linkvertise · lootlabs · wrapper gates
The countdown is fake.
Skip it.
Those gates only work if your browser loads them and plays along. This loads them on a worker instead, does the one part that is actually required, and hands back the URL that was hiding on the other side.
Nothing to install. No extension, no userscript, no companion app asking for permissions it should not have.
idle.
First press can take a few seconds. It is solving a hash puzzle on your machine, which is the point — that cost is what the gate was charging you.
What it is actually doing
It makes the same request your browser would, with an ordinary user
agent, and reads the challenge out of the response. The challenge is
sha256(prefix:nonce) with a target number of leading zero
hex digits. The gate is betting that grinding it costs you a few seconds
and most of your patience. The loop here runs in a worker and usually
lands in well under a second, and the nonce goes back on the same
session.
Then the inner link gets asked for its destination. That is the whole trick. The provider's own API will happily tell you where a link points if you turn up looking like a session that already did the work.
Before anything is shown, the result is checked for an evaluation token. Providers stamp those onto links handed to sessions they have decided are fake, and a stamped link points somewhere useless on purpose. An error is more useful than a URL that goes nowhere, so those get thrown out rather than passed along.
Your browser only ever runs the hash loop. It never loads the provider page, so there is no nested iframe, no five second poller, no fingerprint surface, and nothing to clean out of your cookies afterwards.
Where it stops working
- Gates that want an account
- It does not log in, and it is not going to borrow someone's cookies to pretend it did.
- Captchas that are not the proof of work
- Real ones, the image kind. Not happening, and I am not going to pretend otherwise.
- Providers without a path written
- You get
unknown provider, not a guess dressed up as an answer. - Slow solves
- If the nonce does not turn up in twenty seconds the loop gives up and says so. A hung request is worse than a clear no.
- Bad Tuesdays
- The other side changes a shape, resolves break, and they stay broken until I notice. No SLA, no status page, nobody on call.
Notes
- Resolved links are cached for five minutes so a refresh does not re-grind the puzzle.
- Plenty of destinations are dead files regardless of how you got them. This finds the door. It does not make what is behind the door exist.
- If somebody is getting paid at the other end of that gate, this skips their ad. That is the entire function. Nobody involved is under an illusion about it.
- Version 1.2. Small maintenance, no changelog worth reading.