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Comment by belviewreview | Hacker News Reader

I use archive.today all the time. How do you access pages, like for instance on the economist, without it?

With the paywall blocker so good it got banned! You can also get it on Android.

https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bypass-paywalls-fire...

A Russian domain git website hosting just a readme.md and a copy of the MIT license but no source code? Just the extension files?

The author got banned from github and gitlab after DMCA takedowns. The code used to be available in those, but I guess he got tired of starting over?

Anyway, extensions are just signed zip files. You can extract them and view the source. BPC sources are not compressed or obfuscated. The extension is evaluated and signed by Mozilla (otherwise it wouldn't install in release-channel Firefox), if you put any stock in that.

For me, all archive.* links just present an endless captcha loop. I am not using CF DNS or any proxy/VPN, but even if I do try those things, it still doesn't work.

   http-request set-header user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 14) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/127.0.6533.103 Mobile Safari/537.36 Lamarr" if { hdr(host) -m end economist.com }

Years ago I used some other workaround that no longer works, maybe something like amp.economist.com. AMP with text-only browser was a useful workaround for many sites

Workarounds usually don't last forever. Websites change from time to time. This one will stop working at some point

There are some people who for various reasons cannot use archive.today

Which utility, extension, tool or language is that?

It's from an haproxy configuration file

This unfamiliarity is why I try to use programs that more HN readers are familiar with, like curl or wget, in HN examples. But I find those programs awkward to use. The examples may contain mistakes. I don't use those programs in real life

For making HTTP requests I use own HTTP generators, TCP clients, and local forward proxies

Given the options (a) run a graphical web browser and enable Javascript to solve an archive.today CAPTCHA that contains some fetch() to DDoS a blogger or (b) add a single line to a configuration file and use whatever client I want, no Javascript required, I choose (b)

for instance on the economist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46060487

If dang and tomhow enforce a policy against paywalled content would garner less interest in accessing those pages via third parties. Most news gets reported by multiple outlets in general, so the same discussions would still surface.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com