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Bypass Paywalls: a browser extension to help bypass paywalls for selected sites

258 points by zikohh 5y ago

DevKoala 5y ago
This is cool, but how is it different from piracy?
- dymk 5y ago
  No, you see, it's "provided for educational purposes only" - it says right there in the readme
  - DevKoala 5y ago
    Ahh got it, that’s a great argument. Brb, “downloading a car” for educational purposes.
- theturtletalks 5y ago
  I'm not sure it crosses the line. Most of these websites have the text in the HTML, but hidden to the user. This is so Google can index and send traffic based on search. If the HTML is sent to the client, accessing it is not piracy.
  - picardythird 5y ago
    Just because there’s a technical workaround doesn’t make it not stealing. If I neglect to lock my car and my stuff gets stolen, it’s still stealing. I might have been able to prevent it had I locked the car, but it’s still stealing.
    - theturtletalks 5y ago
      By this definition, ad-blocking is stealing. Is using a technical workaround to hid HTML ok but using it reveal hidden HTML is not? Your car example is not a good analogy. Once you notice people stealing, you would make sure the door is locked. Just like these websites can restrict the content server-side.
      - matt321 5y ago
        yes...yes it is
      - picardythird 5y ago
        This is something broken with the internet. That website need a strong ranking on google search to stay afloat is a symptom of a much larger problem with how the internet operates in this day and age. At the end of the day you are stealing and looting not just from the company, but the everyday people who work for that company, who are just trying to make a living for themselves and their families, and no rationalization will change that. And to the car analogy: Let's say I was stolen from, but I'm so lazy I still can't be bothered to lock my car. Or I leave it open for some other reason. This has zero effect on the morality of the thief stealing from my car. It just means I'm an easy target for stealing. Two completely separate things.
    - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      If a webserver sent me an exact copy of your car but encased in ice, and I used an ice pick to carve it out, you would still have your car, and i would have a copy of your car. That the web server wants to me buy a flame thrower to melt the ice is irrelivent. Stealing does not apply to digital goods. You cannot deprive anyone of something infinitely replicable. You can only prevent those that you do not deem worthy to access it. and that attitude makes a person a bad person.
      - picardythird 5y ago
        So if I break in to Microsoft, stick a USB in their computers, and steal the source code for Windows, it's not stealing because it's just digital information that's infinitely reproducible? Keep in mind: nothing physical was stolen. People lose their jobs because they are digital content creators and the attitude is that paying for intellectual property is uncool.
        rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
        Sounds like breaking and entering to me, but I am not a lawyer. Not legal advice.
        picardythird 5y ago
        I think you would be charged with more than that.
    - LocalH 5y ago
      Do you think that people should be required to view websites as delivered, without modifying them in any way? That would be the logical end of attempting to prevent this kind of "stealing". If there is another term you'd like to use for "looks like theft, but the original owner loses nothing" then feel free. But it is not theft or stealing, those require also depriving the rightful owner of the stolen property. If I could duplicate the exact contents of your car, would it still be "stealing" if I did so? Reminder that you would continue to be in possession of 100% of the contents of your car. Maybe with regards to any digital data on any duplicated devices, I could see a bit of the "stealing" logic, then again nothing was actually "stolen" from you if you still have 100% of your original property, but I now also have duplicates of that property.
      - picardythird 5y ago
        If I walk in to a record store and buy a CD, I'm not just paying for the paper and plastic that it's made of. I'm paying the record company, the record store, and the artist for their time and talent. With a digital goods, we can eliminate the paper and plastic. It's a great thing! But for some reason, we've also decided to write the artist out of the equation too. At least if you're a pirate. If you're a software engineer, you're being paid not to manufacture hard goods but to create something of intellectual value that could be technically be duplicated forever. What's the difference between pirating music and stealing code that is under a software license?
        webmaven 5y ago
        > What's the difference between pirating music and stealing code that is under a software license? If by "stealing code" you mean creating and distributing (probably selling) software derived from it that violates the license, it is quite different. If what you mean is simply downloading warez for your own use, it is more or less the same.
        picardythird 5y ago
        So are you against torrenting copyrighted digital goods then? Because people do exactly that. They steal intellectual property and distribute it for other people to use. Stealing for personal use may be a more minor thing, but it still boggles me that people want to consume the fruits of others' labor without compensating them in anyway, as if creators are slaves who exist only to please.
  - misterbwong 5y ago
    I'm not quite understanding the logic here. Just because another customer (google) was given access, does that mean everyone should have it? Would you rather publishers give google private direct feeds to index?
    - ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
      > Just because another customer (google) was given access, does that mean everyone should have it? They didn't provide access to just another customer or Google -- they send the article text to EVERYONE in the HTML response. They are thus making that text publicly available. If they want to make content only available to certain individuals, that is literally what paywalls and authentication/authorization are for. Instead, they want Google to index the site AS IF the content is publicly available but then use javascript to restrict that content from users client-side on a case by case basis. The golden rule of authorization is never rely on client-side authorization as by then you've already willingly given the data/information to the client. And the client has no obligation to not look at that information/data. They didn't do anything nefarious to get it -- you literally gave it to them. > Would you rather publishers give google private direct feeds to index? Absolutely I would. If we could enhance the indexing and search engine system so that (a) I could tell google which services I subscribe to and (b) google knows which articles are behind paywalls, then we could have a world in which we could intentionally filter To or Away from paywall content. I know that I would often filter TO paywall content, especially if: - I could also tell google to avoid content farm content via a filter or content full of ads (not in their interests currently but it might become so as more of us get frustrated with shittier and shittier search results) - If google could surface the price to access each article on the search results (wherein articles on sites I already pay/subscribe to would be free and articles on sites with individual pay per access would be transparent and upfront).
      - picardythird 5y ago
        This is the “but she was wearing a low cut top” argument.
        5y ago
- ohgodplsno 5y ago
  More akin to breaking DRM. If you didn't want me to read your article, don't send it at all. It's in your response ? Tough luck.
- deleted 5y ago
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- unicornporn 5y ago
  Is this Hacker News?
  - DeWilde 5y ago
    The hackers grew up and now they are what they once hated. Seems to happen to every generation.
    - picardythird 5y ago
      Or they matured. Should writers, musicians, and journalists be slaves?
  - J5892 5y ago
    Judging from the current sentiment around piracy among younger generations, I've concluded that MPAA/RIAA propaganda against piracy has been a rousing success. My philosophy has always been: Pay for things if you are able, it's convenient, and pricing is fair. And if piracy is easier than paying, piracy always wins. It's the reason I buy all my video games now and rarely pirate music anymore, but half of my TV and movies come through my seedbox.
    - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
      This. They convinced the kids that piracy is bad and evil, and the Big IP lobby is laughing all the way to bank. Ensuring that you own nothing, and will rent your life from them in perpetuity.
    - cercatrova 5y ago
      Exactly. If the only way I can get 4k movies and shows without a stream degrading and being able to use mpv or other such video players is through piracy, then so be it.
    - shitlord 5y ago
      I'm in a similar position. I use Spotify for music, but for movies/TV, I pirate everything despite paying for multiple streaming services. It's about being able to consume media on my own terms. Thanks to piracy, I can get the same quality content from another source and enjoy it however I want, on any device, online or offline.
- GekkePrutser 5y ago
  The sites offer the articles for free to search engines and the like, otherwise this wouldn't work. It's not that different from using archive.is etc Imo. Hacker news isn't usable without this anymore.
  - muttled 5y ago
