Letters to the Editor
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Times precedent; what next?
Interesting parallel here to the way the NY Times lockup of its archives (in the old days) could be worked around by using the referrer codes from its RSS feeds. Aaron Swartz even built a lookup tool for old stories, so that if you were a blogger looking to link to an old NYT story and not have the link break, you could always find the permalink that worked.
The assumption the Journal is making, I imagine, is that the number of people who will become aware of and use such workarounds remains small enough, and the economic benefit from openness to the Web great enough, that the company simply doesn't mind.
But in the long term, such have-it-both-ways business models usually fall apart. The Times site is now wide open. I'll bet the Journal ends up there too. Unless the next bubble-bust cuts so badly into the open-Web revenue that people start to obsess on subscription revenue again...
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You use FF? Traitorous Bastard
Safari is the One True Browser, Farhad.
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I'm sure Rupert would like to collect money...
... but his real power is control over so many media outlets. I think he'll forgo the chump change if having many readers increases his power to influence events.
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Doesn't work with FF 3v4 beta
not yet, anyway
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Salon w/o annoying intro ads
There's an easy trick, too, to stop Salon from forcing you to view ads when clicking on articles.
Use www.salon.com/news/cookie756.html as your bookmark. You'll always bypass the annoying ads.
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Simple Math
WSJ should have enough business people to figure this out. $79 a year for an annual subscription comes out to 20 cents a day revenue. That means if the Journal threw its doors open it would lose 20 cents per daily visitor assuming its hit count stayed exactly the same. However, it is much more likely that its number of hits will increase dramatically, possibly as much as 10 times. Free is very popular.
So, if you quadruple your number of daily hits (and this ignores visitors who look at multiple pages) that means you are paying a about 5 cents per visitor per day (take the old 20 revenue lost but spread it over 4 times as many visitors).
All you have to do is capture 5 cents in ad revenue per visitor per day, and you are even. Is that hard? I don't know what internet ad revenue rates look like, but for a high profile outfit like the WSJ, it doesn't sound hard.
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Go ahead, waste your time. Pollute your mind.
I gave up my WSJ print and web subscriptions years ago after I could not take any more of the ridiculous and ignorant editorial slant.
I felt too many articles were also infected with that purview.
I rarely see web links to their articles. And literally none that I could be interested in reading now, so it's clear to me I am not missing anything by ignoring them.
Kind of like most of your columns, where I read the letters first to see if you have anything to say worth looking at.
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A more ethical way to accomplish the same thing
Instead of pretending to be from digg, simply enter any desired WSJ article via digg, digging the story yourself it it is not already on the digg site.
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Better than Expired Coupons
Spoofing I think is more ethical than turning in an expired coupon. The expired coupon is not deceptive but an act of fraud since it's not actually valid.
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WSJ on Google News
An easy way to browse all the WSJ articles that you have access through Google News is to go to news.google.com and search for "source:wall_street_journal".
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Spoofing referers
Even though the referer will have the spoofed domain, I suspect the WSJ can measure how many people use this method if they want. I imagine most of their referer strings have parameters after the domain name such as the specific web page or search query. It looked like this extension just had the domain which is still valid. The practice of spoofed domains isn't new as I've been seeing them injected into my web logs for years. They tend to be from NSFW sites that want me to look at the site.
And if people need help on installing Firefox add-ons, there's a tutorial at: http://www.timeatlas.com/mos/5_Minute_Tips/General/How_to_Find_and_Install_Firefox_Extensions/
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Doesn't seem to work everywhere on the site
This doesn't seem to be a perfect fix. I can get to most of the site, but not to Gadgets for example. In general navigating to individual articles works fine and browsing to main sections (Home, News, Technology, Markets, etc.) works fine, but browsing to the sub-sections (in Technology, these would be Tech Stocks, Gadgets, Telecommunications, etc.) doesn't work.
Anyone find a fix for this?
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SALON FOR FREE
There's a way to do it too. Even simpler than refspoof.
Just type www.salon.com/news/cookie756.html
that's it. no more annoying interstitial ads.
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Get herpes free online!
That's about as appealing as Mr. Murdoch's odious Journal.
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this doesn't seem to work anymore....
I am trying it at 10:41 pm (eastern) and I think they plugged it.....
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230 issues of Wall St Journal for ONLY 1700 Frequent Flyer Miles (DELTA, CO, AA, , NW)
Actually, if you like me to read print version, you can get 230 issues of Wall St Journal for ONLY 1700 Frequent Flyer Miles (DELTA, CO, AA, , NW). It's a cheaper way to subscribe it if you have some unused mileages with above airlines. More information can be found at:
http://www.dealdigs.com/story.php?id=1406
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I intutively figured this out ages ago
I figured this out ages ago, when you want an article and it is in the 'paid subscriber' part of the online publication, google the headline, click and you're in. No duh, but did not know about the add on, thanks. And I never technically knew why it worked and now I do. Learned something new today...
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Just because it's easy doesn't make it right.
Giving the supermarket an expired coupon is wrong, too.
Although, in our culture, it has become easy to rationalize small indiscretions, small gaffes, and small lies, it all ads up. As they say in politics, it's a slippery slope. Once you gain momentum downward, after a while you end up at the bottom. Hi. Governor Spitzer! Great to see you. You look a little sad....
I'm a professional composer and musician. I have a right to own and exploit my intellectual property, and so does everybody else, including odious people like Rupert Murdoch. The argument made here, that, because there is a free way to accomplish a task easily, is not the same as a legal way to fulfill a small desire. The Digg workaround is a cheat, not a solution.
The argument that WSJ wants us to use the spoof because they have agreed to give it to Digg, is fallacious. The assertion is not known. It's a whopping assumption that what is true for one party is therefore true for all parties.
Is is illegal? I don't know. I'm not an intellectual property rights specialist, nor a lawyer.
I do know this. When I first started coming to the Salon site, I would I would use my computer once a day to log in as "Guest." I had the run of the site when I did this. If I had done this forever, I would have been cheating. I like Salon a lot! I subscribed for two years after trying it out for a few days.
Anybody who thinks this is the same as spoofing my way onto the the WSJ site is disingenuous at best; lying to themselves, or ethically challenged at the worst.
Pay up!