My local newspaper's online version for years was free to use. Of course, they then added a paywall which kicks in after only two "free" articles per month. G

My local newspaper's online version for years was free to use. Of course, they then added a paywall which kicks in after only two "free" articles per month. Given that I refuse to pay the $3 per month for access due to strong disagreements that I have, politically, with ownership of the newspaper, I decided to build a "paywall bypass" solution as a side project. The solution involved building a small server app that acts as a proxy between my browser and their site. It parses out the HTML representation of the articles, which their paywall script at runtime first obfuscates, then removes from the DOM. This solution, naturally, also avoids my browser loading and requesting a whole collection of third-party trackers and ads - since I'm not "rendering" their entire site, simply scraping relevant portions of the HTML. The kicker: I pay $5 a month to host this on a DigitalOcean droplet. I regret nothing.