Best Free methods to Access website content like news without subscribing

Introduction:

In an era where digital media dominates, many reputable news sources have implemented paywalls, limiting access to valuable information. Subscribing to multiple services can become financially burdensome, but fear not! We've compiled a thorough guide detailing 12 effective methods to access paywalled content without a subscription.

1. Open the Article in Incognito Mode:

The simplest method involves opening links in incognito mode to prevent websites from tracking your browsing history and imposing article limits. Right-click a link and select 'Open link in an incognito window' or use Ctrl+Shift+N for quick access.

2. Reset Browser Cookies:

For those uncomfortable with incognito mode, resetting browser cookies accomplishes a similar goal. In Chrome, click the three dots, select 'More tools,' and choose 'Clear browsing data' in the advanced tab. Clear all cookies to reset article counts.

3. Use a VPN:

Change your IP address by utilizing a Virtual Private Network (VPN). This masks your location and helps bypass article limits. Numerous free and paid VPN services are available online; check out our top 10 VPN services for secure and anonymous browsing.

4. Use Postlight Reader for Chrome:

Formerly known as 'Mercury Reader,' the Postlight Reader Chrome extension declutters articles and removes paywalls. Add the extension, navigate to the desired article, and select 'Open in Postlight Reader' from the Extensions icon.

5. Use 12ft Ladder to Unlock Any Article:

When traditional methods fail, 12ft Ladder comes to the rescue. Visit https://12ft.io/, paste the paywalled article link, and click 'Remove paywall.' Refresh the article tab for unrestricted access.

6. Use Sci-hub to Read Articles Without a Subscription:

Access academic journals and research papers without subscribing using Sci-hub. Copy the article link or DOI code, paste it on Sci-hub's website, and click 'Open' to unlock the content.

7. Use Your Library Account:

Leverage your local library membership to access a wealth of paid content. Many libraries subscribe to leading newspapers, journals, and magazines. Sign in using your library account to unlock articles.

8. Use the Wayback Machine:

Explore Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, a repository of billions of archived pages. Visit the websites of major newspapers to find and read articles without encountering a paywall.

9. Search for the Headline on Google:

Paste the article headline on Google to discover mirrored content from various sources that offer free access. If the exact article isn't found, look for the same story from alternative, free-to-read sources.

10. Use Reader Mode on Safari:

If you're an iPhone or Mac user, activate Reader Mode on Safari. This feature eliminates clutter, hides ads, and, for some websites, removes the paywall.

Here's how you can enable Reader Mode on MacBooks:

• Open Safari and navigate to the page you want to read.
• Click on the Reader Mode icon on the right side of the address bar. (Note: The icon looks like a small box with horizontal stripes.)
• Wait for Safari to reformat the page for easy reading.
•  Open the article and click the reader icon in the address bar.

11. Save the Article as a PDF:

On certain websites, saving an article as a PDF can bypass paywalls. Open the article on your PC's web browser, press Ctrl+P, select 'Save as PDF,' and click 'Save.'

12. Disable JavaScript:

Prevent paywall pop-ups by disabling JavaScript. In Chrome, go to Settings > Privacy and security > Site Settings > JavaScript. Add the website URL under 'Not allowed to use JavaScript' for uninterrupted access.

Conclusion:

With these 12 proven methods, accessing paywalled content without a subscription becomes a breeze. From VPNs to browser settings, these techniques cover a broad spectrum of websites and journal libraries. Share your success stories in the comments, and empower others to break free from paywall constraints. Unlock a world of knowledge today!

Disclaimer: This article is only for educational purpose.

How to use ChatGPT?

AI and ML have been the buzz words for a while now and so many interesting usage has been found using these. Before we start, let's learn a bit about , what is AI, OpenAI and ML.

