Access to a fully uncensored internet seems to be in decline nowadays, especially in the Western countries. I also saw a comment about this article being blocked in Spain. I'm just glad that my country is still holding out with no centralized censorship authority or mechanism to mass block websites, though that might not last for long with how things are going right now.

> Access to a fully uncensored internet seems to be in decline nowadays, especially in the Western countries.

At this point, it is a global phenomenon (and there's been discussions at the UN General Assembly on carving up interwebs for "security"): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Network_sovereignty

Central European here. We live for piracy (imagine a more positive term). We do not intend to destroy it. Which means sci-hub and libgen are going to stay. So are torrent trackers. We have our own, too.

If piracy was somehow blocked in Central European countries, there would be actual riots.

My thoughts as well!

> I also saw a comment about this article being blocked in Spain.

I'm currently reaching it from Spain after a certificate warning. We have our own disgraceful internet access thing going on nationally at the moment, but it doesn't really depend on domains.

Works fine for me from Spain. Maybe due to IPv6...

The freedom of the internet has peaked. I firmly believe the future of the internet is balkanisation, we’ll have “state networks” like China’s with limited intercommunication. The future will suck. Archive everything.

Same in Germany, unfortunately. Was on HN a few days back: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45003033

Fortunately, in Poland it still works.

Sadly, most of the Europe is in favour of various kind of censorship and surveillance, vide https://www.reddit.com/r/MapPorn/comments/1n22e8s/stances_on...

When scihub main ip/domain was banned by commercial ISPs in France, I could still access it through Renater, which is extremely ironic.

I wonder if a french researcher (or a French student in a university/engineering school) could check if it's still the case.

Same in Denmark. They even stopped DNS-blocking it by redirecting to a page telling you that you have been blocked. Instead they now DNS-block it by redirecting you to 127.0.0.1.

> France government is shameful too

If you had any doubt…

Genuine question: won't having your own—or independant—DNS server completely bypass that block?

Depends how it's implemented - once you've found the correct IP address you still have to connect to it, and some ISPs block and otherwise mess with traffic at that stage.

In the early days of the IWF blocklist I had trouble with a Joomla install timing out when using my own ISP but it was fine if I used a proxy. It turned out to be because the Joomla install was on cheap GoDaddy hosting, and something on the IWF list was in the same IP block as my hosting - so my ISP was directing traffic through a filtering proxy which was causing problems with Joomla.

(IP address alone isn't enough to identify a particular site, filtering everything for target websie was too expensive, so IP-based filtering was used to decide which traffic went through the filtering proxy.)

The site seems to be blocked for me in the UK, too, by the way.

Most ISPs nowadays use DPI to do these blocks which are actually redirects. And with how ssl certificates work, users will only see an error page instead of the redirected domain.

If you're on Android you can use Intra from google https://getintra.org/intl/en-GB/#!/

Or if you're on Windows you can use GoodbyeDPI https://github.com/ValdikSS/GoodbyeDPI

Both will split up your dns requests into chunks so the ISPs filter won't catch it.

If you have DNS-over-HTTPS enabled, then ISP won't be able to interfere with DNS. Right?

Yes that is correct. But some then look into the headers after DNS resolution. They are not blocking ip addresses returned by the dns because everything is on a cdn nowadays.

These tools obfuscates your headers as well.

> Genuine question: won't having your own—or independant—DNS server completely bypass that block?

Depends. It seems Spain is doing interception on the data going from/to IPs, as resolving sci-hub.se with my ISP resolver gives me the same IP as I get when doing it externally (186.2.163.219), but when I visit https://sci-hub.se I see a "Certificate not correct" warning, since the certificate belongs to allot.com, which seems to be the party actually implementing the block here.

You can keep refreshing the page and eventually it will work.

Depends on how they implement the censorship:

# poison the DNS: you can use another unaffected DNS to bypass.

# ISP level or country level content filtering (similar to the GFW of China): you need a VPN that won't be blocked, and make sure the exit node is unaffected. (also the police won't care?)

# take down the server: finger cross that they serve the content from safe location.

Works for me in France using the 1.1.1.1 DNS server, which I use on all my devices.

same in Italy (╯°□°)╯︵ ┻━┻

Also United Kingdom.

Then we meet the question again: how to protect children/copyright owner without censorship?

or how to censor content while keeping freedom of speech?

It's only blocked on certain ISPs in the UK. Mine (Zen) is not blocked.