5y ago
Possibly also a path to greater decentralization. Relying on jurisdictional stuff isn't going to cut it forever (see the current pause on new uploads), but it's also hard to ask people to host data that'll get them sued without offering mitigations. Private torrent trackers do that through, well, being private, but I'm sure as hell not serving springer_catalogue_2020.tar.xz to the whole internet from an address linked to me in any way. Maybe an index of independently operated hidden services, each serving a (redundant) shard of the collection?
GordonS 5y ago
I use SciHub a lot, and just this week have been having problems accessing it on the internet (in the UK) - I don't use Tor, but I also never even thought of it. Totally agree it would be a good idea to promote the Onion address!

joelthelion 5y ago

There's a telegram bot that sends you the papers you ask for. It's by far the most convenient way to use scihub.

paufernandez 5y ago
Agreed, that's the one I use, so fast!
kickout 5y ago
Do you have a link or example for, uh, science? Lol
- vbezhenar 5y ago
  Google sci hub telegram bot returns me @scihubbot as the first results. You might want to try it out.
  - burundi_coffee 5y ago
    Actually, it's @scihubot. You can send it links to the paper from the journal webpage or the doi link, for example: https://doi.org/10.1063/1.432563 https://doi.org/10.1063/1.432563
    - ta988 5y ago
      But it doesnt have any recent papers does it?

deadalus 5y ago

GreenTunnel is another alternative to evade ISP blocking without using a VPN: https://github.com/SadeghHayeri/GreenTunnel https://github.com/SadeghHayeri/GreenTunnel

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
addingnumbers 5y ago
Splitting the request packet into two TCP fragments right down the middle of the offending pattern in the Host or SNI field, that's adorable

Jcowell 5y ago

Can anyone in Europe with IOS 15 see if Private Relay is able to bypass this? We have a similar situation over here in the States with Verizon and some piracy sites and It’s able to bypass.

brumar 5y ago

Tor works well for me so far

sneak 5y ago

Another option is to simply configure your workstation to use DoH. Then your ISP can't fuck with your address resolution. I recommend using NextDNS, and then setting up a provisioning profile at https://apple.nextdns.io https://apple.nextdns.io to set it as your revolver on your macs and ios devices. The ad-blocking features are a nice bonus, too. NextDNS also has a cool free software CLI local DoH proxy resolver which works a charm.

MaxBarraclough 5y ago
From the page's footnotes: > Changing your DNS resolver to a public one like Google’s instead of your ISP’s is not sufficient as of 2021, for two ISPs I’ve tested, and I suspect for all UK ISPs that implement blocking.
- sneak 5y ago
  I read the article in full. Changing your non-DoH resolver (such as using Google Public DNS) means requests and responses can still be edited by your ISP. This is what the article is talking about. I suggested DoH (encrypted DNS) because this is not subject to such tampering. DoH (DNS-over-HTTPS) is not the same as traditional unencrypted port 53 DNS. Really, anyone who gives a shit about privacy should be using DoH exclusively, otherwise you are basically uploading your web history in real-time to your ISP for mining and resale.
  - o8r3oFTZPE 5y ago
    I have been testing a large number of DoH servers. I have noticed that some names are not available across all (supposedly unfiltered) DoH servers. For example, there are some DoH servers that had no A record for webshare.io, the domain mentioned in the OP.

AlexandrB 5y ago

The way SciHub is being treated by governments is pretty infuriating. There's a tiny minority of people who have an interest in keeping SciHub off the internet, and they're generally neither the researchers who write the papers, nor those who want to read them. Despite this, the power of the state has been used repeatedly to keep SciHub inaccessible and limit their ability to get funding.

tomrod 5y ago
Yes, due to allocation of property rights. Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors.
- Mediterraneo10 5y ago
  > Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors. Historically academics have felt forced to support this system, because for-profit journals are the high-prestige ones they must publish in in order to get tenure. This has changed for certain fields, but it isn’t as simple as just suggesting that one publish elsewhere.
  - divbzero 5y ago
    It’s up to not only academics who publish articles, but also organizations that issue grants and tenure. Public policies to adjust their definitions of “prestige” or “quality” would help.
    - ta988 5y ago
      And these are mostly run by people that have not even heard of scihub, openaccess etc
      - a_bonobo 5y ago
        Case in point: The ARC, the biggest Australian Research funding body, recently explicitly banned the mention of preprints in grants. You can't include your own arxiv/biorxiv/etc. preprints in your grants to show your work! To the ARC, that's unpublished work. I know a few mathematicians who exclusively publish on arxiv who were bitten by this change, the whole grant got rejected.

