
Bypass Paywalls – A Firefox extension to bypass paywalls of many news sites - known
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypasspaywalls/
======
grn
Correct me if I'm wrong but I think publishers are trying to have the cake and
eat it too. They want their content to be discoverable in search engines. They
also want readers to pay for it. Given how search engines currently work this
is a self-contradictory model.

I imagine search engine could offer publishers an API to send content for
indexing without having to publish it. Google and others could even charge
publishers for that and then published could ask readers for subscriptions.

~~~
ktpsns
I absolutely support such programs. Similarly to adblockers and DRM, they show
that the mechanisms used to generate money simply does not work. Technically
it is impossible to expose content to a (web crawler) robot but not to a human
(inverse CAPTCHA). And technically it is impossible to control pixels on a
free user device.

Publishers, if you want to have people pay for your content, make honest paid
subscriptions and deal with it that you vanish from the openly accessible web.

~~~
IshKebab
Not necessarily. I could imagine Google adding a "paid crawling" service where
you tell Google how much your content costs, explicitly allow them access via
some authenticated method, and then they display the price next to your
content in search results.

You're imagining that it can't work because it can't work in a generic way
with all search engines, including future ones that don't exist yet. But that
doesn't have to be the case. Most content providers only care about Google.

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amaccuish
I find it much easier to tell firefox to block cookies and localstorage for
such websites. Usually works when they have a certain free allowance. You can
do it from the address bar quite conveniently.

~~~
nsomaru
Self-destructing cookies (whitelist only) + firefox containers works well for
me

------
forsaken
Or we could pay for journalism that the world badly needs.

~~~
tertius
Ah but that doesn't scale!

Do you have an example?

~~~
stfwn
Blendle ([https://blendle.com](https://blendle.com)) is a news aggregator
where you pay per article that you decide to read. Price ranges from ~20 cents
for a fluff opinion piece to ~90 cents for quality journalism. It’s just for
the Netherlands and possibly Germany (?) atm but they are working towards a US
launch.

This is a pretty good model I think. It’s accessible and sustainable for both
publishers and readers.

~~~
icebraining
My problem with Blendle is that you're essentially paying for them to get a
full profile of every article your read. At least Google Analytics and such
can be blocked, making it more difficult to connect your profile across the
sites of different publications. With Blendle, that's impossible.

I know it's adding complexity and most people don't care, but I wish they used
a system of crypto vouchers (not like cryptocurrencies, more like Mozilla
Persona, which allowed identity providers - in this case, Blendle - to vouch
for the user without knowing to whom they were vouching).

------
Jaruzel
This is a double edge sword. We complain about too many adverts on sites, and
we complain about paywalls. Without ads or paywalls, how do big sites pay for
themselves? If you want quality reporting, then someone has to pay those
reporters a fair wage for their skill set.

As much as I'd like 'information to be free' we do not yet live in a 'Star
Trek' world where money no longer has any meaning, and where people produce
'stuff' purely for the benefit of themselves and others.

Until we reach that utopia (or dystopia depending on your view) you can't have
your cake and eat it; It's Ads _or_ Paywalls, pick one.

~~~
esotericn
Paywalls that actually work.

The existing model is to treat the Internet as a magazine rack. It doesn't
work that way.

A user might read one article from the WSJ a month. Obviously they won't pay 5
USD for that, they'll either attempt to get around the paywall or not bother.

Giving users a few free articles means that they'll just rotate around sites
to get what they want. You need to charge a small amount from hit 1.

Not withstanding that it's not hard to build a paywall that actually
functions, just don't send the content unless you've paid. This addon relies
entirely on the fact that content which has not been paid for gets sent
anyway.

Realistically though, the answer is that paid journalism disappears, or the
Internet as we know it disappears. Increasingly lately it's looking like both
will happen.

~~~
balt_s
> Realistically though, the answer is that paid journalism disappears, or the
> Internet as we know it disappears. Increasingly lately it's looking like
> both will happen.

Seems a touch hyperbolic. My question would be: what part of the internet
depends on paid journalism and how would the disappearance of paid journalism
effect e.g. buy stuff online, looking at pornography, or accessing social
media?

~~~
esotericn
Please re-read my comment. I have not stated that they are dependent.

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majortennis
I'd sooner just not use those sites

~~~
mruts
I'd rather just have access to the information I want.

~~~
Cthulhu_
That's implying you somehow have a right to that content - it's a similar
argument that e.g. movie and music pirates use, but which they're not aware of
themselves. It's feeling entitled to the content, and/or fear of missing out.

But news flash: you are not entitled to something if you don't want to pay for
it.

