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Tell HN: Bypass Paywalls repository is gone

ta8645
24 replies
20h57m

Thanks to the Streisand Effect, I've installed this. Seems to work pretty well on the few sites I've tried. Hopefully the maintainer can find a new home and let people know on Twitter.

https://twitter.com/Magnolia1234B

tedivm
16 replies
20h8m

Wow, Gitlab has gotten ridiculous. They're making me sign up for an account, verify email, go through two captchas, and fill out a survey before they'll let me view the repository.

. . . and now that I've done all that the repository is 404ing.

xk_id
9 replies
18h57m

They really had an opportunity to capture significant market share and they ruined it. Their interface also doesn’t work without javascript. What a shame.

speedgoose
6 replies
12h31m

Why would they have to make their interface work without JavaScript? The few people who block JavaScript for sure know how to enable JavaScript again. And if they block JavaScript for security and trust reasons, well, they are going to download software from gitlab and run it anyway.

philwelch
3 replies
12h7m

This is the attitude that has ruined the entire web. The real question should be: why is JavaScript necessary and what does it add? (In the majority of applications, absolutely nothing.)

speedgoose
2 replies
10h24m

It adds interactivity and dynamic features that would be pretty slow or very challenging to implement in pure HTML/CSS.

philwelch
0 replies
51m

That’s nice I guess, but these should be progressive enhancements and the page should still work without JavaScript enabled.

deanishe
0 replies
17m

pretty slow or very challenging to implement in pure HTML/CSS

That's the heart of it, isn't it? It's challenging.

At the core of modern web development is the attitude that developer convenience trumps all.

The software is free after all. (The thousands you pay in bandwidth and hardware upgrade costs to keep running their bloatware doesn't count because none of that goes to the web developer, and is therefore irrelevant in their it's-all-about-me worldview.)

xk_id
1 replies
11h20m

Delivering STATIC DOCUMENTS via dynamic javascript apps running on top of http is the quintessential caricature of overengineering.

speedgoose
0 replies
10h25m

I would argue that gitlab.com is a bit more than a collection of static documents that could be delivered over gopher too.

userbinator
0 replies
14h11m

GitHub isn't usable without JS either anymore.

(A long time ago, I clearly remember it did. There's nothing about browsing files or participating in the effective forum that's called "Issues" which fundamentally requires JS.)

serial_dev
0 replies
18h32m

I suspect it was a conscious decision, they went for large, paying, enterprise customers instead of fighting for the free, public, and open source projects.

xnx
4 replies
19h58m

Phone number verification also fails for Google Voice.

djbusby
3 replies
19h25m

Loads of services have that issue, not just GitLab. Some are even blocking Twilio numbers.

simfree
2 replies
19h18m

Twilio is registered on the PSTN as an IPES, if your making the effort to block non-wireless OCNs, then your gonna block Twilio.

nashashmi
0 replies
18h40m

Ur

wkat4242
0 replies
8h30m

I think the sign up page is because the repo is blocked. It probably redirects to that for non-logged-in users.

cornholio
2 replies
18h38m

Another extension that deserves some fame is "Behind the overlay". it allows you to kill any unskipable full page overlay informing you about the benefits of a subscription and the excellent quality of the article beneath it.

Coupled with the Archive.ph button they make up my holy trinity of paywall bypass.

IG_Semmelweiss
1 replies
15h58m

curious, what's the 3rd part of the trinity now that Bypass Paywalls is gone ?

cornholio
0 replies
12h14m

It's not going anywhere, it just needs to find a more reliable home.

wkat4242
0 replies
8h29m

Thanks for the twitter link, the author has now posted a wetransfer link and is thinking about another home.

spxneo
0 replies
19h59m

warning: gitlab link is taken down too, dont waste time

nottorp
0 replies
20h17m

Streisand Effect indeed... I wasn't aware this existed but now I've saved a copy.

ktosobcy
0 replies
6h27m

Uhm... maybe codeberg.org? Or self-hosted forgejo/gitea?

coretx
6 replies
22h22m

The gitlab one is "clean". But i don't remember the exact details regarding what it means. Just not to use the "dirty" one.

leoh
5 replies
22h13m

The clean one is not “clean” in that it still does all kinds of tracking

michael9423
4 replies
22h2m

What do you mean with this?

cormorant
0 replies
20h33m

If you look at the source code in any of the mirrors people have linked, you'll find that the "clean" one that was taken down today does not have Google Analytics.

compuguy
0 replies
19h10m

Okay, for some reason they took down that one but the original (but not maintained) fork is gone. Fascinating...

