BrianKrebsSep 21, 2025

We all know that many news sites have paywalls. It is, after all, some or a big part of how they've chosen to fund their news gathering. There are lots of ways around paywalls or to access individual stories behind one: e.g., archive.is or archive.today lets you search a news article link to see if it's already been saved, and frequently you can read the full story that way.

I mention this because I post a lot of links to stories that are behind paywalls, and a common reply is "paywall," as if a) that wasn't obvious and b) the link was somehow discovered to be serving malware or something. Sometimes I will post an archive.today link to a story if it's urgent and paywalled, but it's definitely not my job to do that and I've started muting the "paywall" whiners.

Show threadVessOnSecurity

@briankrebs Sometimes it is not obvious that an article is paywalled. E.g., if you click on it from Google News, you get to read it - but if you pass the URL to somebody else and they click that, they'll hit a paywall. Or the site will let you read a couple of articles for free but then you'll hit a paywall (even if you try to read the articles you've read before).

There are browser add-ons that warn you about paywalled links but, more importantly, this extension:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/remove-paywalls/ghkdkllgoehcklnpajjjmfoaokabfdfm

lets you bypass the paywall (if possible) by going to an archived copy of the page you're looking at. There's probably an equivalent add-on for Firefox.

Remove Paywalls - Chrome Web Store

Bypass paywalls by accessing archived versions of articles

Sep 21, 2025 at 7:45pmWeb