That’s very 1984 of them
this post was submitted on 22 Feb 2026
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The root of the problem is Wikipedia not having local snapshots leaves their articles vulnerable to eroding sources.
Is it reasonable for them to keep their own local snapshots?
That's not a trivial amount of work and data, particularly it it's multimedia.
I think it's a concerning issue affecting long-term viability of the platform. It'll only get worse as time goes on and sources go offline.
Okay so, what is the currently going-for alternative that bypasses paywalls?
i've had consistently good luck with the archive.org wayback machine
copy the headline and find the same thing free somewhere else. usually it's a news site full of unreadable slop. pay walls used to be almost worth bypassing. no more. just another money grab, pretending to protect valuable information. not
Fair point. Very few if any news sites provide unique articles.
I’m afraid there aren’t any. You can use the Bypass Paywalls Clean extension though
Oh well, archive.today it is in the meantime I guess.
As someone who uses Bypass Paywalls Clean, this is so frustrating.
Bypass Paywalls Clean was chased off of the Firefox Add-Ons site, chased off of Gitlab, and chased off of Github via DMCA takedown notices for copyright infringement. It is now hosted on the Russian Gitflic.ru.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said "fuck it" in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
We have spent the better part of two decades dealing with the DMCA being used as an outright weapon to silence information that corporations and government find inconvenient mostly because that information is wildly incriminating for them. It works especially strongly because a large amount of the world's internet has been consolidated to the US and its vast hosting structures like AWS and Cloudflare, putting enormous amounts of the internet under the direct influence of US laws like the DMCA.
Websites like Anna's Archive, Libgen, and Sci-Hub live because they use hosting in countries that allow them to bypass these kind of restrictions. Russia is one of the most common countries for them to host the data out of due to the lack of enforcement of copyright laws, although it is obviously not the only country that these sites use.
Until we are able to alter international copyright protections to be reasonable instead of their current over-zealously and aggressively abusive nature, we will all suffer having to risk hosting of such sites in countries that are otherwise very unsavory to be associating with.
We live in the kind of world early piracy pioneers such as the original creators of The Pirate Bay were trying to fight from becoming a reality. The American copyright cabal fought tooth and nail to change Sweden's interpretations of copyright law so they could send these men to prison.
And now Firefox completely bans it from even being sideloaded.
I’m with you on this, but let’s be careful here.
We all know Russia sucks in a litany of ways, but one way it doesn't suck is that it is one of the few countries left that has really thrown all caution to the wind and absolutely said "fuck it" in terms of respecting the international Big Copyright norms as promoted by and deeply influenced by the USA copyright cabal (RIAA/MPAA).
I once made a YouTube video which somehow included a clip from some RT Russian TV bullshit show. (The show was in fact a direct ripoff of Gordon Ramsey’s Hell Kitchen, for which I’m sure they did not get license for.)
Some fucking Russian troll bots then DMCA’d my YouTube video, for using their clip, even though it was clearly “fair use” in US jurisdiction, and YouTube happily sucked their russian dicks and flagged and removed my video.
And my video had probably 15 views, like it wasn’t a big thing.
So they aren’t exactly the Robin Hood of free speech.
Of course they aren't, they will happily block information that they dislike because it's embarrassing and incriminating to them. Skepticism should cut both ways, skeptical of those who use Russian connection to delegitimize valuable tools and the people associated with them, and skepticism of why Russia allows those things to persist providing they impact Western countries but not Russia.
Until the Western copyright situation is amended to something reasonable, we have to be skeptical in all aspects of this situation. I'd rather copyright was a reasonable length with reasonable policies so organizations didn't have to resort to connections with Russia. In the meantime we have to work with the situation we have.
Not sure how this says anything about Russian copyright laws or Russian government.
Ironically, when Russia was joining the World Trade Organization in early 2010s, one requirement was for them to do something about pirate sites, namely torrent-sharing ones. So iirc the domain torrents.ru was taken away from what is now called RuTracker, and they blocked many other sites, which stay blocked to this day.
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Good reminder to pay for journalism.
The Guardian, Le Monde, El País, Tageszeitung and many others need subscribers to stay independent of the oligarchs.