tristanj
0 replies
22h20m

The github repository isn't under active development. The gitlab repository exists because a contributor was frustrated with the slow updates, forked it, fixed many bugs and removed google analytics, and actively maintained it.

https://web.archive.org/web/20240114042043/https://gitlab.co...

koito17
0 replies
22h25m

The Gitlab one is actually maintained. They haven't been using GitHub for a while now. (Plenty of updates to the extension have occurred within the past 6 months, the date of the last commit on GitHub)

KomoD
0 replies
22h22m

The "clean" version is a fork made by someone else, non-clean version has/had Google Analytics in it, and the fork is more actively maintained

bubblethink
10 replies
17h57m

Why was this hosted on gitlab.com ? If you're not on github, the discoverablity is pretty low. You are not self hosting. There is no upside for a project like this to be on gitlab.com. If you're already taking the hit of not being mainstream, why not self host in a sane country ?

brnt
4 replies
12h48m

Discoverability is solved by being on the Mozilla AddOn store.

Besides, not everybody cares about discoverability.

ivann
3 replies
7h57m

But it was removed from AMO. That was an issue as people that installed it from AMO just stopped receiving updates silently. You had to uninstall it and re-install the gitlab version for the auto-update to work again.

brnt
1 replies
5h52m

Hmm, didn't catch that. I see there's still _a_ Bypass add-on on Mozilla. There always were a few, and close forks last I bothered to check. Is this different?

timbit42
0 replies
1h19m

It was removed from AMO after it was already on the site. Maybe they didn't want to move it.

neilv
2 replies
17h35m

I don't know about this project, but some projects fled GitHub on principle, when they sold out to MS.

If this project were, say, an adtech company, or someone publishing open source solely for resume-boosting reasons, then principles might not matter.

vivzkestrel
1 replies
12h55m

i dont understand this principle at all, mind explaining what is the problem with MS owning github?

bsder
1 replies
17h31m

1) There are lots of reasons to avoid Github and they are all spelled Microsoft.

2) Putting something on Gitlab means that there is one level of activation energy between idiots trying to pad out some corporate "social goodwill" number by "fixing" things on your project.

If I ever had to open-source anything, I would host it somewhere else and mirror a read-only repo to github.

bdw5204
0 replies
3h55m

I've never experienced the latter but if somebody wants to waste their time sending me unwanted pull requests I can just ignore them.

idle_zealot
8 replies
21h29m

Do bypasses like this, which I assume just do things like deleting "uncloseable" client-side modals and spoofing UA/referrer headers, count as copy-protection circumvention technology under the DMCA?

Karellen
4 replies
20h38m

Does the thing being bypassed prevent you from saving the page, or from making in any other way a copy of any content you've already fetched?

If not, how could it be classed as copy-protection?

Edit: One other thing: if spoofing UA headers was a problem, all the browsers in the world would fall foul of it - because non-Mozilla browsers all say that they're Mozilla, and Opera said it was IE, and Chrome said it was Safari, and now a bunch of browsers say they're Chrome - at the same time as saying they're Mozilla. Except it's more complicated than that.

Hello71
2 replies
17h32m

this is basically the "computer scientist" view of the world in https://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23, especially the Monolith bit. spoofing UA could be legal in general or when done for interoperability but illegal when done with intent to bypass access control.

beeboobaa3
1 replies
14h4m

Right, the UA spoofing browsers perform is historically done to bypass sites not wanting to serve them content.

LoganDark
0 replies
12h12m

Well the UA spoofing I perform is done to bypass sites not wanting to serve me content.

idle_zealot
0 replies
20h28m

I guess it's less copy-protection and more access-control.

emmelaich
0 replies
17h33m

Maybe it's fraud? The user claims to be reading an article via a facebook reference but in fact does not use facebook.

Hard to see how to police that from the web site's perspective though.

To be clear I'm not advocating for anything here.

Yeul
0 replies
8h41m

The question is: do you actually want to spend time dealing with that or just nuke anything that gives you a legal headache?

When big corpos tell you to jump you jump.

pogue
3 replies
21h30m

It's good that there are forks, but I was under the impression that the head person running the project was the one keeping all the paywall bypasses up to date. Even if these forks work, if no one is actively keeping track of each site that is being bypassed as it breaks or changes, they won't be working for long.

ZunarJ5
2 replies
21h22m

I am looking into uploading it on archive.org as well. Fingers crossed someone takes the torch. Bless open source.

Looks like the official store one was last updated on March 1, so the forked links from mid March are only slightly ahead.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/bypass-paywal...

