Make hyperlinks work again.

• Below is the latest edition of w3w, my free newsletter about emerging technology, including AI, Bitcoin, Ethereum, and more . If you would like to receive it in your inbox every Sunday, please subscribe here.

This week I'm re-sharing a post from a few years back about a problem that still affects many people's daily experience of the web. Hope the tips here are helpful as ever, especially for the folks who weren't subscribed when this ran the first time. - PM ☺️🎅🎄

We've all been there. You see a headline on the web that's of interest — a news article or maybe useful information for your work or a hobby. You click aaaaand... hit a paywall. The article flashes on the screen briefly, and then a pop-up prompt blocks you from seeing it unless you buy a subscription.

The good news: This common pattern is completely avoidable through a variety of workarounds that will allow you to read almost any article you want. Publishers have knowingly allowed these technical loopholes to persist for years now, or have even built them into their websites on purpose in some cases. (More on that later.)

Geekier readers already know this, I'm sure. But I point it out here for the benefit of my "normie" friends frustrated with the default "obstacles" thwarting their daily web browsing.

To that end, one particular solution bears special mention: disabling JavaScript in your web browser. JavaScript is the programmatic language of the web that controls dynamic website behaviors, including those infernal paywall pop-ups. If you simply turn off the JavaScript by changing a setting on your own computer you're usually left with the full story text and no pop-up.

Voilà. Read to your heart's content. That's it.

If you're using Chrome, which is currently the most popular web browser globally, the settings to turn off JavaScript should be viewable here. You can turn it off completely or site-by-site. (The latter worked better for me in terms of news reading, to be honest. But your mileage may vary.) You can also use that settings page to turn JavaScript back on, of course, as it does enable many cool features around the web as well.

If you're using Brave, a pro-privacy browser that's my own daily workhorse, turning off the JavaScript is even easier. Just click on the Brave logo in the main browser bar and toggle the "block scripts" option on and off as needed.

There are a variety of extensions that enable a similar toggle on other browsers, as well as YouTube tutorials about turning off JavaScript in various browsers that I haven't mentioned here, covering both PC and mobile versions.

I estimate that disabling JavaScript will thwart 80% of the paywalls you'll encounter on the web. The only exceptions are publications that have set up server-side paywalls that run on their computers, not yours, sometimes called "hard" paywalls in the media industry. These are usually financial publications like the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg News, and the Financial Times.

So why doesn't everyone in the industry set up their paywall that way? It's because they're trying to balance two strategic goals for their businesses — generating subscription revenue and maximizing site traffic. These goals are often in tension, so publications purposely make their paywalls "porous," as the traffic from users employing various workarounds still counts in their traffic metrics. Thus it helps generate a little extra ad revenue.

There's been coverage of this tactic in multiple media trade publications like the Columbia Journalism Review and Poynter.org. So rest assured, publishers know about it. In fact, they purposefully exploit it in their own way.

On to the week's (now more accessible) headlines:

Week in Review: Dec. 7-13, 2025

• The Securities and Exchange Commission effectively greenlighted blockchain-based trading of U.S.-listed securities for the first time. The market watchdog said the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., which financially guarantees all trades on Wall Street's public stock exchanges, can offer a tokenization service for approved assets, including constituents of the Russell 1000 stock index and U.S. Treasury debt. (CoinDesk)

• New York's governor signed into law America's first regulations requiring advertisers to disclose AI-generated content. But the new law could face a legal challenge from the federal Department of Justice. (Decrypt)

• Some welcome developments for crypto payments: YouTube enabled U.S. content creators to receive their earnings in PayPal’s stablecoin PYUSD... Meanwhile, payments startup N3XT, founded by former Signature Bank executives, launched under a Wyoming banking charter.

• Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon received a 15-year prison sentence in the U.S. for his role in the collapse of the TerraUSD and Luna coins in 2022. Investors lost $40 billion in the meltdown. (Wall Street Journal)

• A group of British lawmakers is urging the Bank of England to reconsider proposals that would cap stablecoin holdings for citizens and businesses, citing concerns that such restrictions would deter innovation and limit adoption of digital finance in the UK. Separately, the UK's Labour Party and Liberal Democrats are calling for a regulatory investigation into crypto-industry donations to the Nigel Farage's hard-right Reform UK.

Market Snapshot

A quick look at some major indicators as of Friday's close on Wall Street:

Looking Ahead

• 2026 could see the first $1 trillion tech IPO in the U.S. Both OpenAI and Anthropic are reportedly planning initial stock listings on Wall Street that could break all previous records. (Reuters)

• A protracted takeover battle looms at Warner Brothers Discovery. On Monday, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile bid for the entirety of the media giant's holdings for $108 billion. The move came in reaction to an announcement by Netflix on Dec. 5 that it had reached an agreement to buy Warner's movie studio and streaming businesses only for $83 billion, subject to shareholder approval. For a sharp analysis of the situation, I would recommend Tuesday's episode of the Pivot podcast, made all the better by the split between co-hosts over which bid will and should win out ultimately. Veteran tech journalist Kara Swisher favors Netflix (as I did in this newsletter last week). But entrepreneur/professor Scott Galloway leans more toward Paramount Skydance.

• America's "Moondoggle:" In Slate, Joel Achenbach reports at length about Artemis, the NASA mission that is supposed to return Americans to the moon by 2027. At least, that's the official policy. Behind the scenes, however, Achenbach says a lot is not going as planned, to the point that a new moon landing is almost certainly much further off than anyone in Washington will publicly admit.

Odds & Ends

• Ben Werdmuller still ❤️ RSS. ProPublica's tech director says that despite often being dismissed as a "dead" technology, the humble Real Simple Syndication feed is still widely used and thus a crucial standard for distributing news across the web. By leveraging RSS, publishers can maintain control over their distribution, and readers can access the content they want without relying on algorithms or intermediaries.

• MacKenzie Scott, ex-wife of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, has donated over $26 billion to charity since their divorce, making her one of the world's most generous philanthropists. That includes almost $7.2 billion in giving in 2025, her most-active year yet. Bravo! 🎁

That's it for now. Thanks for reading the newsletter today! If you want to know more about w3w's history and (ahem) the author, that info is available here.

Please note, I regularly use several AI apps to assist production of w3w. But the final edit is 100% by me. For fuller detail, see the newsletter's commit history on GitHub.

If you need to reach me directly, please email peter[at]pmckay[dot]com.

Best wishes for a healthy and productive week ahead. 😊