Have you craved to read your favorite online paid website, only to realize that you cannot afford to drop $19.95 on it every month? If so, you are lucky – there are simple tricks to access paid sites that offer snippets of free content and then force you to pay to read further.
The trick is to exploit a loophole that many websites themselves have created: allowing search bots to crawl their content. Note that this method may not be completely fool-proof, but you can try it(it’d be useful for all if you try this on various websites and write a comment stating those websites which do not work).
These websites want their site crawled by Google to receive more hits, and yet want to get users to pay up. So, they detect search bots by its User Agent attribute (for Firefox, it is Mozilla 5.0), and allow only bots in. To access such websites, simply disguise yourself as a search bot – many sites will let you in so.
View paid sites for free: user agent trick
The user agent defines the browser, what OS you are using, and other small bits of information. Switching user agent in various browsers require seperate procedure, as follows:
Visit DNSStuff to know your current user agent. Visiting it gave me the following report:
Changing the user agent is easy. You have to uses these settings:
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Browse pay sites on Firefox
Install User Agent Switcher Firefox extension and import this XML file by TechPatterns (do not click the link directly, instead right click and save) that has the required Googlebot/2.1. Once the file is loaded, configure your user agent to Googlebot 2.1
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Pay sites on Internet Explorer
Change a registry entry, by opening Notepad, then copying the code below into it:
ADVERTISEMENT
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEYLOCALMACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings5.0User Agent] @=”Googlebot/2.1″ “Compatible”=”+http://www.googlebot.com/bot.html”
Save as “uagent.reg” (with the quotes). Double click on it to load the setting. You could also go to the Registry directly, but my guess is that at least some of you are not comfortable working with the Registry.
To remove the hack, copy the following code into a Notepad window and save as “originaluagent.reg” (with the quotes) and double click it:
Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEYLOCALMACHINESOFTWAREMicrosoftWindowsCurrentVersionInternet Settings5.0User Agent] @=”Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.1)”
Finally, test whether the hack has taken effect by pointing your browser to DNSStuff website. The user agent should now be “Googlebot” according to DNSStuff.
Related reading
- How to: Access sites blocked by filters and firewalls
- Cold Electric releases free full music album on Demonoid, Mininova and other torrent sites
- How to access FTP servers without any software
- How to access new version of iGoogle
It’s probably a bad idea to post this, but a simpler way to access some paid content with Firefox is to use the ‘Ressurect Pages’ plugin. The plugin will provide access to Google (and several other) cache pages for free.
You really don’t want to post your IP – even if it is dynamic!
Not working on rapidshare.
This doesn’t work for me (I tried it with IE) do you have any suggestions?