[HN Gopher] Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io ...
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       Show HN: Ladder, open source alternative to 12ft.io and 1ft.io
        
       Hey there  I made a opensource alternative for these services.
       Although these workedd very well, I was not so confident what they
       do. So I made my own and opensourced it.  It is written in Golang
       and is fully customizable.
        
       Author : 2cpu1container
       Score  : 277 points
       Date   : 2023-11-06 12:04 UTC (8 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (github.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (github.com)
        
       | SigmundurM wrote:
       | You mention 13ft as another open source inspiration. How is
       | Ladder improving on what 13ft does?
        
         | 2cpu1container wrote:
         | I did try 13ft. But it misses several points.
         | 
         | The ladder applies custom rules to inject code. It basically
         | modifies the origin website to remove the Paywall. It rewrites
         | (most of) the links and assets in the origins HTML to avoid
         | CORS Errors by routing thru the local proxy.
         | 
         | The ladder uses Golangs fiber/fasthttp, which is significantly
         | faster than Python (biased opinion) .
         | 
         | Several small features like basic auth ...
        
           | withinboredom wrote:
           | > The ladder uses Golangs fiber/fasthttp, which is
           | significantly faster than Python
           | 
           | I have a feeling that this performance difference is
           | practically imperceptible to regular humans. It's like
           | optimizing CPU performance when the bottleneck is the
           | database.
        
             | ComputerGuru wrote:
             | Not for any publicly hosted instance, it's not. We're not
             | talking about the time it takes to perform one request but
             | the scalability it affords a small vm to handle so many
             | requests in parallel when it is being used by the general
             | public.
        
           | oh_sigh wrote:
           | If the paywall is implemented in client code, then usually
           | just disabling javascript for the site is enough to let you
           | view it. If it is implemented server side, then there usually
           | isn't a way around it without an account.
        
       | roydivision wrote:
       | Is it just me or has 12ft become less and less effective? I
       | rarely get through with it these days.
        
         | user_7832 wrote:
         | Their policies have apparently... changed. They accept
         | donations to not have your website bypassed. Archive.org is
         | much better.
         | 
         | Edit: apparently it is down now.
         | 
         | 402: PAYMENT_REQUIRED Code: DEPLOYMENT_DISABLED ID:
         | fra1::8wkv2-1699275385535-39dedae23d6a
        
           | jdiff wrote:
           | Is it donations they accept or legal threats?
        
             | ProllyInfamous wrote:
             | Yes.
        
           | i67vw3 wrote:
           | Archive.today never fails compared to Archive.org or various
           | browser extensions
           | 
           | To remove paywalls 12ft<Archive.org<Archive.today is my
           | opinion.
        
             | giancarlostoro wrote:
             | For some reason all the alternative "archive.XYZXDHWIQHDQ"
             | type of sites always give me a captcha page, and I am never
             | able to proceed. I'm assuming its to do with the cloudflare
             | DNS, well if they don't care to fix it on their end, I
             | don't care to use their service.
        
               | i67vw3 wrote:
               | There is a bit of 'tussle' going on between the two of
               | them for quite a few years as you pointed out.
               | 
               | https://x.com/archiveis/status/1018691421182791680?s=20
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971650
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19828702
               | 
               | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36971552
        
               | flutas wrote:
               | IIRC:
               | 
               | It's kind of a "everybody sucks" situation and there's no
               | real winners.
               | 
               | Archive.[whatever] setup a server system to give you
               | access from a country not your own, so that abusers have
               | a harder time of archiving illegal content, then
               | instantly reporting it to get the entire archive taken
               | down. He uses EDNS to do this, but CF doesn't provide
               | EDNS since it's a privacy issue to them.
               | 
               | So archive.[whatever] doesn't work for CF DNS because he
               | doesn't want to risk bad actors being able to take down
               | the archive.
               | 
               | Sensible reasons on both sides, especially for a service
               | like archive.[whatever], and the real losers in this
               | situation are the users.
        