Also remember the journalists that need support the most are local papers and news stations. The big ones have plenty of donors, and while it's worth the support, they are less likely to completely collapse than the news that is run in your city.
Go look for that independent source. They will report more news that actually affects you as well.
guardian is surviving by slowly becoming a tabloid. not sure if i would have paid for it anyway, and im not sure if this was preventable by paying for it in the first place.
yeah and they're also transphobic af as a policy. don't give them a damn cent
https://www.buzzfeed.com/patrickstrudwick/guardian-staff-trans-rights-letter
can also find more stuff by just looking up "the guardian transphobia"
I appreciate the guardian a lot more than I did before now that someone gave me a nytimes subscription, seeing how bad they are now. For the guardian's faults, they do break some stories still, and somewhat comprehensively cover the news, perhaps better than the times, that is too busy trying to cover for Israel to even report honestly on epstein and apparently surrendered to the administration besides.
Paying for journalism simply promotes that those who don't pay it don't get it ie.: more paywalls, not less.
So what you're saying is if we refuse to pay for journalism long enough, the journalists will eventually give up and just work for free? Not have to travel for their investigations, eat nothing and need no private home?
Democracy isn’t possible without an independent press.
Epstein was persecuted because the frigging Miami Herold reported about his abuses in 2018. He would have continued raping and trafficking kids for who knows how long without that. In a world where the media is owned by Epstein, that won’t happen.
what democracy? every person in the leadership of america and most of the world were either friends with epstein or on his payroll.
They're already mostly owned and working for the ultra-rich interests. There have been plenty of outlets over the years that had paying users, they're mostly owned at this point. Those that aren't are getting quite click-baity.
Capitalism is hard on News. Facism is worse.
It's not our fault the media decided to switch to a subscription model while not providing a product worthy of paying a subscription, even before they downgrade it every year.
It's a problem, but one of their own making.
I haven't said that journalists have to work for free. Just that we don't have to be the ones who are trickled out to feed them. I doesn't have to be "poors vs workers" unlike what the media is telling you, ya know? A better system is possible.
Huh, I don’t get that argument. To me, it seems that citizens paying journalists is desirable. I’m genuinely curious, who else should pay them in your view?
It could be the citizens but done indirectly, for example via taxes. Even better, not all citizens: just tax the rich and put the money into a journalism pool, so the rich can't choose to benefit any particular newspaper or editorial line.
Paying for journalism is ideal, but unfortunately makes it difficult to cite/link to a source the way Wikipedia needs as a way to ensure the information remains open and accessible.
Admittedly, I'm not familiar with these outlets enough to know if those paywalls are significant, but the problem with direct article links is that those links can change. Archival services (I suppose not archive[.]is) are important for ensuring those articles remain accessible in the format they were presented in.
I've come across a number of older Wikipedia articles about more minor or obscure events where links lead to local new outlet websites that no longer exist or were consumed by larger media outlets and as a result no longer provide an appropriate citation.
For anyone curious, I looked into the DDOSing, and what was done is a simple string of JavaScript was added to archive[.]today that made a background request to the blog with a randomly generated search parameter. Every time someone looked at an archive, they unknowingly sent a request to the blog under attack.
This is understandable, but at the same time, none of the anti-paywall lists are as good as archive.today. They actually have paid accounts at a bunch of paywalled sites, and use them when scraping.
Unfortunately, they’ve allegedly modified the contents of some archived articles, so even though they may do better to archive, nothing archived is of any value because it cannot be trusted.
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Good reminder to donate to web.archive.org
While archive.org is good and more trustworthy than archive.is, it isn't as useful for bypassing paywalls.
But Wikipedia doesn't need to bypass paywalls, and you can bypass them yourself with a bit of work.
There's websites with paywalls that even Bypass Paywalls Clean can't bypass. In cases that it can, it sometimes just fetches the article contents from archive.today.
That doesn't mean an alternative shouldn't be found, but we also shouldn't pretend that nothing is being lost by losing access to unpaywalled sources. For practical purposes, a paywalled source means no source for most readers, unless a non-paywalled alternative can be found to replace it.
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