WallHop: A Free Paywall Bypass Tool Built After 12ft.io Shut Down
WallHop – 12ft.io is gone, so I built a replacement
WallHop is a free web service that bypasses article paywalls. Paste a link, or prefix any URL with wallhop.io/, and read the story without signing up. It also offers an iPhone Shortcut for sharing from Safari, a bookmarklet, and raw/API endpoints. The creator built it as a replacement after 12ft.io went offline.
12ft.io is gone, so I built a replacement.
- mr_mitm
In your blog you say:
> If every method fails, fall back to an archived copy from archive.is.
What do you reckon is the reason that archive.is is most reliable? I've seen the same in the Magnolia1234 plugin. If all fails, fall back to archive.is. What are they doing that you or the Magnolia devs can't?
- pelagicAustral
This type of initiative should never be open source.
- SmashDan
This is great, straight into my bookmarks. I've been using archive.is but it's much more of a faff.
- chanux
Long back I was wondering if a tip jar type service that'll get me access to what I actually want to see would be a better solution in place of subscribing to every website that produces an interesting article once in a while. There were a couple of such services but they never got popular.
Perhaps this model alone is not sustainable but it could be paired with ads (as in ads or fee off a tip jar pay). Even then, it surely won't lead to infinite growth, which is the only goal nowadays.
- zameermfm
is this legal? or even ethical?
We need to find better ways to sustain great journalism while making it easy for people to pay and consume.
E.g Could we just have one consortium of media contents to subscribe and use it across the web for a month, than buying in each website.
- Cider9986
Well dang, I thought it would just be a worse archive.today (yes the owner doesn't like that it's used for piracy so much), but wallhop works on wsj, ft, and nytimes. It's quite convenient because it doesn't have the recaptcha from archive.today, I'm curious to see how long it lasts.
It really should be quite easy to make one of these. I mean there's only so much new articles every day. If you just had one account it should be able to get the content on sites with hard paywalls.
Wallhop doesn't have a hard, hard paywall bypass? Maybe it's just not been attempted yet, but 404media paid only is not bypassed. For example: https://www.404media.co/heres-the-video-for-our-seventh-foia...
BPWC works for WSJ, Nytimes but not ft. Archive.today works for NYT, FT, and occasionally WSJ.
- golanggeek
It is not working on
https://www.thehindu.com/news/national/tamil-nadu/two-seats-...
- armchairhacker
Why not open source? You modified GPL-3 ladder; I don’t know whether it’s legally required, but I feel it’s morally expected and important in practice (since yours may get taken down).