Press+ - How to get rid of those annoying content blockers on your favorite news site without paying

Update: Press+ has updated their annoying popups.  If you are still receiving popups after reading this article from Press+, please read this article.

I guess corporate greed goes beyond the big oil companies, and has spread to the greedy higher ups in the press industry who are pinching every penny they can from their customers.  Not that I really care about reading 99% of these news sites content because they're just mouthpieces for the liberal cronies they support, but I do like to comment from time to time on the articles to let the lemmings know what morons they really are.  I used these techniques on charlotteobserver.com, and they worked like a charm.  Do I feel bad since I'm not paying $.99/month for their content?  No, because first of all, their content sucks and isn't worth $.99/month anyways, and secondly, upon checking out their pages, they have 10, YES 10, ad servers running in the background.  I'll sometimes click on the ads, so yes, I do financially support them.  I just finally got fed up with the idiot press plus popup that keeps me from seeing content...so I figured out how to get around it.

So, to our friendly hack of the day topic - How to get rid of this annoying as hell press+ popup that covers up the content on the page.

The hacks at press+ have no clue how to secure a site.  They use a number of ways to validate your credentials, and every one of which is on the client side.  You can manipulate the javascript.  You can alter your hosts file.  You can block the cookies.  As with all of my hacks, this is completely legal.  I'm not editing any code on their end r breaking into their server, merely blocking content they're trying to force on MY browser.

Here are the 2 easiest ways using google chrome. If you don't have chrome - get it - it's a thousand times better than internet explorer and firefox.  Though these steps are for chrome, they should be similar to firefox or ie.

Method 1:  Block the cookies - which prevents the press+ forms from calling the authentication server.
1) Click on the chrome control panel icon in the upper right hand corner of chrome and select 'settings'.  It looks like this:

2) Click "show advanced options" at the bottom of the page -> click "content settings" under the privacy section.

3)  Under the cookies section - click "manage exceptions".  Add the following entries and set them to block:

ui.ppjol.com - block

h.ppjol.com-block

ppjol.com-block

Save it, restart your browser (or possibly your machine) and you're done.

Method 2: Edit the hosts file to redirect traffic for their form processing to your own computer

1) Open your hosts file in notepad.  For windows it is located usually here:  "C:/Windows/System32/drivers/etc" and the file is obviously named "hosts"

2)  When you open it, copy this into the file and save it.  The address 127.0.0.1 is the address of your own computer, so in essence, it's short circuiting their form confirmation process, and hence they never load the idiotic popup.

Copy this code into your hosts file:

127.0.0.1 ui.ppjol.com

127.0.0.1 h.ppjol.com

127.0.0.1 ppjol.com 

That should do it, unless they alter the code.  If they altered the code to change the form authorization website domain name, just open your website's view source by right clicking on the web page, and selecting the view source tab, and finding the website they're using to confirm.  Then add that to your hosts file:

127.0.0.1 newsite.com

Save it, restart your browser, and your done.

Method 3: Javascript extension loaded into Chrome which is a bit more complex.  

Since the amateurs at press+ programmed their entire authorization script in javascript - which operates on the clients computer, you can alter this code by creating a simple snippet of *.user.js javascript code and then going into chrome's settings, clicking the extensions tab, and then dragging your .js file on to the page to upload it.  You do have to make some changes to the .js code for the .js file to match your site's parameters - like the site name, but you can do pretty much anything with their code since technically it's the code that is resident on your browser.

I'm too lazy to create this code snippet, but if enough people comment that the first 2 methods aren't working, I'll see what I can do.

Happy Hacking :)

~Hacky McHackerson