
Defeat the New York Times Paywall with 2 lines of CSS (or a Chrome Extension) - will_lam
http://wesbos.com/remove-new-york-times-paywall-css/
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jaysonelliot
If you don't believe the money that the NY Times spends reporting stories and
producing quality journalism is worth it, please just don't read their news.

It costs money to hire quality journalists and send them around the world to
report on the news. If you're willing to pay the cable company $100/month or
more to pipe Jersey Shore into the house, you should be willing to pay the New
York Times to bring you the news they spend so much to report.

~~~
baddox
I don't pay for television, and I've never seen Jersey Shore. I literally only
view NYT articles online when I'm linked to them from a site like Hacker News
or reddit.

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scott_s
Then you will probably be unaffected by the paywall, since it sounds like you
read less than 20 NYT articles a month.

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ugh
This might very well be by design. Why make it hard for those who wouldn‘t pay
anyway to get to their articles? This seems to me like exactly the right way
to do this (if their pricing weren’t so strange).

It will be interesting to see whether they will make it harder or whether
everything stays the same. I could imagine that they get desperate and
introduce much more drastic DRM should their pricing not work out.

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mwsherman
I am sure it's not a technical oversight. As with most DRM, it's about
audience segmentation more than anything. The "DRM" defeater was never going
to pay, and keeping him away from the product provides no upside.

Apple sells a lot of MP3s without DRM. People are looking for convenience and
integration. The convenience/integration sell for the NYT is mobile.

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doghot
If you like the NYT enough to read it, just pay for it.

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baddox
If they want to establish the fact that their content is worth money, they
should actually require a payment to view their content.

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scott_s
They have made it quite clear that they want readers to pay for the content
they access. I know, you said "require," which implies that you think they
should make it nigh-impossible for you to read without paying. But this is not
a legal distinction. They want you to pay. You know this.

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noonespecial
First 4 lines of java, now 2 lines of CSS. I'm feeling a new game of golf
coming on.

What's the fewest characters required to defeat the NY Times paywall?

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wesbos
Thanks for submitting this! I thought of an even smaller way to do it:

$="";

Since they use prototype as $, we can just break the library before they load
it in ;)

~~~
mike-cardwell
$=0;

:p

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notirk
I'm on the fence about paying for the NYTimes once the paywall pops up. I'd
rather not use two lines of CSS to get around it, just like I have made the
decision not to use an AdBlocker.

While the NYTimes pay model would work for me (I'd access via a PC or
smartphone.) I think their pay model is clunky. Why does someone who wants to
access the site via their iPad have to pay more than someone accessing the
same content from a smart phone? The Kindle subscription is left out from this
paywall so those users wouldn't be able to access the site with that
subscription. The full access unlimited digital subscription is $35 a month.
That same user can sign up for the weekend only home delivery for around ~$12
a month and get the full access digital subscription with it.

For such a large, risky undertaking, I don't think it is thought out well at
all.

~~~
vacri
_Why does someone who wants to access the site via their iPad have to pay more
than someone accessing the same content from a smart phone?_

I haven't looked, but I imagine it's a different, more complex app with a
better workflow that takes better advantage of the ipad's capabilities. If you
didn't want the app, you could just pay for the basic website and browse to it
on the ipad.

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donohoe
Please choose ONE of the following:

1\. One or more developers working full-time on fixing bugs and working on new
projects/features

2\. One or more developers working full-time updating Class and ID names and
staying on top of the latest Plugins and Greasemonkey Scripts...

No, seriously - make a choice.

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Johngibb
This is a lame false dichotomy.

This is such an easy exploit that the developers must have known about it, and
consciously decided to ship with a vulnerability.

As others have suggested, they probably realized that those who break the
paywall probably wouldn't have paid anyway.

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donohoe
You are right and I apologize.

There are any number of ways to get around it. Thats a known, regardless of
what you do.

Rather than expend time and resources locking this up as much as possible its
accepted that _X_ number of people will do whatever they want.

What is a little frustrating is people thinking they've totally hacked the NYT
subscription model and subverted our cleverly crafted lock-down methods.

However, its been stated publicly at several pay grades above me, that is
there is an organized concerted effort to work-around the subscription then we
have to act on that. Not just in a legal way, but also by developers working
to lock-down the site more and more.

As I said, I'd rather work on constructive projects instead of that.

It is easy for anyone who knows how to _View Source_ to get to the content. I
just wish they'd stop thinking they're all _l33t_ and subversive when its just
a little sad (to me at least).

I think I'd ultimately feel better if I just ignored this stuff.

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MatthewPhillips
Come on, this has nothing to do with "expending time". It's about SEO.
Otherwise they would take the minimal effort to serve a different page to
people above the threshold.

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Lukeas14
They're trying to have their cake(paying users) and eat it too (free Google
traffic).

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donohoe
Debatable. Right now the only significant revenue stream is advertising on the
site. However advertising took a huge nose-dive last year (or is it closer to
2 years?) and that IMHO was a huge wake-up call.

Having a solid subscriber base would help offset the risk of being soley
dependent on the ebb and flow of advertising.

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Lukeas14
I'm not mad at their strategy. It seemed to have worked for Experts Exchange
who I would guess has a more tech savvy user base. Just pointing out that you
can't hide your content from users while getting it indexed by google at the
same time.

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donohoe
I'm not sure of the specifics but I believe we did continue getting it indexed
by Google during TimesSelect.

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ck2
Stylish is your friend on Firefox.

