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Hate paywalls? 12ft.io is the answer
- more_corn 4y agoNo, the answer is that we as a community ignore content behind paywalls and they will fade from relevance.
- annoyingnoob 4y agoIs the paywall gone? No!
- purplejacket 4y agohttps://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Flive%2F2022%2F06%2F06%2Fworld%2Fuk-boris-johnson-no-confidence https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.nytimes.com%2Flive... Ooops.
- ushakov 4y agotry this https://archive.ph/ybCe9 https://archive.ph/ybCe9
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- KoftaBob 4y agoMore reliable method I've found is creating a bookmarklet with this as the url: javascript:window.location.href="https://archive.is/newest/"+location.href Click the bookmark when you're on a paywalled article, and it'll redirect to the latest archived version of it/
- CSSer 4y agoIn this case it just redirects to a short description :/
- nottrobin 4y agoOh wow. I wonder why? Copyright request or something?
- hunterb123 4y agohttps://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/01/02/sars-cov-2-is-following-the-evolutionary-rule-book https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https://www.economist.com/science-an... That example is linked from their own homepage. Seems a 14ft ladder is needed? Pro tip, just access the google web cache directly: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2021/01/02/sars-cov-2-is-following-the-evolutionary-rule-book https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:https:...
- nkozyra 4y agoThis works most of the time but I find archive.is gives me an almost perfect 100% paywall evasion. Admittedly the idea of having the full url included is appealing.
- hunterb123 4y agoI love archive.is but I generally use it to view edited/deleted articles, save controversial articles, etc. I use google cache for quick viewings due to no captcha, it's simple to prefix the url, and it has a text only mode.
- ozaark 4y agoWhen this was first posted on HN it seemed to work without issue - however since then I have attempted to use it on numerous occasions and get a server error, or just a blank page with the window "is the paywall gone? Y/n".
- Cyclical 4y agoEvery time I've ever tried 12ft, I've gotten a 503 error. Multiple devices tested, always the same thing.
- hwbehrens 4y agoI have tried this site multiple times and never been successful. I find archive.ph to be much more reliable.
- loloquwowndueo 4y agoHow long before this starts being monetized? “Surely you can see that paying for a single monthly subscription beats paying many?”
- nkozyra 4y agoGiven it doesn't seem to work all that well, I wouldn't be worried. There have been many attempts to federate paywalls but the publishers will never play ball.
- _tom_ 4y agoIf it starts making money, publisher will put in the effort to block it. It's not a viable business.
- nkozyra 4y agoThe federated paywall ideas were supposed to work with publishers. They'd go to media company A and sell them something and when they negotiated with company B the requirements were completely different or they wanted different revenue shares, etc. It was a pretty common startup idea in the early to mid 00s.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lapser 4y agoI've been getting less and less success with 12ft.io. I mostly use it on my phone. On my computer I use Bypass Paywall Clean[0] (chrome/firefox addon) which uses different tricks to access the full article. [0] https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean
- WithinReason 4y agothis is the way
- csee 4y agoSafe to install random add-ons like this?
- timbit42 4y agoYou can install it from here instead: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywalls-clean/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...
- timattrn 4y agobypass paywall clean is excellent. And you can use it on your phone, at least if you have the relative freedom of Android. You need firefox nightly, which allows any extension to be added; other versions of Firefox limit add-ons to a curated list. There are other builds of Firefox for Android that allow any add-on, but Firefox Nightly is an easy install from the Play Store. Then you need to make a personal collection of addons at the firefox addon site, link firefox nightly to your Add-On collection, and as long as you added bypass paywall clean (custom) to your collection, you're off the races. The "custom" version of the add-on has a simplified UI with better defaults for a mobile phone. This is not a tutorial, but it's not too hard to get this addon working on Android. Firefox nightly despite the name is stable on my Pixel 6 pro. This has greatly improved my browsing experience on my phone. For the record, I subscribe to the Economist, Wired, NY Times, Telegraph (UK), the Guardian, The Age, lwn and the Conversation (via repeating donation) so I don't think I am much of a free-loader.
