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Comment by em0ney | Hacker News Reader

Can't read the article without a subscription to WSJ

Oh dear - they closed the loophole. It's a shame, but if it's something they need to do to survive then fair play. I do wonder if these should be permitted on HN now though...

How could a site make an article behind a paywall that's available for free somewhere else, especially if it's not their article... getting money from others work seems a little bit odd.

yeah, no clue. after seeing this article behind a paywall I simply googled "nasty gal" and the results returned this article first and a LA Times version of the story second. no paywall on the LAT for me. whether or not the story was the same quality, I have no idea.

I believe if you click the 'web' link under the title of the article here on HN, it will take you to a Google search page which will (sometimes) show you other sources for the same article.

Also, I've been getting around the paywall from Washington Post and NY Times etc. by right clicking on an article I know comes from their site and selecting 'Open in Incognito Window' in Chrome. The lack of cookie tracking gives me infinite free article previews.

(Yes, I do feel a little guilty about this and will pay for a subscription to one or both papers to support them sometime soon). :)

You're not the only one feeling the guilt. The only journalism I was paying for (well paying currency for at least) was my Private Eye subscription for a couple of years, but I found that I didn't want to read it in paper-form. I'd gladly have paid the same amount (which was something like a couple of pounds a month) or more if the same material was available online too.

update: just checked on a whim and it seems that some time over the last couple of years Private Eye have a completely new online portal. Time to put my money where my mouth is :)

This no longer works reliably for the WSJ.

I can't edit my post, but here's a thread full of people saying the WSJ workaround no longer reliably works: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13434938

Weil somebody Posted a link from the same author and the first three lines were exactly the same. I think that there is not a single word that differ. Shame on WSJ that they try to monetize such a thing.

If you're asking how one would do that at a technical level, I imagine they would use HTTP Referer info [1]. Essentially they decided if someone was being referred to WSJ.com by a search engine, then show the whole article, else show the paywall.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTTP_referer

> It's a shame, but if it's something they need to do to survive then fair play.

Depends on how much they value that google traffic, since google doesn't like being tricked into fake search results.

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