Seems like Gitlab seems to be even more ridiculous with their responses to large businesses and potentially dubious copyright claims than GitHub is. It's not the only time this month I've seen them take down repositories related to projects that some large company wanted removed despite it not necessarily being illegal in any way.
Yeah this is not a DMCA thing, there is nothing copyrighted in the code.
The core problem is the newspapers wanting their cake and eat it. They want those sweet google hits but they don't want to give their articles to readers without payment. So there's always a way around it if you can manage to fake a google spider.
For me the current model is so broken. I end up on lots of different newspaper sites. But no, I'm not going to sign up for a subscription to the washington post or whatever to view 1 or 2 articles per month. That's just ridiculous, I don't even live in America. I subscribe to the local paper because it has content I read every day.
If I'd subscribe for every article I get referred to by google or here on HN I would spend hundreds in monthly subscriptions :P It's just not a reasonable ask.
The trouble is that the ideal model (newspapers on the whole used to cost, like, 0.25c) is extremely tricky in the online space, because payments are high friction and small payments especially are not really economically viable. I'm not sure what solution could possibly exist that wouldn't involve some hyper-common payment provider building out a service to solve this specific thing, and then getting all the online news sites to agree to use it, and then getting most visitors to accept "I need to spend less than a dollar if I want to read this article" as normal and okay.
It's ... kinda crazy when I type it out.
But that's basically what advertisements do for publishers today, and if we're moving away from that model (and we *really* should), what do we replace it with?
The ideal model IMO would be P2P micropayments (hopefully a web standard implemented as a browser API), where the payment processor middleman is cut out, so small transactions become viable. Patreon allowing you to bundle and only be charged once for your handful of monthly subscriptions was a good half-measure and a great way to reduce the middleman's cut, but since its elimination, we're back to square one. It doesn't seem realistic to entrust an omnipresent payment provider with this, since they'll always collect a fixed amount of overhead per transaction, which will intrinsicially disincentivize smaller individual payments. But maybe I'm being overly paranoid in some aspects and naïve in others.
The primary purpose of the DMCA was (and, I suppose, still is) to criminalize technology that circumvents access control protecting copyrighted works. There's also the part about takedowns, but circumvention was definitely the big issue when it was made into law.
Yeah that's the thing isn't it? When people use a search engine, they want to be able to click through to the result and read it, not have to subscribe to some paid service to do so.
If your business model doesn't let you offer that, then the answer is to accept you're not gonna be able to rank in search engines. That's it. Maybe a search engine for paid content could exist as its own thing, but that would be because people using it would expect they'd have to pay for what they want to read there.
The attempts to get both Google hits and paywall content feel like some author trying to make everyone pay them money to borrow their book from a library; completely counter to the point of the institution to begin with.
Yeah... some services offer a couple of articles per month and that would be nice though... there is again a way to circumvent it. I'd sign up for a free account with like 1-3 articles views per month because literally I don't read more in majority of the sites (apart from links on HN or reddit)... I do pay sub for the sites I visit often (at least 1-3 times a week)...
Thanks to the Streisand Effect, I've installed this. Seems to work pretty well on the few sites I've tried. Hopefully the maintainer can find a new home and let people know on Twitter.
Wow, Gitlab has gotten ridiculous. They're making me sign up for an account, verify email, go through two captchas, and fill out a survey before they'll let me view the repository.
. . . and now that I've done all that the repository is 404ing.
They really had an opportunity to capture significant market share and they ruined it. Their interface also doesn’t work without javascript. What a shame.
(A long time ago, I clearly remember it did. There's nothing about browsing files or participating in the effective forum that's called "Issues" which fundamentally requires JS.)
Why would they have to make their interface work without JavaScript? The few people who block JavaScript for sure know how to enable JavaScript again. And if they block JavaScript for security and trust reasons, well, they are going to download software from gitlab and run it anyway.
Over-engineering indeed, but it does address actual problems.
Primarily: Addressing what most browsers haven't well managed to handle: interaction with big files.