               | PawgerZ wrote:
               | Copying my previous comment over because I found a fix
               | that works for me:
               | 
               | There's some issue with DNS over HTTPS, so you have to
               | whitelist their sites in your settings, or turn off DNS
               | over HTTPS (which I don't recommend).
               | 
               | To whitelist, on Firefox: Hamburger menu > settings >
               | privacy and security > DNS over HTTPS > Manage exceptions
               | > Add "archive.is", "archive.ph", and "archive.today"
        
             | ryeights wrote:
             | For those on mobile it was the opposite, since the archive
             | sites only show you the desktop sites
        
               | gnicholas wrote:
               | Does reader mode work on archive sites?
        
         | ams92 wrote:
         | I've rarely found it to be able to skip a paywall, I gave up
         | after trying a few times.
        
         | snarkyturtle wrote:
         | Before they went down it seemed that there were many big
         | publishers who got the owner to disable it for their sites.
         | Either that or the sites learned to actually not send their
         | articles unless the user is logged in (and didn't care about
         | googlebot not scanning it).
         | 
         | It was just an effective way to get through substack/medium in
         | my experience.
        
       | fader wrote:
       | For folks like me who have no idea what 12ft.io or 1ft.io are,
       | they appear to be services for bypassing paywalls on websites.
        
         | alberto_ol wrote:
         | Previous dicussions of the service on HN:
         | 
         | https://hn.algolia.com/?q=12ft.io
        
         | 2cpu1container wrote:
         | Those were Paywall bypassing tools. 12ft.io was shut down one
         | week ago and 1ft.io still works.
         | 
         | But I feel a bit unconfident to let someone inject code to
         | sites i view.
        
       | ktpsns wrote:
       | I got the feeling that these features should be part of a browser
       | extension the same way as there are AdBlock extensions. I guess
       | the reason it is not is "personal preference" of the author, or
       | is there some technical reason?
        
         | bilekas wrote:
         | I don't know for sure, but I would imagine there are more
         | severe actions taken against circumventing paid material
         | (content behind a paywall) than there is for free content
         | supplemented by advertisements..
         | 
         | Edit : The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits
         | circumventing an effective technological means of control that
         | restricts access to a copyrighted work. I guess that would
         | apply here.
        
           | mckirk wrote:
           | Given how liberally the DMCA is applied, you definitely don't
           | want to be on the wrong side of that.
           | 
           | I remember some guy that wrote a WoW bot and got sued using
           | the DMCA, with the argument that his bot was circumventing
           | the anti-cheat and the anti-cheat could be seen as a
           | 'mechanism protecting copyrighted material', because it was
           | safeguarding access to the game servers, the servers were
           | generating parts of the game world (such as sounds)
           | dynamically, and those were under copyright... Wild stuff.
        
             | judge2020 wrote:
             | As far a I know section 1201 has never been prosecuted.
             | Distribution of the copyrighted material is what's focused
             | on.
        
               | mckirk wrote:
               | This seems a good summary of the case I was talking
               | about:
               | 
               | https://massivelyop.com/2020/02/28/lawful-neutral-
               | cheating-c...
        
             | kkzz99 wrote:
             | It happened to Honorbuddy, a very advanced bot for World Of
             | Warcraft made by a German company. The argument in relation
             | to DMCA was that the bot was circumventing warden, the
             | games anti-cheat system. The legal battle was long and they
             | ultimately had to strip many features of the bot, until the
             | company went under.
        
           | nottheengineer wrote:
           | Good old section 1201. The EFF has been fighting it for a
           | while, but hasn't had much success unfortunately.
        
           | nerdbert wrote:
           | Isn't anything that can be circumvented ineffective?
           | 
           | Or, looking at it the other way, if you put a small sticker
           | that says "do not do X" and even one person follows that,
           | isn't that therefore an "effective" method?
        
           | Aaargh20318 wrote:
           | > The Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) prohibits
           | circumventing an effective technological means of control
           | that restricts access to a copyrighted work. I guess that
           | would apply here.
           | 
           | It doesn't if you're not in the US.
        
