The New Oil

This is an out-of-band blog post. If you're reading this (not on the day it was published via your usual subscription channels but instead because I shared this link directly with you), chances are you told me that an article I shared on the TNO newsfeed is paywalled. It's possible that this article was paywalled after I posted it and that what I'm about to share won't work. More likely, however, what happened is that my browser is set to block paywalls and yours isn't. Here's how to fix that.

Brave

If you use Brave, click the Brave icon in your address bar. Toward the bottom, click “Filter lists.” When you're taken to the filter settings, click “Show full list,” find “Bypass Paywalls Clean Filters,” and enable it. Reload the page and it'll probably work now.

Firefox (et al)

If you're using a Firefox-based browser (including Librewolf or Mullvad), you should have uBlock Origin installed. (If you don't and refuse to, then skip to the next section). Click on uBlock Origin, click the gear icons to bring up the settings, and navigate to the “Filter lists” tab. Scroll all the way down to “Import” and enter https://github.com/bpc-clone/bypass-paywalls-clean-filters/raw/main/bpc-paywall-filter.txt (another recommended filter I saw was https://raw.githubusercontent.com/liamengland1/miscfilters/master/antipaywall.txt which allegedly blocks twice as many sites and works even better, though I have not tested this myself. The first link is an official recommendation from the original list creator). Click “Apply changes.” “Bypass Paywalls Clean filter” should now appear under the “Custom” tab.

Paywall Unblock Sites

If you do not use Brave and refuse to use uBlock Origin for any reason, I really disagree with your choice but whatever. It's your life, you do you. In that case, you'll have to find a paywall unblocking site. The two most effective ones I've found are archive.is and archive.today (which currently redirects to archive.ph). Unfortunately in my experience, you might get hit with a lot of CAPTCHAs on these sites, but sometimes not. You can always try refreshing your VPN/exit node and try again. I'll revise this blog post to add more if/when I hear of them.

If none of these solutions worked for you, then like I said, chances are that the post wasn't paywalled when I originally found and queued it up. I schedule posts every 30 minutes, 9-6 (Central Time), Monday through Saturday. Sometimes there's a considerable delay between when I first read a post and when it gets posted – at times I've been backlogged by up to 3 days. Sometimes outlets paywall articles at a later date for a variety of reasons. If that's what happened here, I'm really sorry. Try searching the headline in your privacy-respecting search engine of choice and see if you can find other news outlets talking about the same subject, or maybe try entering the link into the Wayback Machine and see if you can pull an earlier, non-paywalled version.

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