That is using messaging for the web through Google Fi. But there is little reason to do that now as Google messages the app itself can be used through messages.google.com. there are several stand alone computer applications that use the portal as well (messages in the windows store, messages or google-messages package in most distros. Dunno about Mac. Either way, instead of fi being the backend, the app connects directly to your PC. You just have to pair your phone using the app directly.
Damn, a security researcher discovered what was known from late 1990’s/early 2000’s: a link on a webpage could take you in a place that it is not the one the link say it will be.
I get the knee-jerk jaded cynicism but this is a little more nuanced than that.
“All they have to do is set up two different URL destinations in their post. In the case outlined above, clicking the forbes.com link actually takes you to joinchannelnow.net. Once on this site, the server checks to see whether the request is coming from a typical browser (that’s you). If so, it’ll take you to the spam site, which for this situation is a crypto scam Telegram channel. However, if the server detects the request is coming from something else—like a X link-verifying bot—it’ll assume the request is not being made by a human; in these cases it returns a legitimate URL. So, even though the first link is to joinchannelnow, X checks it and is taken to forbes.com, and so it places that URL preview on the post. You’re experience will be different.”
Honestly, ANY platform that obscures links through redirection should be considered unsafe. If you can’t verify the target URL before you click the link, then you are asking trouble. Twitter and similar platforms do this so they can track you more effectively. (In the past it also served the purpose of shortening links to SMS-friendly lengths, but that ship sailed like 10 years ago.)
Not that visibility automatically would make it safe, but it is the bare minimum required as a starting point.
Closer to 15 years ago. Skype and WhatsApp (before the FB nonsense) were viable options to SMS as long as your friends were also using the same app.
Although, the viability also depended on the price you had to pay for the data. If it’s like 1.5 €/MB, sending snail mail suddenly seems like a very appealing alternative. Some time around 2003-2005 there was still one company that actually charged that much while all the competitors were switching to monthly packages or even unlimited plans. The price range was absolutely wild back then.
That’s true. I was referring specifically to Twitter’s SMS integration. I forget exactly when they increased the tweet size limit beyond what could be sent via SMS, but it was a long time ago. At first, SMS was a big part of Twitter’s success. People used Twitter on flip phones with no browser or apps. It was basically an SMS broadcast service.
The thing that stops me from moving to rss is that I don’t follow any news sites or blogs. I’ve tried but they all kinda suck to me. The only thing I follow is youtube creators and lemmy communities. Lemmy is my rss feed pretty much.
I figured there are interesting people out there who don't really blog often, but who might post something online a few times ever year and whom I'd like to stay updated on. So I started trying to collect some of these relatively inactive personal feeds.
It's not ass noisy as following blogs or social media, which is what I like about it. The only drawback is of course that so few people maintain an RSS feed.
I follow my lemmy community with my rss and I tossed in a few other sites I felt interested in but always forget to look at like the local paper, that said my server has been collecting months of info but I haven’t setup the link to my mobile app out of laziness so it has all been going to waste
I started using RSS during the summer. It filled a hole after I quit reddit, since I used to get a lot of my news from the subreddits for my city and my province. There’s also the on-going bickering between Meta and Canadian lawmakers/news media groups which means I see way less articles on social media than I used to. Honestly, after adding a couple local news outlets to my RSS apps, I feel better informed than ever before, and I spend a lot less time arguing with people on reddit. Win-win if you ask me.
Anyone looking for good RSS readers, I use Feeder on my phone (Android-only), Fluent Reader on desktop (cross-platform), and I also use the RSS widget of the Renewed Tab addon for Firefox. Both apps I use work locally, and have the ability to fetch full articles in-app (the addon just opens the articles in Firefox).
Something also worth mentioning: you can often find RSS feeds by checking the page’s source (on Firefox: right-click and “View Page Source”) and using Ctrl+F to search, there’s usually a URL somewhere. Keywords to search for: “feed”, “RSS”, “xml”, “atom”. For example, if I go to this community’s page on lemmy.world, I can Ctrl+F “feed” on the page source to find https://lemmy.world/feeds/c/technology.xml
If you host an RSS aggregator yourself such as FreshRSS, I’d recommend using ReadYou or FeedMe (not Open Source) instead so that you can sync. I use FeedMe on Android and Fluent Reader on Linux. It’s nice to have everything synced.
I also recommend rss-bridge if you’re self hosting. Helps gets you more RSS feeds from websites that don’t have them.
I don’t self-host (…yet. I do have a couple of things I’d like to play around with eventually) but honestly, for my use case I don’t feel any need to sync RSS. I mostly read articles on my phone, and if I’m on my PC I just remember which articles I’ve read. I can see how fetching RSS locally on each device might fall apart if one follows a large number of feeds, though.
yeah, i need a new smart home standard every two weeks, so i have a reason to keep throwing away all my smart home devices and install new ones, because my new smart lightbulb can’t talk to my smart toaster. /s
That’s actually the point of matter, to solve the problem you’re alluding to. Home automation was all over the place in terms of compatibility, but an open standard like this should make it easier.
If you have a subscription to Apple News, you can use the Share > News.app feature to open most paywalled major news outlets. And the outlet gets paid.
I don’t have an Android device, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has something similar.