             | zeusk wrote:
             | Kim Dotcom believed so too, didn't fare too well.
        
         | overtomanu wrote:
         | there is below extension for this purpose which I know of, I
         | think there can be many more if we search for them
         | 
         | chrome and firefox extension for removing paywall:
         | https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-chrome
        
           | user764743 wrote:
           | This extension is asking for a lot of permissions it
           | shouldn't ask for
           | 
           | If you want an alternative that only requests permissions for
           | sites with paywalls, this one is better:
           | https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-
           | clea...
        
         | sva_ wrote:
         | > these features should be part of a browser extension
         | 
         | You mean like Bypass Paywall Clean?
         | 
         | https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean
        
           | johnmaguire wrote:
           | Is there a Firefox version?
        
             | sva_ wrote:
             | https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-firefox-
             | clea...
             | 
             | It used to be in mozillas addon store, but they removed it,
             | so have to install via dev mode
        
               | m-p-3 wrote:
               | Or you can load this uBO filterlist, which should
               | basically do the same thing as the extension
               | https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-clean-
               | filters/-/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt
        
               | bluish29 wrote:
               | That's why I like reading HN comments. Thanks for that
               | filter link
        
               | penguin_booze wrote:
               | No need for dev mode - signed XPIs are avaiable from
               | releases: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-
               | paywalls-firefox-clea....
        
               | sva_ wrote:
               | Ah you're right, I confused it with Chrome
        
             | xipho wrote:
             | You don't even need to install it, just add it as an import
             | line to UO, Google how. Game changing.
        
               | xaellison wrote:
               | What's UO? This would've been a great comment with a
               | little more info :)
        
               | rustyminnow wrote:
               | https://ublockorigin.com/
               | 
               | After install go to "Filter Lists" > Import ... > and add
               | the url of the "list"... which is actually from a
               | different repo: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bypass-
               | paywalls-clean-filter...
               | 
               | Note: this apparently works for fewer sites than the
               | linked extension.
        
               | gzer0 wrote:
               | Thank you for the insight. I usually hesitate to install
               | add-ons, but now I can avoid that step entirely based on
               | your advice.
        
               | sva_ wrote:
               | > Note: this apparently works for fewer sites than the
               | linked extension.
               | 
               | Still, this is great to know because it can then be used
               | on Firefox mobile.
        
           | Beijinger wrote:
           | Does not work so well anymore. Better use a bookmarklet
           | 
           | javascript:location.href='https://archive.is/?run=1&url=%27+e
           | ncodeURIComponent(documen...
        
           | NelsonMinar wrote:
           | This works quite well and probably covers 90% of my needs.
           | For the other 10% I still use archive.today or 12ft (RIP).
           | 
           | It's a shame Google won't let this addon be in the store.
        
       | some1else wrote:
       | Relevant: 12ft.io was banned by Vercel, taking down the
       | developer's entire account with multiple other hosted projects &
       | domains: https://twitter.com/thmsmlr/status/1718663563353755982
       | 
       | Edit: Access to other projects & domains was apparently restored
       | some time after:
       | https://twitter.com/thmsmlr/status/1719480558932148272
        
         | abofh wrote:
         | Lovely, the Google classic "ban the world" approach -- I've
         | been desperately trying to move my client off of vercel, this
         | might just be the gasoline.
        
           | rgrieselhuber wrote:
           | Aside from this (which is already very shitty and would cause
           | the same response in me) what are the issues you're running
           | into with Vercel?
        
             | abofh wrote:
             | - Support is failing us - I want my team to use you for
             | vercel support, but it isn't there. - Support is failing
             | our customers - when you fail, I end up reverse-depending
             | your repo to tell us why it's failing -- just give us a
             | clear answer, we all move away happy, bullshit and I go to
             | lambda where I just accept it. - EOD: Vercel makes
             | engineers happy to bullshit, but gives operations teams
             | nothing acceptable - I want a deliverable product.
        
