The original post: /r/piracy by /u/MagnussenXD on 2025-01-01 14:18:00.
I made Periscope, a tool for removing ads, popups, annoyances, that happens to be capable of bypassing paywall😉. (This post has been pre-approved by mods)
Why another one?
There are many great ones already, like 12ft.io, 13ft, and smry.ai, which uses techniques like fetching raw HTML content, spoofing user-agent as Googlebot, or fetching the archive web. But these techniques have limitation, for example using raw HTML content or spoofing user-agent sometimes doesn't work, and fetching the web archive usually depends on someone archiving the page first.
What makes this one different is that it is inspired by another great paywall bypass tool called Ladder, which uses a custom ruleset for each domain, basically having different techniques of bypassing the paywall for different websites. While Ladder is for self-hosting only, Periscope is a live hosted version.
Example of said ruleset: a rule for overriding headers and injecting script for a specific domain.
- domain: www.ft.com
headers:
referer: https://t.co/x?amp=1
injections:
- position: head
append: |
<script>
document.addEventListener("DOMContentLoaded", () => {
const styleTags = document.querySelectorAll('link[rel="stylesheet"]');
styleTags.forEach(el => {
const href = el.getAttribute('href').substring(1);
const updatedHref = href.replace(/(https?:\/\/.+?)\/{2,}/, '$1/');
el.setAttribute('href', updatedHref);
});
setTimeout(() => {
const cookie = document.querySelectorAll('.o-cookie-message, .js-article-ribbon, .o-ads, .o-banner, .o-message, .article__content-sign-up');
cookie.forEach(el => { el.remove(); });
}, 1000);
})
</script>
Is this the perfect paywall bypass tool?
No. Currently, it only supports the header overrides, but not the script injection. So the tool still only fetches raw HTML, with the addition of header override. The script injection is still WIP, because I use iframe to load the content, and it still needs some work to make it load right.
Plus, the ruleset list is still small, since I am using the Ladder ruleset, which hasn't been updated in a while.
Long-time members of the r/Piracy subreddit are likely familiar with the bypass-paywalls-clean (BPC) extension. I mention BPC because it is currently the most effective tool for bypassing paywalls, thanks to its extensive list of rulesets. While BPC uses a different format for storing these rulesets, they can likely be converted into the ladder ruleset format, which Periscope can support.
Afterword
If you’ve made it this far, congrats, and thanks for sticking with this overly technical post. Here’s the link and source code, it’s free to use.
Link: https://periscope.corsfix.com
Code: https://github.com/corsfix/periscope
PS. I wouldn't call this a paywall bypass tool, it is just a web content reader, that has the ability to fetch a URL and apply some custom rules.