    You bring up an interesting point that they offer it for free to search engines. Didn't it used to be against the rules of most search engines to "cloak" your content by serving one thing to the spiders and another to the general public? Edit: Found it. It's still against their rules. <https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/cloaking#:~:text=Cloaking%20refers%20to%20the%20practice,different%20results%20than%20they%20expected. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...>
    - stall 5y ago
      Well, google published https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/paywalled-content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... which describes how it should be done
- echelon 5y ago
  So, piracy turned out to be a great thing for games (Steam), movies (Netflix), and music (Spotify). It just hasn't happened at scale to the news world yet. I will not pay $50/yr for 20 different news sites. It's absurd. Who do these people think they are? I'm glad projects like this are being created. It addresses.a boneheaded, outmoded industry that won't meet consumers where they actually are. These sorts of "news piracy" apps will force change for the good of all parties. But they need one more piece to really take off: social P2P sharing. Strip articles of ads, share them in a p2p protocol (which could also develop interest graph capabilities), add voting, maybe comments, and definitely include the article's pictures. 1 - it would be fantastic as a reader 2 - the entire news industry that is stuck in 1995 would be forced to adopt to a Spotify model or adopt the microtransactions that have been promised since the 90's. I would love to subscribe to a single source for all news. I'd pay a hefty fee. I'd also be happy to pay $0.10 an article. (I'd learn to avoid sites that shill clickbait, too.) This whole industry sucks for readers. I support anything that gets them to adapt to change and become more consumer friendly.
  - uncomputation 5y ago
    Both Netflix and Spotify start at $10/month which is $120 per year. $50/yr is ~$4/month for 20 news sites, which seems to be a better deal. What am I missing, is the price still too high or is the number of news sites too low?
    - cromd 5y ago
      I read the comment as "I wont pay $50 20 times, totaling $1k, to get onto the 20 sites that have articles that interest me"
      - echelon 5y ago
        This was my intended meaning. And in reality, there are far more than 20 websites that have interesting paywalled content.
  - cromd 5y ago
    I definitely read news from at least 20 different sources each year, without going around paywalls, and I pay for the one I enjoy the most - NYT. (I personally read ~150 articles a year, so that's 33 cents per article, which many readers of HN would earn in 10-30 seconds of work. But maybe I read excessive news). If I really just want to read 1 article per month, I'm often accommodated by some "N free articles per month" policies. I agree they may be pursuing a suboptimal strategy somehow. Not sure I would call it "absurd". Having 100k individuals producing music on Spotify might be great, but I'm not sure what the implications would be for getting my news that way. But if someone wants to start "Spotify for News", I'm interested. Not sure that NYT needs their paywalls worked around in order for that to happen though.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- mattdennewitz 5y ago
  it isn't
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
elldoubleyew 5y ago
edit: After checking the repo it appears that this is not a a new extension, nor has there been any recent update. Seems like a new extension for this pops up every few months until the content publishers get savvy to the latest workaround and someone else finds a new method. Originally these would just set the referrer to a search engine regardless of where the link came from and the paywall would go away, I'm not sure how exactly they fixed that but I believe that eventually stopped working. Seems to be a bit of a cat and mouse game at this point.
- Victerius 5y ago
  Controversial opinion: more news outlets should be run by benevolent billionaires who can afford to spend their own money indefinitely to keep the outlet running without resorting to ads and paywalls.
  - NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
    Even the ones that are, don't (c.f. WaPo)
  - DevKoala 5y ago
    The news can change the perspective of individuals. If only “benevolent” billionaires can maintain news sites, then they can also dictate the perception of real world events by individuals. It is too much power. Competition pushes news sites to adhere to some level of truth.
  - dangus 5y ago
    If billionaires were benevolent they wouldn't be billionaires.
    - Victerius 5y ago
      Bill Gates?
      - dangus 5y ago
makach 5y ago
An article worth reading is worth buying.
- lxgr 5y ago
  Agreed, but I don't know many newspapers that sell individual articles. And I certainly don't want yet another subscription.
- echelon 5y ago
  Except the industry is stuck in 1995. You want to pay $50/yr [1] for twenty different news websites? All I want to do is read one article. It needs a Spotify / Netflix model. Or the promise of micropayments that never happened. (Yeah, I'll pay 10 cents for an article. And also learn to distrust your site if you shill clickbait.) [1] NYT digital cost
  - pier25 5y ago
    Totally agree. Micropayments have not worked because major news outlets won't use them. Technically it's a solved problem. See Coil for example: https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/
    - hombre_fatal 5y ago
      It's not a technical problem but a business and social one. For example, getting your users to give their money to a third party that then might come back to you isn't better than getting paid directly—it's even more friction and you're giving all the power away to a third party. The user experience isn't necessarily better either. I still have to open my wallet and start a recurring billing subscription, but with this weird Coil site instead of just this one service that I want. And then there's a chicken-egg problem of no sites using Coil, so no money in Coil, so no value for the user, thus no value for the content creator. Just like every micropayment attempt before Coil. As engineers we like to think that everything is a technical problem. But the technical implementation of a micropayment solution is 0.0001% of the work.
callmeed 5y ago
You wouldn't bypass a car
- munk-a 5y ago
  I would. I've never owned a car in my life. Public transit is clearly the best kind of theft! /s
adamc 5y ago
Mixed feelings about this. I hate paywalls because they inhibit sharing and conversation, but... if people don't pay for news, soon there won't be any reporters. People have to make a living somehow.
- charcircuit 5y ago
  Plenty of news channels exist fine on YouTube without paywalling all of their content. Also people will just report what's going on because they are interested in it. It doesn't require someone to be a "reporter" to talk about what's going on.
  - adamc 5y ago
    Good. Use those and don't steal from others.
    - Karunamon 5y ago
      Nobody's stealing anything. This is even a worse comparison than the industry groups make; in their case it's the wrong law (copyright infringement), in this case no law is being broken. You don't get to put content out on the open internet and then cry foul when its accessed. These orgs are talking out of both sides of their mouth.
    - bcj7393nsk 5y ago
  - bhelkey 5y ago
    People will report on what's going on without a financial incentive. People will also write books, make movies, and develop games for the fun of it. The flip side is that Spider-Man: No Way Home cost $200 Million to make. Sony didn't invest a fifth of a billion dollars into making this movie for the fun of it. They did it because they expect return on their investment. I appreciate living in a world in which high quality content (news, novels, TV shows, ...) exists. High quality content requires a good deal of investment. And that is not going to happen if said content cannot be monetized. [1] https://screenrant.com/spiderman-cost-budget-box-office-success-explained/ https://screenrant.com/spiderman-cost-budget-box-office-succ...
herpderperator 5y ago
How does this work on a high level? If the server never sends the content, how can a client-side extension get it? Do most website just hide this on the frontend?
- Scoundreller 5y ago
  Usually #3. Or corrupting whatever the site uses to run its “5 free articles per month” counter.
- xiekomb 5y ago
  Lot of different tricks. One example: just by using a Google Bot user agent some websites will let you access the full content. Sometimes working with some cookies, blocking some particular 3rd party JavaScript libs, some other are more complicated.
- dymk 5y ago
  Perusing this file here - https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/master/src/js/contentScript.js https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma... It removes the popup elements that cover the page and other little tricks. The common key thing across all of them, though - the server is sending the content, and then a little JS payload that creates the popup asking you to pay. It's not a particularly good way of protecting the content of the article, for obvious reasons.
another_poster 5y ago
PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.
- DeWilde 5y ago
  True, but if a newspaper is open for bots to help promote it through SEO, I won't have many qualms about bypassing the flimsy paywall.
- pier25 5y ago
  We need a better solution than subscribing to a monolithic news source. Specially when they make it super hard to unsubscribe cough NYT cough.
  - jrockway 5y ago
    You can subscribe through your phone, so then Apple is in charge of cancelation. You can link your accounts and still view things on the desktop website. (I think they also have bundles to make it non-monolithic, but that probably doesn't translate to your desktop because... that would be too convenient.)