- 4y ago
- ushakov 4y ago12ft has become useless when big publishers started demanding the content to be taken down just use archive.is which will take care of the paywalls
- CamperBob2 4y agoIf the F9 key in Firefox doesn't make the paywall go away, I generally don't bother looking further. It's pretty rare that some combination of mashing F9 and F5 doesn't bring up a nice, readable copy of the article.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- KoftaBob 4y agoMore reliable method I've found is creating a bookmarklet with this as the url: javascript:window.location.href="https://archive.is/newest/"+location.href Click the bookmark when you're on a paywalled article, and it'll redirect to the latest archived version of it/
- ajaimk 4y agoDisabled for The NY Times Blocked by Bloomberg Doesn't work on WSJ Did this work anywhere?
- baobabKoodaa 4y agoDoesn't work on hs.fi either. Who's upvoting this and why?
- jzymbaluk 4y agoI've found this site fails more often than it succeeds unfortunately
- towaway15463 4y agoI’m still waiting for micro transactions. I won’t pay $5 a month for a newspaper I might read one article from but I would gladly pay 25 cents for that one good article. How are there still minimum amounts and fees on transactions when everything is supposedly digitized and networked?
- hactually 4y agoThis is probably a use-case for crypto currency I could actually support... except the gas fees make it worse than the MC/Visa rails
- mertd 4y agoDoes proof of stake take care of this scalability issue? There are POS based coins. I'm curious why they haven't entertained this use case yet.
- syntheticcdo 4y agoTransaction fees are a market-based mechanism to allocate a scarce resource (limited amount of block space on a given block chain). Moving from POW to POS will not reduce transaction fees in any appreciable amount, instead the fees previously paid to miners will instead be paid to stakeholders.
- mertd 4y agoDoesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply?
- x-complexity 4y ago> Doesn't the block generation become faster with PoS and thereby increase the supply? In the most technically-correct sense: No, switching out PoW with PoS does not guarantee faster block times. There can exist a PoS chain with 10 minute block times, just like there can exist PoW chains with <1 min block times. I'm guessing that this opinion came from the early days of Ethereum, where the roadmap for the transition to PoS was still unclear. Now, as ETH's switching system is being tested on its testnets & is more or less finalized, it's been made clear that the block times will only decrease from 14 seconds to 12 seconds - A ~14% decrease, which is significant, but not by much. https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms/pos/#validators https://ethereum.org/en/developers/docs/consensus-mechanisms... > Whereas under proof-of-work, the timing of blocks is determined by the mining difficulty, in proof-of-stake, the tempo is fixed. Time in proof-of-stake Ethereum is divided into slots (12 seconds) and epochs (32 slots). The truth of the matter is that an increase in block speed will compromise on either decentralization or security/finality: Increasing ETH's TPS will compromise on one of the two. As such, there's been a shift in focus from relying on ETH for everything, & instead towards allowing ETH to focus on security & decentralization, while the L2 solutions (Arbitrum, Optimism, zkSync, etc.) focus on scaling the TPS, utilizing/renting ETH's security for their own benefit. This way, ETH's overall ecosystem gets to scale up, while still maintaining its security & decentralization.
- notjustanymike 4y ago> Paywalls offend me. The Internet exists to share knowledge with everyone across the world. You shouldn’t need a subscription, all you should need is an internet connection to access the world’s knowledge. That is some Grade-A willful ignorance. Professional writers who perform their due diligence get paid. Professional photographers who travel and document important causes get paid. Editors who ensure accuracy and good writing get paid. Good, shareable knowledge costs money to produce and you're supposed to pay for it.
- teeray 4y agoPiracy is a usability problem. People want to read one article, not subscribe for a year. This is just like pirating one song instead of buying the album.
- towaway15463 4y agoBanks need to get their shit together and allow micro transactions.
- notjustanymike 4y agoPiracy is a business problem. They'd happily sell you one article a year if you're willing to pay more to offset the lack of a predictable revenue stream. Feast or famine tends to be a big problem for sustainability though, and it's one reason companies like Adobe moved Photoshop to a subscription model.
