PSA - never go to Forbes.com

[madoka]

Today there was an article I found that I wanted to read, but it turns out it was on Forbes so I was blocked.

I copied the title of the article, in my case:

What India Has Done To Its Money Is Sickening And Immoral

Then I did I google search for it. This gave me access to google's cached version of the article, so I could read it without having to go to deal with Forbes' denial of my ad blocker.

This was my low-tech solution to this problem.

 

[Red Squirrel]

How does it know ad blocker is on? I'm amazed ad blockers aren't stealthy yet

That's what I wonder too, but with JS and all that crap I would not be surprised if they can just get a list of all the extensions you run. Browsers these days are too leaky and just give any information a site requests. Even if you disable the ad blocker it still thinks you have one, so I don't think it's just checking to see if the ads are being loaded, it checks to see if you actually have it installed.


I wonder if it would be illegal to write a program that spiders news sites and rewrites the article in slightly different words, then republishes it in a more friendly format without all the garbage javascript and other BS that news sites today have. Could be a hell of an interesting AI project. It would need to read and understand the article, then summarize it while keeping it accurate. Or it could be as simple as just replacing certain words/phrases with known synonym ones. Suppose it would still be illegal though. Kinda like how a youtube video with the radio playing in the background gets taken down. It's not a verbatim copy of the song byte per byte, but it's still a general representation of it.

 

[Elganja]

add businessinsider to the shit list of sites... lol

 

[FelixDeCat]

I like Forbes. It is very insightful.

 

[Raduque]

Forbes? Yeah, not modifying my router again, just to allow your turd of a website to work.

 

[Mike64]

I wonder if it would be illegal to ...

Yes, any or all of your theoretical projects would result in unauthorized derivative works and doing what you propose knowingly, especially if you make any money or otherwise materially benefit from it, could get you into real trouble. If you were so inclined, you could pick literally just whatever facts are stated/cited and publish those either in your words or as a list, but that would be neither very interesting or particularly useful, considering how little of what they publish could be considered "investigative" by any stretch of the imagination...