NY Times shuts down a paywall bypass in just 68 minutes

For next headline, choose one:

Arms race escalates, NYT paywall defeated again in 4.3 hours

DMCA takedown issued to $host over paywall hack in 12 hours

Paywall hacker fights back, issues counter-notice and restores access in 10 days

The NYT Paywall and Color: Unexpected connection revealed in weekend hack

Introducing paywal.ly (YC S'11), developed in just 14 days

I read the title expecting to read about how their technical team modified the system to stop a bypass from working, not that they contacted someone to get him to stop offering a bypass service.

I considered a similar idea like this back when the paywalls were first introduced across some of the larger news sites. Simply register 1 account and then funnel all requests through it for free. It did however conflict with my own idea of what should and shouldn't be done, so I never made it.

I think that in this prank there is hidden an interesting experiment, which shows alternative ways to create micropayments. I wonder if you can build a bookmarklet was built it would become less cumbersome to use.

Now if the Times had some smart person on their staff, they'd call off the hounds and instead sell him content on a wholesale basis. Then let everybody sell NYT stories, just as anyone who wants to can sell for Amazon.

If you are serious about wanting to bypass the paywall, you should probably wait until their entire server admin force isn't hovering over the console and server logs monitoring the launch. Just saying.