Over the past several years, countless websites have added paywalls: If you want to read their articles, you have to sign up and pay a monthly fee. Some sites have a “metered” paywall—meaning you can read a certain number of articles for free before they ask for money—and others have a hard paywall, where you’ll have to pay to read even one article.
It’s mostly news websites that have paywalls, largely because relying on advertising income alone just isn’t viable anymore, and news companies are pursuing more direct revenue sources like monthly subscriptions. And, of course, we’re not against paywalls—and you probably aren’t either. If you can afford to pay to read articles, you absolutely should. But whether you lost your password, haven’t saved it on your phone, are in a rush, or are just strapped for cash and promise yourself that you’ll subscribe later, there are several ways to bypass paywalls on the internet.
You may be able to use some of these methods successfully today, but that could change in the future as websites clamp down on bypass methods. I hope that you support the websites that you read by signing up for memberships—especially your friendly local news outlet—but if you can’t right now, here are some of the best ways to bypass paywalls online.
Paste the headline into Google
The simplest ways are often the best. There are plenty of paywalled websites that have an arrangement that lets people arriving from Google search access their articles for free. Your first port of call should be to copy the headline and paste it into the search bar on Google. The article should appear as the first result, so just click that to read it for free.
Try a Facebook redirect
Some paywalled websites let readers arriving from Facebook read articles for free, and the method works even if you don’t have a Facebook account. To do it, open the article you want to read and go to the address bar of your web browser. Now paste facebook.com/l.php?u= before the URL of the paywalled article and open the page. This’ll show you a Facebook redirect page, and you can click Follow Link to open the website. The paywalled article should now be free to read.
Open the link in an incognito window
Another quick way is to open the paywalled articles in an incognito window in your web browser. Just note that this method works with metered paywalls only. If you’ve used up your free article quota for the month on any website, opening its articles in an incognito window could let you keep reading without paying yet.
Disable JavaScript in your browser
Some websites use JavaScript to hide content behind paywalls, and you can circumvent those blocks by disabling JavaScript in your browser. Note that disabling JavaScript can (and will) break most websites—some may not let you view comments, while others may not load at all. But it’s worth trying if you just need to read the content of the post.
Ideally, you’d use a separate browser for this so that you don’t have to keep enabling and disabling JavaScript. Once you’ve chosen your secondary browser, check out our guide to disabling JavaScript in various ones.
Edit a couple of elements on the webpage
If you understand a bit of HTML and CSS, you can edit elements using your browser to go past some paywalls. Essentially, you’re editing the page to remove the banners that lock content behind a subscription. It’s a lot like opening the curtains to reveal the nice view outside your window.
It works with some websites, but others have added a hard block that reveals the article only if you’ve signed in with a paid account. Still, it’s worth trying once to see if it works:
On any website, right-click the banner just below the last visible sentence of the article and select Inspect Element. This will open up a console where you can search for the offending elements and hide or change them. The exact element varies from site to site, but it’s often labeled display, paywall, or subscribe. Here’s a neat GIF on Reddit that shows you how to get it done.
Try browser add-ons
There are lots of browser extensions that allow you to bypass paywalls on most websites. You can check out Bypass Paywalls (works on Chrome, Edge, and Firefox), or Bypass Paywalls Clean (Firefox). For academic articles, Unpaywall (Firefox, Chrome) is a good choice.
Use 12ft.io
A simple website created with the sole purpose of skipping paywalls, 12ft.io provides a simple solution to this problem. The website is probably the most user-friendly solution here. Simply paste the link on the “Remove Paywall” bar and click it. The website will show you the cached, “unpaywalled version” of the page. The only problem is that it does not work on all websites. If you get the “access denied” message, try this next tool.
Archive the page to bypass the paywall
Archive.today is a website that archives any website you paste the link on their bar. It’s like taking a screenshot of any website with a time stamp (a self-described “time capsule,” if you will). It “saves a text and a graphical copy of the page for better accuracy” and gives you a short link to an unalterable record of any web page. And you can use this to read the entire article and bypass the paywall. If the website you’re trying to bypass isn’t already archived (it would show up after pasting the link on the black “I want to search the archive for saved snapshots” bar), then put it on the red “My URL is alive and I want to archive its content.” This tool has worked 100% of the time I have used it.
Check out paywall bypass shortcuts on iPhone
The last method on our list works only on iPhones: Apple’s free Shortcuts app lets you run automation routines on your iPhone, and its tools have been used to bypass paywalls on various websites. There are plenty of these shortcuts and they may not work with all websites. You can try AntiPaywall, Bypass Paywall, Paywall and Cookie Bypass, or Unpaywall.
Depends on the instance. Lemmy.One has downvoting turned off, for example.
(edit) Also, there are differences between posts and stories/blogs on the fediverse. On the stories/blogs you get an option to favorite/boost instead of upvote or downvote.
And since Lemmy/Kbin/Mastodon all deal with it in slightly different ways, maybe they just got confused.
as a longtime mastodon user, tech articles about the fediverse are often very confused and under researched. it’s like tech reporters take one look at the websites and their brains shut off- if they ever even looked at them to begin with.
Not only can kids not afford the ridiculous ticket prices, but they aren’t interested in a Gen X movie series or yet another vapid adaptation of an equally-ancient, mind-numbing newspaper cartoon that was created solely for the purpose of extracting wealth.
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