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The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
111–120 of 345 posts
Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
#112[deleted]
Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
#113[deleted]
Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
#114[deleted]
Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
#115My pain at the loss of the Google loophole is tempered by the realization that the WSJ has largely become a propaganda organ of the GOP.
Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
#116Earlier quoted context omitted.
There is still incentive for WSJ to allow Google to index, they probably just will redirect you to sign up when you click through. Perhaps they'd let Google just index the preview text to prevent using the cache
Doesn't Google punish sites that show different content to Googlebot than they do to a user?
The old experts exchange rule where they put all the content at the bottom :/
Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
#117Another way to get around many paywalls is to change your browser's user agent string to 'Googlebot'. I've got a subscription to the Financial Times, but if there's a one-off article somewhere else that I want to read, that's my go-to method for getting through a paywall. I wonder if their fix will close it off too.
Google recommends using reverse DNS lookup to determine if a client claiming to be Googlebot is really from Google – https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/80553?hl=en
It isn't hard for paywall website operators to use this to block Googlebot fakers. (Rather than doing a reverse DNS lookup on every request, you'd want to maintain a local cache of those results, so you only need to do DNS lookups on new client IPs.)
I believe Cloudflare already does this, and possibly some other CDNs too.
Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
I would give you HN gold if it existed (now we just need a bookmarklet/extension to automate this). Do we know that this will still work on Monday? Maybe this will also be closed and you'll need a special link?
Instead of buying internet points for someone who figured out a little hack to access journalism, maybe you could instead pay for journalism?
You cant get a refund for the time wasted reading drivel and opinion of facts, and how do you know its drivel or spin until you have read it?
Its like with businesses, you buy a product, it turns out to be rubbish, unfit whatever, so you take/send it back and get a refund, but you don't get refunded for your time wasted finding out something is unsuitable. In the mean time, said business has benefited from your money for the period of time its had it, if its put the money to work. Capitalism is the most surreptitious control system going, because if you don't have any money, you cant survive, you cant live, you just become an even lower grade slave to the system.
I don't know if this hack still works, but changing your browser agent to pretend its a Google Spider might also work, if it doesn't, then the online content provider might be using Google's ip address ranges as another metric before allowing unrestricted access to allow the search engine's spider to do its job.
So search engine's want to be the users starting point, an interface to be directed to everything online. I wonder how much revenue a company would make by excluding search engines and sticking to traditional advertising methods to raise customer revenues. Will we see a resurgence in printed papers like we see a resurgence in Vinyl, because one thing a printed piece of paper wont do, is hack your systems, wasting your time even more.
Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
#119First of all, I think it's great that journalists can get compensated for their work. but, strictly speaking as a consumer, I must say their paywall is completely out of touch with the way I want to pay for news consumption. I don't mind paying 5c or even 10c per article, but I'm certainly not going to sign up to pay 120$ for 6 months, if I'm only going to read 1 or 2 articles here and there. but since they've done i…
I would consider perhaps $5-$10 a month if the WSJ was going to be my only source of news. If I could trust it to provide me with all I need every morning while I eat my breakfast. Unfortunately I live in Australia so most stuff in WSJ I don't care about. (And we have the ABC)
The Washington Post, one of the three best papers in America (NYT, WSJ, Post), is $50/year if you're a prime subscriber.
Re: The Wall Street Journal to Close Google Loophole Entirely
#120I see in the comments there are still some workarounds to this paywall. Good to know. Cheers.
Just a reminder another workaround to the paywall is to you know actually subscribe to the newspaper. That is an option they offer. Obviously not possible for everyone. But if you have the money and want to read and support journalism... WSJ is really far from perfect but it's not the worst newspaper one could be subscribed to.
Also I think their discounted corporate plans program is huge, so depending where you work you may get a discount or it could be free, never hurts to ask.
Also, maybe YC could negotiate some sort of group WSJ discount for Hacker News users above a certain karma count? Just an idea...