I just discovered something cool today. I wanted to print a recipe from America’s Test Kitchen but didn’t want to become a member. The link to the recipe is:
But non-members are presented with a popup that blocks scrolling the content, like so:
But, I used the Adblock Plus extension’s “Block Element” feature to simply block the pop-up! And after refreshing the page, the block was gone, and the page happily (or not) showed the rest of the page content with no further impediments.
Interesting, it took me 3 element blocks to clear the site, using Adguard, but yes, it did the deed as well, at least on that page, will try others down the line! Fun n games!
The hack I’ve been using for years is just to use an archive site.
Just copy the URL of the blocked web page, and head over to a site like:
and call up the archived version of the page. That clears nearly all web blocks. The Wayback Machine over at Internet Archive also works a lot of the time, though not as regularly as other archive sites. I’ve found that archive.li or archive.ph nearly always work.
BTW, the power of archive tools to eliminate barriers to viewing current websites always puts me in mind of an old Isaac Asimov short story, “The Dead Past.” Scientists invent a “chronoscope” to view the past. They want to view historical events, to find out what really happened in places like Ancient Carthage…but they don’t realize the consequences of what their device can do:
"Now you three know a century . or a little more is the limit, so what does the past mean to you? Your youth. Your first girl. Your dead mother. Twenty years ago. Thirty years ago. Fifty years ago. The deader the better. But when does the past really begin?”
He paused in anger. The others stared at him and Nimmo stirred uneasily.
"Well,” said Araman, "when did it begin? A year ago? Five minutes ago? One second ago? Isn’t it obvious that the past begins an instant ago. The dead past is just another name for the living present. What if you focus the chronoscope in the past of one-hundredth of a second ago? Aren’t you watching the present? Does it begin to sink in?”
Hmm. Indeed that works both for my recipe link above and for a recent article on The Atlantic (which I am not subscribed to). But I don’t understand how. Are we simply relying on the probability that someone else WITH a subscription to the content happened to use the same archive site to create a saved copy? Surely, that archive site isn’t paying subscription fees for hundreds of sites and manually creating archived copies of all the pages, right?
And at first I though you were referring to archive.org’s “Wayback Machine” (https://web.archive.org) that trawls the internet daily creating archived copies of everything on the internet. I often use that to find old web pages, but have found that it doesn’t work on subscription-only sites like The Atlantic or the NY Times, I assume because it too would need to pay the subscription fee.
I don’t know. It might be something as simple as content providers choosing to make their sites accessible to archival websites (like they do to robot crawlers from search engines), which aren’t technically “consumers” of the content the same way that viewers might be. So they let the sites be archived for posterity…and perhaps not paying attention to the fact that “posterity” begins a few minutes ago. That’s why I thought of the Asimov story when I first discovered I could do this.
I was referring to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine above. It usually also works. For example, here’s the “archived” version of an article published on The Atlantic just this morning:
But it is a little hit and miss, and usually takes a little longer than some of the other archive sites.
