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I was searching for something, and found a document on a website. It is showing it using the Flash Player. When I wanted to save a copy by clicking "Download this document", it says needs to register, and registration is for free.

So I entered my email address and a simple password to register. And then it showed: needs US$0.30 to buy this document and download it.

Besides feeling a little bit cheated, I wondered, is there a way to save the document as a txt or pdf if it is being shown by the Flash player?

I say Reinstate Monica
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nonopolarity
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1 Answers1

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Depends on site engine. Flash viewers often download the real content from site with a dynamic HTTP request. You can try to intercept such a request and view it's contents with a Mozilla addon named Firebug: http://www.getfirebug.com/.

Download the addon, then travel to site, turn on Firebug panel (click on grey bug in right side of statusbar), select the 'Net' tab and click 'Flash' button. Do not close the panel and then reload whole page. All requests made by Flash plugin will be shown in Firebug. You can save their contents with context menu.

I can suggest that you may analyze contents of intercepted requests with some program that supports magic value searching; this is surely file under *nix and probably WinHex on Windows (but I did not checked the latter).

Also you can try to analyze the <object> tag that is includig Flash Player to the page. Sometimes there is bare link to some file passed to the player, but this is unlikely to happen on paid site.

Catherine
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