
Show HN: Where is Sci-Hub now? - Vinnl
https://whereisscihub.herokuapp.com/
======
Vinnl
I whipped this up this morning after growing tired of the repeated Tweets
linking whatever current Sci-Hub URLs work.

You can also visit
[https://whereisscihub.herokuapp.com/go](https://whereisscihub.herokuapp.com/go),
which should always redirect you to a valid URL.

 _Edit:_ I should add that I would not encourage the user of Sci-Hub, and am
in fact myself trying to create legal alternatives [0]. This is mostly to
hopefully clean up my Twitter timeline :)

[0] [https://medium.com/flockademic/announcing-flockademic-
academ...](https://medium.com/flockademic/announcing-flockademic-academic-led-
publishing-6339235c57ba)

~~~
psychometry
Nice work. Can you add a favicon so that I can use it on the bookmark toolbar
without text? Maybe just borrow the SciHub icon?

~~~
Vinnl
Should be added now!

------
_emacsomancer_
Is there a reason to prefer Sci-Hub to Library Genesis
[[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Library_Genesis)]?

~~~
Qasaur
Scihub checks Libgen first when looking up an article or book, and if there is
no hit it will attempt to retrieve the document from the publisher directly
using stored authentication credentials. The retrieved file will be later
uploaded to Libgen by Scihub for caching purposes.

~~~
Asdfbla
Seems like the publishers could relatively easily figure out whose credentials
are being used by searching for presumably uncached files, which will then
trigger an access to the file using the credentials Sci-Hub is using, no?

But I suppose it's no use since the authentication credentials to scientific
portals aren't that exclusive anyway, so playing whack-a-mole would be pretty
ineffective.

~~~
vxNsr
Don't worry, they've been playing this whack-a-mole game for the better part
of 4 years, they're not much more effective now than when they started.

------
dingo_bat
Not working, it seems: [https://imgur.com/h3jgspd](https://imgur.com/h3jgspd)

None of the URLs work for me. The last one [http://sci-hub.tech/](http://sci-
hub.tech/) works but it takes me to a list of URLs. Again, none of those work
either.

Edit: some weird fuckery is going on with my laptop. My phone is able to open
all the links on the same connection.

~~~
exikyut
Very interesting.

Would you mind posting the results of nslookup and traceroute to sci-hub.tw?

If you don't have nslookup ping technically works.

On Linux mtr is a good traceroute utility if you don't have one.

~~~
dingo_bat
nslookup and ping work fine. It's the corporate firewall installed in my
laptop that's blocking the website, probably based on an IP blacklist.

~~~
exikyut
Ah. Wow.

------
jimmytidey
Top work.

Wonder what the legal implications for OP might be though.

~~~
amelius
Apparently, the Wikipedia page on Sci-hub also maintains a link to the active
versions.

(And to be honest, that's a fact easier to remember than
"whereisscihub.herokuapp.com"; the author should really find an easier url)

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sci-Hub)

~~~
bringtheaction
If you bookmark it then your browser will autocomplete when you type “scihub”.

If you bookmark the Wikipedia article as well then you have autocomplete for
“sci-hub”.

So then together you have autocomplete for both.

However I predict that the Wikipedia article will outlive the site OP made.
It’s a fact of life that most sites (including a bunch I made myself so it’s
not meant as any form of criticism) don’t last very long, either because the
owner forgets to renew the domain or they’ve lost interest and don’t want to
pay for it, or their hosting provider shuts down (don’t think heroku will
anytime soon though), or the server they are hosted on has a disk malfunction
(probably heroku customers will not suffer from that since I think heroku has
a redundant storage solution in place), or the site gets out of date in
regards to either the runtime on the server or an external API that is being
used.

~~~
Vinnl
Although I agree that it's just fine to use Wikipedia directly if you're aware
of it, the main risk in this case is reaching the limits of the free tier of
Heroku, I think. Otherwise, it's only dependent on Heroku, the Wikidata API,
and Wikidata being maintained. Those are relatively safe assumptions.

Also, the code is open source, so you can easily fork it and host it on e.g.
your own Heroku account :)

------
gressquel
Don't wanna sound like a party pooper. But isnt this the same as what movie
streaming sites are shut down for, linking to sites with copyrighted material?

For information: I love to download or stream movies and tv-series.

