Afaik there's issues on GitHub talking about both Chrome and Mozilla addon stores. I think the add-ons used to be split by browser so might be in an older repo issues
The iOS Safari Reader view does - most of the time- the trick for me. Disabling javascript altogether (in Safari) works like a charm, at least for NYT articles.
I have an iOS shortcut[0] to clear the cookies and then uses google to get a referral link back to the page.
Works for a lot of sites, doesn't work for others.
Someone else created it, I just added a check for medium.com headers(even on non-medium domains) to then search on Twitter for that URL, as Twitter referrals usually bypasses medium paywalls.
Please note that this version got replaced by another version [1]. Apparently there was some drama [2] around Google Analytics tracking in the first one.
Here we are discussing how to steal content and you make that comment about a developer who is giving you something for free?
Wow, some people really have no perspective.
It's the police that have spend that time to apprehend and return the stolen articles that I have most concern for, they surely have better things to do.
I'm pouring one out for the researchers who have to rerun all their experiments and rewrite +republish their entire papers every time I click a link on scihub.
That's rather uncharitable. They most likely just want to get some usage data. It's ignoring the privacy concerns that come with GA, which isn't great, but saying they have no morals is more than a stretch.
They never embedded GA in the Firefox extension, just on Chrome and explained it by their assumption that chrome users probably aren't as opposed to Google tracking as those using Firefox.
Probably the only reason I remember it is because it felt like such a peculiar justification.
The other extension got some pretty shady backers on HN in the past as well. [1] I think that this kind of extension just attracts drama more than others.
Google Analytics is not spyware, it just counts users, OSes, browsers, page views. It doesn't identify users personally ( you could if you knew the only person with a Chromebook in a city, but that's about as granular as it could get).
As can be seen by any statistic - be it the download/rate/comment ratios on any of the mobile app stores, or the Chrome extension stores, the vast majority of users will stay silent. Wanting to know a tiny bit about them is understandable.
It's naive to think that Google - an advertising company whose business model depends on stalking every one - would offer such an advanced tool for free if it wasn't spyware.
The "Bypass Paywalls Clean (c)" version for Firefox doesn't prompt you for new domain permissions on every update, which is convenient if you trust the developer.
Worth noting that at least in the United States, your public library likely provides free access to some paywalled / subscription sites. Mine has NYT, WSJ, Consumer Reports and a bunch of others.
Typically, you log in to your library web site, they will give you a magic link to the paywalled web site which then gives you a 'subscription' that is good for the day.
This used to be a good option for me (in Silicon Valley), but when I last checked this option was much less attractive. Previously you could sign up for a 1-year pass; now it's something like a week.
They definitely don't make it super convenient. With NYT I have to jump through the same hoop every day, with WSJ about once a week. On the plus side, it helps make the decision to read an article (or the news at all) more deliberate.
It’s usually a limited number of passes, so when customer k+1 requests access, customer 1 gets dropped. I don’t tell anyone about my library’s resources—they’re great, and so are the ones 2 counties up ;)
Remember, these paywalled sites are inviting in the Google Webcrawler to add to the index EVERYBODY searches; they are purposely poisoning Google's results with paid for content.
Any bypasser that either present fake credentials [ie as the google bot] or returns the contents of the Google cache is fair game.
I feel like Brave came pretty close with the Basic Attention Token, but not many web sites enrolled. Hell, last time I checked HN wasn't even set up on it (why not? what's the down side?).
Nah, this would just be death. Paywalls arose from the decline in ad revenue and I doubt much of that is coming from ad blockers. Ads just aren't worth as much. Paywall/subscriber model is the only want to be and a huge swath of publications already can't generate enough subs to survive. Others are getting swallowed up by private equity. If you evade paywalls too, then they'll just cease publication.
Although I am fortunate enough to be able to afford to subscribe to almost anything I might want to read, I don't like the idea of paywalls in general.
I believe they exclude the less fortunate from access to important resources, so I refuse to give my money to companies that use paywalls, because I see that as rewarding bad behaviour.
Instead, I always pay for sites I find valuable that don't have paywalls (e.g., guardian.co.uk)
I realise this isn't the same view that everyone has, which is fine. Vote with your money.
> I believe they exclude the less fortunate from access to important resources, so I refuse to give my money to companies that use paywalls, because I see that as rewarding bad behaviour.