               | judge2020 wrote:
               | FYI you have to use two line breaks to start a new line
               | with (HN's) Markdown.
        
               | Rauchg wrote:
               | Would love to dig into your support issues. Let me know:
               | rauchg@vercel.com
        
               | abofh wrote:
               | And if the support team had done so, I'd have nothing to
               | converse about :)
               | 
               | After digging upwards, additional support seems like an
               | option delivered too late, and too outside of 'proper'
               | channels - if you want a sanitized rant I can probably
               | deliver it tomorrow, but too-little too-late is where
               | vercel has landed in the operations team.
        
           | canadianfella wrote:
           | Why desperately?
        
           | threatofrain wrote:
           | One might consider Cloudflare as a very nice competitor to
           | Vercel in terms of DX, although I suspect all companies use a
           | ban the world approach, even banks.
        
             | MaKey wrote:
             | Not the best time to recommend Cloudflare.
        
               | judge2020 wrote:
               | Maybe, but they've kept customers informed throughout the
               | entire outage.
               | https://www.cloudflarestatus.com/incidents/hm7491k53ppg
        
               | JCharante wrote:
               | They just had a big outage. What's the probability of
               | having another so soon?
        
               | orphea wrote:
               | If outages don't depend on each other, the probability is
               | the same.
        
               | explaininjs wrote:
               | Why would you assume independence? I'd expect an outage
               | to put people "on edge" for a period of time following
               | the outage, during which changes are scrutinized to a
               | higher degree, and/or a greater engineering focus/budget
               | is dedicated to reliability to reflect the changed
               | business/image requirements.
        
           | benjaminwootton wrote:
           | I followed this drama on Twitter. The author was breaking the
           | terms of service and creating DMCA support burden for Vercel.
           | They had proactively been in touch with him a few times to
           | reach a solution.
           | 
           | I think it's quite reasonable that they blocked the account
           | rather than the project. You wouldn't have got that level of
           | service from big tech.
        
             | ComputerGuru wrote:
             | > I think it's quite reasonable that they blocked the
             | account rather than the project.
             | 
             | I'm just responding to your last sentence: why would you go
             | out of your way to say it is _reasonable_ to block the
             | account rather than the project?
             | 
             | I can understand locking the account just as the "lazy
             | default" but I would not call it in any way reasonable -
             | but you did, so I'm curious.
             | 
             | If _that_ is reasonable, what would you consider _un_
             | reasonable?
             | 
             | (Because to me, the obviously _reasonable_ thing to do
             | would be to block the project and not his entire account.)
        
             | ensignavenger wrote:
             | Care to provide any links? The Twitter claim above is that
             | their was no communication and the ban occurred on a
             | Friday.
        
           | lxe wrote:
           | Very disappointing that this was the path Vercel chose to
           | take. This is something I would expect from Google or Amazon,
           | but not a developer darling like Vercel. Seems like all
           | companies shed their values is service of growth and
           | capitalism at some point or another. A shame.
        
         | paulgb wrote:
         | Taking down all his projects (not just 12ft) is heavy-handed,
         | but otherwise Guillermo's response in that thread seems pretty
         | reasonable to me:
         | 
         | > Hey Thomas. Your paywall-bypassing site broke our ToS and
         | created hundreds of hours of support time spent on all the
         | outreach from the impacted businesses.
         | 
         | > Our support team reached out to you on Oct 14th to let you
         | know this was unsustainable and to try to work with you.
        
           | hombre_fatal wrote:
           | The 12ft guy doesn't look so great in that thread. He admits
           | to ignoring the email (gosh I was busy mmkay?) and then
           | argues that Vercel is lying about the extra work they had to
           | do.
        
             | flutas wrote:
             | > gosh I was busy mmkay?
             | 
             | Mischaracterization much? He was on Vacation.
             | 
             | How many of us read every email for personal projects that
             | comes in when you're half way across the world and supposed
             | to be relaxing.
        
