T H I N K

The New York Times paywall has arrived for us Canadians, and it will be arriving stateside shortly. There is already considerable discussion on the Internet about it, and how it is generally fairly easy to evade. For example, of the total 20 free articles/month, any links from social networking sites don't count, and any links from Google are counted seperately to a total of five.

But, there are a number of easy ways to get around the paywall without searching around Twitter for links

1. Cookie blocking or cookie clearing. Yup, New York Times tracks your clicks in a cookie. If you delete the cookie periodically (or block it in the first place) you can read articles without restriction. Choose your favourite Firefox or Chrome extension to help with this.
2. Read on Instapaper (Read it Later or Read it Now). Once you reach your 20 article limit the screen is blocked with a large advertisement asking you to sign up. You can click on links back to the home page, or press your browser's back button, either of which will allow you to browse the New York Times webpage, but any time you click in to a link you will see the text momentarily, and then the advertisement will swoop in and block everything. The blocking, however, leaves the underlying HTML untouched, so if you use a tool that reads the HTML instead of the rendered version you can still get the article. Instapaper's bookmarklet adds a POST form to the page which is used to scrape the HTML and send it back to Instapaper for viewing, so if you use either the Read it Now or the Read it Later bookmarklets you can view the page without problem (in Instapaper's clutter-free rendition of the page).

<Update: likewise, you can use Chrome or Firefox's incognito/private browing feature to remove cookies as soon as the session is over. Just open NYTimes.com in a new private browsing window, and when you are done all your cookies will be cleared.>