    - pier25 5y ago
      I don't have an iPhone and 99% of the times I read news on desktop...
  - NikolaNovak 5y ago
    Oh man; I was going to support the GP post, but then I remembered what unsubscribing from The Economist was like, and my mouth is filed with Bile & my brain is filled with pure sheer hate.
    - ok123456 5y ago
      They made it so difficult to unsub, I just waited until the credit card expired. I vowed never to pay for a news subscription again. Big mistake.
sethbannon 5y ago
I feel like I'm getting old. The youth ethos of "information should be free!" has been replaced with the reaction "gee, I really hope great journalism can make money, otherwise we won't have any".
- annoyingnoob 5y ago
  Back in the day, the newsstand price for a newspaper, if you got it at the newsstand everyday of the week, was maybe $10-$11 a month. But you could get a subscription for less. You could also read the front page right there at the newsstand without paying anything. You could walk into just about any office building, especially any business with waiting room (like a doctor), and find the daily paper there to read for free. If you didn't want to pay for the paper then you could always find one - just ask someone that read theirs already. Back in the day news was plenty available for free, you just had to know where to look or ask. Now there is no such thing as a free look. No one has a paper they already read to share. I'm all for paying for subscriptions but that alone does not bring the balance the world once had. Just try to figure out what say the LA Times will charge you after the 'introductory period' - and they won't tell you up front that you have to call to cancel and that the call will take like 30 minutes while they try to retain your business (after jacking up the price by many times after the intro period). And you probably cannot choose the length of your subscription, subscriptions now go on in perpetuity until you complete the onerous cancellation process. I have no love for the way modern news charges for its product and treats its customers. You can blame the internet and cheap people but that isn't the whole story.
- asteroidp 5y ago
  They should pick one: pay for it, OR fill the page with 50 shitty ads You shouldn't have to deal with both
  - seanp2k2 5y ago
    Not doing both = money left on the table. Game theory says they will as long as they can, as in the extra $ outweighs the subscriber loss. It’s terrible that the brand damage isn’t weighted more heavily and the calculations seem to be so short-sighted, but that’s where we are I guess.
hombre_fatal 5y ago
Looks like this has site-specific rules for setting referrer, clearing cookies, blocking external scripts, and removing modals. And the add-on embeds Google Analytics. I wonder if some of those ad-hoc setTimeout(removeModal, 500) could be made more robust by looking for modals with MutationObserver. That way you can remove things the second they activate instead of letting them flash / hoping they exist once your timeout fires.
steveharman 5y ago
People don't like ads. People don't like paywalls. People want everyone else to do things for free. How will that work?
- garrettgarcia 5y ago
  People do like ads, if you judge by their actions.
- deleted 5y ago
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endisneigh 5y ago
Do people generally feel like digital goods should be free? Seems like people are always trying to rationalize bypassing paywalls, pirating games and using emulators, torrenting movies, etc. It’s very ironic that this is a tech forum, much of which is software and this view is prevalent among some here
- Tenoke 5y ago
  I take advantage (pirate and use this extension) mostly because where I've grown up it was normalized (Eastern Europe) and because it's convenient. Nowadays I do try to support more but I am not so sure I really buy the arguments that this isn't wrong. The way I see it those who support subsidize the rest and that's not necessarily a bad thing but I can be convinced otherwise.
- mint2 5y ago
  It is strange those making their living off coding and tech and are tech enthusiasts based on reading HN are also promoting ways to steal the income of others who make their living coding and tech and other knowledge based work.
  - bcj7393nsk 5y ago
    > promoting ways to steal the income of others who make their living coding and tech and other knowledge based work. Kill or be killed. YC founders, Fortune 500 devs, and FAANG engineers: 1. pirate all kinds of shit (Sublime Text, FLAC songs, movies) 2. Improve their company’s software to prevent pirating and/or licensing detection Not everyone on Earth is a saint.
- pedroma 5y ago
  One way to justify this is if people don't feel like paying for something and the business runs out of money, it culls the models of business that aren't working and a replacement will come along at some point if there is any merit at all to it. However I am not convinced people don't want to pay for digital goods. Many digital goods can be accessed through piracy, like music or TV shows, but people still pay for Spotify and Netflix. Steam still makes a ton of money selling digital games despite rampant piracy. These businesses provide some value beyond the content itself, and perhaps the more successful media/news outlets will have to discover what that is for them.
deleted 5y ago
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cercatrova 5y ago
FYI use the clean version which removes Google analytics. It's also updated more frequently while the one in the link is almost a year old: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean I use this, and it's great. I recommend using uBlock Origin as well to remove ads on these sites.
- makeworld 5y ago
  +1, this version is great and has always worked for me.
- Daffodils 5y ago
  +1, this version is better. And Magnolia1234 is more helpful and polite towards her users. Would recommend.
faridelnasire 5y ago
Maybe pick 1 or 2 newspapers you consider to be truthful to actually get a subscriptions for, besides using this addon. I get it, there are newspapers out there you really don't check out that often, and they have no free articles per month or "purchase this article", and paying 20 dollars for a subscription for 2 articles a month at 10 different newspapers is a little much. But the more people don't pay for news, the more clickbaity and hyped up journalism will be.
- pedroma 5y ago
  It seems like the current model isn't working too well. The more outlets clickbait the more they damage their brand. And people get a lot of news through Reddit and Twitter these days completely bypassing news outlets.
  - martinald 5y ago
    I don't know why people still think that. NYTimes is basically back to their glory days of revenue and profit, the FT is doing extremely well, etc etc. Non paywalled news outlets will be clickbait - they are 100% dependent on advertising revenue and need to get clicks. Paywalled sites generally aren't.
    - whakim 5y ago
      Because while the "top-tier" media outlets are doing extremely well (NYTimes, WSJ, FT, etc.), everyone else is suffering. Huge numbers of media outlets have closed over the past 20 years and there are now far fewer journalists in the United States. Local newspapers that haven't closed are often operating a skeleton crew. And this trend has consequences: numerous studies have linked the decline of small, single-subject and local journalism to increases in political polarization and local corruption. (I worked at Harvard's Shorenstein Center which did much of the research.)
  - bragr 5y ago
    Where do you think the well informed people on Reddit and Twitter get their info? I'm being slightly facetious, and there's obviously independent reporting and direct witnesses to events online. But you take away the journalism organizations at the core of the system and then the influencers on twitter on reddit have nothing to inform their hot takes.
bdz 5y ago
I use https://12ft.io/ https://12ft.io/
- soneil 5y ago
  I keep seeing this recommended, but it hasn't worked for me yet. What gives?
  - iudqnolq 5y ago
    You're probably using sites with a harsher paywall? What sites?
    - soneil 5y ago
      Looking through my history I've tried & failed irishtimes.com and wsj.com. It might be a short list, but it's every site I've tried, so you can imagine 2 for 2 is starting to leave an impression.
      - iudqnolq 5y ago
        Makes sense. In my experience wsj has one of the strictest paywalls, nothing works. These workarounds do things like impersonate Google. Most news orgs think the vulnerability is worth being fully indexed, whereas wsj would rather have Google only index their intro. Broadly speaking these workarounds are for websites that sometimes show you the full story (i.e. based on a cookie or your referer).
- ihb 5y ago
  https://incoggo.com https://incoggo.com also works well :)
hamaluik 5y ago
Is there a service in the same vein as music streaming, but for news outlets? I'd be happy to pay for a subscription somewhere at a reasonable price, but not happy to pay for and manage 150+ individual subscriptions (like what this tool provides). Granted I wouldn't ever actually sign up for most of them, but managing even more than a couple would be rather undesirable. Perhaps something with pay-per-view built in, given how infrequently I come across articles from certain publishers?
- jwilliams 5y ago
  Take a look at https://www.inkl.com/ https://www.inkl.com/
- aezell 5y ago
  Apple News does this. Tons of magazines across the spectrum and number of larger US newspapers. If you aren't in the US or at least wanting to read in English, I don't know.
  - RC_ITR 5y ago
    In general HN doesn't like apple's approach to news aggregating (i.e. a closed app rather than a 'super account' that works on native websites or an RSS-type feed) but +1
    - aezell 5y ago
      I wouldn't rely on their aggregation. But, with a subscription, you can just read the magazines in the same format and layout as they are printed. No aggregation to get in the way.
