Apple Iphone owners get more. They get free Wireless access at AT&T Hotspots, which no longer is that easy to defeat and now they also get to view free digital magazines of 20 or so popular magazines without costs, courtesy of Zinio. Guess how they are providing those free digital magazines and figuring out that an Apple iPhone user is actually requesting it and not someone else ?
Yes, the same insecure User Agent check that did not work on so many occasions before. All that needs to be done is change the User Agent in your browser to the one of the iPhone which will trick the website into thinking that you are accessing it with an iPhone. This in turn will give you access to those magazines, among them PC Magazine, Technology Review, Macworld, Lonely Planet and, um, Playboy and Penthouse.
The content is provided in full screen in your browser and you can flip through the pages with a click. It’s probably not the most comfortable way but it’s free and easy enough. Pages are actually shown as images which means they can be saved to the local hard drive.
Firefox users can install the User Agent Switcher add-on and configure it with the following User Agent:
Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/4A102 Safari/419 (United States)
just add the line into the User Agent field in the options of the add-on and any name in the description. Then switch to that User Agent and visit the Zinio website that was created for iPhone users. Thanks Scott for the tip.
Related posts:
Texterity Magazines offering free iPhone magazinesApple and AT&T Will Learn that User Agents are no good for access control
Read Full Magazines at Mygazines
Read Magazines At Google Book Search
Ten Interesting Free Magazines For Professionals
Free Magazines and Whitepapers for Professionals
Free Computer Mags for Ghacks Readers
Read all Wallstreet Journal articles for free
24 Responses to “Read 20 Digital Magazines for Free”
Trackbacks/Pingbacks
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[...] article that explains how you can change the User Agent in Firefox to be identified as an iPhone (Iphone user agent) when browsing the [...]
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[...] Once that’s done, switch to your iPhone agent and head to the Zinio link below. You’ll get full-page browsing of 20 titles, including UK and Spanish-language versions of Macworld and a handful of mens’ magazines. I should note here that Playboy and Penthouse are also offered up, so don’t follow through if a glimpse from a boss might land you in hot water. Zinio iPhone interface [via gHacks] [...]
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[...] Juokas ima iš visokių rinkodaros veiksmų, skirtų izoliuoti vienus vartotojus nuo kitų. Kadangi iPhone savininkai suvokiami, kaip turintys daug pinigų, juos Zinio tarnyba vilioja nemokamais elektroniniais žurnalais, įskaitant PC Magazine, MacWorld ir netgi Playboy bei Penthouse. Tačiau su User Agent Switcher įskiepiu, tuos žurnalus gali nemokamai skaityti visi. :) (gHacks) [...]
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[...] are accessing it with an iPhone. This in turn will give you access to those magazines, among them PC Magazine, Technology Review, Macworld, Lonely Planet and, um, Playboy and [...]
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[...] one of the tipster of gHacks just shares his trick to make your desktop Firefox browser act as iPhone [...]
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[...] Dicha extensión se configura agregando un ‘User Agent’ tal como se explica en gHacks. Después se le indica a Firefox que se comporte como el browser del iPhone y nos dirigimos a [...]
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[...] riviste che sono però tutte in inglese.Facile indovinare quale ho sbirciato per prima… Via gHacks [...]
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[...] Read 20 Digital Magazines for Free (tags: Free Hack Magazine) [...]
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[...] Read 20 Digital Magazines for Free (tags: internet) [...]
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[...] Once that’s done, switch to your iPhone agent and head to the Zinio link below. You’ll get full-page browsing of 20 titles, including UK and Spanish-language versions of Macworld and a handful of mens’ magazines. I should note here that Playboy and Penthouse are also offered up (as you might guess from the declarative link title below), so don’t follow through if a glimpse from a boss might land you in hot water. [via gHacks] [...]
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[...] Configuramos el navegador como un iPhone, siguiendo estos pasos [...]
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[...] A simple Firefox hack lets you Read 20 Digital Magazines for Free. [...]
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[...] and there is also a neat little trick to get to some iphone only sites in your browser over at ghacks. Well let’s see what others are using out there and how they help your browsing experience! [...]
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[...] Fuente: gHacks.Net [...]
I would better say “gHacks readers get more!” :D. Thanks for the amazing tip buddy.
Hi,
Thanks Martin. Awesome post!
Do u know anyway to download these stuff to local Harddisk without having to save each and every page manually?
-p5chin
Hey, is that firefox? What theme is that? Thanks for the tip.
That’s my Windows XP theme.
P5chin there is probably a way to automatically save the images once you are on the page but I don’t think it is possible to mass download them unless you use a tool that can spoof the user agent.
Awww
I’m using vista.
Here is how to download a whole magazine to your desktop:
1) Do the trick to get acces to the Zinio Newsstand
2) Select your magazine (I’ll do it with PC Magazine)
3) Click on the cover to see it
4) Right-click on the image and copy the address of it.
5) Open Excel
6) in A1 copy the address of the image http://imgs.zinio.com/iphone/issues/pcmag0805v2/images_pages//pcmag0805v2_1.jpg
7) remove everything after the last underscore so that it looks like this:
http://imgs.zinio.com/iphone/issues/pcmag0805v2/images_pages//pcmag0805v2_
8) in A2—> A201 put numbers from 1 to 200
9) in B2 type =CONCATENATE($A$1;A2;”.jpg”)
10) Pull B2 all the way to B201
11) Copy the B column and download the links using your favorite download manager. (Flashget does the job for me)
Just use the Firefox extension DownloadThemAll with Batch Downloads, set the start and end pages and download.
great tip, some other hacks with User Agent Switcher?
haha, try Iphone’s User Agent with Google :o
Bruno
Great stuff. It works like magic.