               | paulgb wrote:
               | Sure, but if you go on vacation and don't check your
               | email for two weeks, you can't really claim "no warning".
               | If two weeks isn't sufficient notice because of vacation
               | it's fine to say so, but it's not the same thing as "no
               | warning" just because you're not checking email.
        
               | stronglikedan wrote:
               | To take it even further, if you're a one man operation,
               | not checking emails regarding your operation for two
               | weeks is pure negligence, vacation or not.
        
               | jdminhbg wrote:
               | I might ignore personal project emails while I'm on
               | vacation, but I also won't complain if one of those
               | emails says my billing method is out of date and I come
               | home and it's been turned off.
        
         | alwayslikethis wrote:
         | Shows the importance of controlling your own critical
         | infrastructure, or at least not being dependent for critical
         | functions. Other examples include Github and Discord, both
         | having shown the tendency do arbitarily ban users with little
         | recourse.
        
         | treyd wrote:
         | I don't know why anyone trusted Vercel in the first place. The
         | vibes of VC money funding an unsustainable offering for a
         | relatively niche market are so strong, it doesn't make any
         | sense.
        
       | janejeon wrote:
       | Really dummy question: how do services like this work? As in, how
       | do they bypass these paywalls?
       | 
       | The obvious thing is to mock Googlebot, but site owners can check
       | that the request isn't coming from a Google-published IP and see
       | that it's a fake, right?
        
         | narinxas wrote:
         | > site owners can check that the request isn't coming from a
         | Google-published IP and see that it's a fake, right?
         | 
         | just because they can doesn't mean they will... also most "site
         | owners" are (by this point) a completely different people than
         | "site operators" (who I take to be the 'engineers' who indeed
         | can check this IP things)
        
         | calflegal wrote:
         | related: If this is how they work, why doesn't google offer a
         | private service to allow publishers to have content indexed
         | while still protected?
        
           | matsemann wrote:
           | It used to be against guidelines to serve different content
           | to google vs what users would see. Not sure if still the
           | case, but I don't think it's in google's interest to give a
           | result that the user actually can't access.
        
             | ComputerGuru wrote:
             | I'm not aware that this policy has changed. What has
             | changed is that Google will rank results it can't
             | (officially) index without showing their content. I'm
             | guessing they _do_ shadow index them but use the whole "if
             | you outwardly can't tell they did then it's as if they
             | didn't" C++ compilers use to get away with insane
             | optimizations.
        
         | Fnoord wrote:
         | Some possible clues:
         | 
         | > https://github.com/kubero-dev/ladder#environment-variables
         | 
         | > USER_AGENT User agent to emulate Mozilla/5.0 (compatible;
         | Googlebot/2.1; +http://www.google.com/bot.html)
         | 
         | > X_FORWARDED_FOR IP forwarder address 66.249.66.1
         | 
         | > RULESET URL to a ruleset file
         | https://raw.githubusercontent.com/kubero-dev/ladder/main/rul...
         | or /path/to/my/rules.yaml
        
           | janejeon wrote:
           | Oh wow... I'm surprised that's enough. When I was researching
           | scraping protection bypass, you had to do some real crazy
           | stuff with the browser instance + using residential IPs at a
           | minimum...
        
             | 2cpu1container wrote:
             | Thats not the full story. It works on many sites, but some
             | (ft.com as an example) have more severe countermeasures to
             | bypass the paywall. Therefore the ladders modifies the
             | served HTML from origin to remove such.
             | 
             | Those rules still need to be build up. (by me or the OS-
             | community)
        
           | ComputerGuru wrote:
           | I don't know of _any_ off-the-shelf product that respects
           | X_FORWARDED_FOR unless the current request ip originates from
           | a whitelisted (or lan) address.
        
       | pacifika wrote:
       | Open source makes it easy for the cat in the cat mouse game,
       | right?
        
         | lucideer wrote:
         | There's no real cat & mouse game here (yet*) - sites don't do
         | anything to mitigate this. Sites deliberately make their
         | content available to robots to gain SEO traction: they're left
         | with the choice of allowing this kind of bypass or hurting
         | their own SEO.
         | 
         | * I say "yet" because there could conceivably be ways to
         | mitigate this, but afaik most would involve individual
         | deals/contracts between every search engine & every
         | subscription website - Google's monopoly simplifies this
         | somewhat, but there's not much of an incentive from Google's
         | perpsective to facilitate this at any scale.
        
