Hacker News Reader

Comment by eduction | Hacker News Reader

Bizarre to call this “circumvention”.

I have not looked at BPC but I have an idea what’s going on: Many “paywalls” operate by letting you download the full content of an article but covering it up with an overlay imposed via JavaScript code.

You’d be surprised how many so-called paywalls stop working when you turn off JavaScript. Presumably at least part of how BPC works is simply blocking the JavaScript from covering up the content already transmitted to you.

So this is what passes for circumvention these days: A publisher sends you the full content of an article in a web page, but you decline to run hostile code that would like to hide most of the content you have already downloaded.

We are a long, long way from DeCSS. At least that involved decryption. This essentially criminalizes “view source.”

View on HN

I often browse without JavaScript, and often find myself bumping into paywalled sites don’t send the article in the first place. Of course, it is hard to distinguish between that, and a page that is just broken without JavaScript.

If a paywalled site doesn't send the article in the first place unless you have a valid, paid account that you've logged in with, then what exactly is the problem with BPC? BPC can't hack into accounts like that.

Guessing from the interface it exposes, BPC seems to work by making a ruleset matching sites with a battery of possible changes, including resetting cookies (to reset freebie-counters), fetching from Google cache, disabling javascript (for purely client-side paywalls) and by finding exceptions for the paywall (user-agent, referer, IP).

The last one is probably the one that is closest to being a breach of some law. If the plugin did not ship with rules for a lot of sites, it would probably be considered harmless, but shipping a list of the magic user-agents etc. that circumvents paywalls seems risky, legality-wise.

Although, it seems really weird, user-agents are generally thought of as an authentication mechanism, right?

I’m 0% sympathetic to sites that for which this works. The reason they accept these user agents is to mislead Google, right? I think it is fine for a site to not send content to me if I have ads or JavaScript disabled, or if I don’t have a subscription. But it is wrong to falsely advertise that the content is available.

For some reason I assumed this had some automatic archive integration or something like that—actually circumventing real account mechanisms by copying out the content to some third party host. Because otherwise, taking them down seems pretty dumb. But then, I should not have assumed, the world is a pretty dumb place.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com