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It’s a soft paywall, protected only by cookies and JavaScript, bypass-able by using private browsing/incognito mode. Most news sites are — they give you your fi

It’s a soft paywall, protected only by cookies and JavaScript, bypass-able by using private browsing/incognito mode. Most news sites are — they give you your first N articles free and try to upsell, with the assumption that few will know to or bother to reset cookies, disable JavaScript or browse privately/incognito. (Surprisingly, the full text of the article is usually in the initial http response and only hidden by JavaScript running in your browser after the fact, based on the presence of a cookie from a prior visit - such a fragile and trusting system, but worth the upsell trade off to them.) You can also go to https://archive.is https://archive.is and paste in the article url. They generate nice shareable url like this one for this article: https://archive.is/y58Py https://archive.is/y58Py Ironically, the Google AMP version of the article will have no paywall at all, and is usually accessible with a slightly modified article url, discoverable via Google search from mobile. In the case of the Washington Post simply appending outputType=amp does the trick. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/apple-csam-abuse-encryption-security-privacy-dangerous/?outputType=amp https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/apple-csa... Reader modes, like Apple’s, frequently, inadvertently, bypass soft paywalls, particularly when set to activate automatically, because they can see the hidden content on the page before it’s hidden. There are of course browser extensions that automate all of this. Few news sites use hard paywalls that prevent this. Whether you’re comfortable using private browsing or Google amp and not paying for the article is up to you.

zepto 5y ago
> It’s a soft paywall, protected only by cookies and JavaScript, bypass-able by using private browsing/incognito mode. Not true. I tried that. > They generate nice shareable url like this one for this article: https://archive.is/y58Py https://archive.is/y58Py This is helpful.
- skygazer 5y ago
  Well, I can't know if you're invoking it properly, but it's true of modern browsers. That's the whole purpose of private/incognito mode, to not share your previous cookies with the visited site, so if it doesn't work for you and you're entering private/incognito before visiting the article url, then there's something amiss with your configuration and you're not browsing privately at all. Or, perhaps you never leave private browsing mode, and so you keep your private mode cookies alive indefinitely, defeating the whole purpose of private mode -- ironically, it works best if you don't leave it on continuously. There's a lot of subtlety in technology. :) The full article is indeed returned upon your request and hidden by your browser after the fact. You can prove this to yourself by dropping to a unix-like command line and typing: curl -L 'https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/apple-csam-abuse-encryption-security-privacy-dangerous' and you'll see, if you look carefully, the full text of the article embedded within that extremely verbose result, just as the browser sees it before it's hidden by javascript after inspecting your cookies. I'm not sure you wanted to know all of this, but it feels like wanting to understand how things work is why hacker news exists.
  - zepto 5y ago
    > Well, I can't know if you're invoking it properly, but it's true of modern browsers. No it isn’t. > There's a lot of subtlety in technology. :) Agreed. Perhaps you are missing something. > The full article is indeed returned upon your request and hidden by your browser after the fact. You can prove this to yourself … This is irrelevant to whether private browsing solves the problem or not.
    - skygazer 5y ago
      You are a delight. Thanks for brightening my day.

zepto 5y ago

> It’s a soft paywall, protected only by cookies and JavaScript, bypass-able by using private browsing/incognito mode. Not true. I tried that. > They generate nice shareable url like this one for this article: https://archive.is/y58Py https://archive.is/y58Py This is helpful.

skygazer 5y ago
Well, I can't know if you're invoking it properly, but it's true of modern browsers. That's the whole purpose of private/incognito mode, to not share your previous cookies with the visited site, so if it doesn't work for you and you're entering private/incognito before visiting the article url, then there's something amiss with your configuration and you're not browsing privately at all. Or, perhaps you never leave private browsing mode, and so you keep your private mode cookies alive indefinitely, defeating the whole purpose of private mode -- ironically, it works best if you don't leave it on continuously. There's a lot of subtlety in technology. :) The full article is indeed returned upon your request and hidden by your browser after the fact. You can prove this to yourself by dropping to a unix-like command line and typing: curl -L 'https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/19/apple-csam-abuse-encryption-security-privacy-dangerous' and you'll see, if you look carefully, the full text of the article embedded within that extremely verbose result, just as the browser sees it before it's hidden by javascript after inspecting your cookies. I'm not sure you wanted to know all of this, but it feels like wanting to understand how things work is why hacker news exists.
- zepto 5y ago
  > Well, I can't know if you're invoking it properly, but it's true of modern browsers. No it isn’t. > There's a lot of subtlety in technology. :) Agreed. Perhaps you are missing something. > The full article is indeed returned upon your request and hidden by your browser after the fact. You can prove this to yourself … This is irrelevant to whether private browsing solves the problem or not.
  - skygazer 5y ago
    You are a delight. Thanks for brightening my day.