Why not open source? You modified GPL-3 ladder; I don’t know whether it’s legally required, but I feel it’s morally expected and important in practice (since yours may get taken down).
I plan on it! In my repo, I have some stuff I wouldn't want public in it right now. I am going to clean up the repo and make the fork of the repo public!
If something is granted under GPL terms, it's not a gift. It has terms.
You can accept the terms or decline the thing. The terms are simply not money. The terms are "you can have this and do anything you want with it and the only cost is that you have to give the next guy the same thing you were given."
It's morally expected, not required. And because that's the spirit of FOSS. It's just considered bad form to extract, profit, and not give back.
I don't know any FOSS folks that think they're "giving people a gift" alone. It usually goes deeper than that. Maybe some kind of anti authoritarian, anti establishment, or anti capitalist ideology, or a strong care for user freedom, or a desire to participate in the FOSS community.
I imagine the commenter is worried that if it's open source, publishers can read exactly how it works and then adjust their setups to defeat it. Vs I suspect publishers already know how it works, or could figure it out from their own server instrumentation, or by inspecting client code (I haven't looked at this project but I know a few I've seen previously work mostly with JS and CSS modifications).
You can already pay the journalist's employer, but ultimately your dollars will be going to a hedge fund owner or eventually a billionaire like Bezos that buys up media and pays the journalist a bare minimum to keep them generating clicks.
For everyone else that doesn't pay, they'll ask their AI owned by billionaires to summarize the reporting and be satisfied.
What you're suggesting is supporting independent journalism not owned by a hedge fund or billionaire, which will eventually be acquired by capitalists unless you somehow magically convince all your neighbors that it's worth monetarily supporting for a greater good.
Yeah, on my dev.to article about it... I did say that if there's a publication that you read on a regular basis, you should pay and subscribe. This tool is mostly for reading an article that a friend sent you to and to use one-off.
Agree with the above commentor, I don't think you are not legally safe by putting that disclaimer. I know you may have done in good faith, but online news and article sites are in a long battle to get the monetization models right for their users, kinda feel bad for them, even if its one off reading.
Yeah, an extension is sometimes easier. My site's audience is for people who mainly browse on mobile or just don't feel like installing extensions. But wallhop.io uses a lot of the same methods that extension does.
Most of the real good software is driven, mostly by p*ssing someone off, then go home on a friday, and by monday... its a wrap. This is how UNIX was written.
Eh... if/when I get a shutdown notice/C&D, I will shut it down immedietly. They usually only sue if you ignore a C&D. I had a movie piracy site that functioned for the most for over a year, but once I got a C&D in my mailbox, I shut it down.
Hi HN, I'm Josh. WallHop is a free paywall bypass: paste an article URL (or prefix any URL with wallhop.io/) and you get the readable article without the paywall popup, ads or clutter. No signup, no extension.
I built it after 12ft.io went away. The News Media Alliance took it down in July 2025 and I missed having something I could hit from my phone.
How it works: it started as a fork of everywall/ladder (GPL-3.0) and I've modified it heavily since. Instead of relying on one trick, it chains several bypass methods per request and falls back to archive.is when they all fail, so one site blocking one technique doesn't break it.
Things that might be interesting:
- iOS Shortcut: on iPhone, tap Share > WallHop from any article in Safari or another app. This is how I use it 95% of the time.
- It works on Medium member-only posts, which 12ft never handled.
- Bookmarklet for desktop, plus /raw/<url> and /api/<url> endpoints if you want to script it.
I've tested it against most major news outlets and a bunch of local papers. It won't work everywhere. There are SOME server-side paywalls that are out of reach, and I'd rather say that up front. If you find a site that breaks, I'd love the link, and I can likely figure out a way to bypass it!
If newspapers make money literally by writing this content and asking people to pay for it, how is this website not just stealing their content wholesale?
Operating a malware portal is not a good way to advertise, or run a media business, and we’ve no obligation to support that.
