NY Times Pay-Wall Workaround

Introduction

The NY Times paywall has been quite lucrative... for me. Traffic to my advertising supported blog tripled after posting instructions to my little paywall hack. I posted a couple of links in Twitter, using a clever url shortner, http://j.mp/nytpaywall , but I shouldn't have bothered, as the vast majority of traffic came in via Google. Visitors came in from all over, including from the Associated Press and the US Senate.

The New York Times spent 40 million dollars on the paywall. I'm posting these new paywall hacking/workaround instructions while in bed in my underwear, using my TV (note the shaky mouse in the screen capture: I'm using a remote control trackball !).

To my dismay, I read a comment in a forum where someone, after reading my last post, didn't understand the instructions (sympathy goes out to Ronald Reagan). So here is my second try (also advertiser supported).

A picture is worth a thousand words. But for the visual impaired out there, here is what you do:

Paywall Tearing Down Instructions

URL: Uniform Resource Locator (website address). 

 You highlight the text after the .html in the url (also known as website address), and you press "delete" or "backspace", your choice. When, and if, you get to page 2 of an article, you delete the part of the url after page=2 .

Other NY Times Paywall Hacking Options

If this is still too complicated for you, then your job probably doesn't pay enough to house you, never mind paying for a New York City online newspaper. So here is what you can do:

-Read the NY Times in multiple browsers.

-Read the NY Times on multiple Internet devices (PS3, Nintendo, iPad, spare computer, work computer, iPod touch, iPhone, Android Phone, etc...)

-Delete cookies.

-Copy the title of the article into Google (or Bing, or Ask.com, etc...). This will only give you page 1 of the article, but it is a useful method if you don't have access to a keyboard to press "delete" using my method.

-Right click on the article and select "view source". As an added benefit, you may passively learn hypertext mark-up language. 

-Use complicated plug-ins and add-ons like NYT Clean that have unintended consequences.

-Access the NY Times online via Twitter feeds like Free Unnamed News  (Hat Tip to Gizmodo Australia).

-Subscribe to the Sunday edition of the NY Times (and have it delivered to a New York address); the Sunday edition subscription includes the entire week of the online, smartphone and iPad versions of the NY Times.  

Obvious NY Times Paywall Hack

While you search for a non-blog alternative to the NY Times to spend your valuable time, you can continue to read the NY Times even after you hit the infamous New York Times paywall (two weeks earlier here in Canada).

No, I don't mean getting a second job at Tim Horten's. No, pestering your blog or microblog (aka Twitter) readers with links is not the most efficient way either. Simply press backspace until you hit html.

If you can't figure it out from the following pictures, may I suggest that a Newscorp product might be better adapted to your intellect.

A. http://twitpic.com/4bbm9r

B. http://twitpic.com/4bbmmb

*****Update: My new and improved NY Times pay-wall workaround instructions . Now with more options and in-post pictures.****

Good Enough for the USA, Good Enough for Canada

Does immigration controls for traffic from the USA really make sense? Let's face it, if you are good enough for the USA, you are good enough for Canada. Obviously, we still need customs officials at land borders for tax and gun enforcement, but I question the need at airports.

How about a law that requires an expensive permit to transport alcohol, tobacco or guns by plane. Then do random spot checks at airports. That way, incoming airline traffic from the USA could be treated as domestic. The limited tax savings on other products hardly make smuggling by plane worth it. So the loss in tax revenue would be very limited. 

We could also do the same for traffic from the European Union, Japan and Australia.

Obviously, it would be nice if those countries returned the favour to Canadians (Australia requires an on-line visa, for crying out loud), but the increase in efficiency would be worth it regardless. Planes from the UK or Spain could stop over in Halifax without forcing passengers to de-plane. Planes from the USA could stop in Toronto or Montreal before flying to their final destination (instead of forcing passengers to de-plane in already busy airports)

More importantly, immigration official's time could be better spent questioning people who fly in direct from India, the UAU, etc, people who haven't already been vetted by American and European immigration.

Or, we could continue to live like this. 

Brega itself was impossible to reach on Wednesday.

Tisk tisk to the Aljazeera Live blog for pretending that 17,000 articles said that Brega itself was impossible to reach on Wednesday. As you know, you need to put "quotes" when searching a sentence in Google. But I do give them credit for reminding their competition that Brega was indeed reachable. However, I'm pretty sure "by us" was implied.

I also give credit to the live blog for writing around the clock. The updates aren't always that frequent, but at least they are around the clock. The Guardian posters go to sleep for 10 hours every day.

Hillary Clinton still blames Canada for 9/11. However, the horribly misinformed US Secretary of State thinks you should be watching Aljazeera, not CNN.