Hopefully the original user migrates to a new platform, but if this store version gets removed I think we can all assume they got struck with a lawsuit threat.

edit - done: https://archive.org/details/bypass-paywalls-firefox-clean-ma...

cormorant
1 replies
21h6m

What did you mean by "Item details is no longer available via the wayback machine"?

The Wayback Machine seems unable to archive the JavaScript-based GitLab UI in general; it wasn't removed. For example, another major repo: https://web.archive.org/web/20240228225845/https://gitlab.co...

wkat4242
4 replies
20h9m

There's also a version still in the Firefox catalog (the official one has been banned from there too): --link removed, it was a fake, the one I referred to is gone too :( --

This is a help in particular for mobile firefox because they refuse to let us sideload addons.

lemoncookiechip
2 replies
20h0m

Pretty sure that's the version that kept calling Google Analytics, and why we got a clean fork "Bypass Paywalls Clean".

EDIT: Actually, never mind, this isn't even that, this is a fake according to the reviews.

wkat4242
1 replies
19h10m

Oh yes the one I mean is Bypass Paywalls Clean (D). But this also seems to have been kicked out of the Mozilla store. It was just a resubmit by someone else after the original got kicked out when a French newspaper complained.

We really need sideloading capability in mobile firefox :(

Yeul
0 replies
8h29m

You can sideload in Firefox Android beta branch.

Settings> about Firefox> tap on the fox logo a few times> debug menu enabled> now you see "install ad on from file" under advanced in the settings menu.

fwn
0 replies
10h15m

In Firefox for Android Nightly, you can (since recently) sideload extensions via the hidden debug menu (tap the Firefox logo in the About section a dozen times). This will add an "Install extension from file" option to the main settings menu.

I don't know whether this also works in the standard version of Firefox for Android.

It is good they reenabled this feature. Since it is/was very short-sighted of Mozilla to make their centralized addon store the single gatekeeper for extension access on user devices. As if they never thought about power dynamics in software.

garciansmith
3 replies
21h9m

I get 404s now following those links.

spxneo
2 replies
19h57m

how powerful do you have to be in the US to be able to take down mirrors within an hour? this is disturbing to see

KomoD
0 replies
12h22m

You just need a lot of money and some lawyers, everyone just folds as soon as lawyers and legal threats get involved.

CatWChainsaw
0 replies
19h36m

Specifically for a tool for bypassing paywalls. I'd expect this behavior if we were talking about CSAM or a stream of terrorists beheading people.

ZunarJ5
2 replies
20h49m

I updated the archive.org copy with this one. Oh man, what a great site.

cormorant
1 replies
20h39m

I think you need the "chrome" repository too.

ZunarJ5
0 replies
20h34m

I'll put all 3 you linked up.

ktosobcy
0 replies
10h18m

Is it possible to clone it instead of only downloading current version or viewing history?

IncreasePosts
4 replies
16h44m

The easiest way to bypass paywalls is to just disable JavaScript for the site. It works pretty much everywhere I've tried it except for the WSJ, which I suspect this extension doesn't work for either.

Edit: or, maybe it does. I see WSJ.com in the config, with a referrer as drugereport and user agent as Google not to get around it.

afp14
2 replies
13h5m

it works on WSJ, I use it for that site. for some bypasses, it doesn't "just load the page" but rather pops up a link to archive.ph or similar to pull the article, still convenient

I also point out there is "bypass paywalls" and "bypass paywalls clean", kind of similar to the uBlock family with "uBlock origin" being the "good guy" edition

blamazon
1 replies
10h50m

Some WSJ articles work and some don't for me. I think the difference may be opinion pieces.

fwn
0 replies
10h20m

Not sure about WSJ, but in some cases the extension fetches the content from archive today and inserts it into the displayed website tab.

If there is no mirror on archive today, the extension cannot insert it.

terrycody
0 replies
14h28m

I remember there is a big media site, which even use Archive.is can't check its paywalled content part, do you know that site?

Can this plugin work on it? I doubt.

CM30
4 replies
19h56m

Seems like Gitlab seems to be even more ridiculous with their responses to large businesses and potentially dubious copyright claims than GitHub is. It's not the only time this month I've seen them take down repositories related to projects that some large company wanted removed despite it not necessarily being illegal in any way.

wkat4242
3 replies
8h26m

Yeah this is not a DMCA thing, there is nothing copyrighted in the code.

The core problem is the newspapers wanting their cake and eat it. They want those sweet google hits but they don't want to give their articles to readers without payment. So there's always a way around it if you can manage to fake a google spider.

