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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.
- lewiscollard 7y agoGood stuff timar - this definitely beats my trick of hitting the Esc key at just the right moment to stop JS from loading. I've gotten very good at that, but also life is very short and I shouldn't need to! So your bookmarklet will come to the rescue :) Could this be integrated with Firefox's Reader mode somehow?
- timar 7y agoNot very familiar with firefox or reader mode. But if it's something firefox does with the html of the website youre currently on. Than I see no reason why it couldn't work together. First getting the article with Readium, secondly starting Reader mode.
- timar 7y agoHere is a gist of the commented code. It works by fetching the HTML content of the website, anonymously with no cookies. Using the fetch API. In a second step the HTML is preprocessed, removing javascript, inserting elements like images that might be done through javascript etc. The third step is to rerplace the current windows HTML with the clean-preprocessed HTML with the article. https://gist.github.com/sugoidesune/884bfdf8a975920e98e7307e981e8daf?fbclid=IwAR1Hb8Og5_u8bbWbePfZi-tpN2lObKybZS01kICH_pwxIR4lFUbPY96qm8Q https://gist.github.com/sugoidesune/884bfdf8a975920e98e7307e...
- wiseleo 7y agoNice...
- qnsi 7y agoI though people are paid for posting on medium?
- timar 7y agoThey do, but you have to apply and be selected. Compared to all users, its a fraction. And everyone else gets pushed into the paywall, because medium basically says: "If you don't we will not promote it and your post will die in obscurity"
- sharkmerry 7y agoso medium is running a business? Did you apply and get turned away?
- timar 7y agoNo, I don't aspire to be a writer for a living. If I publish something I do it to share knowledge or for personal branding.
- timar 7y agoOfc they're a business. But in youtube terms. As a creator you either put your video behind a paywall,and not necessarily get paid, or your video will never show up in any recommendations. So unless somebody searches for it or has the link. Nobody is going to see it. And every viewer on youtube gets 5 videos a month. Has a bit of a bad taste for me.
- hprotagonist 7y agohttps://medium.com/@tgaul/introducing-unobstruct-230e4e95cf5e https://medium.com/@tgaul/introducing-unobstruct-230e4e95cf5... works nicely for iOS/mobilesafari.
- selfishgene 7y agoThis one is also quite helpful: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox 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.
- atombender 7y agoFor Chrome and Brave: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome. Seems to work well.
- barretts 7y agoAnd evading paywalls disproportionately impacts the journalists creating the stories you seem to value, though for some reason refuse to pay for.
- selfishgene 7y agoInformation wants to be free. If you don't believe me, just head over to your favorite mirror of libgen and see what you can find there. 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?
- baddox 7y agoDo you think that people reading newspapers for free at the library negatively impacts journalists?
- barretts 7y agoDo you think the 1,600 journalists at The New York Times, many of whom work in difficult environments (including the White House, lol), should work for free? Quite the Scrooge move.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoSidebar: working for and writing at tbe NYT - or any "news" publisher - doesn't make you a journalist. Journalist is a process and a result. We're too quick to use the word journalist. The low bar should not be so normalized.
- barretts 7y agoLol. NYT = "low bar". You're living in an alternate reality.
- chiefalchemist 7y agoYa think? If you read the NYT in the 70's and 80's like I did - and then compare it to today's - then you'd realize how hard I'm laughing right now. You reflecting their approach (i.e.,unable to be objective) is nothing short of vindication (for me).
- knolax 7y agoThey should pay me reparations for reading some of the nonsense they publish.
- wiseleo 7y agoThank you. Both for the code and for giving me an inspiration. :)
- LoSboccacc 7y agothis it's literally facilitating copyright infringement if you don't want to pay for them is fine, just don't read them
- baddox 7y agoIt's certainly not copyright infringement to download a hypertext document from a company's public web servers.
- LoSboccacc 7y agodid I say it's copyright infringement? no. "facilitating" is not just there for shit and giggle. https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201 https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/17/1201
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoThat's stretching the definition. By your argument any parsing of a payload containing copywritten work is copy right infringement.
- LoSboccacc 7y agono? section 3a circumvention definition is exceptionally (and intentionally) wide in the and section 3b does the same for what is considered a restrictive measure. > any parsing of a payload again, no? authorized parsing does not.
- Red_Leaves_Flyy 7y agoAs far as I'm aware most websites don't have (enforceable) eulas that state what parsers can and can't be used. If I want to read the binary stream from the wire that's my prerogative. 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.
- Eduard 7y agoHow to use it with mobile Chrome on Android?
- fidla 7y agoThanks! I've been looking for something like this for ages. I use Brave browser on my android and pc. This will be super handy!
- mchintu 7y agoThis is fantastic