OT: on paywalls

[The Natural Philosopher]

CERTAIN sites, who shall remain nameless decide to limit your access to reading say a certain number of pages per month/week/day.

Then they demand cash to read more. They do this by setting a cookie in your browser.

If you edit your cookies and delete the ones from that site, that resets the counter and you can read as many as you like.

Since you have no contract with the site, and since no one has yet argued that editing your cookies is illegal, its hard to see that any laws are being broken.

Likewise if you choose to use adblock or flashblock to remove the more egregious paid adverts and googleanalytic crap..

I pass this on in the interest of cost effective browsing in the community...

[polygonum]

I have four browsers installed, which can be handy...

(Firefox, Safari, IE, Chrome, Opera - IIRC)

[mike]

Is that a subtle dig at IE or just dubious arithmetic?

[polygonum]

As it happens, a simple mistake! I forgot about Opera, then neglected to

+1. :-)

Today someone who is not exactly the most technically aware person I have come across was saying how nice to was that they now had a spelling checker on a web-site (a forum). I had to explain that she had just applied a Windows updated including IE10. And that, at last, IE now has a built-in spelling checker. So it is arguably not quite as bad as it was a few days ago. But I still only use it for things like testing web-sites. :-)

[Frank Erskine]

Surely cookies are _your_ property so you can do whatever you like with them...

[John Williamson]

That's not something I'd have noticed, as I have Firefox set to delete most cookies on closedown.

[Theo Markettos]

Doesn't always work. However, for some 'news' sites, copying the headline into Google News, searching and clicking the link will take you to the article sans paywall.

Theo

[Andy Burns]

Very few sites are allowed to set more than a session cookie on my machines, so a quick browser re-start achieves the same result, and usually frees up a few hundred MB of RAM into the bargain.

[Andrew May]

One of my pet hates is Google News headlines that take you straight to a pay page. I wish Google News had some way of telling it to exclude specified sites from its results.

[Brian Gaff]

Yes, I use better privacy and the adblock plus in FF, and simple ad block in IE, the early one without the restriction before payment. Some sites are getting canny though and noting that you need to turn off the anti add device before they will let you in. Brian

[Handsome Jack]

The Natural Philosopher posted

Some news websites rely on Javascript to block non-subscribers' access, so all you have to do to read them to your heart's content is turn off JS in your browser.

[The Natural Philosopher]

well yes, but this was a specific comment on paywalls that count your accesses from a particular browser.

I subscribe to the FT, they have a different process. Some content is paywalled, other is not. You need a valid cookie to get to the paywalled content. If you delete it then you have to log in again.