Artificial intelligence (AI) refers to the simulation of human intelligence in machines that are programmed to think and learn like humans. AI can be divided into two categories: narrow or weak AI, which is designed to perform a specific task, and general or strong AI, which has the ability to perform any intellectual task that a human can.  Examples of narrow AI include Siri, Alexa, and self-driving cars, which are designed to perform specific tasks such as recognizing speech, answering questions, and navigating roads. Strong AI, on the other hand, is still in the early stages of development and is the type of AI that can think and learn like a human. It has the potential to revolutionize many industries and change the way we live our lives.  Some of the key technologies that are used to develop AI include machine learning, natural language processing, computer vision, and robotics. 

OpenAI is an artificial intelligence research laboratory consisting of the for-profit OpenAI LP and its parent company, the non-profit OpenAI Inc. The company is focused on developing and promoting friendly AI in a way that benefits all of humanity. They have developed a number of widely-used AI technologies, such as the GPT natural language processing model. OpenAI's mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence (AGI) benefits all of humanity.

Machine learning (ML) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that gives systems the ability to learn and improve from experience without being explicitly programmed. It involves the use of algorithms and statistical models that enable a system to automatically improve its performance with experience.  There are different types of machine learning, including:  Supervised learning: where the system is trained on a labeled dataset, with input-output pairs, and then makes predictions on new, unseen data. Unsupervised learning: where the system is not given labeled data, but instead must find patterns or features in the input data on its own. Reinforcement learning: where the system learns to make decisions by interacting with an environment and receiving feedback in the form of rewards or penalties. Machine learning is used in a variety of applications such as natural language processing, computer vision, speech recognition, recommendation systems, and many more.

ChatGPT: It is a large language model that can perform a variety of natural language processing tasks, such as:

• Text generation: generating human-like text based on a given prompt or context

• Text completion: completing a partially written text

• Text summarisation: summarising a given text to a shorter version

• Text classification: classifying a given text into predefined categories

• Text translation: translating a text from one language to another

• Text answering: answering questions based on a given context

• Text generation of code, poetry, song lyrics and many more.

Additionally, ChatGPT can be fine-tuned on specific tasks or domains, such as customer service, technical support, and creative writing, to improve its performance on those tasks.

It's important to note that while ChatGPT can generate human-like text, it is not a human and may make mistakes or misunderstand certain prompts. It is important to verify any information generated by the model before using it.

ChatGPT is a variant of the GPT (Generative Pre-training Transformer) model, developed by OpenAI.

GPT was first introduced in 2018 by a team of researchers at OpenAI, who trained the model on a large dataset of text from the internet. Since then, OpenAI has released several versions of the GPT model, including GPT-2 and GPT-3, with ChatGPT being one of the most recent versions.

The team behind GPT and its variants includes several prominent researchers in the field of natural language processing, such as Ilya Sutskever, Alec Radford, and Jeff Dean, among others. The development of the GPT model has been led by OpenAI, a research organization founded by Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Greg Brockman, Ilya Sutskever and Wojciech Zaremba.

OpenAI, the organisation that developed ChatGPT, has made the model available for use through a commercial API, which allows users to access the model's capabilities through a web-based interface. The API requires a subscription and usage fee, which varies depending on the usage volume, the type of usage, and other factors.

However, OpenAI also provides some free access to the API, through a free-tier program, or through some partnership or research program, which allows developers and researchers to test and experiment with the model at a lower cost or even for free.

It's worth noting that the research version of the GPT-3 is open-source, meaning it is publicly available for anyone to download, use, and modify. However, the model is very large and requires considerable computational resources and expertise to train and fine-tune for specific tasks. So, it's not recommended for general usage.

Will ChatGPT be free?

ChatGPT, like other large language models such as GPT-2 and GPT-3, requires a significant amount of computational power to train and run.

The original version of GPT-2, which had 1.5 billion parameters, required 4 days of training on 8 NVIDIA V100 GPUs, with a batch size of 2048. This implies that a computational power of about 2 Petaflops is required for training.

GPT-3, which has 175 billion parameters, required several months of training on several thousand of high-performance GPUs, which is not accessible for most of the users.