E.g. huge database-like Plain Text: browsers typically fail with OOM (Out of Memory).
I'll write a review of GitHub's delivery infrastructure when I have the time.
This is the attitude that has ruined the entire web. The real question should be: why is JavaScript necessary and what does it add? (In the majority of applications, absolutely nothing.)
Agreed. Sadly it's due to the constant churn of tech these days. Developers should just take notes from the books on the shelf: don't change without consent unless you explicitly some change.
Slightly off-topic: I've been viewing YouTube on a old YouTube frontend that works back to (at least iirc) IE6 and Win98 for some time now [1] [2] [3]. The frontend feels mad snappy as hell and it loads fast compared to YouTube today since the frontend is not heavily JavaScript reliant, it just uses it to enhance the site.
Abuse of animation and skip of best-effort loading:
This is probably more relevant to the sluggishness and bad interoperability, rather than JavaScript.
[ Those abusing JavaScript for nefarious purposes: probably not the JavaScript to blame. ]
Standards established don't necessarily imply being well-designed:
Blindly following without thinking shall regardless trap.
Many current infrastructures are fundamentally flawed and difficult to fix:
1 step wrong, all steps wrong.
> pretty slow or very challenging to implement in pure HTML/CSS
That's the heart of it, isn't it? It's challenging.
At the core of modern web development is the attitude that developer convenience trumps all.
The software is free after all. (The thousands you pay in bandwidth and hardware upgrade costs to keep running their bloatware doesn't count because none of that goes to the web developer, and is therefore irrelevant in their it's-all-about-me worldview.)
I suspect it was a conscious decision, they went for large, paying, enterprise customers instead of fighting for the free, public, and open source projects.
Another extension that deserves some fame is "Behind the overlay". it allows you to kill any unskipable full page overlay informing you about the benefits of a subscription and the excellent quality of the article beneath it.
Coupled with the Archive.ph button they make up my holy trinity of paywall bypass.
This extension works remarkably well. But it requires frequent updates to stay working as sites change. I sure hope there's some statement on what's up soon.
You can only install from the Chrome Web Store. All other methods are annoying and you have to manually whitelist extension ids. I don't understand why the Chrome Web Store does not fall under the Digital Markets Act in the EU. Google is clearly a Gatekeeper here.
Do bypasses like this, which I assume just do things like deleting "uncloseable" client-side modals and spoofing UA/referrer headers, count as copy-protection circumvention technology under the DMCA?
Does the thing being bypassed prevent you from saving the page, or from making in any other way a copy of any content you've already fetched?
If not, how could it be classed as copy-protection?
Edit: One other thing: if spoofing UA headers was a problem, all the browsers in the world would fall foul of it - because non-Mozilla browsers all say that they're Mozilla, and Opera said it was IE, and Chrome said it was Safari, and now a bunch of browsers say they're Chrome - at the same time as saying they're Mozilla. Except it's more complicated than that.
this is basically the "computer scientist" view of the world in https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23, especially the Monolith bit. spoofing UA could be legal in general or when done for interoperability but illegal when done with intent to bypass access control.
magnolia1234_bpc
@Magnolia1234B
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22m
Update: tomorrow a new Firefox-release v3.6.4.0 (signed = security check) !
Manual update required with upload on X (new version will update automatically)
EDIT: magnet link with all btc-uploads content magnet:?xt=urn:btih:7839e845f7965bed1035dc5d4635811d1ede73d2&dn=magnolia1234-bypass-paywalls-uploads-master
The last couple of versions I tried to download gave TROJAN warnings from MS Defender. I had created an issue on the project notifying the developer, and I understood he was changing things to not give a "false positive". Perhaps GitLab didn't think they were false positives?
Why was this hosted on gitlab.com ? If you're not on github, the discoverablity is pretty low. You are not self hosting. There is no upside for a project like this to be on gitlab.com. If you're already taking the hit of not being mainstream, why not self host in a sane country ?
