Defeat the New York Times Paywall with 2 lines of CSS (or a Chrome Extension) | Hacker News Reader

Defeat the New York Times Paywall with 2 lines of CSS (or a Chrome Extension)

wesbos.com

58 pointswill_lam48 comments

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.

I totally agree. This wasn't an exercise is getting around the business model but rather a quick tutorial so show how laughable (or possible by design) their hiding of articles was. If they really wanted to hide the content, they could easily check for the cookie on the server side rather than doing on the client side.

Nonsense. It was dressed up as a tutorial to "style the content of a page to your liking", but you know something, I learned very little about styling a page to my liking in that tutorial. The game is also given away by the name of the supplied function: "Paywall smasher".

The "tutorial" is the thinnest veneer of an excuse I've seen in a long time, and sits right alongside all those people who torrent scores of gigabytes of "linux isos" every month.

"It costs money to hire quality journalists and send them around the world to report on the news."

Investigative journalism is probably around 2% of their budget. Paying the New York Times to support journalism is like eating every meal at Burger King because they donate 1/10th of a cent from each hamburger to Japan.

If you want to donate money somewhere, give it to Salon.com or NPR.

Don't Americans already donate to NPR through taxes?

Edit: Why the down vote, did I hit a sensible cord? For the record, I'm not American.

NPR member stations get some money from the Corporation For Public Broadcasting, which is funded by the federal gov't. NPR itself gets less than they do. According to Wikipedia, 1.5% of its funding is from CPB.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NPR#Funding

You're right, but that's not all the funding they get. The member stations also get tax deductions, grants from federal/state/local government as well as grants from government funded universities.

This is from a (clearly) slanted source, but their numbers seem above-board: http://www.americanthinker.com/2010/10/how_public_is_nprs_fu...

No. Its not 2% of our budget. NYT (to the best of my knowledge) has the largest newsroom in the world (even after recent layoffs and hiring freeze). As such thats a very very large expense.

While this same newsroom covers nice and safe things like Travel, Arts, Books, Crosswords and such it also covers things that entail 4 journalists getting detained and abused in Libya, a photographer losing limbs in Afganistan, reporters abducted by the Taliban, and all the other war, economic, analytical, and political reporting that is done.

The NYT is far from perfect but its not Burger King.

I should clearly state that I work there - this opinion is my own and very very personal

"It also covers things like involve 4 journalists getting detained in Libya, photographers losing limbs in Afganistan, reporters abducted by the Taliban, and all the other war, economic, analytical, and political reporting that is done."

But how much of that is actually investigative journalism versus reporting, opinion, or shallow analysis?

I'm going to avoid this argument. I'm not going to change your mind. The only thing I can say is look at the CNN homepage, and then look at the NYTimes. EOM.

Update (since i cannot reply to your comment): I don't know the %, but i know is greater than 2. I can ask and see if anyone can give me an actual figure.

"The only thing I can say is look at the CNN homepage, and then look at the NYTimes."

I don't see that's relevant to how much the NYT spends on investigative journalism. You say I'm closed-minded, but you're the one whose not willing to disclose the actual percentage.

I love the NY Times, but I'm angry at both the subscription options and their price points. As has been pointed out elsewhere, they make no sense:

$x = NYtimes.com (website) + smartphone app $y = NYtimes.com (website) + tablet app $(x+y) = NYtimes.com (website) + smartphone app + tablet app

So you can effectively cancel out the website access, even though that's all that many of us want. The value of the website is $0? (Also worth noting that there is absolutely no conceivable reason that a tablet app should require an additional subscription. If you're going to make everything à la carte, then price it that way and let me pick. But there's no way I'm going to accept that the website would be priced at $0.)

Do I think the Times spends oodles of money to report on tons of topics nobody else wants to cover? Yes, and I want to support that. But what they've done with these subscription options is convince me that they don't understand how the industry is actually changing. For $23/month (which is just a little over the cost of $y above), I could get M-F delivery of the paper and the complete $(x+y) digital package -- and throw out all the papers I receive. This makes no sense.

From what I understand, your issue is with the amount they plan to charge, not the fact that they will be charging?

That seems like a reasonable place to have a discussion, rather that people who just think everything which once cost money should now be free.

Yes, I believe the Times generates more than enough content to warrant paying -- I look at the last few years as probably some lucky free-period that should have ended a while ago. I just think their plans are misguided and overpriced.

In the meantime, though, I got an email from Lincoln offering me free Times access through the end of 2011[1]. So at least I won't have to think too hard about it for another 8 months.

[1] See http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870446130457621... for details.

Business maths is not algebra. Algebra, for example, doesn't give you discounts for buying in bulk.

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.

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

I assume that you're capable of substituting another entertainment or news option which you do pay for in the example.

Literalism is a logical fallacy.

>If you're willing to pay the cable company $100/month or more to pipe Jersey Shore into the house

I am not.

And if that is your argument, then sir you have lost.

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.

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.

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

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

they want both SEO juice and to impose a limit on how many free articles you can read. They're going to be forced to come up with a more sophisticated solution to enforce their paywall instead of the half-baked one they have right now.

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.

I don't but if I did I certainly wouldn't pay that much.

A penny an article is fair enough and ensures they actually have to make each and every article worth paying for.

This just screams "old media", we can't innovate.

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?

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 ;)

$=0;

I just clicked around the NYT and opened about 20 articles to get the paywall to come up so I could find my own way around it. Couldn't even trigger the paywall.

Does it come up when a 3rd party site links to an article or after a certain amount of usage?

Given how difficult it seems to be to actually GET to the paywall I can't see any point to all of this.

The start date for the paywall is March 28th.

Unless you're in Canada.

I may be a little late to the party but from my understanding:

> a paywall where you can only view 20 articles

..they are probably using some sort of cookie to track how many articles you have read? Then you need no lines of code at all. Just don't accept the tracking cookies.

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.

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.

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.

Why not just make the check on the back end, if the article content never gets sent then this kind of stuff doesn't need to be an issue.

Can't upvote this enough. If you want to protect content, make the checks server-side. Security must be server-side first, no exceptions. Doing anything else is asking for tech savy people with debuggers (or "view source" in this case) working around it.

You can get into a race with your users renaming javascript variables or changing CSS classes, or implementing the most advanced javascript obfuscator that exists today, but this is a waste of time.

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.

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.

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.

Looks like it was knowingly done: http://news.theage.com.au/breaking-news-technology/some-read...

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

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.

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.

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

Just like every other online subscription, including SaaS?

Stylish is your friend on Firefox.

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