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Comment by chatmasta | Hacker News Reader

> We found that some web customers were unable to access the puzzle, and found the cause of the problem to be App Engine’s limit on the size of outbound request headers (16KB). Users with a large amount of third-party cookies had their identity stripped from the proxied request. We made a quick fix to proxy only the headers and cookies we needed and we were back in action.

That’s pretty funny. Users of NYT are sending request headers with sixteen kilobytes of tracking data. Maybe that’s the real problem eh?

I wonder which news website has the largest amount of trackers. If I let the CNN home page sit open in chrome, I can come back an hour later and find thousands of requests blocked by uBlock.

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Try a Cracked.com article. I left one open for 10 minutes and had 50,000 requests and 80MB transfered.

Holy crap, you weren't kidding. Loaded their main page, 12MB transferred in the first minute before I noped out of there.

How times change.

That would've taken half a hour on a dial-up connection.

> Users of NYT are sending request headers with sixteen kilobytes of tracking data.

How do you see this? What tools in the browser?

If you use chrome just look at network under the developer tools.

Well nyt saw it by proxying user traffic. You could do the same with a chrome extension, similar to uBlock.

If the website is free then you are the product. Not sure why it’s a surprise these companies aim to maximize the value they can derive from their product (aka our data).

It’s not a surprise, but it is a certain kind of schadenfreude to see a bug caused purely by the sheer amount of trackers they’re forcing into their users’ browsers. It might have been a good time for them to do some internal reflection.

And btw it’s not free; there is a paywall and you can subscribe to the NYT.

NYT isn't forcing these trackers into the user's browsers, ad banners are. You might say that's a distinction without a difference but I disagree, until you work with programmatic ad stuff it's difficult to fathom just how stupid it is, but also how unavoidable it is if you want to make money.

They could try a subscription model.

Glibness aside, there is probably more written about NYT's revenue from ads vs subscription than any other major media company.

IIRC they recently made more money from digital subs than they made from ads for the first time ever. But if they removed ads tomorrow it would still destroy the business as it currently operates.

OP said it was funny, not that it was a surprise.

I'm a paid subscriber to NYT (so it's not free) but I'm still to prone to this issue

If you're a paid subscriber then I think it's morally OK to use an ad blocker on them. You're paying for what you're consuming, and in all likelihood you're only earning them a few cents to maybe a dollar from ads anyways. What you spend on your subscription drives way more value.

Something I haven't though of before - with paper newspapers, there is no way to opt out of ads, and those are also subscription based. Why is the internet different? There is no opt-out for newspapers. Presumably they are getting less revenue than the customer agreed upon if the ads aren't displayed or aren't clicked on. Is using an ad blocker effectively stealing?

Note: I use an ad blocker primarily as a means against malware.

If internet ads were as unobtrusive as newspaper print ads (I'm not talking about the shitty free tabloids), a lot fewer people would be using ad-blockers.

It's not free. NYT relies on a subscription model.

The mini-crossword is free as well as some of their full crosswords.

Some. I actually cancelled my subscription with them because of the horrendously large Google Home ads on all the paid crosswords. When I asked them about it I got about four non-answers — it's ridiculous that even if you pay they still serve you ads.

Newspapers have always included ads even if you pay; not sure why anyone would expect “on the internet” to change that.

Because I pay specifically for only the crossword part. I bought a book of 50 (of NYT puzzles) for the same price, and it came with no ads. Much better deal, if you ask me.

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