  - netfortius 5y ago
    In fact in France quite a few major French, local and some international newspapers + tech + science + entertainment + + + magazines are free online with a library registration. The service is called Cafeyn, and you could bookmark, print or save as pdf pages of all publications available.
deleted 5y ago
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albybisy 5y ago
i use 12ft.io and in most cases it works or i use facebook redirect [1] [1] https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u={url} https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u={url}
aezell 5y ago
Would you go into a store, pick up the newspaper, and walk out without paying?
- munk-a 5y ago
  It remains (generally) legal and pretty commonly acceptable to walk into a store and read the paper before returning it and leaving.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  "You wouldn't steal a baby. You wouldn't shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow and then steal it again!"
AlwaysRock 5y ago
I love these. They tend to work for a while a then break. So many articles are behind paywalls now. Or at least account walls. I get that you have to make money somehow but if you put out 1 thing I'm interested in per year its not worth a subscription for me.
peppermint_tea 5y ago
I dont think bypassing paywall is the right way to go about this, I am thinking about a paid news source aggregator where you could select the news source you want and pay accordingly. Information cost money to gather afterall... of course, it involves partership with a lot of different news outlets, but if it takes off, nobody would want to be left out of it... (rss/atom format? :) ) if anyone is interrested to start this, get in touch with me. personally, I pay lemonde.fr and that's it, I read al-jazeera a lot for free too, I should pay...
QuikAccount 5y ago
I will never understand people complaining about paywalls. Quality writing cost money and these writers need to support in one way or another. Ads are not effective because everyone runs adblock and ads are also suspect so the easiest way to is to directly charge for their work which everyone whines about while simultaneously whining about how low quality most writing is these days. I wonder why?
- asteroidp 5y ago
  Then they should remove the massive amount of interuptions by ads
- mikeiz404 5y ago
  Personally I don’t like paywalls because… 1) the price is too high for the content I consume. Often I will read a single article from a single well known publisher a couple times a month to a couple times a year. 2) I don’t know if I will find the content valuable until after I have read it. Headlines haven’t been of too much help especially lately where some quality content is under click-baity headlines; though sometimes the opposite is true or more often click-bait headlines do accurately reflect the quality of the content. 3) There is a lot of friction to pay even if the price did match my consumption model. And in addition to friction I have concerns with how my personal information might be used or resold; Creating an addressable audience via first party data is a tactic being pushed by advertisers and marketers. So while I do agree with your evaluation I think the problem is a bit more nuanced (or maybe I’m just the minority). Some have suggested a “spotify for news” which checks many of the above boxes but creates its own privacy concerns, may incentivize low quality content in the way ads do, add walled garden concerns, and may introduce fair compensation concerns. An “open” solution, as hand wavy as that sounds, seems closer to ideal but as has been demonstrated time and again may not be competitive enough to “closed” solutions where winner takes all is in effect. Just some thoughts.
Wolfenstein98k 5y ago
I know I'll get downvoted for this but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft. I can understand justifying ad-blocking, arguing that you don't want to see it. So even though you're depriving them of revenue while consuming the product funded by it, there's at least an argument that you're only controlling what you see. But using tricks to get access to something not available to you without paying? This seems akin to sneaking into a movie theatre. This isn't the equivalent of avoiding looking at something (your choice), it's the equivalent of breaking into a private business and pinching the products without paying. (Cue the usual argument about IP, tangibles vs intangibles, and various dismissive remarks arising from cognitive dissonance)
- Barrin92 5y ago
  >but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft It is theft, plain and simple. Someone makes something, owns the property, they have the right to determine under what conditions they sell it. I always find it hilarious how people defend piracy with arguments about making products more user friendly/cheaper and so on. If you don't like something, don't buy it. If you're bypassing payment without the owners permission, you're stealing.
  - sfe22 5y ago
    What did the publisher lose that he had before?
    - chillingeffect 5y ago
      resources to transmit data over a network.
      - sfe22 5y ago
        I don’t think this extension receives additional data that the publisher did not willingly provide. Besides I am pretty sure many others would be willing to offer said resources for free (if it wasn't for “good” guys with assault rifles showing up to enforce information and knowledge transfer controlls)
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shmde 5y ago
I used to pirate a lot of video games when I was young. Steam ( later epic ) entered India and started regional pricing and now I have pretty big collection on steam and epic ( free games ) Same thing with Movies and music. I made a huge offline collection worth 2-3TBs before I just had to throw it all away because everything was available on spotify, Netflix, Disney+Hotstar, Amazon Prime. Their services are top-notch and most importantly affordable. I think something similar must be done to the online article/news market to make people want to pay them for easier and affordable access. Until then I will use every extension the internet has to provide to read any article I wanna read.
- spondyl 5y ago
  > “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” https://www.gamesradar.com/au/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/ https://www.gamesradar.com/au/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-servi... I subscribed to the New York Times once and it's nearly impossible to cancel. You have to call up a phone line and from memory, it takes ages. Given that, I would never subscribe again, even though I've considered it. As such, I "pirate" New York Times articles because the service sucked, not because the price was an issue.
  - cobbaut 5y ago
    Sorry but this is not true. I canceled my NYTimes subscription online, in a less than two minute chat.
    - dahpu 5y ago
      Why do you have to chat and interact with someone in the first place?
      - 5y ago
version_five 5y ago
The value of basically all online news articles to me right now is $0. So I'm very comfortable paying that for them. Being able to find a link to an article I might be interested in offers some value (and I would pay more for better screening, see below). But being able to browse the actual content is basically worthless, sorry. In fact, I generally don't even go to a site if there is a modal popup that makes me accept cookies (occasionally I have if I'm curious enough) and I have literally never signed up, even if free, to get access to an article. Bypassing paywalls lets me pay what articles are worth to me to continue to browse them. I do pay for an article aggregation service (academic articles), and I do pay for substack newsletters (although this is in part to support work I think is good even if I wouldn't pay for every article).
matvonder 5y ago
mootzville 5y ago
People will complain about your project, and then use SciHub next time they need to reference a paper. I like it!
matvonder 5y ago
matt321 5y ago
Accessing paid content without paying is stealing...right?
- rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
  No? Who told you that?
samgtx 5y ago
Hiding the news behind paywalls means only people with money get to be well informed. Is this not "hacker" news? Seems like a lot of well-paid people forgot where they came from. I love this extension. It works very well. I use it to browse 20-30 different sites a month. It would cost hundreds of dollars to individually subscribe to each publication. You want people to pay for everything? Go "disrupt" the industry and create a spotify for news.
atultw 5y ago
I just use reader view. Works surprisingly often. Some sites (WSJ for example) don't work though
badwetter 5y ago
And all your browsing data is transferred to sites like Outbrain etc., quite the list, actually. I get it, a lot of work, and you don't work for free. I'd rather pay a nominal amount rather than the tracking.
liquidwax 5y ago
Important bit buried inside because … clickbait > We will then begin the hybrid pilot in full on May 23, with people coming to the office three days a week — on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday — and working flexibly on Wednesday and Friday if you wish.
waylandsmithers 5y ago
In my experience most paywalls are bypassed with Reader mode in Safari or Firefox.
TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago
You're targeting non-deterministic classnames in some of these: paywall-container__1UgCE That hash at the end of the name is subject to change, making the code brittle. Compounded by the fact that a lot of paywalled content is truncated at the server level now, CSS overrides aren't always enough. The days of "press Esc before the JS kicks in!" are quickly waning. I thought this would check for the article on archive.org or something.