1) There are lots of reasons to avoid Github and they are all spelled Microsoft.
2) Putting something on Gitlab means that there is one level of activation energy between idiots trying to pad out some corporate "social goodwill" number by "fixing" things on your project.
If I ever had to open-source anything, I would host it somewhere else and mirror a read-only repo to github.
But it was removed from AMO. That was an issue as people that installed it from AMO just stopped receiving updates silently. You had to uninstall it and re-install the gitlab version for the auto-update to work again.
Hmm, didn't catch that. I see there's still _a_ Bypass add-on on Mozilla. There always were a few, and close forks last I bothered to check. Is this different?
Use DIllo, Lynx or Links on the URL's. If that fails, head to gemini://gemi.dev, the section News Waffle, and paste your own link. Use Lagrange, Gplaces or whatever Gemini client you like.
The Gemini 'News Waffle' service it's just an HTML decrapifier, you can put almost any web source as the input. Copy and paste the URL from a browser and that's it.
It's good that there are forks, but I was under the impression that the head person running the project was the one keeping all the paywall bypasses up to date. Even if these forks work, if no one is actively keeping track of each site that is being bypassed as it breaks or changes, they won't be working for long.
Hopefully the original user migrates to a new platform, but if this store version gets removed I think we can all assume they got struck with a lawsuit threat.
I happen to have downloaded the master branch at 9am this morning. Here's a torrent: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:92042e65d1b38cd5d97c29baa4d0c9e2af46f355&dn=bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean-master.zip
The easiest way to bypass paywalls is to just disable JavaScript for the site. It works pretty much everywhere I've tried it except for the WSJ, which I suspect this extension doesn't work for either.
Edit: or, maybe it does. I see WSJ.com in the config, with a referrer as drugereport and user agent as Google not to get around it.
it works on WSJ, I use it for that site.
for some bypasses, it doesn't "just load the page" but rather pops up a link to archive.ph or similar to pull the article, still convenient
I also point out there is "bypass paywalls" and "bypass paywalls clean", kind of similar to the uBlock family with "uBlock origin" being the "good guy" edition
magnolia1234_bpc
@Magnolia1234B
·
22m
Update: tomorrow a new Firefox-release v3.6.4.0 (signed = security check) !
Manual update required with upload on X (new version will update automatically)
The Gitlab one is actually maintained. They haven't been using GitHub for a while now. (Plenty of updates to the extension have occurred within the past 6 months, the date of the last commit on GitHub)
The github repository isn't under active development. The gitlab repository exists because a contributor was frustrated with the slow updates, forked it, fixed many bugs and removed google analytics, and actively maintained it.
If you look at the source code in any of the mirrors people have linked, you'll find that the "clean" one that was taken down today does not have Google Analytics.
Now I wish I had bookmarked the distributed (peer to peer?) github replacement I’ve seen trend on HN a couple of times. It seems like a good place to host something like this. Anyone remember which tool I’m talking about?
There's also a version still in the Firefox catalog (the official one has been banned from there too): --link removed, it was a fake, the one I referred to is gone too :( --
This is a help in particular for mobile firefox because they refuse to let us sideload addons.
In Firefox for Android Nightly, you can (since recently) sideload extensions via the hidden debug menu (tap the Firefox logo in the About section a dozen times). This will add an "Install extension from file" option to the main settings menu.
I don't know whether this also works in the standard version of Firefox for Android.
It is good they reenabled this feature. Since it is/was very short-sighted of Mozilla to make their centralized addon store the single gatekeeper for extension access on user devices. As if they never thought about power dynamics in software.
Oh yes the one I mean is Bypass Paywalls Clean (D). But this also seems to have been kicked out of the Mozilla store. It was just a resubmit by someone else after the original got kicked out when a French newspaper complained.
We really need sideloading capability in mobile firefox :(
Settings> about Firefox> tap on the fox logo a few times> debug menu enabled> now you see "install ad on from file" under advanced in the settings menu.
