[Dnsmasq-discuss] Uncensoring Sci-Hub.io: how to deal with subdomains & local DNS records?

[Mel Brands]

Hi all,

Sci-Hub's a controversial website that offers paywalled academic
papers for free [0]. Unfortunately, sci-hub.io domain was recently
disabled but their SSL cert is still using that domain and I have a
bunch of links that use that domain as well. Naturally, I tried to fix
this censorship issue by adding a local DNS record to .hosts file:

     31.184.194.81 sci-hub.io

While this does work and you can now connect to the site, you cannot
search DOI records because sci-hub.io creates virtual subdomains like
so (it proxies to them):

http://dx.doi.org.sci-hub.io/10.1038/nature17445

So my attempt at fixing this was to add this record to .hosts file to
catch all the subdomains:

    address=/.sci-hub.io/31.184.194.81

However, when I tried this, the browser was actually trying to connect to:
http://www.nature17445.com/10.1038/dx.doi.org.sci-hub.io
instead of:
http://dx.doi.org.sci-hub.io/10.1038/nature17445

Bizarre. Last part of the URL was being used as a second-level domain.

What am I doing wrong? I'm using the latest dnsmasq.

Thanks!
Mel,

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