Free Magazines

Fancy free and full access to magazines, such as Car & Driver, Men’s Health, Penthouse (whatever that is), Popular Mechanics, and PC Magazine? Well, Amit Agarwal over on Digital Inspiration reveals a neat hack that involves changing your web browser settings so that when you visit the magazine’s website you can surf right in.

The trick is to download and install Apple’s Safari browser (it may work with Firefox and others too), then set the browser user agent to “Mobile Safari 1.1.3 - iPhone”. This then tricks the website into thinking you are using an iPhone to visit and because iPhone has agreements with certain publishers to provide access to content you too can get the lowdown from all those magazines. Once you’ve set your user agent visit this page to get access to the magazines for free. Of course, I presume if you’ve got an iPhone contract you don’t need to do this as you could just use your iPhone instead.

I suspect that in revealing this hack, Amit is actually in breach of some rules and regulations in some parts of the world. I’m letting you in on the secret simply to provide educational insight into how to tweak your browser. I doubt this loophole will stay open for long, however, and it’s just possible that Zinio is already in the process of pulling up the drawbridge as it doesn’t look like current issues are available right now.