I agree with what you wrote but I think it is an understatement.
The good fortune of spending an amount of years in a great coastal community with an excellent library system; those primarily physical assets I used as a child are now mainly digitized.
Where does that leave much of the world that cannot afford these exploitative paywalls?
This is truly a diversity & inclusion issue about providing the same 100 steps forward many of us were fortunate to receive, to everyone. Our tax dollars already funded much of it anyways.
We cannot permit the unjust enrichment of paywall tyranny!
Paywalls seem to work but at the cost of restricting access to a large group of people. It is evident from sites like Eurogamer, Wikipedia and The Guardian that a more patreon-like "supporter" model can work just as well without annoying people.
How many of these "paywalls" are reliant on Javascript and/or cookies.
From a quick glance I can attest that almost all of them show no "paywall" in a text-only browser that does not support Javascript.
I would be very curious about any "paywalls", i.e, deliberate annoyances directed at non-subscribers viewing public, non-password protected content, that are not reliant on Javascript and/or cookies.
FYI, I was still blocked by WaPo's paywall after the first article, even though this extension is showing itself as on in Chrome (tried restart to no avail).
Insight Browser (a YC company!) has an iOS browser that supports extensions. I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult for someone to take this extension and port it to their platform.
A couple of comments here talking about how this is piracy, none discussing the fact that paywalls are a completely broken business model in an era where sharing information with your friends/online communities is so important.
Back in the day, with physical paper, if you wanted to discuss an article with someone you'd simply hand them the paper and point. Now, people simply don't share paywalled articles, or if they do someone will comment an archived link immediately.
As Gabe Newell once said, "piracy is almost always a service problem". If the media companies started delivering the product in a way that people actually want the problem of piracy would disappear overnight.
Just shooting the shit, but $x a month to read the paper, with a button to generate un-paywalled links to share with friends and family, and $y a month for a "thought leader" version that lets you generate un-paywalled links with unlimited circulation would let people consume and share news the way they actually want to while still being monetisable.
Trying to charge everyone who looks at your article in an era where success is defined by virality is just dumb.
Maybe this is what people want but maybe it isn't. I'm not paying a subscription because I find the news I want to read for free anyway. There are a zillion sites reporting exactly the same things.
I think that kind of thing works better for magazines or journals, where coverage arrives more slowly but the analyses and writing are less redundant between publications (and sometimes even meaningfully unique).
I'll probably get downvoted into oblivion but I gotta put this out here:
I understand adblocking because of how absolutely garbage ad networks are for privacy (and to some extent device performance). But I can't help and compare mass bypassing paywalls of news sites to jumping the pike on a transit network.
Some people should probably do it (who really can't afford subscriptions) but generally HN audience is well paid and can afford to support their sources of news.
I know people here will come up with ~~reasons~~ excuses for justifying this theft, but it just reinforces the entitled nature of well-paid tech workers in my mind.
Remember old school shareware games? Many people used fake keys to unlock the full versions of the game. At least most people had the decency (I think) to feel a little bad about it. When it comes to news reporting -- people seem to think it's wrong to ask for payment. I really don't get it.
That's not a legitimate comparison of the situation, because if you can bypass the paywall to be able to read it usually means the data is already on your device for you to read in the first place, it's just "hidden" in some shitty way.
I would compare it with a physical newspaper company sending you the newspaper covered in some tamper-resistant material that lets you read the first rows only. I see no reason why you shouldn't try to tamper with that cover given that you effectively own it now.
Go full "log in to read this" (by which I mean only sending the data you intend EVERYONE to read even when the user is not logged in) and then it's a fair comparison.
EDIT:
> I know people here will come up with ~~reasons~~ excuses for justifying this theft, but it just reinforces the entitled nature of well-paid tech workers in my mind.
I think the industry that has given rise to shitty paywallish implementations should justify themselves as well, then.
NB: I pay/have paid for news sources, including ones that I appreciated but had literally no time to read. However, this sort of approach to "protecting IP" is particularly stupid, so I feel no remorse bypassing it (I do it manually, though, it's more satisfying).
HN cracks me up. We are largely a demographic of people that make money from selling our IP and yet for some reason many of us are pretty brazen about our efforts to circumvent payment for others' IP.
I'll admit that I incognito my way around a paywall from time to time, but I at least have the decency to feel kinda salty about it.
