3 Unexpected Ways to Bypass Paywalls at Malaysia News Sites

You may find that Malaysia news sites like The Star, Chinapress and others have started paywalls or subscription wall for some of their contents. I believe it is a positive move for the local newspaper to slowly transition from offline to online. However, it is bad news for some of the Malaysia online readers because not everyone can afford another subscription.

First and foremost, we encourage readers to subscribe to any of your prefered news site, either paid or unpaid, in order to support local media company.

On the other hand, it seems that I am contradicting myself here to teach you how to bypass paywalls right now. Because I believe that those who are willing to subscribe will continue to subscribe for sake of convenience and support content creators. Those who can’t afford or not willing to subscribe will still not subscribe anyways. It is similar to the game and movie’s piracy issue.

Here are the three easy methods which can be used to bypass subscription walls. It may or may not work on certain local newspaper websites, depending on whether it is a hard or soft paywall. By the way, there’s no way to bypass a hard paywall.

1. Google Chrome browser incognito mode

In order to protect users’ privacy, incognito mode of chrome browser for mobile and desktop prevents sites from detecting the cookie which uses for blocking you out of their content.

So, boot up your chrome brower and visit the page with paywall”

• Copy the page URL.
• Turn on incognito mode.
• Paste the URL.
• Bam! you get to read the full content.

2. Outline.com

Outline.com has the tag line “read and annotate without distractions”. It helps readers to strip away all the banners, advertisement, links and any distraction of online article and present readers the purest form of article, text and photo only. It somehow works wonderfully to extract the full content from various news sites.

• Copy the page URL with a paywall.
• Go to outline.com.
• Paste the URL.
• And you get a neat and tidy article with no distractions.

Or

• Visit any page with a paywall. Example: www.abc-news.com/123-news
• Add outline.com/ in front of the URL. Example: outline.com/www.abc-news.com/123-news
• Click enter to refresh.
• And you will be forwarded to outline.com with the article ready.

3. Adding a “dot” at the end of website domain name

It is actually an URL bug first posted by a reddit user, as quoted below:

“It’s a commonly forgotten edge case, websites forget to normalize the hostname, the content is still served, but there’s no hostname match on the browser so no cookies and broken CORS – and lots of bigger sites use a different domain to serve ads/media with a whitelist that doesn’t contain the extra dot”

This bug actually helps to bypass paywall of news site like New York Times, Washington Post and is working for some local news site. Also, this trick even works to block out advertisement on youtube.com.

Here’s how to do the trick:

• Visit the page with paywalls. Example: abc-news.com.my/abc-news
• Add dot at the end of the domain name. Example: abc-news.com.my./abc-news
• Click enter to refresh.
• You can access the full content now.

Try it out now and let me know if its working.