Working Around the Pay Walls

[jesse_the_k]

Metafilter mentioned Lil Nas X in full lilac jumpsuit on the cover of the NYTimes Sunday Magazine.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/07/magazine/lil-nas-x.html

Followed the link and I hit the pay wall: "sign in to your account or subscribe.*"

I do pay for local publications. I won’t pay for the NYTimes because then I’d read the NYTimes and my mental health would plummet.

My workarounds in order of use:

1. Try another browser
2. Wayback Machine
3. Find another archive
4. Use my local library’s subscription

Try Another Browser

Sites use cookies and fingerprinting to count how many times you visit, and these are browser specific. I have five browsers on my laptop, so when my free views are done on Safari, I try again in iCab, Firefox, Brave, or MS Edge.

Wayback Machine

The Internet Archive's Wayback Machine** lets anyone save a page view at a particular time. Many people save NYTimes links!

Paste the paywalled link into the form at https://archive.org/web/

You’ll see a monthly calendar — scroll down to the blue spots and click there to get a snapshot.

If WBM doesn’t have it, visit https://archive.today

And paste the link in the lower "I want to search" box.

A Random Archiver

When that fails, I Google the URL. That leads to somebody who loved a piece so much they copied it wholesale. (This is the digital equivalent of reading a discarded newspaper you find on the bus.)

The Library’s NYTimes

And if that fails, I use my city library’s subscription — when I feed my library account number in, I get 24 hour access to the NYT site.

Tell me about your pay-wall tricks!

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* advertising supported print media for a couple centuries before the net.

** On "Rocky and Bullwinkle," Mr Peabody extracted his fractured history from a mainframe computer called the Way Back Machine

Comments

[melannen]

Yes, turning off javascript usually still works for me! It doesn't always work if what I want to see is an image, because for some reason a lot of sites use javascript to load their images, but I could see Lil Nas X in full lilac glory!

(I actually have javascript turned off by default, and have to add any site where I actually want the javascript features to the "allow" list. It is a quite short list. And I almost never see paywalls on news sites.)

[yourlibrarian]

Same -- it doesn't work for all sites though. I've been blocked by the Wall Street Journal and the Times of London, for example. But I often don't realize a site even has paywalls because the JS is off.

That said, there are a number of sites that won't work properly without some JS turned on and it can be an incredibly long list to pick and choose from.