~~~
icebraining
You're not entitled to decide what I'm entitled to.

~~~
tertius
Not as an individual no. But maybe you want to replace "entitled" with
"freedom" if you're arguing from a libertarian perspective.

------
mostafaberg
I don't understand the point of bypassing, the creators need to make money, if
you can afford it, subscribe, if not, use another website. it's that simple

~~~
icebraining
I subscribe to a couple of sites. I won't be subscribing for an extra monthly
fee I can't afford just to read one or two articles linked on HN. Therefore I
have two options: don't read the article, or bypass the paywall.

In both options, the outcome for the site is exactly the same. So, not being a
masochist, why shouldn't I choose the outcome that benefits me without harming
anyone else?

~~~
mostafaberg
But it is harming someone else in a way, they only want you to read it if you
pay for it, there will still be bandwidth costs to cover for people who bypass
the paywall, some might argue that in some paywalls, the content is already
sent to your browser anyway but that's a whole different story.

It's the same argument for piracy, "if I make a copy, I'm not taking away the
original, so I'm not stealing", which is just a lie to tell ourselves to feel
a bit better at the end of the day.

~~~
icebraining
I agree it's the same as in piracy, and I do the exact same there - pay for
what I can, download the rest.

Regarding the bandwidth costs, those are absolutely negligible, since the
methods for bypassing the paywalls either only fetch the text (e.g.
[http://outline.com](http://outline.com)) or cache it on other servers (e.g.
[http://archive.is](http://archive.is)).

It is definitively not what they wish, but not complying with someone's wishes
is not _harming_ them.

\--

On that last point, while I don't take my moral code from the law, I note that
it agrees with me; for example, even if you have a contract with a guy to
build your house, and you say your want a certain brand of pipes, but he ends
up using another, you're _not_ entitled to anything. Unfulfilled wishes are
not harms.

------
msravi
Technically, the extension is clearing cookies for the site, and setting the
"Referer" header to either google.com or facebook.com. Is it illegal to do
that?

Source: [https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
firefox/blob/m...](https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-
firefox/blob/master/background.js)

~~~
esotericn
Illegal?

What?

Wallace and Gromit in a case of... the Wrong Bits!?

~~~
MagnumOpus
IANAL but the definition of Wire Fraud is ridiculously flexible. Manipulation
of http headers to get free access to paid services is likely to get you
convicted if anyone cared enough to prosecute...

Also likely to be punishable under DMCA as circumventing access controls.

------
bad_user
Blocking ads being about privacy always seemed like hypocrisy and extensions
like these only prove it.

Of course, the ads revenue model for the Internet only happened because people
basically want free labor, being unwilling to pay for the content they
consume, screw the publishers the world will survive.

It's sad because what we'll get is legislature and/or more DRM.

~~~
icebraining
This extension proves nothing; it's perfectly sensible that someone worried
about the privacy of their reading doesn't want to make it worse by tying a
payment ID to their profile. Subscriptions are in that sense worse than ads.

~~~
bad_user
Haha, yes, exactly my point.

And this makes me think that the existence of DRM is justified.

------
rambojazz
How does this work? Do they reuse login credentials or something like that?

~~~
devilmoon
Depends on the website usually, one that I managed to "hack" is a newspaper in
my country (the biggest one actually) that only hides the article text through
a CSS class; You just remove that from the HTML through dev tools and have
access to the whole thing. I hope in most cases it is more complicated than
that

------
hawos
I want quality journalism but exporsure should be payment enough.

~~~
Cthulhu_
There's an /s in there right?

------
WorkLifeBalance
In which jurisdictions is this deliberate circumvention of access controls
legal?

~~~
darekkay
In Germany, this is defined in § 95a UrhG [0], as in "bypassing safeguard
measures to gain access to copyright material". "Anti-Anti-Adblocks", as in
Adblock filters bypassing adblock popups, were already declared illegal in the
BILD case [1].

[0]
[https://dejure.org/gesetze/UrhG/95a.html](https://dejure.org/gesetze/UrhG/95a.html)

[1] [https://www.wbs-law.de/it-recht/verbreitung-einer-
anleitung-...](https://www.wbs-law.de/it-recht/verbreitung-einer-anleitung-
zur-umgehung-einer-adblock-sperre-ist-rechtswidrig-71569/)

~~~
Tepix
The first word of the law is "wirksame", which means "effective".

It's very easy to argue that this protection that is trivial to circumvent is
not "wirksam".

~~~
darekkay
Yes, that's why I've added the second link. Someone posted a tutorial on how
to bypass the BILD Anti-Adblock. He argued that this is not an "effective"
protection, but a court ruled an "Anti-Adblock" script as "effective".

~~~
yanonymous2
It depends on the court. IIRC, that ruling came from the Landgericht Hamburg,
which has become a bit of a running gag because of their copyright friendly
rulings.