> HN cracks me up. We are largely a demographic of people that make money from selling our IP and yet for some reason many of us are pretty brazen about our efforts to circumvent payment for others' IP.
Eh, that's not really correct. Most of us actually make money from creating IP for others to own, so it's not nearly as hypocritical as you imply.
IMHO, the brazenness is cultural momentum from the expectations formed during the heady 90s "information wants to be free" period and the resulting long period where paywalls were rare. Honestly, it probably would have been better for everyone if everything had been pay-walled from the beginning.
Much of what is said about Elsevier, the worst offender, is true to a lesser extent in other paywalls.
I don't believe that paywalls are Moral, Ethical, or Fair. I also believe that paywalls can be discrimatory, and deceptive. This goes along with a general critique I have of IP. Paywalls regularly use others' content, without compensating them.
In many cases, content thieves likes Elsevier take content that is funded by our tax dollars, and hide it behind paywalls, or expensive subscriptions. I paid for that. This is stealing from me.
IP is really a fake term that conflates a number of things, some of which are just ideas or math. It also regularly cheats basic things like "Right of First Sale" through BS such as licensing/bundling/etc
Paywalls regularly permit search engines to index their content, but when you go to see the content that was openly indexed, they block you, and hit you up for funding. This is a bait & switch. Some paywalls vacillate between business models intentionally to get your personal data, sell it, while using ads, then go full paywall after the sale has already been made of info.
I think there is a social contract underpinning communications, that we were always free to redistribute them. But the "Communication thieves" Paywalls don't want that through the cottage industry that grew to exploit these gaps.
If we think of the negative impacts of all these paywalls to the 3rd world and increasing digitization, talk about a horrible digital divide emerging?
> Much of what is said about Elsevier, the worst offender, is true to a lesser extent in other paywalls.
Honestly, I think it's a mistake reason about all paywalls from the example of Elsevier's paywalls. There are a lot of unique aspects to the production of academic work that are not present in other areas.
Revenue is needed to fund the creation of other kinds of work, such as news reporting, and for stuff like that, paywalls are needed because other free-access revenue models frankly didn't work.
If everything had been paywalled from the beginning, the internet would have been less successful. Most of that free information was possible because there was enough print subscription and personal ads money to subsidize it all. That is no longer true.
It's not our problem if media sites send us the full content of their articles and expect our browsers to implement their arcane decisions whether to magnanimously allow us to see it this time or not.
If they don't like it, it's trivial to put their content behind a requirement to log in with a validated account. In fact, it's even easier than what they do now!
Oh, but wait, that won't play with the SEO, user engagement, social media sharing, dark patterns to entice users to pay by offering them a few crumbs now and then... Again, not my problem. They do them, I'll do me.
And yet I do pay subscriptions for the news and publications whose content I find good enough to be interested in what they will publish next, or if I support what they stand for. However, I feel no reason to pay subscriptions for one-off articles that may interest me from the myriad of media companies that I don't care to follow for one reason or another if they send me the content anyway. Their business model is not my problem.
Sure, there are a lot of moral gymnastics going on here.
Seems we don't really have a good understanding of what goes wrong
with paywalled links.
For me, as an author, I find myself in a ridiculous situation when I
want to share with friends works I've done for a site that uses
paywalls but doesn't pay me (yes this happens in the real world of
publishing). So I am ambivalent and often share a link along with
instructions on how to bypass access controls.
But more generally I am irritated by links other people share, such as
here on HN, that are paywalled. I'd rather not know about them than
experience the frustration and time-waste of following them.
So there is a contradiction/tension at the heart of digital
publishing, that creators, critics, researchers and commenters really
want exposure/reach more than they want (or get) money.
That said, paywalls are not the only problem and are more
understandable than sites that block Tor, use Cloudflare, Geo-block,
or those brain-dead ISPs or university sysadmins who block sites based
on broad keywords so that almost any kind of research is impossible
without tunnelling out past their crappy firewalls.
Yet this is called Hacker News, and hackers usually like to, well, hack and work around stuff just because they can.
It's one of the nice things of knowing how technology works, and as long as it's doable only by technical people it's probably not a big issue for IP / content creators (I'm considering adding an extension from source a technical task).
As long as you don't commoditize piracy too much, it's fine.
> As long as you don't commoditize piracy too much, it's fine.
Still, I wouldn't call that piracy at all.
