How to circumvent Sci-Hub ISP block – fragile credences

"In the UK, many internet service providers block Sci-Hub. Fortunately, a simple proxy is enough to circumvent this (you don’t even need a VPN).

Routing requests through a suitable1 proxy lets you open Sci-Hub in your regular browser as if it weren’t blocked.

Routing all your traffic through a proxy may come with privacy and security concerns, and will slow your connection a bit. We want to use our proxy only for accessing Sci-Hub.

You can use extensions like ProxySwitchy to tell your browser to automatically use certain proxies, or no proxy at all, for sets of websites that you define.

Unfortunately, this extension, and others like it, require permissions to insert arbitrary JavaScript into any page you visit (the web store accurately explains that the extension can “read and change all your data on the websites you visit”). That’s likely due to insufficiently granular permission definitions by Chrome, and is not the fault of the presumably well-intentioned extension authors. But it freaks me out a little bit (bad things have happened).

Luckily, we can achieve the same effect by writing our own proxy auto-configuration file. ..."