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Comment by pierrefar | Hacker News Reader

>>"There’s a lot of technical work that we need to do over the next year to get this right," said Martin A. Nisenholtz.

Well, duh. For one, is this cookie-based tracking? I already know how to fix that. Is it sign in tracking? I predict a surge in account sign-ups. Is it IP-based tracking? Say bye to all your AOL users and those behind proxies. Will they force users to install a browser plugin or and ActiveX control or use a FLASH plugin or Silverlight or whatnot? Yeah, that will work for sure.

So, which magical solution do they think they can come up with?

Anyone else thinking this is going to fail quietly in the next few months?

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Are you somehow implying that a pay-wall can't be built? Porn sites seem to have figured it out quite a while ago so I don't see how NYTimes would be any different.

Of course they aren't going to be able to stop people copy/pasting articles to a friend but that generally isn't a problem.

Even if their pay-wall is only 99% effective and a small amount of smart techies manage to get around it for free it really isn't that big of an issue since people that determined to get the content for free never would've paid for it anyway.

I'm not saying anything a paywall: if it is "pay for everything", then you're right, it can be built very effectively. What they're saying is that they want to give free capped usage for users, and I'm thinking that whatever mechanism they think of can probably be circumvented easily.

Most people would rather be honest and pay a few dollars than mess with cookies/proxies/multiple accounts, especially if they don't know what a cookie is in the first place.

If someone values his time sufficiently low to make several email accounts to read the NYT without paying... he probably can't/won't pay, whatever is done.

That's a very fair point. My only counter to it is that us geeks will spread the word that using Chrome in incognito mode is quite effective.

Ctrl-Shift-N is quite fast, and Google is pushing Chrome very hard, and us geeks are called on for tech support quite often.

I think your honesty thought will win out most of the time, but not always. People like a free lunch and sticking it to the man, especially if they have the tools to do it very easily. We'll see.

Wait, wait! Are you trying to tell us that NYTimes' content is as valuable as porn?

I beg to differ, Sirrah!

Also, if you, ah, investigate online porn, you'll find that the on-line porn sites seem to have a gentleman's agreement to not get all huffy if the occasional, incomplete picture set leaks to a free site.

It's not a "gentleman's agreement", it's promotional material.

The porn sites themselves build the picture sets and if you have an affiliate account with them you see the available material (along with all the relevant html code that you can customize to match your colour scheme or whatnot and that already has your referral codes in place) and pick what you want to use on your own site.

It's basic affiliate marketing.

Although you may be able to bypass their protection, even if it's a simple cookie authentication, the whole operation will probably not be a failure. Presumably most people they are targeting, who might be willing to pay for a subscription, aren't tech-savvy enough and lack the motivation to get around it.

Why not just do it with IP address? Too annoying for most people to spoof. The few who have shared IP addresses get screwed, not really a big deal.

Do it with sign ins and require you to validate the account with a phone number (a la Craigslist). That has been incredibly effective at CL.

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