258 points by zikohh 5y ago

DevKoala 5y ago

This is cool, but how is it different from piracy?

dymk 5y ago
No, you see, it's "provided for educational purposes only" - it says right there in the readme
- DevKoala 5y ago
  Ahh got it, that’s a great argument. Brb, “downloading a car” for educational purposes.
theturtletalks 5y ago
I'm not sure it crosses the line. Most of these websites have the text in the HTML, but hidden to the user. This is so Google can index and send traffic based on search. If the HTML is sent to the client, accessing it is not piracy.
- picardythird 5y ago
  Just because there’s a technical workaround doesn’t make it not stealing. If I neglect to lock my car and my stuff gets stolen, it’s still stealing. I might have been able to prevent it had I locked the car, but it’s still stealing.
  - theturtletalks 5y ago
    By this definition, ad-blocking is stealing. Is using a technical workaround to hid HTML ok but using it reveal hidden HTML is not? Your car example is not a good analogy. Once you notice people stealing, you would make sure the door is locked. Just like these websites can restrict the content server-side.
    - matt321 5y ago
      yes...yes it is
    - picardythird 5y ago
      This is something broken with the internet. That website need a strong ranking on google search to stay afloat is a symptom of a much larger problem with how the internet operates in this day and age. At the end of the day you are stealing and looting not just from the company, but the everyday people who work for that company, who are just trying to make a living for themselves and their families, and no rationalization will change that. And to the car analogy: Let's say I was stolen from, but I'm so lazy I still can't be bothered to lock my car. Or I leave it open for some other reason. This has zero effect on the morality of the thief stealing from my car. It just means I'm an easy target for stealing. Two completely separate things.
  - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    If a webserver sent me an exact copy of your car but encased in ice, and I used an ice pick to carve it out, you would still have your car, and i would have a copy of your car. That the web server wants to me buy a flame thrower to melt the ice is irrelivent. Stealing does not apply to digital goods. You cannot deprive anyone of something infinitely replicable. You can only prevent those that you do not deem worthy to access it. and that attitude makes a person a bad person.
    - picardythird 5y ago
      So if I break in to Microsoft, stick a USB in their computers, and steal the source code for Windows, it's not stealing because it's just digital information that's infinitely reproducible? Keep in mind: nothing physical was stolen. People lose their jobs because they are digital content creators and the attitude is that paying for intellectual property is uncool.
      - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
        Sounds like breaking and entering to me, but I am not a lawyer. Not legal advice.
        picardythird 5y ago
        I think you would be charged with more than that.
  - LocalH 5y ago
    Do you think that people should be required to view websites as delivered, without modifying them in any way? That would be the logical end of attempting to prevent this kind of "stealing". If there is another term you'd like to use for "looks like theft, but the original owner loses nothing" then feel free. But it is not theft or stealing, those require also depriving the rightful owner of the stolen property. If I could duplicate the exact contents of your car, would it still be "stealing" if I did so? Reminder that you would continue to be in possession of 100% of the contents of your car. Maybe with regards to any digital data on any duplicated devices, I could see a bit of the "stealing" logic, then again nothing was actually "stolen" from you if you still have 100% of your original property, but I now also have duplicates of that property.
    - picardythird 5y ago
      If I walk in to a record store and buy a CD, I'm not just paying for the paper and plastic that it's made of. I'm paying the record company, the record store, and the artist for their time and talent. With a digital goods, we can eliminate the paper and plastic. It's a great thing! But for some reason, we've also decided to write the artist out of the equation too. At least if you're a pirate. If you're a software engineer, you're being paid not to manufacture hard goods but to create something of intellectual value that could be technically be duplicated forever. What's the difference between pirating music and stealing code that is under a software license?
      - webmaven 5y ago
        > What's the difference between pirating music and stealing code that is under a software license? If by "stealing code" you mean creating and distributing (probably selling) software derived from it that violates the license, it is quite different. If what you mean is simply downloading warez for your own use, it is more or less the same.
        picardythird 5y ago
        So are you against torrenting copyrighted digital goods then? Because people do exactly that. They steal intellectual property and distribute it for other people to use. Stealing for personal use may be a more minor thing, but it still boggles me that people want to consume the fruits of others' labor without compensating them in anyway, as if creators are slaves who exist only to please.
- misterbwong 5y ago
  I'm not quite understanding the logic here. Just because another customer (google) was given access, does that mean everyone should have it? Would you rather publishers give google private direct feeds to index?
  - ryan_j_naughton 5y ago
    > Just because another customer (google) was given access, does that mean everyone should have it? They didn't provide access to just another customer or Google -- they send the article text to EVERYONE in the HTML response. They are thus making that text publicly available. If they want to make content only available to certain individuals, that is literally what paywalls and authentication/authorization are for. Instead, they want Google to index the site AS IF the content is publicly available but then use javascript to restrict that content from users client-side on a case by case basis. The golden rule of authorization is never rely on client-side authorization as by then you've already willingly given the data/information to the client. And the client has no obligation to not look at that information/data. They didn't do anything nefarious to get it -- you literally gave it to them. > Would you rather publishers give google private direct feeds to index? Absolutely I would. If we could enhance the indexing and search engine system so that (a) I could tell google which services I subscribe to and (b) google knows which articles are behind paywalls, then we could have a world in which we could intentionally filter To or Away from paywall content. I know that I would often filter TO paywall content, especially if: - I could also tell google to avoid content farm content via a filter or content full of ads (not in their interests currently but it might become so as more of us get frustrated with shittier and shittier search results) - If google could surface the price to access each article on the search results (wherein articles on sites I already pay/subscribe to would be free and articles on sites with individual pay per access would be transparent and upfront).
    - picardythird 5y ago
      This is the “but she was wearing a low cut top” argument.
      - 5y ago
ohgodplsno 5y ago
More akin to breaking DRM. If you didn't want me to read your article, don't send it at all. It's in your response ? Tough luck.
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unicornporn 5y ago
Is this Hacker News?
- DeWilde 5y ago
  The hackers grew up and now they are what they once hated. Seems to happen to every generation.
  - picardythird 5y ago
    Or they matured. Should writers, musicians, and journalists be slaves?
- J5892 5y ago
  Judging from the current sentiment around piracy among younger generations, I've concluded that MPAA/RIAA propaganda against piracy has been a rousing success. My philosophy has always been: Pay for things if you are able, it's convenient, and pricing is fair. And if piracy is easier than paying, piracy always wins. It's the reason I buy all my video games now and rarely pirate music anymore, but half of my TV and movies come through my seedbox.
  - rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
    This. They convinced the kids that piracy is bad and evil, and the Big IP lobby is laughing all the way to bank. Ensuring that you own nothing, and will rent your life from them in perpetuity.
  - cercatrova 5y ago
    Exactly. If the only way I can get 4k movies and shows without a stream degrading and being able to use mpv or other such video players is through piracy, then so be it.
  - shitlord 5y ago
    I'm in a similar position. I use Spotify for music, but for movies/TV, I pirate everything despite paying for multiple streaming services. It's about being able to consume media on my own terms. Thanks to piracy, I can get the same quality content from another source and enjoy it however I want, on any device, online or offline.
GekkePrutser 5y ago
The sites offer the articles for free to search engines and the like, otherwise this wouldn't work. It's not that different from using archive.is etc Imo. Hacker news isn't usable without this anymore.
- muttled 5y ago
  You bring up an interesting point that they offer it for free to search engines. Didn't it used to be against the rules of most search engines to "cloak" your content by serving one thing to the spiders and another to the general public? Edit: Found it. It's still against their rules. <https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guidelines/cloaking#:~:text=Cloaking%20refers%20to%20the%20practice,different%20results%20than%20they%20expected. https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/guideline...>
  - stall 5y ago
    Well, google published https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structured-data/paywalled-content https://developers.google.com/search/docs/advanced/structure... which describes how it should be done
echelon 5y ago
So, piracy turned out to be a great thing for games (Steam), movies (Netflix), and music (Spotify). It just hasn't happened at scale to the news world yet. I will not pay $50/yr for 20 different news sites. It's absurd. Who do these people think they are? I'm glad projects like this are being created. It addresses.a boneheaded, outmoded industry that won't meet consumers where they actually are. These sorts of "news piracy" apps will force change for the good of all parties. But they need one more piece to really take off: social P2P sharing. Strip articles of ads, share them in a p2p protocol (which could also develop interest graph capabilities), add voting, maybe comments, and definitely include the article's pictures. 1 - it would be fantastic as a reader 2 - the entire news industry that is stuck in 1995 would be forced to adopt to a Spotify model or adopt the microtransactions that have been promised since the 90's. I would love to subscribe to a single source for all news. I'd pay a hefty fee. I'd also be happy to pay $0.10 an article. (I'd learn to avoid sites that shill clickbait, too.) This whole industry sucks for readers. I support anything that gets them to adapt to change and become more consumer friendly.
- uncomputation 5y ago
  Both Netflix and Spotify start at $10/month which is $120 per year. $50/yr is ~$4/month for 20 news sites, which seems to be a better deal. What am I missing, is the price still too high or is the number of news sites too low?
  - cromd 5y ago
    I read the comment as "I wont pay $50 20 times, totaling $1k, to get onto the 20 sites that have articles that interest me"
    - echelon 5y ago
      This was my intended meaning. And in reality, there are far more than 20 websites that have interesting paywalled content.
- cromd 5y ago
  I definitely read news from at least 20 different sources each year, without going around paywalls, and I pay for the one I enjoy the most - NYT. (I personally read ~150 articles a year, so that's 33 cents per article, which many readers of HN would earn in 10-30 seconds of work. But maybe I read excessive news). If I really just want to read 1 article per month, I'm often accommodated by some "N free articles per month" policies. I agree they may be pursuing a suboptimal strategy somehow. Not sure I would call it "absurd". Having 100k individuals producing music on Spotify might be great, but I'm not sure what the implications would be for getting my news that way. But if someone wants to start "Spotify for News", I'm interested. Not sure that NYT needs their paywalls worked around in order for that to happen though.
deleted 5y ago
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mattdennewitz 5y ago
it isn't
deleted 5y ago
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elldoubleyew 5y ago

