Comment by mr_mitm

4 months ago

Then why hasn't anyone built a client-side browser addon that impersonates a suitable search engine?

They have. It's called bypass-paywalls-clean . It works pretty ok.

It just keeps getting banned from the addon catalogs because of complaints from media. The Firefox one was taken down by a french newspaper. So you have to sideload it, which is hard to do on Android.

Edit: it looks like even the github was taken down now: https://github.com/iamadamdev/bypass-paywalls-firefox

But yes it exists. And it works for most sites. It's just hard to get it now.

  • It's on gitflic.ru now.

    • Hmm yeah but their adversaries did achieve their goal by pushing it away from the mainstream sites. Now we're into this situation of "how much do I trust this vague Russian site with my browsing activity".

      At least the addon declares the sites it's for and ignores the rest but still I'm a lot less comfortable with it. It's more something I'd install in a container now, limiting its usefulness :(

      In practice I just use archive.today now.

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