If your physical copy of the Sunday Paper got up and walked around your house, rifled through your personal effects, then made a bunch of secret phone calls to shady numbers, would you say “Well, they gotta run a media business, it’s wrong of me not to let them make money this way, after all I agreed when I subscribed”
Don't be glib, it's a legitimate question. If this entire business only exists because they sell content written by their journalists, how is this website not just stealing access?
I own the paper, I paid a journo to research and infiltrate a group of people, he wrote a great article, I want to charge $1 to anyone who cares, now this website comes along and says nah here's the content for free hosted on my site.
How can you prove that AI didn't write it or that it isn't pre-scripted, government-backed propaganda? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't pay a dime for that.
Why not open source? You modified GPL-3 ladder; I don’t know whether it’s legally required, but I feel it’s morally expected and important in practice (since yours may get taken down).
I plan on it! In my repo, I have some stuff I wouldn't want public in it right now. I am going to clean up the repo and make the fork of the repo public!
Can you send me a link once it's up? Or otherwise link to your GitHub profile so people can follow you.
https://github.com/joshholly and my main portfolio site is wafflehacker.dev, I don't have my ladder fork open just yet.
Oh.. And follow me on substack! I write about all the cool stuff I build!
https://wafflehacker.substack.com , and I am on Dev.to , but I don't post as much there. https://dev.to/wafflehacker
OS means the people behind the service can patch (?)
> feel it’s morally expected
Why is reciprocation for a gift required? Gifts are given without obligation conferred.
If something is granted under GPL terms, it's not a gift. It has terms.
You can accept the terms or decline the thing. The terms are simply not money. The terms are "you can have this and do anything you want with it and the only cost is that you have to give the next guy the same thing you were given."
Why is reciprocation such a problem?
It's morally expected, not required. And because that's the spirit of FOSS. It's just considered bad form to extract, profit, and not give back.
I don't know any FOSS folks that think they're "giving people a gift" alone. It usually goes deeper than that. Maybe some kind of anti authoritarian, anti establishment, or anti capitalist ideology, or a strong care for user freedom, or a desire to participate in the FOSS community.
This is cool. Do you also have a version that provides free versions of paid SaaS apps? If not, why not?
This type of initiative should never be open source.
Why on Earth not??
I imagine the commenter is worried that if it's open source, publishers can read exactly how it works and then adjust their setups to defeat it. Vs I suspect publishers already know how it works, or could figure it out from their own server instrumentation, or by inspecting client code (I haven't looked at this project but I know a few I've seen previously work mostly with JS and CSS modifications).
Also it's one thing to shut one instance down.. entirely another to shut down a whole bunch (not to mention private instances)
is this legal? or even ethical?
We need to find better ways to sustain great journalism while making it easy for people to pay and consume.
E.g Could we just have one consortium of media contents to subscribe and use it across the web for a month, than buying in each website.
There are several sides to this, ex:
Is it ethical to advertise something that users (or indexers) expect to be freely accessible, and then to pull a bait-and-switch when they arrive?
Is it ethical for ads networks to spy on people, fingerprint their machines, and create dossers about them?
You can already pay the journalist's employer, but ultimately your dollars will be going to a hedge fund owner or eventually a billionaire like Bezos that buys up media and pays the journalist a bare minimum to keep them generating clicks.
For everyone else that doesn't pay, they'll ask their AI owned by billionaires to summarize the reporting and be satisfied.
What you're suggesting is supporting independent journalism not owned by a hedge fund or billionaire, which will eventually be acquired by capitalists unless you somehow magically convince all your neighbors that it's worth monetarily supporting for a greater good.
Is it ethical for a newspaper to interview facist, antidemocratic politicians and then put the interview behind a paywall?
There are surely ethical newspapers that use paywalls, but the majority in my country (Germany) are mostly about rage bait and/or facist dogwhistles
Yeah, on my dev.to article about it... I did say that if there's a publication that you read on a regular basis, you should pay and subscribe. This tool is mostly for reading an article that a friend sent you to and to use one-off.
