Lazy Paywalls

Why are so many paywalls for news sites so sloppy?
Most of them just check for a referrer and an user-agent but they don't even care to check the IP of the request. You can just pretend to be a googlebot indexing their stuff and you're free to read whatever is behind the paywall. Also, why doesn't googlebot use some sort of a digital signature?

Other urls found in this thread:

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors
nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/why-women-had-better-sex-under-socialism.html
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall
anyforums.com/
twitter.com/NSFWRedditVideo

Last time I heard it wasn't trivial to spoof you user agent, maybe that's why.

>It wasn't trivial to spoof your user agent
There's literally one click addons to do tha

NYT's paywall is hilariously leaky. It gives you 10 free articles per month...and how many you've read is stored in a cookie! Delete cookie, 10 more articles.

They don't check IP because many places like in airports all users share the same public IP.

Their sloppy because only .01% of their readers are technologically knowledgeable enough to understand what a cookie is and how going into incognito mode will clear it.

It's for the 99.9% of people who won't do any of that

What I meant was, why don't they check the IP of the request and compare them with the ones of the googlebot. I'm sure it would be possible to filter out all of the IPs pretending to be bots.

they're

>Last time I heard it wasn't trivial to spoof you user agent
Wut. I think you should check your hearing then. That's literally just one header switch in curl.

Ok, I found out it is possible to verify googlebot, google itself says how, and it seems dead easy.
That's even more reasons why I can't comprehend why is this a thing.

Google has tons of IPs and it is meant to stop normies.

If you enjoy/use NYT's content you should pay for it though. I know there's a so-cheap-its-almost-free discount for students at ~$4 a month.

Support the important things. I'd argue NYT is bretty important.

>communist propaganda owned by a wetback
>important
lmao @ u

Fuck off to Sup Forums kiddo. No one wants your opinion here.

>communist propaganda
>behind a paywall
I think you're a case of so called "a fucking moron"

their is no reason to be upset

Ew. Why would I ever support mass media? If they fail someone else will come along and try again. I don't give a damn who is giving me the news.

>If they fail someone else will come along and try again
that would only happen if the business itself somehow fucked up because of e.g. poor decision making, not if there would be no market for them. If the market is weak, no one will come next.

This, there's a reason WSJ tried to kill youtube.

>I don't give a damn who is giving me the news
You'd like to get news from Sinclair Broadcast Group?

obviously they don't think it's in their interest to strongly enforce the paywall

ok, but why would that be?

>just like you don't get communist t-shirts and communist flags being sold
it is communist propaganda for retards to buy in, of course a company wouldn't be communist

Too expensive to implement for the tiny amount of money they would make by mitigate the comparably minuscule amount of people bypassing the paywall.
The cost would be higher than the reward.

That wasn't the point you dolt. The point was, that propaganda is by definition something that is as accessible as possible, and not limited by some means. Ever wondered why all the alt-right bullshit is free and so easily reachable?
Actually, something being behind a paywall is a strong proof for it not being a propaganda.

Leaky paywalls bring readership, on the principle that eventually those might convert to subscriptions. Also, it's not as if they can tightly lock it all up and still be considered a paper of "public" record.

>If you enjoy/use NYT's content you should pay for it though.
Why? The CIA and all the (((foundations))) can afford to give the shit away for free.

>a massive media corporation
>supposedly read by the most elite and elitist city in the USA
>publishing neoliberal shilling
>is communist
Must be the "everything I don't like is communist" principle. Isn't it time for school to start again?

>Too expensive to implement
what cost? that's like, ten lines of code

It's an example of types of errors in hypothesis testing on the picture, I like statistics.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Type_I_and_type_II_errors

You were a type-II error user
-youre mom

are you actually retarded?
i literally wrote that the company wouldn't be communist you idiot

Get the fuck out of here stormnigger nobody invited you in.

...

pathetic

Nigger, the NYT is so fucking bourgeois neoliberal it hurts, which class and ideology are both existentially threatened by and strictly opposed to communism. Learn to theory some time instead of licking the anuses of your corporate masters. My accusation stands.

Whatever you say, shaniqua.

>a bourgeois neoliberal company can't produce communist propaganda
your accusation is retarded
nytimes.com/2017/08/12/opinion/why-women-had-better-sex-under-socialism.html

>The point was, that propaganda is by definition something that is as accessible as possible
Every single newspaper is propaganda.
Even if a newspaper didn't force the writers to toe the line you would just get more diverse propaganda with every journalist trying to push his own personal worldview.

