
Show HN: A bookmarklet to remove clickgates on New York Times, Medium, etc. - timar
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:&#x2F;&#x2F;sugoidesune.github.io&#x2F;readium&#x2F;
For the curious I will explain the technical aspects in a comment.
======
timar
Here 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/884bfdf8a975920e98e7307e...](https://gist.github.com/sugoidesune/884bfdf8a975920e98e7307e981e8daf?fbclid=IwAR1Hb8Og5_u8bbWbePfZi-
tpN2lObKybZS01kICH_pwxIR4lFUbPY96qm8Q)

~~~
wiseleo
Nice...

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hprotagonist
[https://medium.com/@tgaul/introducing-
unobstruct-230e4e95cf5...](https://medium.com/@tgaul/introducing-
unobstruct-230e4e95cf5e)

works nicely for iOS/mobilesafari.

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lewiscollard
Good 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
Not 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.

------
selfishgene
This 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.

~~~
barretts
And evading paywalls disproportionately impacts the journalists creating the
stories you seem to value, though for some reason refuse to pay for.

~~~
baddox
Do you think that people reading newspapers for free at the library negatively
impacts journalists?

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barretts
Do 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.

~~~
wolco
Calling someone a scrooge or cheap for finding a hole in a technical
limitation device that is sloppy in its implementation as it is click-bait in
it's dark patterns of pretending the page is an open page/free page so it can
compete in the search engines but in reality it presents a paid-gate that only
appears after leading content is very unhackernews like.

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.

~~~
baddox
> it is click-bait in it's dark patterns of pretending the page is an open
> page/free page so it can compete in the search engines but in reality it
> presents a paid-gate that only appears after leading content

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.

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fidla
Thanks! I've been looking for something like this for ages. I use Brave
browser on my android and pc. This will be super handy!

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qnsi
I though people are paid for posting on medium?

~~~
timar
They 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
so medium is running a business? Did you apply and get turned away?

~~~
timar
No, 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.

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Eduard
How to use it with mobile Chrome on Android?

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mchintu
This is fantastic

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wiseleo
Thank you. Both for the code and for giving me an inspiration. :)

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LoSboccacc
this it's literally facilitating copyright infringement

if you don't want to pay for them is fine, just don't read them

~~~
baddox
It's certainly not copyright infringement to download a hypertext document
from a company's public web servers.

~~~
LoSboccacc
did 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
That's stretching the definition. By your argument any parsing of a payload
containing copywritten work is copy right infringement.

~~~
LoSboccacc
no? 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
As 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.