edit: After checking the repo it appears that this is not a a new extension, nor has there been any recent update. Seems like a new extension for this pops up every few months until the content publishers get savvy to the latest workaround and someone else finds a new method. Originally these would just set the referrer to a search engine regardless of where the link came from and the paywall would go away, I'm not sure how exactly they fixed that but I believe that eventually stopped working. Seems to be a bit of a cat and mouse game at this point.

Victerius 5y ago
Controversial opinion: more news outlets should be run by benevolent billionaires who can afford to spend their own money indefinitely to keep the outlet running without resorting to ads and paywalls.
- NovemberWhiskey 5y ago
  Even the ones that are, don't (c.f. WaPo)
- DevKoala 5y ago
  The news can change the perspective of individuals. If only “benevolent” billionaires can maintain news sites, then they can also dictate the perception of real world events by individuals. It is too much power. Competition pushes news sites to adhere to some level of truth.
- dangus 5y ago
  If billionaires were benevolent they wouldn't be billionaires.
  - Victerius 5y ago
    Bill Gates?
    - dangus 5y ago

makach 5y ago

An article worth reading is worth buying.

lxgr 5y ago
Agreed, but I don't know many newspapers that sell individual articles. And I certainly don't want yet another subscription.
echelon 5y ago
Except the industry is stuck in 1995. You want to pay $50/yr [1] for twenty different news websites? All I want to do is read one article. It needs a Spotify / Netflix model. Or the promise of micropayments that never happened. (Yeah, I'll pay 10 cents for an article. And also learn to distrust your site if you shill clickbait.) [1] NYT digital cost
- pier25 5y ago
  Totally agree. Micropayments have not worked because major news outlets won't use them. Technically it's a solved problem. See Coil for example: https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/
  - hombre_fatal 5y ago
    It's not a technical problem but a business and social one. For example, getting your users to give their money to a third party that then might come back to you isn't better than getting paid directly—it's even more friction and you're giving all the power away to a third party. The user experience isn't necessarily better either. I still have to open my wallet and start a recurring billing subscription, but with this weird Coil site instead of just this one service that I want. And then there's a chicken-egg problem of no sites using Coil, so no money in Coil, so no value for the user, thus no value for the content creator. Just like every micropayment attempt before Coil. As engineers we like to think that everything is a technical problem. But the technical implementation of a micropayment solution is 0.0001% of the work.

callmeed 5y ago

You wouldn't bypass a car

munk-a 5y ago
I would. I've never owned a car in my life. Public transit is clearly the best kind of theft! /s

adamc 5y ago

Mixed feelings about this. I hate paywalls because they inhibit sharing and conversation, but... if people don't pay for news, soon there won't be any reporters. People have to make a living somehow.

charcircuit 5y ago
Plenty of news channels exist fine on YouTube without paywalling all of their content. Also people will just report what's going on because they are interested in it. It doesn't require someone to be a "reporter" to talk about what's going on.
- adamc 5y ago
  Good. Use those and don't steal from others.
  - Karunamon 5y ago
    Nobody's stealing anything. This is even a worse comparison than the industry groups make; in their case it's the wrong law (copyright infringement), in this case no law is being broken. You don't get to put content out on the open internet and then cry foul when its accessed. These orgs are talking out of both sides of their mouth.
  - bcj7393nsk 5y ago
- bhelkey 5y ago
  People will report on what's going on without a financial incentive. People will also write books, make movies, and develop games for the fun of it. The flip side is that Spider-Man: No Way Home cost $200 Million to make. Sony didn't invest a fifth of a billion dollars into making this movie for the fun of it. They did it because they expect return on their investment. I appreciate living in a world in which high quality content (news, novels, TV shows, ...) exists. High quality content requires a good deal of investment. And that is not going to happen if said content cannot be monetized. [1] https://screenrant.com/spiderman-cost-budget-box-office-success-explained/ https://screenrant.com/spiderman-cost-budget-box-office-succ...

herpderperator 5y ago

How does this work on a high level? If the server never sends the content, how can a client-side extension get it? Do most website just hide this on the frontend?

Scoundreller 5y ago
Usually #3. Or corrupting whatever the site uses to run its “5 free articles per month” counter.
xiekomb 5y ago
Lot of different tricks. One example: just by using a Google Bot user agent some websites will let you access the full content. Sometimes working with some cookies, blocking some particular 3rd party JavaScript libs, some other are more complicated.
dymk 5y ago
Perusing this file here - https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/master/src/js/contentScript.js https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome/blob/ma... It removes the popup elements that cover the page and other little tricks. The common key thing across all of them, though - the server is sending the content, and then a little JS payload that creates the popup asking you to pay. It's not a particularly good way of protecting the content of the article, for obvious reasons.

another_poster 5y ago

PSA: Newspapers educate the public, and their services are essential for the functioning of our democracies. The best newspapers fund their operations through subscriptions, so please help society become well-informed by subscribing to your favorite newspapers.