He means the articles are liberal.
Also I don't think one article is a roof of anything.

What the fuck is this supposed to prove?

>Every single newspaper is propaganda.
No it isn't. Being not objective is not the same as being biased, and being biased is not propaganda.

Fuck (((news))) companies in general. In order to start an LLC, you need to list your company in two newspapers, once a day and once every week for each newspaper. If you live in NYC, this can cost over $1000. I wonder (((who))) lobbied for this...

i am not going to search through all of their articles just so i can provide more than one example
this one was just the most recent i could find by clicking the top result
exactly what i stated
communist propaganda by
>a bourgeois neoliberal company

Nobody reads their propaganda anyways.

I think it's 'meant' to be free for anyone willing to put the effort to not pay.

>information, ideas, opinions, or images, often only giving one part of an argument, that are broadcast, published, or in some other way spread with the intention of influencing people's opinions
Every news outlet does that.

>provides proof
>this doesn't prove anything, goy

>implying that a propaganda source that is always consistent and hard-line in pushing its messaging is more likely to attract credibility and readership than one that doesn't pretend that its opposition doesn't exist
Underageb&

At what level was that law enacted? NY? NYC? It was never like that in California.
>easy hack: run your notices way upstate

The bourgeoisie reads the hell out of their propaganda so they can mark their class membership appropriately and sing on key.

Yet their exalted place in society is predicated on their not doing so, or at least us pretending that they aren't doing so. The whole """news""" industry is useless to a democracy, indispensable to a ruling class.

>Leaky paywalls bring readership, on the principle that eventually those might convert to subscriptions.
Sure, but that's the "10 articles per month or whatever" part. I'm not convinced if the easiness of walking around the paywall is intended.

>Also, it's not as if they can tightly lock it all up and still be considered a paper of "public" record.
But that's exactly how scientific journals work.


Also, thanks for derailing my thread you worthless fools who can't stfu about Sup Forums for a few minutes. I bet that's because you don't have anything other in your life you can talk about.

One article doesn't prove the whole newspaper is like that.
Please be underb&.

>the opinion section covering a specific topic about socialism and the "red state" makes the paper communist propaganda

You realize the NYT publishes 200+ articles a day? 10-15 articles about communism is a fucking blip on the NYT publication radar.

Isn't that against Google's rules? Giving google bot the article and visitors a paywall is what they call "cloaking"

>Every news outlet does that.
guess what else they do?
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_wall
>The term is used in journalism to describe the separation between the editorial and advertising arms
in other words, those are the mechanisms in real newspapers that separate money from content

>Isn't that against Google's rules?
no, they made some kind of an exception for it afaik

>trusting nyt post 9/11
consider allahu akbar

How would they track anyone reliably unless they logged in? You're hardly going to have people logging in just to be restricted. They might be more concerned about creating extra work for their comment moderators or whatever.
Scientific journals ostensibly restrict access in order to fund peer review activities, which open-access journals are showing to be a monopolistic sham.

Giving Googlebot the article and giving the Google visitor the article, as determined by referrer, might not be considered cloaking to them.

>in other words, those are the mechanisms in real newspapers that separate money from content
You actually believe that there are no subtler ways to influence coverage, or that the journalist class who has debnts to pay is going to act against his class interests? The professionalization of journalism was a huge mistake.

wtf has sinclair done?

fabricating news and pushing them onto local news stations

My trust in NYT was severely hit when it was shown that they delayed the NSA surveillance whistleblower back in '04.

I still think they're the best paper around due to how often they write and the Sunday paper. No other paper does Sunday right like the Times. It's simply a matter of not relying on a single source for news. For that, WSJ, WaPo, and my local Newsday paper works fine.

>every journalist trying to push his own personal worldview
the state of legacy media, 2017

>WaPo
The ProPornOT and muh russia shills? You gotta be kidding me.
Better to read foreign news in English than whatever the Democrat Party wants you to see.

The state of human sharing of information since the invention of gestures.

example?

Agreed just a bunch of boomer bullshit.

Fuck off John Oliver Liberal.

