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They are not actually bypassing firewalls - therefore I think they are on ethically good grounds. Those sites show their full text for web crawlers - only not to humans. Basically, archive.is and the folk simulate that through various means. Headless browsers, better agent injection etc.

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I don't think that's true. If it was that simple, there would be browser plugins or other apps that would replicate that behavior. Do you know of any?

Perhaps not in the same way as described above, but BPC exists.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bypass_Paywalls_Clean

I always assumed so - because Google can index them full text. It used to be the case that you could see those full snapshots in Google as cache - this was before the sites strong armed Google to remove those snapshots from being accessible, then archive.* folk rose to power. You can test this yourself for searching for a unique quote on those sites and still getting hits in Google. But you are right - why could this not be achieved with a plugin then - don't know.

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