While the exact computational requirements for ChatGPT may vary depending on the specific architecture and configuration of the model, it's safe to say that it requires a significant amount of computational power and resources to train and run.

It's worth noting that the computational power required to run a pre-trained model like ChatGPT is much lower than what is required to train it. The pre-trained model can be loaded into memory and run on a single high-performance GPU or even a standard CPU, which makes it more accessible to a wider range of users.

 How to login to ChatGPT?

 Open https://chat.openai.com/ on your web-browser.

 Click on Sign up.

Use any account, if you have already a logged in Google account , it makes it more easier. Just click on Continue with Google.

Enter your Name

Provide your phone number. You will receive a verification SMS on you mobile.

Enter the code and you are good to go.

The UI is very simple and easy to use.

Just type in Queries that you want to ask the AI and wait for the AI to get you the answers.

One thing to note in particular. The knowledge date cut off for ChatGPT is marked as 2021. So if you are looking for any new information, refrain yourself from asking it to ChatGPT instead, Google it!!!

Tips on how to write Emails

I had never thought I would write something about how to write an email in this blog. But recently came across few necessary tips on writing email and thought about sharing them here.

We do all write emails, to our friends, family and mostly for our official communications .Yet, we do not actually worry much about how we write them.

I have got few tips for you on writing emails to the point and not letting the email reader or recipient confuse on why it was actually written.

Tip #1:
Does your mail pass the "So What?" question

 Emails are written with a specific reason in mind. While writting you need to keep it concise and enough information for the reader so that they wont get lost. To make more sense out of your email, re-read your email once its drafted completely and ask yourself, does it answer "So What?" question. From reader's perspective: 'you told me all these info in your mail, so what?", ' do I need to do something about it or take any action item' , 'or will you be doing something about it?'

Make sure you address this information in your mail and change the information as needed.

Tip #2:
Change the Adjectives to Actual Data

Noone likes half cooked information! And if you are just vaguely saying, 'Sometimes it happens' OR 'Few of the items..' OR ' it had improved and its faster now..' , you are trying to express something but not enough to impress. If you dont give the data points with the information, it's not going to leave a major impact on the readers mind. Data is important while you express the staus. 

It would make more sense if you say ' The quarterly results have seen surge of 40%' instead of 'We have improved the quartely results'

Tip #3:
Actually... not to use them

Continuing to Tip number 2, do not use the fillers like "Actually", "Basically", "Generally". They don't make much sense and adds vagueness to the writing. If you can put data here that is well and good, if not, try not to use them at all.

Tip #4:
Listen to your Active Voice

The active voice sentence are described as sentenses where the subject performs the action stated by the verb. It follows a clear Subject + Verb + Object (SVO) construct that's easy to read.  The more you complicate the sentense, the more confusing it would sound to the reader.

Tip #5:
Explain the short-forms

Remember to explicitly explain the short forms when writting them for the first time. For Example, if you are using a jargon CPR , CPC, CTM try to explain elaborate them if needed or mention the fullform next to them like Clickthrough rate (CTR), Cost-per-click (CPC), Cost-per-thousand (CPM).

It would not confuse them and would help the reader understand it better.

TIP #6:
30 or Less

Last but the important tip, try to keep the word count in a sentence under 30. Its not a rule of thumb but just a precautionary measure. If you want to write something like, "due to the fact that.." you can easily replace it with "because..". 

You do not want to have a sentence like below one from the book "Blindness" which itself is 97 words long. If such sentenses are included in the mail, the reader might get lost in the words and might have to re-re-read to understand it.

Jose Saramago, “Blindness.” 97 words:

“On offering to help the blind man, the man who then stole his car, had not, at that precise moment, had any evil intention, quite the contrary, what he did was nothing more than obey those feelings of generosity and altruism which, as everyone knows, are the two best traits of human nature and to be found in much more hardened criminals than this one, a simple car-thief without any hope of advancing in his profession, exploited by the real owners of this enterprise, for it is they who take advantage of the needs of the poor.”