As a non subscriber they open their door to you, offer you a counter and tell you you can lurk anything until the counter say you have to leave or pay. But that counter only really work if you accept to put batteries inside and turn it on and nobody is really bothering to check.
Also they chose to use drug dealers methods knowing very well that network effects will make you knock at their door on a regular basis.
Choosing to ignore that counter would be unethical/rude the same way taking photo in a museum that prohibit them is. But none of this is piracy.
I don't really buy this. I think I technically have subscriptions to both the Washington Post and New York Times that my wife purchased that I assume are valid for an entire household, and I used to subscribe to the LA Times when I was younger and read a physical newspaper.
The consumption model now just isn't comparable, though. If I was regularly going to my city newspaper's website to figure out what was going on, I'd pay them. But that isn't what is happening. Instead, their links are getting spammed all over the web to link aggregation sites like Hacker News, mixed in with links to non-paywalled content, from a universe of thousand of providers, many of which provide all of the content for free. Subscribing to one newspaper is fine, but there is no conceivable world in which I'm going to purchase subscriptions to every paywalled site I ever encounter a link to, especially when I usually don't know before clicking that it is paywalled.
Nonetheless, being able to meaningfully participate in the conversations generated by the article on link aggregator sites like this that provide comment sections means I need to read the articles, doesn't it? If the only options for consistently being able to do that are either 1) purchase 300+ distinct subscriptions to sites where I have no idea if I'm ever going back again, or 2) bypass the paywalls, I'm going to bypass the paywalls.
> Nonetheless, being able to meaningfully participate in the conversations generated by the article on link aggregator sites like this that provide comment sections means I need to read the articles, doesn't it? If the only options for consistently being able to do that are either 1) purchase 300+ distinct subscriptions to sites where I have no idea if I'm ever going back again, or 2) bypass the paywalls, I'm going to bypass the paywalls.
You're looking at it purely from the perspective of a consumer, which misses pretty significant parts of the picture. Someone needed to get paid to produced a lot of that content, and in many cases they won't have the revenue to do that without a paywall.
Your justification isn't too different from one that goes "if I want to meaningfully participate in American society, I need a car. However I don't want to pay $30,000+ for one, so if I can pick locks and hotwire a car to get the transportation I want, I'll do that instead of paying."
> You're looking at it purely from the perspective of a consumer, which misses pretty significant parts of the picture. Someone needed to get paid to produced a lot of that content, and in many cases they won't have the revenue to do that without a paywall.
And nothing is stopping businesses from implementing an actual paywall, such that you must log in to see the content. Under such a model nothing short of actual copyright violation, i.e. somebody with access to the content making it available elsewhere, would make it possible to see the content without paying.
If content producers truly care that we don't "bypass" their paywall, the solution is trivial. Log in to see. No login, no see.
> And nothing is stopping businesses from implementing an actual paywall, such that you must log in to see the content. Under such a model nothing short of actual copyright violation, i.e. somebody with access to the content making it available elsewhere, would make it possible to see the content without paying.
I'd imagine they're being put in a difficult due to search, which why they're doing it the way they're doing it.
And honestly, your justification rings hollow. It's akin to saying it's OK to steal if the anti-theft technology isn't there are is too easy to defeat. If you take my car from me, it's still theft if I left the doors unlocked an the key in the ignition.
Difficulties due to search? Well I have difficulties due to search too, when I find an article that briefly tries to appear open access to entice me and then suddenly plasters a client-side paywall on me. That's why I am doing it.
I think we're long past using "theft" as an analogy for access to content. If I take a car from you I am depriving you of your car, and I would be able to profit from it if I were to sell it on the black market—that's what makes it theft. Let's not forget that at no point am I talking about gaining unauthorised access to a computer system, nor about making use of the content to the detriment of the copyright holder (publishing it elsewhere etc.). All I am doing is making use of my personal property in whichever way I please, and that sometimes happens to be reading the content that has already been sent to me by a business in whichever way it pleased. I am depriving nobody by activating Web Developer Tools in Firefox after having clicked a link to a website and being able to see the data that has already been sent to my browser. In fact, the website won't even be aware that I "stole" from them rather than decided not to subscribe.
