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Access paywall content for Free with this trick

technologyEdward Kiledjian

There are dozens of large well respected online sites that protect their content using paywalls. A paywall is a fancy way to define  subscriber only content. In the above case, it is an article about Elon Musk's electric car company called Tesla.

Unfortunately I can't read the article. If I click the X to close the subscription options, I get taken back to the homepage. But there is a way to gain access to the content without paying the subscription.

If you read content from a specific site regularly, I recommend you pay the subscription fee and support the site. Without paying customers, the site will eventually wind down and you’ll lose your source.

The trick to access the content is fairly straightforward. Right click on the link from the home page and copy the destination URL.

Then head over to Google Translate (link) and paste the URL into the translation box. Make sure the translate to is also English.

Then press Translate. The inaccessible site is now "translated" from english to english and you gain access to the content. 

This is possible because many sites want search engines to index their content (in order to drive traffic) so when the page is read by Google, access is permitted and Google then displays it to you.