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How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

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Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#101

Post by einpoklum »

munk-a wrote: post #47
einpoklum wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the sane price is an optional "Donate to keep this site going" link, then ok. But only free access, without authentication or payment, to scientific papers, is sane. IMHO.

Might this be a case where the best resolution would be to have the government (which is at least partially funding nearly all of these papers) step in and add a ledger of papers as a proof of investment? The cost of maintaining a free and open DB of scientific advances and publications would be so incredibly insignificant compared to both the value and the continued investment in those advancements.

Well, some research venues (and publication venues) are not government-funded, and even if they are indirectly government funded, it's more of a sophistry than something which would make publishers hand over copies of the papers.

Also, a per-government ledger would not be super-practicable. But if, say, the US, the EU and China would agree on something like this, and implement it, and have a common ledger, then it would not be some a big leap to make it properly international. Maybe even UN-based.

That's a pretty big "if" though.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#102

Post by miloignis »

Natsu wrote: post #93
divbzero wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS would face a similar challenge as the “keep torrents seeded” problem mentioned by GP. Wouldn’t there be risk to peers who host the PDFs?

I sort of feel like there should be some way to use some kind of construct to get people to seed things so that others seed things for them, but I haven't seen that invented yet.

Been a while since I've looked at them, but IPFS with FileCoin and Ethereum Swarm had that kind of goal.

It might be beneficial to create something like what you describe without any cryptocurrency association though, and I've been mulling over possibilities for distributed systems that are inherently currency-less to avoid all of the scams that cryptocurrency attracts.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#103

Post by Deathmax »

Gormisdomai wrote: post #2

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=2004010109555326...

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.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#104

Post by koheripbal »

beermonster wrote: post #15

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…

Are there good recommendations for privacy centric cloud providers?

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#106

Post by divbzero »

zolland wrote: post #98
divbzero wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IPFS would face a similar challenge as the “keep torrents seeded” problem mentioned by GP. Wouldn’t there be risk to peers who host the PDFs?

What kind of risk?

I was thinking legal risk. In this case the publishers are going after Sci-Hub, but in the past they have gone after individuals.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#107

Post by lapinot »

NilsIRL wrote: post #46
lapinot wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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)

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

Is it? I didn't understand that. It's just a random tutorial on using a proxy for a specific domain.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#108

Post by MaxBarraclough »

sneak wrote: post #54

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 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.

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.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#109

Post by sildur »

jandrese wrote: post #26
tmkadamcz wrote: post #10

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_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.

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 t…

Maybe we can create a freesite, on Freenet.

Re: How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block

#110

Post by anigbrowl »

Mediterraneo10 wrote: post #63
tomrod wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, due to allocation of property rights. Cease to supply this system with the fruits of your research labors.

> 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.

Sure, but it's a divide-and-conquer problem. Academics have to mutually support each other rather than trusting everything to a competitive marketplace (which most of them seem to hate anyway).
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