For me the current model is so broken. I end up on lots of different newspaper sites. But no, I'm not going to sign up for a subscription to the washington post or whatever to view 1 or 2 articles per month. That's just ridiculous, I don't even live in America. I subscribe to the local paper because it has content I read every day.

If I'd subscribe for every article I get referred to by google or here on HN I would spend hundreds in monthly subscriptions :P It's just not a reasonable ask.

zeta0134
0 replies
4h16m

The trouble is that the ideal model (newspapers on the whole used to cost, like, 0.25c) is extremely tricky in the online space, because payments are high friction and small payments especially are not really economically viable. I'm not sure what solution could possibly exist that wouldn't involve some hyper-common payment provider building out a service to solve this specific thing, and then getting all the online news sites to agree to use it, and then getting most visitors to accept "I need to spend less than a dollar if I want to read this article" as normal and okay.

It's ... kinda crazy when I type it out.

But that's basically what advertisements do for publishers today, and if we're moving away from that model (and we *really* should), what do we replace it with?

ktosobcy
0 replies
6h29m

Yeah... some services offer a couple of articles per month and that would be nice though... there is again a way to circumvent it. I'd sign up for a free account with like 1-3 articles views per month because literally I don't read more in majority of the sites (apart from links on HN or reddit)... I do pay sub for the sites I visit often (at least 1-3 times a week)...

CM30
0 replies
7h2m

Yeah that's the thing isn't it? When people use a search engine, they want to be able to click through to the result and read it, not have to subscribe to some paid service to do so.

If your business model doesn't let you offer that, then the answer is to accept you're not gonna be able to rank in search engines. That's it. Maybe a search engine for paid content could exist as its own thing, but that would be because people using it would expect they'd have to pay for what they want to read there.

The attempts to get both Google hits and paywall content feel like some author trying to make everyone pay them money to borrow their book from a library; completely counter to the point of the institution to begin with.

zerof1l
3 replies
21h23m

Apparently this page works! You can download latest version from here: https://gitlab.com/magnolia1234/bpc-uploads/

EDIT: magnet link with all btc-uploads content magnet:?xt=urn:btih:7839e845f7965bed1035dc5d4635811d1ede73d2&dn=magnolia1234-bypass-paywalls-uploads-master

spxneo
0 replies
19h58m

gitlab link does not work

donutpepperoni
0 replies
18h37m

Seeding for Streishand ™

anthk
2 replies
19h39m

Use DIllo, Lynx or Links on the URL's. If that fails, head to gemini://gemi.dev, the section News Waffle, and paste your own link. Use Lagrange, Gplaces or whatever Gemini client you like.

djbusby
1 replies
19h23m

Does Gemini have any news about being vegan?

anthk
0 replies
8h44m

The Gemini 'News Waffle' service it's just an HTML decrapifier, you can put almost any web source as the input. Copy and paste the URL from a browser and that's it.

aksophist
2 replies
18h25m

Now I wish I had bookmarked the distributed (peer to peer?) github replacement I’ve seen trend on HN a couple of times. It seems like a good place to host something like this. Anyone remember which tool I’m talking about?

NelsonMinar
2 replies
21h6m

This extension works remarkably well. But it requires frequent updates to stay working as sites change. I sure hope there's some statement on what's up soon.

rrrrrrrrrrrryan
1 replies
16h53m

I've ran into this issue as well.

Is there an alternate "store" for open source chrome extensions?

Something akin to F-droid that keeps them up to date?

sunaookami
0 replies
9h34m

You can only install from the Chrome Web Store. All other methods are annoying and you have to manually whitelist extension ids. I don't understand why the Chrome Web Store does not fall under the Digital Markets Act in the EU. Google is clearly a Gatekeeper here.

rounakdatta
0 replies
14h8m

Orthogonal question: Does bypassing of paywall somehow work for Substack? Can a solution like RealDebrid / SciHub, but for Substack exist?

penguin_booze
0 replies
16h50m

I'm grateful for the extension. I used to see a steady stream of updates. I hope the author find another host to host the repository.

ktosobcy
0 replies
21h30m

So... any mirror out there?

cmer
0 replies
15h43m

I happen to have downloaded the master branch at 9am this morning. Here's a torrent: magnet:?xt=urn:btih:92042e65d1b38cd5d97c29baa4d0c9e2af46f355&dn=bypass-paywalls-chrome-clean-master.zip

NoelJacob
0 replies
3h0m

I think a good idea would be forking Telegram's quick article view feature source code and developing on it.

KomoD
0 replies
23h5m

Weird, someone said something about that earlier today but then it got restored and now it's gone again?