Paywall bypass

[andrewducker]

For people who read my links and sometimes hit a paywall, there are multiple methods of bypassing them.

Sometimes you can use "reader mode" (it's called that in Firefox, very handy, strips out everything but the text. I believe Chrome has something similar.), and then refresh the page.

If that doesn't work then open https://archive.ph/ and paste in the URL you want to see the archived version of.

For pages where that doesn't work, sometimes https://12ft.io/ works.

Edit: For FT articles, search for the headline on Google then follow the link. The paywall is deactivated for page views driven from Google. (Thanks Mike!)

If none of those work then let me know and I'll see if I can find an alternative.

(I pay for a variety of news sources. If you find one of them useful more than a couple of times per week then I recommend you do too.)

Comments

[rhythmaning]

Thanks for this, much appreciated. I forgot 12ft.io was back online!

I've been using archive.is (which I've just seen is identical to archive.ph).

The FT tip via Google is one I'll have to try!

[skington]

Some lazy websites (e.g. the I, Independent) enforce their paywall via JavaScript, so if you turn that off (it's e.g. under Security in Mac OS Safari, and under Advanced in iOS Safari) you get stuff for free, and it doesn't try to set cookies.

Reader mode also exists in Safari, BTW.

[andrewducker]

Yeah, I reckon that's how the reader mode bypasses it - by not running the JavaScript.

[skington]

It's subtly different, at least on Safari, where Reader mode is something you apply after the page has loaded. Reader mode bypasses some paywalls by ditching the CSS that says "you can't read on from here", but if there's some JavaScript that checks whether you were logged in (or Google) and not nukes a whole bunch of text in the DOM, reader mode won't help you.

[andrewducker]

That's where refreshing *after* You've changed to reader mode seems to make a difference on Firefox.

[conuly]

Some other lazy websites - might be the same ones, honestly - run it so poorly that if you just hit esc as soon as the text loads you'll dodge the paywall entirely. You'd think they all would've closed up that gap by now.

[cellio]

The NoScript extension is another way to control Javascript. You can whitelist or blacklist individual sites (or, as it often turns out, third parties).

[mountainkiss]

"Useful" is an unexpected (to me) choice of word here. Do you mean "of interest" or do you genuinely mean "useful"? If the latter, how?

[andrewducker]

Whatever use you put new information to.

Might be useful for educating yourself. Or for citing in a discussion with others. Or for making you (or others) happy. Or for making you feel superior because you already had the right opinion. Or for providing you with just the right bit of information to bring a project together. Or for better understanding some part of your nature that had previously eluded you.

(I'm sure I've forgotten many other uses people find for information)

[mountainkiss]

Thank you! I think it's very rare that I find anything I read here useful by any of these definitions, but I often find them interesting.

[andrewducker]

We'll have to settle for that then :⁠-⁠)

[mountainkiss]

Oh it’s in no way a complaint! I was just curious about the choice of word because I couldn’t connect it to my experience, but my experience is not universal.

[andrewducker]

I'm not convinced that my choice of words is producing the intended result a fair bit of the time.

[mountainkiss]

To which I think we say “welcome to the human race”.

(From your expanded definition, your choice of words appeared in this instance to convey precisely the meaning you intended.)

[andrewducker]

I think they just fell out of my fingers and then had a post-hoc justification.

(Which, also, welcome to the human race)

[mountainkiss]

There’s an interesting conversation to be had about whether educating oneself is intrinsically useful, which leads to an interesting conversation about the definition(s) of utility.

[andrewducker]

Something is useful *for something*. So it very much depends on what your goals are.

[mountainkiss]

Exactly what I was thinking.

[conuly]

I have the bypass paywalls extension in firefox and now I hardly ever see firewalls.

[andrewducker]

Ooh, that sounds tempting

[magedragonfire]

+1 for that. It doesn't work for everything - the Toronto Star and New York Times are notably finicky on it for me - but it cuts out a lot of the cruft.

[calimac]

How about that; the reader mode icon has been appearing on my Firefox all along and I never knew what it was or indeed noticed it.

What I'd been doing, for sites which show you the article for a few seconds before blocking it, was hitting Ctrl-A Ctrl-C during that interval, which highlights the whole article and copies it. Then I could paste it at my leisure into Notebook or whatever and read it there.

[andrewducker]

I'm glad you had something that worked for you!

[skington]

Looks like 12ft.io got pulled and now back as a simple "remove JavaScript" filter, which is to say that it won't work on the FT or any site which is serious about their paywall.

While Googling around, I found removepaywall.com where you can stick https://removepaywall.com on the front of a URL and it will look for an archived version. This is basically what Andy was suggesting by sticking https://archive.ph on the front instead, but maybe it knows about more ways of archiving stuff.

[lilysea]

Also worth checking out https://1ft.io/

which is like 12 foot ladder, only new and improved

[falena]

I wasn't familiar with https://12ft.io/ so thanks for teaching me that! I knew of https://archive.ph/, instead (the day another online friend told me about it really improved my online life). As a Southern European with very limited spending power, I subscribe to only one online newspaper and definitely can't afford multiple subscriptions. I like the Guardian's model because it allows me to use their website and still give them some money from time to time. I wish online news outlet allowed 'a la carte' access options. I would pay for single article access, most of the time, if it was reasonably priced (say, the cost of a coffee). Btw, thank you for your links posts. I never comment (your journal friends are way more erudite and interesting than me) but I enjoy them tremendously.

[andrewducker]

Very happy to help! And delighted to have you on here!

Please don't feel that you can't join in if you have something to say. The more the merrier.

[jducoeur]

Oh, good point -- I've mostly been ignoring the Reader Mode icon in Orion, and I should probably pay more attention to that.

(I pay for a variety of news sources. If you find one of them useful more than a couple of times per week then I recommend you do too.)

Yeah, that's pretty much my guideline as well, but it doesn't help with the enormous long tail of something like a hundred sites that I only read maybe once every month or two, due to links.

The world desperately needs a decent micropayment system for this sort of thing -- I'd happily pay ten cents, sometimes even a dollar, per-article, but there's almost never a way to do so. I sometimes think that, when I retire, I should create a non-profit specifically for this purpose. (Non-profit because, while it would heavily be serving for-profit businesses, the enshittification incentives for doing something like this in a for-profit way probably mean it could never be trusted.)

[andrewducker]

I'm happy enough with it being possible to bypass them, but a bit of work, to encourage you to think "Hey, I've used Ars Technica a lot recently, maybe I should just pay for it."