Reading without Subscribing (Convenient Freeper Tip)

[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"

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[ Browse | Search | Topics | Post Article | My Comments ]

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.

Excerpted - Full Article ^

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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.

[Lancey Howard]

Ha!
BUMP

[muggs]

Thanks!

[Timesink]

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.

Which get immediately tossed into the trash at the very same post office where your friend mails them. And if they're not caught then, they'll be thrown out at the destination, and the magazine will not have to pay one cent for them. The only people that get screwed are the taxpayers, who end up paying increased rates from all the gas and manpower used to transport X tons of useless paper every year.

Postal regulations are very clear on this: Obvious use of business reply mail for harassment of the business is thrown out the moment it's caught by any postal employee. Tell your friend to stop wasting his time.

[Fracas]

LOL. You put 'teeth' into Conservative ingenuity.

Thanks and Merry Christmas.

[Sabertooth]

Postal regulations are very clear on this: Obvious use of business reply mail for harassment of the business is thrown out the moment it's caught by any postal employee. Tell your friend to stop wasting his time.

Will do. Too bad, though, since empty subscription cards would make great stocking stuffers for AOL-Time-Warner-Turner.

[BJungNan]

That was indeed a nice Christmas present. Thanks and Merry Christmas to you! BJN

[Grampa Dave]

Thanks for this great suggestion. There is no way that I will be on an email spam list with the likes of the Washington Post, NY Slimes, LA Slimes or other lefty mediot organizations.

Merry Christmas!

[Timesink]

This is interesting. I can't figure out why this works. Perhaps they made a deal with Google to accept all direct referrals?

[Samizdat]

Thanks! Good find. And along those lines, I'm not interested in any of the left wing publication's viewpoint anyway so no need to subscribe. I would rather have it dissected by a loyal Freeper anyway and save me the time of picking it apart. In case anyone doesn't know the publications to be leery of, here is a partial list:

Washington Post
New York Times
L.A. Times
Gannett Newspapers
Reuters
AP

Just to name a few big ones. You can count on them mostly slanting or reporting stories that put conservatives/Republicans in a bad light. So beware.

BTW, the other day a friend of mine who is aware of the left wing slant of most big publications actually referred to and took as valid an L.A. Times article that was written by some nutcase out of Berkeley. It was all about Bush planning on taking over Iraq and annexing it to the U.S. Stuff of left wing fairy tales. I had to bring her back to reality and point out that 1) It was written by a Berkeley wacko, 2) it was published in the L.A. times, 3) it wasn't sourced and 4) it was guilt by association. Just goes to show even the most savvy of us are still susceptible to the elitist left wing propaganda.

[ShuShu]

What great news! Thanks for the tip. There have been many articles I've been unable to read for this very reason.

A Very Merry Christmas to you!!!

[.38sw]

oooh. Thanks for the ping. I had signed up at the LA times using phony information and a throw-away email address because there was an article I wanted to post. Never again!

[Sabertooth]

This is interesting. I can't figure out why this works. Perhaps they made a deal with Google to accept all direct referrals?

I haven't a clue. Not sure if it's an oversight of some sort.

If Google has a subscription through their servers, would that do it?

[RippleFire]

You can also give userid: cypherpunk and password: cypherpunk . It works many places, brought to you courtesy of the cypherpunks.

[ALS]

If postal employees can toss mail in the trash, what stops them from throwing any mail in the trash?

[Sabertooth]

You can also give userid: cypherpunk and password: cypherpunk . It works many places, brought to you courtesy of the cypherpunks.

Thanks, good info.

How does that work on the WP survey page that comes up when you click on their excerpt links?

[LiteKeeper]

bump

[MadelineZapeezda]

Doesn't it take a few days for the article to show up on Google?

No..........thankfully Google and the internet is not like our banks where our deposited checks take a few days to process!

[Timesink]

If postal employees can toss mail in the trash, what stops them from throwing any mail in the trash?

The law says that business reply mail labels that are plainly being used to harass the business in question (the old "tape it to a brick" urban legend, for example) DO NOT QUALIFY AS MAIL and can be dumped. Don't believe me, go to usps.com and dig through the Domestic Mail Manual.

I can drop a live chicken into a mailbox with an address written in Magic Marker on its feathers; that doesn't make it a legitimate piece of mail.

[G.Mason]

" Obvious use of business reply mail for harassment of the business is thrown out the moment it's caught by any postal employee."

Thanks for the laugh!

Who's the "harassed"?

And if you think a "postal employee" is going to read anything more than he/she/it has to, your sadly mistaken.

Been doing it for years....scribble a ficticious name /address and whala......off it goes, back to give the "spammers" a dose of their own medicine.

Tell your friend to keep up the good work.

Postal regulations my behind!

[gcruse]

There was a time I used to fill out the blown-in cards of all my magazines and send them in, too. The addresses I used were from the Usenet posts of people posting chain letters where you were supposed to send money to the address at the top of the list, add your name at the bottom, etc. The creeps who posted addresses got lots magazines.