Posted on 12/25/2002 9:37:44 AM PST by Sabertooth
More and more websites now require subscriptions and passwords before viewing their material. As they do, I've found that I don't want dozens of subscriptions and passwords. They're a nuisance and an invitation for spam. No thanks.
This has become especially true of excerpted news stories from certain websites. Because of a legal settlement, some stories may no longer be posted in full at Free Republic. Yet clicking on the link only brings up a subscription window where some of these sites are concerned. Again, no thanks.
Fortunately, I've discovered a work-around, a completely legal and honest way to view these stories at their websites without subscribing. I'm not sure how long this loophole will last, but I thought I'd pass it along. I'll also include a way of setting up a two-step link on excerpted threads at Free Republic.
Let's start with the problem. Take this excerpted thread on Free Republic as an example:
FreeRepublic.com "A Conservative News Forum"
Click to scroll to commentary.
Intelligence Official Will Lead TSA Profiling Effort
Washington Post ^ | Tuesday, December 24, 2002 | By Robert O'Harrow Jr.
Posted on 12/24/2002 11:31 AM PST by MineralMan
The federal Transportation Security Administration has hired an intelligence official with database expertise to oversee development of the agency's computer profiling system, a proposed network of supercomputers intended to instantly assess every passenger's background for potential ties to terrorism, officials close to the project said yesterday.
Ben H. Bell III, who recently served as deputy director of a technology-oriented terrorism task force at the Justice Department, is expected to work out technical and policy kinks that have delayed what some officials regard as the most ambitious domestic data-surveillance system ever begun by the federal government.
If you click on either the source link, or "Excerpted - Full Article," you get that lousy subscription page. Here's how you get around it:
Open up another window in your web browser, and go to Google News Search (http://news.google.com/). Copy the headline, "Intelligence Official Will Lead TSA Profiling Effort" into the search field, and click the "Search News" button. You'll find yourself at this page, with the link to the original article in the search results. Click on the headline, and you'll be reading the article without subscribing. Nice, huh?
For posters of articles from subscription sites, you can follow the instructions above before posting, and then provide links through Google News to the article so that Freepers won't have to mess with subscriptions or passwords.
Please note that the only purpose of the above information is to avoid the subscriptions, not to in any way encourage violations of various legal agreements which prohibit posting anything more than excerpts from certain websites.
And I can't deny the satisfaction in that. I've got a friend who drops those "no postage necessary" magazine suubscription postcards into mailboxes with no info on them.
Merry Christmas!
Birth of Tha SYNDICATE, the philosophical heir to William Lloyd Garrison.
101 things that the Mozilla browser can do that Internet Explorer cannot.
True, but there are certain sites whose subscriber numbers I don't want to pad.
Thanks for the heads up.
Merry Christmas
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