Honestly, what rings hollow to me is so much moralising around wanting people to feel guilty for being able to circumvent the unnecessarily weak paywalls implemented by businesses which, let's not forget, are designed in that way for the businesses' own benefit and often to the detriment of the user's interest. A better analogy would be if a music venue insisted on playing with no sound-proofing to hopefully attract customers from the street, but expected any nearby homes to keep their own windows closed so they must pay if they want to listen to the music.
> Difficulties due to search? Well I have difficulties due to search too, when I find an article that briefly tries to appear open access to entice me and then suddenly plasters a client-side paywall on me. That's why I am doing it.
You're only looking at this only from your own selfish perspective, which misses a lot of important stuff.
> I think we're long past using "theft" as an analogy for access to content. If I take a car from you I am depriving you of your car, and I would be able to profit from it if I were to sell it on the black market—that's what makes it theft.
No, that's just a tired bit of bullshit self-justification. When you bypass a paywall, you're depriving the operator of the revenue they were expecting to support their operations. It's like sneaking into a movie theater without paying--if too many people do that, the movie theater will shut down and there won't be any movies playing to sneak into. And even if it doesn't reach that critical mass, you're freeloading off of other paying customers.
> Honestly, what rings hollow to me is so much moralising around wanting people to feel guilty for being able to circumvent the unnecessarily weak paywalls
A lock being weak doesn't mean it's OK to bypass it. Most locks are basically just messages saying you're not allowed to access. I could probably pick the lock to your house or apartment (and I'm not any good at lock picking, those locks usually suck). It sounds like you think it'd be fine if I did that and watched your TV or read your books when you're not home--after all, I wouldn't be depriving you of anything, right?
I guess I am a horrible human being. I don't feel bad at all blocking ads, bypassing client side modal popups, or viewing data happily provided to search engines with the intent of giving me a taste. To be fair, I mostly just don't read paywalled articles.
I was a subscriber to NYT until I wanted to cancel and there was no option to do that, you had to call some number in the US and explain yourself to some guy about why you want to cancel your subscription. Learned my lesson there, never again.
Whenever they have an online help chat with a human and they tell me to call, I tell them I deaf. It's not true but they have always just done the cancellation for me. YMMV
Same. Left a really bad impression. Their shitty pricing model too, charging people $100s/year until they try to cancel then reducing it down to like $30/year.
Me too. This is why I just subscribe to Substack now. Yes they try to subtly pressure you in ux to “just pause”, but that’s nothing compared to NYT “please call this US line”.
Agreed. Same goes for online streaming content. I'll pay up to $50/mo in total for media subscriptions (eg: Netflix). I won't pay $19.99 for 8 individual services that each have 1 or 2 things worth watching and then a bunch of filler (Netflix is continually heading this direction, IMO).
I have no issues at all paying for content, but I really only want to pay for the things that interest me directly, not a bundle of shows that have no personal appeal. And there is a disincentive to have too many services in general.
It's not really their choice. Most of the content owners have their own competing service now, so Netflix need content. Small amounts of good quality content won't keep people subscribed for long, so they need quantity and quality.
For me, the internet works like this: you find a link on social media. A cookie banner or paywall prevents me from reading the article. So I read the comments section. Nice shooting yourself in the foot, original content creator.
This is why we can not have nice things online....
Why not implement a paywall that lets you pay for an article?
The tech already exists, see [1] and [2]. And if you feel bad about leaving your credit card details somewhere, you could use a plugin like Alby [3].
Due to interchange fees on the major processing networks it is not practical to charge less then $1. Fees per charge are something like 30 cents plus percentage of transaction.
Because a very small amount of the articles are worth paying for, so they bundle the product together to with all the low quality articles that no one will pay for.
And how will I know if an article was worth paying for until I've already read it? This might work with a site I frequent and have grown to trust but most of the views on most articles aren't regulars of the publication itself but probably got there because it was shared or came up as a search result
It is a tricky situation. On the one hand, subscription models are great as they don't incentivize flashy click-bait as much and reward steady, high-quality content. On the other hand, you don't know whether a publication is worth subscribing to until you've sampled some of their content.
The "free-articles-then-paywall" model seems to be working for a lot of publications to tackle this and get people to pay, but when your limit is 1 article a month, you can't be too shocked if people go around it. I like the idea of TechCrunch free + paid content, but I wonder how it's working for them.
So I wonder what this extension in particular is doing that Google wouldn't approve of.
...also 12ft.io already does this for almost every paywalled site.