New York Times Paywall Goes Live, Loopholes Abound 127
RedEaredSlider writes "As the New York Times' new paywall went live this afternoon at 2 p.m., discussion of the move has made the natural transition to methods of bypassing it. As expected, a number of loopholes and hacks have appeared. One of the more notorious methods appeared almost instantly. Using a Twitter account named @FreeNYT, an anonymous user aggregated every article the newspaper posted to Twitter. The site caught The Times' notice and before long, The Times requested that Twitter suspend the account, arguing that it violated its trademark. Another loophole uses four lines of CSS and JavaScript. Canadian developer David Hayes managed to strip the Times' website of any mention of digital subscriptions in addition to getting past the paywall. The hack was released in the form of NYTClean, a bookmarklet easily added to web browsers."
It's likely that the paywall is deliberately porous; as paywalls go, it's a relatively unrestrictive one. Readers referred from search or other sites are unlikely to notice a difference. Workarounds at least keep readers on their site.
Re:4 lines of JS... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Get a sunday subscription, it's cheaper. (Score:4, Informative)
I thought about that too, until I found out that for the D.C. metro area, that's the intro price and only good for 8-12 weeks. After that, it doubles to $7.50/wk. Last time I checked -- granted, it was several years ago -- the newsstand price for the Sunday NYT was only $5.00. (In my case, since I own a smartphone but no tablet, I would be better off taking the Sunday NYT for 12 weeks, then switching to digital.) I'd be curious to know what the NY/NJ/"home area" rate is compared to D.C., or if other parts of the country have cheaper "standard" rates.