Recently i stumbled on too many clickgates on the Medium blog Towards Data science. Considering that most people publish to share knowledge on Medium and are driven into putting their content behind a paywall, without actually getting paid for it, including myself. I felt like Medium is running the academic publishing scheme. Get free content and get paid for it. So I decided to create a small script to bypass the paywall on Medium, it turns out it also works on other newssites. Heres the website: https://sugoidesune.github.io/readium/
For the curious I will explain the technical aspects in a comment.
Here is a gist of the commented code. It works by fetching the HTML content of the website, anonymously with no cookies. Using the fetch API. In a second step the HTML is preprocessed, removing javascript, inserting elements like images that might be done through javascript etc. The third step is to rerplace the current windows HTML with the clean-preprocessed HTML with the article.<p><a href="https://gist.github.com/sugoidesune/884bfdf8a975920e98e7307e981e8daf?fbclid=IwAR1Hb8Og5_u8bbWbePfZi-tpN2lObKybZS01kICH_pwxIR4lFUbPY96qm8Q" rel="nofollow">https://gist.github.com/sugoidesune/884bfdf8a975920e98e7307e...</a>
Good stuff timar - this definitely beats my trick of hitting the Esc key at just the right moment to stop JS from loading. I've gotten very good at that, but also life is very short and I shouldn't need to! So your bookmarklet will come to the rescue :)<p>Could this be integrated with Firefox's Reader mode somehow?
Do you think the 1,600 journalists at The New York Times, many of whom work in difficult environments (including the White House, lol), should work for free? Quite the Scrooge move.
This one is also quite helpful:<p><a href="https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox</a><p>... for all of the folks out there who don't have
a university picking up the tab for the articles that they want to read.<p>It's important to remember that paywalls disproportionately impact those who are not "working" in an academic setting.