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How do you securely police the "20 free articles a week" system if you can't trust cookies, can't put validation on the page itself, and ip addresses change all the time without requiring even a free account to read the content?

You assume that the number of people with the ability and desire to circumvent your defenses is a small fraction of your total audience, and ignore them.

In other words, exactly the same way you deal with AdBlock on your ad-supported website.

This is, at least obliquely, the subject of an honours thesis I am working on. I'd like to say more but this margin is too narrow to contain the complete proof.

You can trust cookies if you disallow anonymous access and force everyone to sign in to an account, free or otherwise, before reading anything.

Then there's nothing to stop people from just making a new free account each time they use up their 20 free stories.

Yup and it could be 1 line if we were playing codegolf.

I'm loading that code dynamically from the bookmarklet because I assume that they'll change the ids of the divs at some point.

Indeed. A simple work-around if you're using chrome: 1) right-click a nytimes article 2) open in incognito mode

EverCookie?