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

github.com

21–30 of 246 posts

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

#21
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.

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

#22
post #4

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

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.

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

#25
post #16
post #4

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

No, you see, it's "provided for educational purposes only" - it says right there in the readme

Ahh got it, that’s a great argument. Brb, “downloading a car” for educational purposes.

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

#27
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.

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

#30
post #4

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

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.

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