Technically, if one were to disable the JS used for said paywall on a site, they would never see it again. I haven’t personally done this but has anyone tried?
If the website developer is worth their salt, the article contents won’t be delivered from the web server until the reader has been authorized. So it doesn’t matter how much JS code you disable.
There are multiple scripts being used on almost every website. You need to find the one that pops up the paywall. Use NoScript or just unlock origin (I use both) and with some trial and error it’ll work just fine
It would only work if they specifically bundle the functions which cause the paywall in a separate file (it is very unlikely for this to be the case), and also relies on the assumption that the paywall is entirely front-end side, as well as the “default” content to be without paywall (as opposed to the default content being paywalled and requiring JavaScript to load the actual content).
Not a specific file but a domain. And yes, if the processing is done server-side then there is very little we can do about that. Note that I’m not asking one to disable every script on the page, just the specific script for the pop-up/blurring by the paywall
I think I understood what you were suggesting: try disabling the script tags one by one on a website until either we tried them all or we got through the paywall.
My point is that it’s very unlikely to be feasible on most modern websites.
I mention files because very few bits of functionality tend to be inline scripts these days, 90-95% of JavaScript will be loaded from separate .js files the script tags reference.
In modern webapps the JavaScript usually goes through some sort of build system, like webpack, which does a number of things but the important one for this case is that it re-structures how the code is distributed into .js files which are referenced from script tags in the html. This makes it very difficult to explicitly target a specific bit of functionality to be disabled, since the code for paywall is likely loaded from the same file as a hundred other bits of code which make other features work - hence my point that the sites would actively have to go out of their way to make their build process separate their paywall code from other bits of functionality in their codebase, which is probably not something they would do.
On top of this, the same build system may output differently named files after the build since they’re often named after some hashing of the content, so if any code changes in any of the sources the output file name changes as well in an unpredictable way. This would likely be a much smaller issue since I can’t imagine them actively working on all parts of their codebase all the time.
Lastly, if the way a website works is that it loads the content and then some JavaScript hides it behind a paywall then it’s much simpler to either hide the elements in front of it or make the content visible again just by using CSS and HTML - i.e. the way adblockers remove the entire ad element from the pages.
This is an oversimplification. Paywalls are generally designed to circumvent simplistic “remove popover” approaches. Sites like 12ft.io and paywalls removal extensions use myriad solutions across different site to circumvent both local and server side paywalls.
Some extra context / clarification from the thread re Vercel: they did warn him starting two weeks ago. They’ve stated he has a line open with customer support to get his other projects restored but that hasn’t happened yet.
I think that Vercel wants to drop them as a customer entirely. Vercel could’ve suspended the services related to 12ft.io, but Vercel chose to nuke their account from orbit. I’m unsure why Vercel suspended their domains tho. That’s just asking for trouble with ICANN.
12ft.io was performative useless garbage anyway, if any site can just ask your paywalling bypass site to not bypass their paywall, what is the point of your site
My phone won’t open xpi files and the only solutions I’ve been able to find is either create a html file in the same folder, which I don’t know how to do on android, or download and install an extension which is ALSO only available as an xpi 🤦
Looks like it SHOULD work, but when I search for addons, I get quick (far too quick to select any of them m) flashes of gray rectangles where suggestions would normally be and no search results after I execute the search.
I’m beginning to suspect that the Firefox app is broken 😕
Well I use Fennec for Android from F-Droid, which has the option of using custom collections for addons.
I don’t think it’s possible yet on “normal” Firefox other than Nightly.
I also get infinitely CAPTCHA blocked on Android trying to connect to archive.md and the other domains. Doesn’t matter if I use Firefox, chrome, Samsung mobile browser.
It is in fact an issue when using Cloudflare’s DNS. They have written a comment on hackernews explaining the issue. news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
Interesting thanks for sharing that. I don’t use cloudflare as my dns resolver though.
EDIT: That’s not true. I just double-checked my DNS settings for this network and it WAS using Cloudflare after all! I guess the private DNS settings weren’t working. Let’s hope this fixes the issue because it’s been a major PITA for months. I will update after the cache has had some time to clear. Thank you!!!
I haven't had any issues with medium personally. But I have pretty extensive blocking as a whole (ublock, adguard, ghostery, ddg, bypass paywalls clean, canvas blocker, etc)
It’s just a glorified web scraper, I didn’t know it was this popular. You could build a barebones scraper and output in less than 10 lines with curl in PHP. And 12ftio used to inject its own code into the output, it’s funny how people were Ozzy with that.
Everyone who ever does web scraping knew serving it on his own public domain was going to be a problem.
Yeah, that’s literally the same as 12ft or any other anti paywall tool. I mean hey, it’s just two lines, that’s even 8 less than the original smoothbrain, absolutely easy to use for any end user. Thanks. /s
I’m not suggesting people do it or that the OP was right to suggest it. I just wanted to show it more to see if I could remember how it’s done since I’ve not done web dev in about 2 years and am a bit rusty.
That’s not even what 12ft.io was. It wasn’t scraping anything, it was just a redirect to the google web cache. Importantly, it was also accessible, something that anyone could use without installing anything.
It stopped working on any of the sites I ever bothered to use it on anyway- most of them wisened up to the crawler bypass and simply made a 2 sentence tagline visible to crawlers that hit the SEO terms, with everything else hidden. Soooo nothing of value lost and Capital comes to claim its pie once again.
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