The fragmentation of the Internet behind paywalls, social media “walled gardens,” and other forms of censorship makes it hard for “information to be free.”
Here are some tips (of varying legality) for getting around those barriers!
- To bypass paywalls (e.g., New York Times), use archive.ph.
- For academic publications, use sci-hub (URLs change often).
- To get non-copyrighted books, use Project Gutenberg.
- To get copyrighted books, use Library Genesis (URLs change often; be careful of malware).
- To get music and video, use BitTorrent (beware malware!!)
- To download streams (e.g., Youtube, Soundcloud), use YT-DL.
I strongly recommend against downloading pirated programs (.exe or .dmg), as those are often malware.
I strongly recommend in favor of good anti-virus software, such as Windows Defender (there’s a lot of bad software).
Remember: If it’s free, then you are the customer… or victim.