
Four lines of code for The New York Times’ paywall - atularora
http://www.niemanlab.org/2011/03/that-was-quick-four-lines-of-code-is-all-it-takes-for-the-new-york-times-paywall-to-come-tumbling-down-2/
======
klenwell
Am I the only one who assumes the NY Times considered the futility of trying
to stop every single 2000-bit hack and is rather trying to change the way
intelligent consumers of news and culture with disposable income approach the
Times, and perhaps quality content generally, online.

I think they've done a fair job of trying to handhold users through the
transition. I expect the success or failure of the paywall not to depend on
the fact of the paywall itself (obviously), but on how easy and frictionless
they'll make it to pay. If they can make it graceful enough, I will happily
pay for content I know there are loopholes for accessing. If it's a
clusterfuck, as with other DRM schemes, I'll either seek out the leaks or give
up.

I'm hoping they've adopted something like this approach, a slightly more
rigorous version of the NPR pledge model, and are relying on the goodwill and
intelligence of their readership and not its stupidity.

~~~
ultrasaurus
I assumed they want to see how people will react (they are in essence A/B
testing Canada vs the USA). And that they're oping that people will end up
using the service more or less as intended.

It's an interesting experiment, I read more than 20 articles from NYTimes.com
a month, but I don't need more than a few. If the blogosphere starts pointing
to the BBC instead, I'll end up reading that.

I should probably mention that it's my code (if we can call it that) we're
talking about. The traffic is killing my blog now, but I a few hours ago made
it out of curiosity if I could hack that (it was 20 minutes all in).

------
jameskilton
The javascript: <http://toys.euri.ca/nyt.js> (which is really 3 lines).

The NYT does have a really hard problem to solve though. How do you securely
police the "20 free articles a week" system if you can't trust cookies, can't
put validation on the page itself, and ip addresses change all the time
without requiring even a free account to read the content?

They are trying to come up with a modern pay solution to journalism and for
that I give them props. It's not going to be an easy road though.

~~~
neild
_How do you securely police the "20 free articles a week" system if you can't
trust cookies, can't put validation on the page itself, and ip addresses
change all the time without requiring even a free account to read the
content?_

You assume that the number of people with the ability and desire to circumvent
your defenses is a small fraction of your total audience, and ignore them.

~~~
eli
In other words, exactly the same way you deal with AdBlock on your ad-
supported website.

------
rabidsnail
I just realized that since the NYT paywall is copy protection, View Source on
the NYT is now illegal.

~~~
dexen
_> ... is now illegal._

In a certain country, you may want to add.

Some people are arguing whether the country in question is more of a
representative republic or of a democracy ((guess that's enough of snarkiness
for one short post)).

~~~
xiaoma
It's actually a pretty long list of countries that have signed that treaty.

~~~
wladimir
Yes, he forgot to add that the imperialistic country in question tries hard to
push its draconian ideas about copyright to the rest of the world. Spread the
hurt...

------
buss
And if this fails, "referer: <http://google.com/search?q=totallyfake> " works
just as well.

------
jgilliam
It was clearly designed to be easy to hack, so they are not afraid of that.
What they've really done is set a premium price on their content. Whether
people pay it or not, everyone will now feel like the NYT is very high
quality. That seems to be the intent.

------
jasonkester
Has anybody done the math to figure out how many people they'll need to sign
up for this thing in order to break even?

They seem to have spent $40M building it and dropped their stock price 3% on
the first day it was live. That's a lot of $40 annual subscriptions just to
cover the cost of putting it in place.

------
kingkawn
They'd setup a method of preventing right-click save of images not that long
ago, replacing the image's referencing URL with a small blank block. Easily
overcome by viewing source, but still was the new start of their effort to
protect the content a little more.

------
apas
Messy Javascript code, indeed. Nice work-around.

------
Breefield
Curious as to what this was.

~~~
Groxx
I'm assuming you're referring to the site being non-responsive? Try searching
Google for "cache:url" :)

~~~
ultrasaurus
Assuming it's my blog that we're referring to, I mirrored the relevant bits on
the slice that hosts the static files: <http://toys.euri.ca/>

