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Comment by mtmail | Hacker News Reader

We do signup, including captcha, email confirmation step, record IP addresses, extensive check against temporary/burner/disposable email addresses. Still 10 people per day sign up multiple times. If people want to go over the trial period they will. Literally while I was writing this I got a notification of a repeat signup and sure enough the user hit their quota and just signed up with another email address to continue. That's the reason you see websites requiring phone number or credit card verification these days.

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> That's the reason you see websites requiring phone number or credit card verification these days

And this is trivial to overcome (depending on how eager the registrants are). The pro freeloaders have access to many different numbers and typically order SIM cards in bulk, and CC's can be spun up easily too all using different names. The real pros buy these in bulk from the dark web, so it's a non-issue for them. Passport scans and a 3D selfie that matches is the gold standard for auth now.

Whatever verification data becomes standard to request, it is easy for someone to obtain and sell in bulk. All they have to do is spin up a free app and request the same.

How in the world does new york times keep track of how many articles you've read before slapping the paywall? It seems to work even if you switch to private mode or use a different browser from the same machine.

I thought they do it by HTTP referrer. Paywall by default but if you came from e.g. a Google result page it's lifted.

Browser fingerprinting, probably network fingerprinting as well. Neither require client persistence.

And yet they don’t block reader view. I have reader view always on and I can read all articles on NY times for free.

Wow this is a neat hack. Thanks

My guess is that works because the article loads a split second before the paywall and Safari (or whatever) has cached that article for reader view. If NYT wanted to get around this they could load only that first part of the article that shows before the paywall until someone signs in with a valid subscription.

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