Few more quick one line tips before I wind-up this post...

• A meaningful subject line.
• Identify yourself.
• Be kind.
• Write it precise.
• Always Proofread before sending.
• Don’t assume that your email will be not be forwarded/shared.
• Seperate formal and informal situations. 
• Show Respect and Restraint.
• Prompt Response. 
• And add the senders names (i.e To list) only after proofreading

Do let me know if you like this post in the comments and share some other Tips if you've.

What exactly SFTP is? And how to Setup SFTP Server

SFTP (SSH File Transfer Protocol) is a secure file transfer protocol and it runs over the SSH and comes with all auth and security that ssh supports. Now-a-days FTP or FTPS is getting replaced by SSH as FTP is considered as not so secure.

The SFTP protocol runs over the SSH protocol as a scheme and it was designed by Tatou Ylonen.
Special thing about SFTP is , there are no ports exposed.

SFTP VS. FTPS

People usually wish to check SFTP vs. FTPS. FTPS is essentially the previous ftp protocol run over SSL (Secure Sockets Layer) or TLS (Transport Layer Security).

Benefits of FTP over SFTP includes,
FTPS is essentially FTP, which implies it's code mode, which might corrupt files if the mode isn't properly set and SFTP runs over SSH within the normal SSH port. Thus, no extra ports have to be compelled to be opened on the server and no extra authentication must be maintained. This simplifies configuration and reduces the probability of config errors.
FTPS wants sophisticated firewall configuration and might not work NAT. Ports 989 and 990 have to be compelled to be open. 
FTPS needs an additional server software system package to be put in and patched, whereas SFTP comes with SSH.
What's more, FTPS supports each active and passive modes , that additional complicates firewall configurations and is susceptible to issues.
FTPS can't be used as a File system. 


Here are easy steps to setup Free SFTP server

To setup the Free SFTP server you can download the Rebex Tiny SFTP server
from https://labs.rebex.net/tiny-sftp-server
And surprisingly, it is free for Commericial and Non-commercial purpose.
Once download is finished, unzip the zipped file and run the "RebexTinySftpServer.exe" file.
There would be another file named "RebexTinySftpServer.exe.config" file which is a server configuration file with below config settings available by default.
The configuration is straight-forward , key-value pair and easy to understand.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<configuration>
<appSettings>
<!-- user and root dir -->
<add key="userName" value="sftpuser"/>    
<add key="userPassword" value="sftpuser"/>
<add key="userRootDir" value="data"/>

<!-- user public keys for public key authentication (optional) -->
<add key="userPublicKeyDir" value=""/>

<!-- misc config -->
<add key="showUserDetailsOnStartup" value="true"/>

<!-- security -->
<add key="rsaPrivateKeyFile" value="server-private-key-rsa.ppk"/>
<add key="rsaPrivateKeyPassword" value="my-super-secure-password"/>

<add key="dssPrivateKeyFile" value="server-private-key-dss.ppk"/>
<add key="dssPrivateKeyPassword" value="my-super-secure-password"/>

<!-- port -->
<add key="sshPort" value="22"/>

<!-- start server when application is started? -->
<add key="autoStart" value="false"/>
</appSettings>

</configuration>

As SSH works on port 22 so config also has the same.
For further security , you can create RSA and DSA keys (.ppk) and provide the password in config which was used while creating the keys.
If you are not comfortable in creating the SSH keys, you can you this awesome free tool that runs on Windows called "PuttyGen" (a utility for RSA and DSA key generation )

Link to download : https://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty/latest.html

If you are working with any SFTP client and you are just looking for test connection with SFTP Server, you dont need to host one. Rebex has already provided a dummy sftp running server at
test.rebex.net  Use demo as username and password as password



Please Note: REBEX SFTP server store the password in clear text as you can see from the config file.
Do let me know if you have any other SFTP server that can be easily setup.

Incoming search: Rebex sftp firewall issues