The README says "The author does not endorse or encourage any unethical or illegal activity." Is it actually illegal anywhere to bypass a paywall?
Not sure about the paywalls. But it might be used for "drive by attacks" or phishing.
Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
91–100 of 165 posts
Re: Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
#92Earlier quoted context omitted.
> gosh I was busy mmkay? Mischaracterization much? He was on Vacation. How many of us read every email for personal projects that comes in when you're half way across the world and supposed to be relaxing.
Sure, but if you go on vacation and don't check your email for two weeks, you can't really claim “no warning”. If two weeks isn’t sufficient notice because of vacation it’s fine to say so, but it’s not the same thing as “no warning” just because you’re not checking email.
To take it even further, if you're a one man operation, not checking emails regarding your operation for two weeks is pure negligence, vacation or not.
Re: Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
#93I got the feeling that these features should be part of a browser extension the same way as there are AdBlock extensions. I guess the reason it is not is "personal preference" of the author, or is there some technical reason?
> these features should be part of a browser extension You mean like Bypass Paywall Clean? https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean
This works quite well and probably covers 90% of my needs. For the other 10% I still use archive.today or 12ft (RIP).
It's a shame Google won't let this addon be in the store.
Re: Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
#94Earlier quoted context omitted.
Some possible clues: > https://github.com/kubero-dev/ladder#environment-variables > USER_AGENT User agent to emulate Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Googlebot/2.1; + http://www.google.com/bot.html ) > X_FORWARDED_FOR IP forwarder address 66.249.66.1 > RULESET URL to a ruleset file https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubero-dev/ladder/main/rul... or /path/to/my/rules.yaml
Oh wow... I'm surprised that's enough. When I was researching scraping protection bypass, you had to do some real crazy stuff with the browser instance + using residential IPs at a minimum...
Thats not the full story. It works on many sites, but some (ft.com as an example) have more severe countermeasures to bypass the paywall. Therefore the ladders modifies the served HTML from origin to remove such.
Those rules still need to be build up. (by me or the OS-community)
Re: Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
#95Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know for sure, but I would imagine there are more severe actions taken against circumventing paid material (content behind a paywall) than there is for free content supplemented by advertisements.. Edit : The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits circumventing an effective technological means of control that restricts access to a copyrighted work. I guess that would apply here.
Given how liberally the DMCA is applied, you definitely don't want to be on the wrong side of that. I remember some guy that wrote a WoW bot and got sued using the DMCA, with the argument that his bot was circumventing the anti-cheat and the anti-cheat could be seen as a 'mechanism protecting copyrighted material', because it was safeguarding access to the game servers, the servers were generating parts of the game w…
It happened to Honorbuddy, a very advanced bot for World Of Warcraft made by a German company. The argument in relation to DMCA was that the bot was circumventing warden, the games anti-cheat system. The legal battle was long and they ultimately had to strip many features of the bot, until the company went under.
Re: Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
#96In the README there is a WHY paragraph: > Freedom of information is an essential pillar of democracy and informed decision-making. While media organizations have legitimate financial interests, it is crucial to strike a balance between profitability and the public's right to access information. The proliferation of paywalls raises concerns about the erosion of this fundamental freedom, and it is imperative for societ…
For me this is grotesque. Democracy is in dispair so is journalism. What exactly is this software doing to support journalism or democracy?
We live in a world, where we have more misinformation and poor journalism every day, and less money in the pockets of the people to afford paying for good journalism. So this might start a more open discussion on how to finance journalism. And while discussions are still going on, people can inform themselves with good journalism, which supports the democracy.
Re: Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
#97I use services like this as I often skip news site paywalls because I just can't afford, nor is it practical, to have so many subscriptions. That said, I work in news media (and have been involved in building paywalls at different orgs - NYT and New Yorker). I know how money for these directly support journalism - salaries and the costs with associated with any story. If you are skipping paywalls a lot, I would encou…
There's a huge need for subscription bundles. I'd gladly pay $20/mo for access to a bunch of big names, even if I'm limited to like 60 articles per month combined across those sources. Instead I just don't pay anyone, turn back when I encounter a paywall and look for someone's summary if I'm really interested.
Isn’t that the value-prop of Apple News?
Re: Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
#98Earlier quoted context omitted.
Lovely, the Google classic "ban the world" approach -- I've been desperately trying to move my client off of vercel, this might just be the gasoline.
I followed this drama on Twitter. The author was breaking the terms of service and creating DMCA support burden for Vercel. They had proactively been in touch with him a few times to reach a solution. I think it’s quite reasonable that they blocked the account rather than the project. You wouldn’t have got that level of service from big tech.
> I think it’s quite reasonable that they blocked the account rather than the project.
I’m just responding to your last sentence: why would you go out of your way to say it is reasonable to block the account rather than the project?
I can understand locking the account just as the “lazy default” but I would not call it in any way reasonable - but you did, so I’m curious.
If that is reasonable, what would you consider unreasonable?
(Because to me, the obviously reasonable thing to do would be to block the project and not his entire account.)
Re: Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
#99Earlier quoted context omitted.
- Support is failing us - I want my team to use you for vercel support, but it isn't there. - Support is failing our customers - when you fail, I end up reverse-depending your repo to tell us why it's failing -- just give us a clear answer, we all move away happy, bullshit and I go to lambda where I just accept it. - EOD: Vercel makes engineers happy to bullshit, but gives operations teams nothing acceptable - I want…
Would love to dig into your support issues. Let me know: rauchg@vercel.com
And if the support team had done so, I'd have nothing to converse about :)
After digging upwards, additional support seems like an option delivered too late, and too outside of 'proper' channels - if you want a sanitized rant I can probably deliver it tomorrow, but too-little too-late is where vercel has landed in the operations team.
Re: Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
#100Earlier quoted context omitted.
The 12ft guy doesn’t look so great in that thread. He admits to ignoring the email (gosh I was busy mmkay?) and then argues that Vercel is lying about the extra work they had to do.
> gosh I was busy mmkay? Mischaracterization much? He was on Vacation. How many of us read every email for personal projects that comes in when you're half way across the world and supposed to be relaxing.
I might ignore personal project emails while I'm on vacation, but I also won't complain if one of those emails says my billing method is out of date and I come home and it's been turned off.