~~~
crispyporkbites
Is HN now illegal then?

~~~
LeonM
I think this is a really good question.

How is this any different than posting a piratebay URL for a pirated movie on
HN?

~~~
TeMPOraL
> _How is this any different than posting a piratebay URL for a pirated movie
> on HN?_

It's a link to a site that links to the front page of SciHub, not a particular
paper accessed through it.

~~~
toomuchtodo
What would a magnet link be considered?

~~~
TeMPOraL
A link directly to content, I presume.

~~~
toomuchtodo
One of my projects is to serve torrent magnet links as DNS TXT records. Will
be interesting to find out what happens.

------
skoocda
It's pointing towards goatse.ru

After enough time on the internet, I'm thoroughly afraid to click that link.

Can anyone confirm if that's a real sci-hub link, or has someone actually
manipulated this site to point at goatse?

~~~
Vinnl
_sigh..._ That's the internet for you. People were vandalising Wikidata:
[https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q21980377&action=...](https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Q21980377&action=history)

It's been reverted now.

------
hollerith
If I know the url of the publisher's web page describing the paper I want, I
append that url to "[http://sci-hub.tw/"](http://sci-hub.tw/"). For example
following this link will immediately cause the pdf of the full text of what is
otherwise a paywalled paper to start downloading into one's browser's download
directory:

[http://sci-hub.tw/http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/809494...](http://sci-
hub.tw/http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8094949)

But I was unable to get a similar concatenated url to work with whereisscihub,
which means I cannot replace "[http://sci-hub.tw/"](http://sci-hub.tw/") with
"[https://whereisscihub.herokuapp.com/go/"](https://whereisscihub.herokuapp.com/go/")
in the definition of the simple command I use to interact with Sci-Hub.

~~~
Cenk
Yes, I’d love this too. At Citationsy
([https://citationsy.com](https://citationsy.com)) we link out to sci-hub like
this: [http://sci-hub.la/10.14361/9783839408650-011](http://sci-
hub.la/10.14361/9783839408650-011)

Would be great if that worked with /go/ too.

~~~
Vinnl
This should work now :)

~~~
hollerith
It might work for DOIs (I haven't tried that) but when the second part of the
url is another url, it doesn't work the way I wish it did.

In particular, this next url redirects to the paywall, whereas I wish it
redirected to sci-hub:

[https://whereisscihub.herokuapp.com/go/http://ieeexplore.iee...](https://whereisscihub.herokuapp.com/go/http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/8094949)

(The reason for wanting to use a URL instead of a DOI is that some paywalls
have stopped publishing the DOI, so if all I start with is a link to a page at
a paywall, there's no reliable way I know of to discover the DOI.)

~~~
Vinnl
Oops, sorry - I had actually fixed that, but apparently didn't deploy it
properly (it's at whereisscihub.now.sh as well now, which makes it somewhat
hard to keep track of). It should work properly now.

~~~
hollerith
I agree that it works properly now. Thanks for making this.

------
degenerate
Are you updating this manually, or scraping tweets to determine working URLs?

~~~
makepanic
It uses
[https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21980377](https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q21980377)
as input to extract the provided URLs.

------
thatssosid
Thanks a lot. I have too built a Paperdownloader
[https://paperdownloader.cf/](https://paperdownloader.cf/) Just in case if
URL's are blocked

------
exikyut
OP: sci-hub.tech has a list of good working links. There's some contact info
on there as well in case you want to get in touch. Maybe you could add them as
an alternate data source.

~~~
Vinnl
Thanks, that doesn't appear to have an API though. In any case, I think
Wikidata is kept relatively up-to-date, and I'd warmly recommend people to use
and contribute to that :)

~~~
exikyut
Anything's an API if you don't mind scraping :P

------
andrepd
Why use this, if you can just memorize/bookmark the IP address?

~~~
Vinnl
Because apparently people don't do that, as they keep (re)tweeting whatever
URLs are current :)

