Wednesday, April 27, 2011

Getting Around the NYT Paywall

Man, it's been forever since I posted to this. But school is basically out, and I've got some time again. So, here goes a quick tip that I just found useful.



The NYT moved to a paid subscription model a while ago (2nd time), which was unfortunate for me, since I'm poor as hell. But, there's ways around it, which I've just now stumbled across. Here goes:

Clear your cookies.

I was surprised by this one, as it's really simplistic. I would have thought they'd at least use IP addresses.

Stop the Page

Also very simplistic; But it works. Just stop the page from loading before the paywall overlay pops up.

And lastly:

Remove everything past the &gwh= part of the url


There was a bit of javascript you could paste into the url as well, but that didn't seem to work the one time I tried it real quick. Regardless, all 3 of the above methods work perfectly fine. Personally, I'm a bit surprised just how little effort went into securing content. Especially considering that it allegedly cost them $40-50 million to create. I imagine they'll tighten up security eventually, but until then, enjoy!

42 comments:

  1. That is pretty cool that you found a way around it.

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  2. Haha, that's pretty sweet. Following...

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  3. nice. Hard to believe the NYT wouldn't have a better system than this.

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  4. nice. I wonder how they managed to miss that

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  5. Interesting... would like to check out some code

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  6. Aahaha, bad for them for letting that escape! :D

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  7. HAHahahaha definitely will give this a try :P

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  8. I don't read the NYT much, but occasionally they might have a good article, so this is useful info. Thanks. I'm wondering how long until they figure out how to close this...

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  9. haha, those are some useful workaround tips! NYT puts out some good articles

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  10. Yeah, they are eventually gonna fix that because it's so easy, lol.

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  11. wow!! very nice men, thanks for the info

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  12. free news has never been sweeter! haha cool trick

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  13. Well, you guys that use this to actually read the articles are shooting yourselves in the feet. Newspapers need this revenue: NEED . It's not just profiteering.
    As the general pop goes over to reading the reports online we stop buying the papers - hence reducing the profits...
    So the paper quality starts to decline due to the publishers not being able to employ decent reporters, typesetters ECT.
    Thankfully we have the BBC, and here in Australia the ABC which are government supported agencies that supply Good unbiased news.

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  14. Great way to get NY NEWS for free :D

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  15. Free news, pretty cool! Well, actually I get my news from other sources.

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  16. Know how you feel being poor man...

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  17. Wow. Sounds like they take lessons from PlayStation Network.

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  18. haha yeah thats ridiculous! you would certainly think they'd put a little more effort in then that, works for us though haha

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  19. oh and p.s cheers for the tip with embedding youtube vids, i wondered about that haha

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  20. kewl post for the pirates in all of us... ARR! hehehe

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  21. great trick i like it. thanks for sharing man.

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  22. I love it when THE MAN wants to bleed you dry but forgets a few holes in his plan, here and there!
    Great!

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  23. Can't believe they have this long-known security hole...

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  24. 40-50 mil for this? what a fucked-up world

    utubed.blogspot.com

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  25. Wow, the NYT spent all that effort for nothing.

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