DeWilde 5y ago
True, but if a newspaper is open for bots to help promote it through SEO, I won't have many qualms about bypassing the flimsy paywall.
pier25 5y ago
We need a better solution than subscribing to a monolithic news source. Specially when they make it super hard to unsubscribe cough NYT cough.
- jrockway 5y ago
  You can subscribe through your phone, so then Apple is in charge of cancelation. You can link your accounts and still view things on the desktop website. (I think they also have bundles to make it non-monolithic, but that probably doesn't translate to your desktop because... that would be too convenient.)
  - pier25 5y ago
    I don't have an iPhone and 99% of the times I read news on desktop...
- NikolaNovak 5y ago
  Oh man; I was going to support the GP post, but then I remembered what unsubscribing from The Economist was like, and my mouth is filed with Bile & my brain is filled with pure sheer hate.
  - ok123456 5y ago
    They made it so difficult to unsub, I just waited until the credit card expired. I vowed never to pay for a news subscription again. Big mistake.

sethbannon 5y ago

I feel like I'm getting old. The youth ethos of "information should be free!" has been replaced with the reaction "gee, I really hope great journalism can make money, otherwise we won't have any".

annoyingnoob 5y ago
Back in the day, the newsstand price for a newspaper, if you got it at the newsstand everyday of the week, was maybe $10-$11 a month. But you could get a subscription for less. You could also read the front page right there at the newsstand without paying anything. You could walk into just about any office building, especially any business with waiting room (like a doctor), and find the daily paper there to read for free. If you didn't want to pay for the paper then you could always find one - just ask someone that read theirs already. Back in the day news was plenty available for free, you just had to know where to look or ask. Now there is no such thing as a free look. No one has a paper they already read to share. I'm all for paying for subscriptions but that alone does not bring the balance the world once had. Just try to figure out what say the LA Times will charge you after the 'introductory period' - and they won't tell you up front that you have to call to cancel and that the call will take like 30 minutes while they try to retain your business (after jacking up the price by many times after the intro period). And you probably cannot choose the length of your subscription, subscriptions now go on in perpetuity until you complete the onerous cancellation process. I have no love for the way modern news charges for its product and treats its customers. You can blame the internet and cheap people but that isn't the whole story.
asteroidp 5y ago
They should pick one: pay for it, OR fill the page with 50 shitty ads You shouldn't have to deal with both
- seanp2k2 5y ago
  Not doing both = money left on the table. Game theory says they will as long as they can, as in the extra $ outweighs the subscriber loss. It’s terrible that the brand damage isn’t weighted more heavily and the calculations seem to be so short-sighted, but that’s where we are I guess.

hombre_fatal 5y ago

Looks like this has site-specific rules for setting referrer, clearing cookies, blocking external scripts, and removing modals. And the add-on embeds Google Analytics. I wonder if some of those ad-hoc setTimeout(removeModal, 500) could be made more robust by looking for modals with MutationObserver. That way you can remove things the second they activate instead of letting them flash / hoping they exist once your timeout fires.

steveharman 5y ago

People don't like ads. People don't like paywalls. People want everyone else to do things for free. How will that work?

garrettgarcia 5y ago
People do like ads, if you judge by their actions.
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endisneigh 5y ago

Do people generally feel like digital goods should be free? Seems like people are always trying to rationalize bypassing paywalls, pirating games and using emulators, torrenting movies, etc. It’s very ironic that this is a tech forum, much of which is software and this view is prevalent among some here

Tenoke 5y ago
I take advantage (pirate and use this extension) mostly because where I've grown up it was normalized (Eastern Europe) and because it's convenient. Nowadays I do try to support more but I am not so sure I really buy the arguments that this isn't wrong. The way I see it those who support subsidize the rest and that's not necessarily a bad thing but I can be convinced otherwise.
mint2 5y ago
It is strange those making their living off coding and tech and are tech enthusiasts based on reading HN are also promoting ways to steal the income of others who make their living coding and tech and other knowledge based work.
- bcj7393nsk 5y ago
  > promoting ways to steal the income of others who make their living coding and tech and other knowledge based work. Kill or be killed. YC founders, Fortune 500 devs, and FAANG engineers: 1. pirate all kinds of shit (Sublime Text, FLAC songs, movies) 2. Improve their company’s software to prevent pirating and/or licensing detection Not everyone on Earth is a saint.
pedroma 5y ago
One way to justify this is if people don't feel like paying for something and the business runs out of money, it culls the models of business that aren't working and a replacement will come along at some point if there is any merit at all to it. However I am not convinced people don't want to pay for digital goods. Many digital goods can be accessed through piracy, like music or TV shows, but people still pay for Spotify and Netflix. Steam still makes a ton of money selling digital games despite rampant piracy. These businesses provide some value beyond the content itself, and perhaps the more successful media/news outlets will have to discover what that is for them.

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cercatrova 5y ago

FYI use the clean version which removes Google analytics. It's also updated more frequently while the one in the link is almost a year old: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean I use this, and it's great. I recommend using uBlock Origin as well to remove ads on these sites.

makeworld 5y ago
+1, this version is great and has always worked for me.
Daffodils 5y ago
+1, this version is better. And Magnolia1234 is more helpful and polite towards her users. Would recommend.

faridelnasire 5y ago

Maybe pick 1 or 2 newspapers you consider to be truthful to actually get a subscriptions for, besides using this addon. I get it, there are newspapers out there you really don't check out that often, and they have no free articles per month or "purchase this article", and paying 20 dollars for a subscription for 2 articles a month at 10 different newspapers is a little much. But the more people don't pay for news, the more clickbaity and hyped up journalism will be.

pedroma 5y ago
It seems like the current model isn't working too well. The more outlets clickbait the more they damage their brand. And people get a lot of news through Reddit and Twitter these days completely bypassing news outlets.
- martinald 5y ago
  I don't know why people still think that. NYTimes is basically back to their glory days of revenue and profit, the FT is doing extremely well, etc etc. Non paywalled news outlets will be clickbait - they are 100% dependent on advertising revenue and need to get clicks. Paywalled sites generally aren't.
  - whakim 5y ago
    Because while the "top-tier" media outlets are doing extremely well (NYTimes, WSJ, FT, etc.), everyone else is suffering. Huge numbers of media outlets have closed over the past 20 years and there are now far fewer journalists in the United States. Local newspapers that haven't closed are often operating a skeleton crew. And this trend has consequences: numerous studies have linked the decline of small, single-subject and local journalism to increases in political polarization and local corruption. (I worked at Harvard's Shorenstein Center which did much of the research.)
- bragr 5y ago
  Where do you think the well informed people on Reddit and Twitter get their info? I'm being slightly facetious, and there's obviously independent reporting and direct witnesses to events online. But you take away the journalism organizations at the core of the system and then the influencers on twitter on reddit have nothing to inform their hot takes.

bdz 5y ago

I use https://12ft.io/ https://12ft.io/

soneil 5y ago
I keep seeing this recommended, but it hasn't worked for me yet. What gives?
- iudqnolq 5y ago
  You're probably using sites with a harsher paywall? What sites?
  - soneil 5y ago
    Looking through my history I've tried & failed irishtimes.com and wsj.com. It might be a short list, but it's every site I've tried, so you can imagine 2 for 2 is starting to leave an impression.
    - iudqnolq 5y ago
      Makes sense. In my experience wsj has one of the strictest paywalls, nothing works. These workarounds do things like impersonate Google. Most news orgs think the vulnerability is worth being fully indexed, whereas wsj would rather have Google only index their intro. Broadly speaking these workarounds are for websites that sometimes show you the full story (i.e. based on a cookie or your referer).
ihb 5y ago
https://incoggo.com https://incoggo.com also works well :)

hamaluik 5y ago

Is there a service in the same vein as music streaming, but for news outlets? I'd be happy to pay for a subscription somewhere at a reasonable price, but not happy to pay for and manage 150+ individual subscriptions (like what this tool provides). Granted I wouldn't ever actually sign up for most of them, but managing even more than a couple would be rather undesirable. Perhaps something with pay-per-view built in, given how infrequently I come across articles from certain publishers?

jwilliams 5y ago
Take a look at https://www.inkl.com/ https://www.inkl.com/
aezell 5y ago
Apple News does this. Tons of magazines across the spectrum and number of larger US newspapers. If you aren't in the US or at least wanting to read in English, I don't know.
- RC_ITR 5y ago
  In general HN doesn't like apple's approach to news aggregating (i.e. a closed app rather than a 'super account' that works on native websites or an RSS-type feed) but +1
  - aezell 5y ago
    I wouldn't rely on their aggregation. But, with a subscription, you can just read the magazines in the same format and layout as they are printed. No aggregation to get in the way.
- netfortius 5y ago
  In fact in France quite a few major French, local and some international newspapers + tech + science + entertainment + + + magazines are free online with a library registration. The service is called Cafeyn, and you could bookmark, print or save as pdf pages of all publications available.

