combatting idiocy
Fix
4:56PM Angus Kidman | Back in February, we told you about the handy Deobfuscator tool, which made it possible to copy and paste text from the Australian Financial Review (via its sister site MIS). Following reader reports, we can confirm that the original Deobfuscator tool no longer seems to work on MIS pages (presumably there’s been a coding change at the back end).However, all is not lost — as I learnt during the Pubcamp media conference in Melbourne earlier this week, the AFR is making at least some content available on its site the day of publication, and the Deobfuscator still works fine on that. Here it is working its magic on an article about the corporate coming of age of Twitter and LinkedIn by Renai LeMay, well worth passing on to your management if they still insist that social networking should be banned on work computers. The original AFR article is here. (Thanks Sean C for raising the issue!)
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Keeping pace with the AFR
4:56PM Angus Kidman | Back in February, we told you about the handy Deobfuscator tool, which made it possible to copy and paste text from the Australian Financial Review (via its sister site MIS). Following reader reports, we can confirm that the original Deobfuscator tool no longer seems to work on MIS pages (presumably there’s been a coding change at the back end).However, all is not lost — as I learnt during the Pubcamp media conference in Melbourne earlier this week, the AFR is making at least some content available on its site the day of publication, and the Deobfuscator still works fine on that. Here it is working its magic on an article about the corporate coming of age of Twitter and LinkedIn by Renai LeMay, well worth passing on to your management if they still insist that social networking should be banned on work computers. The original AFR article is here. (Thanks Sean C for raising the issue!)
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Unobfusticate the Australian Financial Review
6:50PM Sarah Stokely | If you follow Australian news online news, you probably know that the Australian Financial Review locks up most of its online content to paid subscribers only. Recently they’ve been loosening up this policy somewhat – so you’ll sometimes see AFR content posted over at the website of sister magazine, MIS.But the AFR seems pretty attached to its online copy. So much so that recently it’s begun “obfuscating” its pages so that if you select text in the browser (or view source), it litters the text with “ ” converting it to unreadable gibberish – presumably to stop people cutting and pasting their content.This is bizarre – often people like to cut and paste to read later, or to email to a friend to tell them about the article, or to quote in their blog. Enter the Deobfusticator - a website created by Lindsay Evans which lets you enter an AFR URL and get a page of readable text in return. Thanks for helping us keep the Fin somewhat user friendly, Lindsay. :) More » 