- teeray 4y agoRight, the problem is nobody cares about the business at all. They care about the content. The same problem exists for streaming services and cable TV channels before them. People want one or more specific shows, they don’t think Netflix is any better than Hulu, and are happy to cancel and move their streaming dollars from service to service when something else interests them. Subscriptions just subsidize mediocrity.
- melenaboija 4y ago
- SeanLuke 4y agohttps://12ft.io/proxy?q=http://washingtonpost.com https://12ft.io/proxy?q=http://washingtonpost.com Fails. :-(
- abirch 4y agoDoesn't appear to be working for Bloomberg, NY Times, etc.
- sefrost 4y agoIn my opinion if we keep popularizing technologies like this we will lose them. Look at the number of websites that are now blocking ad blockers because we all installed ad blockers on our parents machines and popularized the technology. We should keep some technology under the radar and just for hackers.
- wbobeirne 4y agoPerhaps this is the ultimate way to gatekeep paywall circumvention for hackers only, you have to build your own novel solution for yourself. /s
- walrus01 4y agomaybe we need some kind of workaround for adblocker-blockers. load the entire page including the ads and javascript and strip it out on the client side for rendering. make the httpd side think that the client is a dead normal microsoft edge or chrome browser with zero plugins installed and deliver the page. it's an arms race the adblocker-blockers aren't going to win.
- sva_ 4y agoIt'll always be a cat-and-mouse-game.
- paxys 4y agoNo useful technology can be kept under the radar. In fact I think ad blocking is a good example of something that got so widespread that it became impossible to block. The "disable your adblocker to read this site" banners are quickly disappearing from the internet now that a critical mass of users has adopted them and companies are realizing they can't give up all that traffic.
- sefrost 4y agoDo you have any source to show that those banners are being removed? I haven't anecdotally noticed that.
- 4y ago
- princevegeta89 4y agoWell, last time I tried a couple of sites on 12ft, it gave me an error saying "this site has been disabled on 12ft" Hmmmmm
- sbf501 4y agoSadly, the sites that don't work on 12ft.io is growing. I keep running into this when trying to read NYT.
- nottrobin 4y ago:(
- bogomipz 4y agoThe author states: >"Most sites block content with a simple JavaScript-generated facade, and bypassing them is as simple as disabling JavaScript. The Firefox Reader View is fantastic for bypassing paywalls of this type." Is this also how "Reader View" on iOS works? Would using no-script or disabling JS in Chrome or Firefox produce the same result then? >"The FT is the most interesing one. Many of their articles are blocked right away. But the trick here is to copy the title of the article, paste it into google.com, click on the link from Google and presto - the article is visible." Can someone say how this works? Does this work on the HTTP Referer header?
- anothernewdude 4y agoI use archive.is or just close the tab.
- samsquire 4y agoI would happily pay for well researched information and that is not on a website overencumbered with advertisements. And has a useable blog like experience. Is this the collective action problem? We cannot have nice news websites due to the profit from subscriptions is too low to afford business so they add adverts everywhere. I think microtransactions could work. But people need to be willing to pay and people aren't willing to pay the same as me. I don't want to subscribe to one newspaper I want a mixture of information available.
- nagonago 4y agoBesides simply being unwilling to pay, I think most people just don't want to spend the mental effort evaluating the potential value of an article they haven't read yet. When the question arises, "is this article worth $1?" it's much easier to just click away and read something else. We are spoiled by a wealth of free information, even if it's mostly low quality.
- samsquire 4y agoI recently bought the film Contact as it's my favourite film. But I don't usually buy film or music and I use Spotify. So the advertless model works with me. When it comes to seeing if you want to buy something that's pretty difficult. I like the bandcamp model of Pay what you want, so you can try someone's music and if you like it you can give them money to reward them. Spotify has PayPal links on artists pages. What I want is an all you can eat subscription where I can direct what content gets created. So I would be responsible for the content that is produced as I funded it. What's that community of Linux kernel developers that you pay for articles?
- pizzalife 4y agoIt's not the answer, a bunch of places are blocked (like others have mentioned, NYT etc). A better alternative is archive.is
- gzer0 4y agohttps://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean This repo is also a great alternative. Bypasses almost all known paywalls.