Agree with the above commentor, I don't think you are not legally safe by putting that disclaimer. I know you may have done in good faith, but online news and article sites are in a long battle to get the monetization models right for their users, kinda feel bad for them, even if its one off reading.
Shoutout to counsel reading this in discovery
Install it now, thank me later: https://gitflic.ru/project/magnolia1234/bpc_uploads
Yeah, an extension is sometimes easier. My site's audience is for people who mainly browse on mobile or just don't feel like installing extensions. But wallhop.io uses a lot of the same methods that extension does.
This is great, straight into my bookmarks. I've been using archive.is but it's much more of a faff.
can you expose an endpoint for “most requested articles” list, would be great
That would be a good idea! Yeah I actually plan on adding it in.
+1
I wish it worked with www.irishexaminer.com. No luck :(
Thanks for bringing it to my attention! I will tinker around with it and try to find a bypass for this site and implement it into wallhop!
Most of the real good software is driven, mostly by p*ssing someone off, then go home on a friday, and by monday... its a wrap. This is how UNIX was written.
This is the way.
irishexaminer.com paywallbypass = implimented! Here's an example of a subscriber-only article here:
https://wallhop.io/https://www.irishexaminer.com/opinion/col...
Looking forward to a Yunohost package to replace the 12ft.io one. https://appgenerator.yunohost.org
Bless you!
That's cool.
Also, you gon' get sued.
Eh... if/when I get a shutdown notice/C&D, I will shut it down immedietly. They usually only sue if you ignore a C&D. I had a movie piracy site that functioned for the most for over a year, but once I got a C&D in my mailbox, I shut it down.
Why did 12ft io go away?
Thank you! Thank you very much.
Hi HN, I'm Josh. WallHop is a free paywall bypass: paste an article URL (or prefix any URL with wallhop.io/) and you get the readable article without the paywall popup, ads or clutter. No signup, no extension.
I built it after 12ft.io went away. The News Media Alliance took it down in July 2025 and I missed having something I could hit from my phone.
How it works: it started as a fork of everywall/ladder (GPL-3.0) and I've modified it heavily since. Instead of relying on one trick, it chains several bypass methods per request and falls back to archive.is when they all fail, so one site blocking one technique doesn't break it.
Things that might be interesting:
- iOS Shortcut: on iPhone, tap Share > WallHop from any article in Safari or another app. This is how I use it 95% of the time. - It works on Medium member-only posts, which 12ft never handled. - Bookmarklet for desktop, plus /raw/<url> and /api/<url> endpoints if you want to script it.
I've tested it against most major news outlets and a bunch of local papers. It won't work everywhere. There are SOME server-side paywalls that are out of reach, and I'd rather say that up front. If you find a site that breaks, I'd love the link, and I can likely figure out a way to bypass it!
If newspapers make money literally by writing this content and asking people to pay for it, how is this website not just stealing their content wholesale?
Operating a malware portal is not a good way to advertise, or run a media business, and we’ve no obligation to support that.
If your physical copy of the Sunday Paper got up and walked around your house, rifled through your personal effects, then made a bunch of secret phone calls to shady numbers, would you say “Well, they gotta run a media business, it’s wrong of me not to let them make money this way, after all I agreed when I subscribed”
It’s basic caveat emptor stuff.
Welcome to the Internet! You have so much to explore. Start here and just follow the links that interest you.
https://yahoo.com
;-)
Don't be glib, it's a legitimate question. If this entire business only exists because they sell content written by their journalists, how is this website not just stealing access?
I own the paper, I paid a journo to research and infiltrate a group of people, he wrote a great article, I want to charge $1 to anyone who cares, now this website comes along and says nah here's the content for free hosted on my site.
How does that work?
Yahoo.com's advertisers are a great source of drive bys, so much so, I scrape it for places to block.
How can you prove that AI didn't write it or that it isn't pre-scripted, government-backed propaganda? I don't know about you, but I wouldn't pay a dime for that.