           | tiagod wrote:
           | Google publishes IP ranges for GoogleBot. You can also
           | reverse-lookup the request IP address - the resolved domain
           | should in turn resolve to the original address.
        
             | ForkMeOnTinder wrote:
             | Does anyone else remember 10 years ago when Google would
             | penalize sites for serving different content to GoogleBot
             | than to normal users? Those were the days.
        
       | fyzix wrote:
       | I'm very new to this kind of service, but do you have to write
       | your own rulesets for each site you want to bypass? The repo
       | doesn't seem to include much...
        
         | 2cpu1container wrote:
         | Yes, the one i provide is still pretty empty yet. I plan to
         | build one that can be used as a starting point or as a default.
        
       | szaboat wrote:
       | Not relevant to the project but I usually check for earlier
       | versions of the paywalled pages in the wayback machine (~75%
       | success). I felt bad using these services (paywall removers), and
       | just feeling a bit better checking in archive.org.
        
       | jwmoz wrote:
       | 12ft was really good!
        
         | 2cpu1container wrote:
         | In deed it was. Sad it's gone.
         | 
         | One single downside was the intransparency. It was not clear
         | which code was added or removed on the site you where looking
         | at.
        
       | KoftaBob wrote:
       | Create a browser book mark and set this as the URL of the
       | bookmark:
       | 
       | javascript:window.location.href="https://archive.is/latest/"+loca
       | tion.href
       | 
       | It will usually open up the archived version of article without
       | the paywall.
        
       | gumby wrote:
       | The README says "The author does not endorse or encourage any
       | unethical or illegal activity."
       | 
       | Is it actually illegal anywhere to bypass a paywall?
        
         | 2cpu1container wrote:
         | Not sure about the paywalls. But it might be used for "drive by
         | attacks" or phishing.
        
       | JustinGoldberg9 wrote:
       | I still miss outline.com
       | 
       | I use txtify.it
        
       | donohoe wrote:
       | I use services like this as I often skip news site paywalls
       | because I just can't afford, nor is it practical, to have so many
       | subscriptions.
       | 
       | That said, I work in news media (and have been involved in
       | building paywalls at different orgs - NYT and New Yorker). I know
       | how money for these directly support journalism - salaries and
       | the costs with associated with any story.
       | 
       | If you are skipping paywalls a lot, I would encourage you to pay
       | for a subscription to at least one or two news sites you respect
       | - bonus points if its a small or medium local newsroom that
       | benefits!
       | 
       | For me that has been; NYTimes, New Yorker, Wired, Teen Vogue, and
       | my wife's hometown paper in Illinois.
        
         | mejthemage wrote:
         | There's a huge need for subscription bundles. I'd gladly pay
         | $20/mo for access to a bunch of big names, even if I'm limited
         | to like 60 articles per month combined across those sources.
         | 
         | Instead I just don't pay anyone, turn back when I encounter a
         | paywall and look for someone's summary if I'm really
         | interested.
        
           | orpheansodality wrote:
           | Isn't that the value-prop of Apple News?
        
           | QkPrsMizkYvt wrote:
           | There used to be an app called scroll
           | (https://twitter.com/tryscroll?lang=en), which got bought by
           | Twitter, which is now part of subscription, but only for the
           | top articles. Informed.so is doing something similar but
           | different: https://www.informed.so/
           | 
           | The problem creating such a service is that most media houses
           | believe that their content is the best thing since sliced
           | bread and thus they often don't want to partner. Even though
           | most of their content isn't that unique. Of course, some
           | publications do have unique content, e.g. nyt, bloomberg.
           | 
           | I could see artifact being an interesting company to tackle
           | this though (https://artifact.news/). They are already
           | sending traffic to news sites and only serving what the user
           | wants. If they now let me bypass paywalls for $20 that would
           | be nice.
        