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albybisy 5y ago

i use 12ft.io and in most cases it works or i use facebook redirect [1] [1] https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u={url} https://www.facebook.com/flx/warn/?u={url}

aezell 5y ago

Would you go into a store, pick up the newspaper, and walk out without paying?

munk-a 5y ago
It remains (generally) legal and pretty commonly acceptable to walk into a store and read the paper before returning it and leaving.
deleted 5y ago
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rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
"You wouldn't steal a baby. You wouldn't shoot a policeman and then steal his helmet. You wouldn't go to the toilet in his helmet and then send it to the policeman's grieving widow and then steal it again!"

AlwaysRock 5y ago

I love these. They tend to work for a while a then break. So many articles are behind paywalls now. Or at least account walls. I get that you have to make money somehow but if you put out 1 thing I'm interested in per year its not worth a subscription for me.

peppermint_tea 5y ago

I dont think bypassing paywall is the right way to go about this, I am thinking about a paid news source aggregator where you could select the news source you want and pay accordingly. Information cost money to gather afterall... of course, it involves partership with a lot of different news outlets, but if it takes off, nobody would want to be left out of it... (rss/atom format? :) ) if anyone is interrested to start this, get in touch with me. personally, I pay lemonde.fr and that's it, I read al-jazeera a lot for free too, I should pay...

QuikAccount 5y ago

I will never understand people complaining about paywalls. Quality writing cost money and these writers need to support in one way or another. Ads are not effective because everyone runs adblock and ads are also suspect so the easiest way to is to directly charge for their work which everyone whines about while simultaneously whining about how low quality most writing is these days. I wonder why?

asteroidp 5y ago
Then they should remove the massive amount of interuptions by ads
mikeiz404 5y ago
Personally I don’t like paywalls because… 1) the price is too high for the content I consume. Often I will read a single article from a single well known publisher a couple times a month to a couple times a year. 2) I don’t know if I will find the content valuable until after I have read it. Headlines haven’t been of too much help especially lately where some quality content is under click-baity headlines; though sometimes the opposite is true or more often click-bait headlines do accurately reflect the quality of the content. 3) There is a lot of friction to pay even if the price did match my consumption model. And in addition to friction I have concerns with how my personal information might be used or resold; Creating an addressable audience via first party data is a tactic being pushed by advertisers and marketers. So while I do agree with your evaluation I think the problem is a bit more nuanced (or maybe I’m just the minority). Some have suggested a “spotify for news” which checks many of the above boxes but creates its own privacy concerns, may incentivize low quality content in the way ads do, add walled garden concerns, and may introduce fair compensation concerns. An “open” solution, as hand wavy as that sounds, seems closer to ideal but as has been demonstrated time and again may not be competitive enough to “closed” solutions where winner takes all is in effect. Just some thoughts.

Wolfenstein98k 5y ago

I know I'll get downvoted for this but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft. I can understand justifying ad-blocking, arguing that you don't want to see it. So even though you're depriving them of revenue while consuming the product funded by it, there's at least an argument that you're only controlling what you see. But using tricks to get access to something not available to you without paying? This seems akin to sneaking into a movie theatre. This isn't the equivalent of avoiding looking at something (your choice), it's the equivalent of breaking into a private business and pinching the products without paying. (Cue the usual argument about IP, tangibles vs intangibles, and various dismissive remarks arising from cognitive dissonance)

Barrin92 5y ago
>but I feel like this stuff is pretty close to theft It is theft, plain and simple. Someone makes something, owns the property, they have the right to determine under what conditions they sell it. I always find it hilarious how people defend piracy with arguments about making products more user friendly/cheaper and so on. If you don't like something, don't buy it. If you're bypassing payment without the owners permission, you're stealing.
- sfe22 5y ago
  What did the publisher lose that he had before?
  - chillingeffect 5y ago
    resources to transmit data over a network.
    - sfe22 5y ago
      I don’t think this extension receives additional data that the publisher did not willingly provide. Besides I am pretty sure many others would be willing to offer said resources for free (if it wasn't for “good” guys with assault rifles showing up to enforce information and knowledge transfer controlls)

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shmde 5y ago

I used to pirate a lot of video games when I was young. Steam ( later epic ) entered India and started regional pricing and now I have pretty big collection on steam and epic ( free games ) Same thing with Movies and music. I made a huge offline collection worth 2-3TBs before I just had to throw it all away because everything was available on spotify, Netflix, Disney+Hotstar, Amazon Prime. Their services are top-notch and most importantly affordable. I think something similar must be done to the online article/news market to make people want to pay them for easier and affordable access. Until then I will use every extension the internet has to provide to read any article I wanna read.

spondyl 5y ago
> “One thing that we have learned is that piracy is not a pricing issue. It’s a service issue,” explained Newell during his time on stage at the Washington Technology Industry Association's (WTIA) Tech NW conference. “The easiest way to stop piracy is not by putting antipiracy technology to work. It’s by giving those people a service that’s better than what they’re receiving from the pirates.” https://www.gamesradar.com/au/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-service-not-price/ https://www.gamesradar.com/au/gabe-newell-piracy-issue-servi... I subscribed to the New York Times once and it's nearly impossible to cancel. You have to call up a phone line and from memory, it takes ages. Given that, I would never subscribe again, even though I've considered it. As such, I "pirate" New York Times articles because the service sucked, not because the price was an issue.
- cobbaut 5y ago
  Sorry but this is not true. I canceled my NYTimes subscription online, in a less than two minute chat.
  - dahpu 5y ago
    Why do you have to chat and interact with someone in the first place?
    - 5y ago

version_five 5y ago

The value of basically all online news articles to me right now is $0. So I'm very comfortable paying that for them. Being able to find a link to an article I might be interested in offers some value (and I would pay more for better screening, see below). But being able to browse the actual content is basically worthless, sorry. In fact, I generally don't even go to a site if there is a modal popup that makes me accept cookies (occasionally I have if I'm curious enough) and I have literally never signed up, even if free, to get access to an article. Bypassing paywalls lets me pay what articles are worth to me to continue to browse them. I do pay for an article aggregation service (academic articles), and I do pay for substack newsletters (although this is in part to support work I think is good even if I wouldn't pay for every article).

matvonder 5y ago

mootzville 5y ago

People will complain about your project, and then use SciHub next time they need to reference a paper. I like it!

matvonder 5y ago

matt321 5y ago

Accessing paid content without paying is stealing...right?

rfd4sgmk8u 5y ago
No? Who told you that?

samgtx 5y ago

Hiding the news behind paywalls means only people with money get to be well informed. Is this not "hacker" news? Seems like a lot of well-paid people forgot where they came from. I love this extension. It works very well. I use it to browse 20-30 different sites a month. It would cost hundreds of dollars to individually subscribe to each publication. You want people to pay for everything? Go "disrupt" the industry and create a spotify for news.

atultw 5y ago

I just use reader view. Works surprisingly often. Some sites (WSJ for example) don't work though

badwetter 5y ago

And all your browsing data is transferred to sites like Outbrain etc., quite the list, actually. I get it, a lot of work, and you don't work for free. I'd rather pay a nominal amount rather than the tracking.

liquidwax 5y ago

Important bit buried inside because … clickbait > We will then begin the hybrid pilot in full on May 23, with people coming to the office three days a week — on Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday — and working flexibly on Wednesday and Friday if you wish.

waylandsmithers 5y ago

In my experience most paywalls are bypassed with Reader mode in Safari or Firefox.

TAKEMYMONEY 5y ago

You're targeting non-deterministic classnames in some of these: paywall-container__1UgCE That hash at the end of the name is subject to change, making the code brittle. Compounded by the fact that a lot of paywalled content is truncated at the server level now, CSS overrides aren't always enough. The days of "press Esc before the JS kicks in!" are quickly waning. I thought this would check for the article on archive.org or something.