"Tunneling Under" the New York Times' Paywall

http://www.zaccohn.com/2011/03/tunnel-under-the-nytimes-wall/

by zacharycohn • 15 years ago

26 14 15 years ago

nudge• 15 years ago

I don't understand this at all. What is it you want from the New York Times, exactly? A more restrictive paywall so that you can't view things you find on twitter? Or just no paywall at all, and a pony?

h5n1• 15 years ago

I think it's more of an ideology. Obviously, the NYT could (and probably will) close down particular workarounds, such as this one, but the bigger picture is that computer-savvy people will always be able to get around the paywall as long as it's targeted at blocking mainstream users.

simias2• 15 years ago

The way I see it, the point is that the NYT convoluted and overpriced paywall is no better than any other "DRM" on copy-protection: crackers will always find a way through.

If you look at the movie and music industries, antipiracy measures have constantly failed to stop people from "stealing" their products. They want the people to go back to "the way it was before" when you bought your newspaper every morning and rented videotapes. All it did is give more troubles to legitimate buyers and give more incentive to go bittorent.

Netflix, Spotify and others try to move forward and find new ways to monetize the media, by actually adding value over the "old way" and by making illegal download actually _less_ convenient than their legit services. I believe the NYT and all the other news conglomerates need to find their Netflix, not try to make things more difficult for users and give us the feeling we're losing something.

flatline• 15 years ago

They want you to pay to see their content but they don't want to force you to pay for reasonably small or occasional usage. They have not implemented an onerous system that some simple hacks can't get around and I'm assuming that they know this. It seems like they've carefully weighed the trade-offs between pissing off users and getting people to pay - I'm looking forward to seeing how this works out for them. My guess is that it is, as you imply, doomed to failure, but perhaps will be made up for by selling content via more closed channels (ipad, etc.)

timr• 15 years ago

"Netflix, Spotify and others try to move forward and find new ways to monetize the media, by actually adding value over the "old way" and by making illegal download actually _less_ convenient than their legit services. I believe the NYT and all the other news conglomerates need to find their Netflix, not try to make things more difficult for users"

Riiiight. Because Netflix, Spotify and others will be doing just dandy with their paywalls when it's as trivially easy to download a pirated, DVD-quality movie as it is to download some text and images today.

I love the logic, though: it's not that you're annoyed that you have to pay for something that you think should be free; it's that the DRM isn't onerous enough that it makes it more convenient for you to pay.

ultrasaurus• 15 years ago

I assume everyone posting on HN knows how to turn off cookies/spoof a referer, so I doubt Zac wants anything more than to play around with getting through the paywall - like codegolf for hackers.

conductor• 15 years ago

just fake the "Referer" HTTP header to http://www.twitter.com/something using one of many extensions available for Firefox... Much more easy than messing up with yahoo and rss..

hoprocker• 15 years ago

Yup. Doubtful anybody could simply make use of this: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/refcontrol/

yahelc• 15 years ago

It is indeed unusual that this paywall has quarks.

_flag• 15 years ago

I don't think anyone posting about how easy it is to circumvent the paywall understands the point: it's not targeted at you. The NYT knows that if they create a completely restrictive paywall they will die, so they're trying to let just enough people in and annoy them just enough to get people to pay for their service. Whether or not somebody with basic technical knowledge can bypass it is not the point. After all, they don't even ask you to register an account and yet they expect to stop you from reading x numbers of articles per month -- why would anyone expect this to be secure?

bengebre• 15 years ago

Boy, there are certainly much easier ways around it than this. The thing is, I'd really like to not have to use them. I'd love to give the Times $5 a month for access to something more than 20 articles but less than infinity. Sadly that's not an option.

meatsock• 15 years ago

if the nyt is selling ads based on number of twitter click-throughs then this article won't displease them very much.

"Tunneling Under" the New York Times' Paywall

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