         | stetrain wrote:
         | My personal experience with this has been that paying for a
         | subscription still gets me inundated with ads and marketing
         | (often more now that I'm on their official mailing list), is
         | still inconvenient since I may not be logged in to every news
         | site on every device where I may follow an article link, and
         | leaves me to fight through dark patterns to unsubscribe, since
         | a button to allow you to cancel online is clearly dark magic
         | that has not yet been invented.
         | 
         | I do wish there was a better way for me to share an account
         | across multiple news sites that let me properly pay for good
         | journalism without these issues. I do subscribe to a very local
         | news source that seems to handle this a lot better, but they
         | also don't paywall (most) of their primary content.
         | 
         | In the meantime I do find it strange that so many sites wish to
         | gain the advantage of advertising that they have put up an
         | article on the web, without actually providing that article. I
         | have no issue with paid content, but when that content gets
         | listed in search engine results and social media links like a
         | web page, but clicking on it does not behave like a web page,
         | It feels something feels like something has broken from the
         | idea of the linkable World Wide Web.
        
       | rounakdatta wrote:
       | Given a very different paywall model for Substack, what exactly
       | would work for bypassing their paywalls?
       | 
       | Wouldn't we always require a paid account to cache the HTML
       | through (the SciHub model)?
        
       | arendtio wrote:
       | Sounds great, not just for paywalls, but for removing CORS as
       | well:
       | 
       | > Remove CORS headers from responses, assets, and images ...
        
       | j-a-a-p wrote:
       | In the README there is a WHY paragraph:
       | 
       | > _Freedom of information is an essential pillar of democracy and
       | informed decision-making. While media organizations have
       | legitimate financial interests, it is crucial to strike a balance
       | between profitability and the public 's right to access
       | information. The proliferation of paywalls raises concerns about
       | the erosion of this fundamental freedom, and it is imperative for
       | society to find innovative ways to preserve access to vital
       | information without compromising the sustainability of
       | journalism._
        
         | j-a-a-p wrote:
         | For me this is grotesque. Democracy is in dispair so is
         | journalism. What exactly is this software doing to support
         | journalism or democracy?
        
           | 2cpu1container wrote:
           | We live in a world, where we have more misinformation and
           | poor journalism every day, and less money in the pockets of
           | the people to afford paying for good journalism. So this
           | might start a more open discussion on how to finance
           | journalism. And while discussions are still going on, people
           | can inform themselves with good journalism, which supports
           | the democracy.
        
       | boplicity wrote:
       | Slightly edited "Why":
       | 
       | Access to private property is an essential pillar of democracy
       | and the safe proliferation of ideas. While property owners have
       | legitimate financial interests, it is crucial to strike a balance
       | between property and the public's right to access property. The
       | proliferation of locks on doors raises concerns about the erosion
       | of this fundamental freedom, and it is imperative for society to
       | find innovative ways to preserve access to people's homes and
       | workspaces without compromising the sustainability of property
       | ownership.. In a world where property should be shared and not
       | commodified, locks should be critically examined to ensure that
       | they do not undermine the principles of an open and informed
       | society.
        
       | benatkin wrote:
       | This reminds me of the thread when 12ft was taken down.
       | 
       | Does anyone have any insight into how it would take Vercel
       | hundreds of hours of support time?
       | https://twitter.com/rauchg/status/1718680650067460138
        
         | someotherperson wrote:
         | My assumption here is that affected websites sent multiple,
         | persistent support tickets and engaged in back and forth
         | communication, as well as updates to the client, support team
         | contacting engineering/legal/management/meetings on how to deal
         | with 12ft.
        
       | TanguyN wrote:
       | I have noticed that on a lot of websites, if you stop the page
       | loading at just the right moment (you have to be quick), the
       | whole content will display without the paywall. And that's
       | without any external tools. These kinds of tools seem, of course,
       | much more convenient.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2023-11-06 21:00 UTC)