- mdotk 4y agoHas never worked for me
- RF_Savage 4y ago12ft.io used to be awesome, it bypassed all paywalls I threw at it. But nowdays it rarely does, just like what happened to outline.com.
- u2077 4y agoI’ve been using 12ft since beta. They’ve been hit by some legal notices and no longer work on some sites like NYT. It’s just a game of whack-a-mole. Ideally these workarounds are open source so they can’t just shut a domain down.
- Sloppy 4y agoI don't mind paying for content but not all content is worth paying for. If micro-payments ever become viable I'd be game for that but the paywall options of today are far too onerous! I sometimes clear cookies, use Brave in private mode, edit the html to remove a fade out etc. But 12.io makes all that BS a thing of the past. +10 12ft.io BTW speaking of billionaire owned news... doesn't work on washingtonpost.com
- systemvoltage 4y ago> Paywalls offend me. The Internet exists to share knowledge with everyone across the world. You shouldn’t need a subscription, all you should need is an internet connection to access the world’s knowledge. Then who the hell is going to pay for the people that write articles all day for you? What makes you entitled for free information? How will the writers pay their bills and raise their families? Either we can complain about advertisements or we can shut up and pay for things. Now that's off my chest, I think there should be a pooled version of news sites. One subscription to rule them all. No, not Apple news or Google news+ or whatever. Something that is sort of like Patreon but for news sites. I am totally happy to pay up to $20/month for them all. But I fundamentally and morally disagree with the author of this site. If they framed it as "No, we cannot have $120/month for 12 different news subscriptions, until that is resolved, we built a paywall solution". But, instead they feel entitled to access premium content that requires funding and financing to produce, for free.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago> Paywalls offend me. The Internet exists to share knowledge with everyone across the world. You shouldn’t need a subscription, all you should need is an internet connection to access the world’s knowledge. Cool. So remind me how anyone can survive creating high quality content online? Ads? Nope. Privacy nightmare. Subscriptions? Nope. "Offensive". What next? Tips? Please. We already know most people won't pay for content if they don't have to. Micropayments? Just tips dressed up as technology. What's left? Patronage of the rich?
- nottrobin 4y agoYeah, it's a problem. I suppose badly implemented paywalls that tech savvy people can get around but others can't is almost worse... I think we should keep searching for solutions. I'm not a huge fan of advertising, but I also don't think they have to be a privacy nightmare. I don't think there's actually strong evidence that intimately targeted advertising works significantly better than simple context-based advertising (put an advert for bicycles in an article about bicycles). I think that's a myth that's been propagated by the tech giants who depend on it (Google & Facebook, obviously). So maybe non-invasive advertising could work quite well? At the end of the day, I accept we're going to have a mix of models. A bit like tackling climate change - we need a mix. Some ads sponsored, some donation-based, some with affiliate links, some with billionaire patrons, some state-sponsored. But to my mind, models that literally block those who can't pay, or are disadvantaged in some other way (not tech-savvy enough) are the worst models of all.
- BaseballPhysics 4y ago> So maybe non-invasive advertising could work quite well? You'll never get that without government intervention. At a bare minimum, ignoring targeting, tracking to enable conversion analysis--which necessarily requires deanonymizing users and connecting advertising engagements with purchases--is nirvana for advertisers and they'll never want to give that up without a fight. And that's ignoring the fact that users install ad blockers because ads are also "offensive". > But to my mind, models that literally block those who can't pay, or are disadvantaged in some other way (not tech-savvy enough) are the worst models of all. Why? Until the internet came along, for folks not privileged enough to be able to pay for content, there was the library, and that remains an option today (many libraries offer free access to both physical and digital newspapers, among other things). Given that, unless the content is sponsored by the government in some way (e.g. BBC, CBC, etc), what gives individuals the right to benefit from others' work for free?
- ck2 4y agoCan something like that survive being well known? archive.today is having trouble staying alive last I read?
- 243423443 4y agoThe first site I tried (nytimes) does not work.
- Sloppy 4y agoDoesn't work for washingtonpost.com, "disabled" for the Economist. WTF, legal problems?