leephillips 5y ago

If you can’t get to sci-hub and you need a (free) copy of a paper, there are several other ways to get it: https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/ https://lee-phillips.org/articleAccess/

emsal 5y ago

I once attempted to make something like ProxySwitchy for DNS[1], but I didn't work on it long enough to get off the ground. This article made me think about it again. Is there actually a use case for that kind of thing? [1]: https://github.com/emsal0/resolvplox https://github.com/emsal0/resolvplox

dredmorbius 5y ago

A few years back, frustrated with increasaed DNS blocking of Sci-Hub, I wrote a quick DNSMasq hack (haq?) to return Sci-Hub IPs for any "sci-hub.<domain>" possible. The shins-n-grits factor of surfing "scihub.elsevier.com" were palpable. https://old.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/7m3uin/meta_if_you_cant_remember_what_domains_scihub_is/ https://old.reddit.com/r/Scholar/comments/7m3uin/meta_if_you... As others have mentioned, Sci-Hub also maintains a Tor presence, and you can access the Onion link using the Tor browser (provided you can install that on your desktop or device). https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion https://scihub22266oqcxt.onion

crtasm 5y ago
Unfortunately the .onion is currently timing out. Love the haq!
- teeray 5y ago
  I’ve never had success with their .onion link. I suspect something may be wrong there.
  - Aachen 5y ago
    Aside from Facebook and my own onion services, that has been my experience with all onion domains somehow. Since my own onion services work (from unrelated networks and no special config), I'm pretty sure it's on the hosters' end. Quite frustrating; I'd love to use this more but it doesn't seem like people can get this stuff together.
lapsis_beeftech 5y ago
scihub22266oqcxt.onion is a v2 onion address which are deprecated for security reasons and no longer supported in Tor. For more information see https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline https://blog.torproject.org/v2-deprecation-timeline

xvector 5y ago

This is the reason Tor exists.

StavrosK 5y ago

Too bad the Handshake domain donation to SciHub didn't pan out.

tingletech 5y ago

once upon a time I wrote a script that took a MARC file from the library catalog as input, and output a PAC file for the group that ran the campus proxy server.

RedComet 5y ago

Do they have an official .onion, by chance?

xtat 5y ago

TIL that the UK has gone down a slippery slope

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

valprop1 5y ago

I still cannot get my head around on to why the world is not embracing open sourcing of data. One way or other people get what the want so you might as well give open access and reinvent the entire business model altogether. Harnessing the power of community could be the key for this reinvention.

qwerty456127 5y ago
I also could never understand why software companies like Microsoft invest into software activation stuff. They constantly try to improve protection of their apps, run activation servers and probably have already spent huge lots of money on this and I have never seen anybody willing to use pirated software facing any real difficulty. Whoever wants it gets it anyway. Those who can afford a license easily and those (mostly businesses) who care about the legal aspect buy anyway. A simple (even easily crackable from the technical point of view) low-tech "enter a serial" dialog is enough to stop the rest (lazy/stupid people). I understand how does this work in games and movies (the publisher gets most of the profit in the first hours after the release, before it gets cracked) but can't understand what's the point with business/utility apps.
- valprop1 5y ago
  Interesting point, I guess it is just be a marketing gimmick so as to show the customer that "security" is our priority.

edeion 5y ago

A very easy one: Firefox > Preferences > General > Network settings > Enable DNS overs HTTPS

zeepzeep 5y ago
This is a good step, but afaik you can still identify and block a website using onyl the TLS traffic, even without the DNS.
- edeion 5y ago
  Sure. I'm just saying it's been working for the last years. Let's hope it lasts. The good thing is that, so far (in France), the blockings only affect the most mainstream providers.

generationP 5y ago

Dear authors: Just post your papers (before they have been formatted by the journal, but after they have been refereed at the latest) on the arXiv (maths, cs, physics) and similar repositories. Including the old ones you still have. Once a critical mass does this, the problem will be solved, whatever the Indian courts decide.

lobocinza 5y ago

Wikimedia should start publishing science articles (legally). It has the infrastructure, money and culture to become a non-profit world-scale publisher with decentralized curation.

jwilk 5y ago
https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal
- lobocinza 5y ago
  That's cool.

ptspts 5y ago

No need to use a .pac file for configuring site-based HTTP(S) proxy selection in modern browsers. I've just installed the FoxyProxy extension (works in Chrome and Firefox), and I was able to specify regexps for the URL, and select the HTTP(S) proxy based on which regexp matches.

bouh 5y ago

The best way imo is the telegram bot