Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc.
Recently i stumbled on too many clickgates on the Medium blog Towards Data science. Considering that most people publish to share knowledge on Medium and are driven into putting their content behind a paywall, without actually getting paid for it, including myself. I felt like Medium is running the academic publishing scheme. Get free content and get paid for it. So I decided to create a small script to bypass the paywall on Medium, it turns out it also works on other newssites. Heres the website: https://sugoidesune.github.io/readium/
For the curious I will explain the technical aspects in a comment.
53 comments
[ 4.1 ms ] story [ 121 ms ] threadhttps://gist.github.com/sugoidesune/884bfdf8a975920e98e7307e...
Has a bit of a bad taste for me.
works nicely for iOS/mobilesafari.
Could this be integrated with Firefox's Reader mode somehow?
https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox
... for all of the folks out there who don't have a university picking up the tab for the articles that they want to read.
It's important to remember that paywalls disproportionately impact those who are not "working" in an academic setting.
I thank Aaron Swartz and his co-conspirators every time I download something from one of those sites. I could always walk over to a nearby university and use their public wifi to download much of this material through more "legitimate" channels ... but have to admit that it wouldn't provide the same thrill as just stealing it.
It's also comforting to know that no girls (as young as 10-years of age) had to be sexually exploited by a monster like Jeffrey Epstein in order to cover my subscription to these materials (Epstein allegedly donated millions to universities like MIT ... much of which they deliberately tried to cover up until exposed by a courageous whistle-blower in the Media Lab).
Ironic that this was the same squeaky clean institution that handed a "criminal trespasser" like Swartz over to the Feds so that they could spank his ass hard, ain't it?
NYT, wapo, BBC, fox, CNN, etc all push out tonnes of clickbait garbage every day. If that's not making them enough money then maybe they should get back to investigative journalism. I want long, painstakingly neutral, well researched, and cited articles on topics that concern me. E.g. healthcare, economics, politics. I find more value from the participants in discussion boards I frequent than just about every article I read. Sure, there's a few that provide more value than the participants like the work out of the ICIJ, but they don't hide their work behind paywalls, have ads, or run clickbait, and yet somehow they remain solvent... Hmm...
You reflecting their approach (i.e.,unable to be objective) is nothing short of vindication (for me).
To steal is "to take illegally, or without the owner's permission, something owned by someone else" - can't really take the bits from NYT - after someone reads their article without paying them NYT has no less bits than they had before.
> Please don't comment about the voting on comments. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
It's not free, but I've found it to be a great way to read the NYTimes.
Example of the 10-page daily PDF: https://timesdigest.com/samples/timesdigest
I'm happy to pay for content. I donate $10/mo to both Mother Jones and ProPublica. That's more for each than the cost of a New York Times subscription. Neither of these has a paywall. I'd prefer that they didn't have popovers either, but that's about as good as I can expect in the modern anti-privacy, anti-attention culture of the internet. I just don't feel obligated to pay for content that is sent to me without me ever agreeing to pay for it.
I also think search engines shouldn't index paywalled content, and that newsfeeds like HN or Reddit shouldn't allow links to paywalled content, and I consistently downvote paywalled content.
EDIT: I'm also going to start requesting that people not link to paywalled content when I see it, I think.
NYT one of the largest most profitable companies pretends to show you an article baits you and demands money and you are a scrooge for not paying? In that context they are the rich entity and should give the content away (the way Scrooge should have). No where in the story does it mention Tiny Tim finding coal in Scroogle's garbage and someone stopping him and calling him cheap for not paying full price because Scrooge employes so many people.
This is the most important point here. If your content is not actually public, you really shouldn't get the benefits of search engine exposure, HN exposure, or even the distribution from sharing what appears to be a URL to a hypertext document.
I felt forced to disable cookies and javascript on the following sites just after exclusively clicking on links submitted to HN: NYT, Medium, Washington Post, Bloomberg, MIT Technology Review and Harvard Business Review.
I'd prefer if submitters choose more user-respecting sources, but until then I refuse to feel guilty over stopping these intrusive sites and their dark patterns.
NYT does do good journalism, but, even for a company with their credentials and resources, its share seems to be ever dwindling as time goes on.
Seconded. There's something very tasteless about a bunch of very well paid tech employees who'll readily decry adtech, tracking and data brokerage (despite many of them working on it themselves), who'll proclaim "there has to be another way!", who'll also lambast modern journalism for "falling quality", circumventing content subscriptions and depriving publishers of revenue simply because of a built-up sense of entitlement to everything being free.
If the content is worth reading, i.e. it's from a publisher you believe to be of sufficient quality to try and find methods to work around their subscriptions, then it's worth paying for.
if you don't want to pay for them is fine, just don't read them
no.
"facilitating" is not just there for shit and giggle.
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
> any parsing of a payload
again, no? authorized parsing does not.
If you have a website that shows a blank page, to everyone that doesn't send a specific token to your webserver, and I discover that I can view said page by manipulating the dom with any old browsers console I am not violating your copyright. You willingly sent that information.
To bring this home, if I can read an article visually obscured by code that has otherwise been given to me in an unencrypted form I am not violating copyright. If a company has a problem with people seeing everything said company sends to them then they're woefully ignorant of how browsers work. The solution is to stop including the article. Rightfully, this kills seo rankings.