>How would they track anyone reliably unless they logged in?
sure, you could hop between IPs, but that's not really that simple and achievable for anyone, not to mention annoying af, so that's something I really wouldn't concern myself in the shoes of a newspaper. But the trick with pretending to be a googlebot is something completely different because it's trivial for users to do and as trivial for newspapers to block. I'm not convinced it's something made to deliberately "spread readership", so what else could that be? Some technical shenanigans? Some other purpose?
Also, it's worth to note, the same exact behavior is exhibited not only by NYT, but also plenty of other newspapers with different paywall systems

WaPo? You mean the whole biased pro Liberal news? The one that says Japan is at fault for trying to get it's army back to protect itself against Korea, the same place that says Trump and Russia are connected yet there has been no proof other than circumstantial rhetoric?

Not necessarily. I think it only really took off with the formalization of rhetoric, the art of fabricating shared interests.

>who is Jane Akre

>WaPo
the only good thing wapo has done in a long time is to take their mouths off obama's schlong long enough to let barton gellman publish some of the snowden leaks. the last couple of years they have been caught in almost daily abuses of their position and outright fabrication of stories.

The very next person mentioning anything else than technical aspect (or something relatively on topic) of paywalls is a certified child molester.

>Who is George Soros
>funnels money into corporation group called open societies to donate to News Organizations to go after Trump


B-but it's okay when the Liberals do it.

>as trivial for newspapers to block
Only if one has a current database of google's googlebot IPs and has time to spend on checking it out. A user-agent check is trivial for a proxy cache to perform. An IPv4 PTR record lookup could take quite a while and provides an avenue for DoS when the proxy cache runs out of sockets.

Your thread ended at . The rest is just the afterparty.

No, it's not okay when either (((side))) does it, whether it's John Oliver or Monsanto, and I'd have all of them and anyone who gave them aid or comfort breaking rocks in a concentration camp until they died.
mfw barely dodged the certified child molester label

>why doesn't googlebot use some sort of a digital signature?
Because the web is not built for that sort of authentication. It would probably be a pain in the ass to do correctly.

Yes, that paper.

>An IPv4 PTR record lookup could take quite a while and provides an avenue for DoS when the proxy cache runs out of sockets.
Ok, I was thinking along those lines desu, but also if it would be possible to protect it from DoS, and who cares if it takes long if it's the genuine one?

>Because the web is not built for that sort of authentication
Can you explain? I often hear people say the same thing but they never cared to say what exactly they meant by that

>Google bot makes a request with a unique identifier in the query string
>Web server verifies unique identifier with Google server
>issues session token to remove paywall for crawler
Pretty easy for those sites to do something like this. But they won't because management wouldn't waste time on seo. Probably why the piece of shit paywall site doesn't have appropriate meta tags in the first place

>Last time I heard it wasn't trivial to spoof you user agent,

I don't see why Google would bother on their end either.

>I don't see why Google would bother on their end either.
deep web access?

d-did the child molester certificate actually work?

Google was built on quality search results. If they indexed a bunch of paywalls, people would use other search engines to get their news. Google builds just as much for their business customers, if not more, than for their consumers. Having a quality auth mechanism for paranoid business customers would be helpful to their brand. But that would be over the top when you could just use tags instead

>doesn't know about TLS client certificates
um, wht?

>who cares if it takes long if it's the genuine one
The other users trying to get in. The socket is still hanging there waiting for the DNS result.

>implying a bot needs that overhead

>a newspaper builds up a positive reputation
>people start to believe what is posted
>they insert propaganda once in a while
sounds like a reasonable way to get the message out to people while not looking like an obvious propaganda machine

>implying a bot needs that overhead
It's Google. They already penalize non-https sites. It's not as if they couldn't afford to send a client cert with every new host connection, or they're not developing new datagram-oriented TLS protocols to replace http(s).

In general, it's more efficient to run 95% propaganda and 5% reality. What's really happened is that people took the interests of the bourgeoisie as their own, because there ""was"" a plausible path for them to become part of it, if only they obeyed and conformed. Now that the interests of the bourgeoisie and everyone else have diverged, the best the Times and the Post can do is return to the pre-liberal norms of being Party organs.

Adding, the 95% of propaganda turns the message into the ambient reality that confirms people's aspirations and the rightness of their subordinate positions, and the 5% of reality allows the propagandists to declare a false equivalence between the exception and the rule and hold up the publication as legitimate.

Fuck off to /po/ kiddo. No one wants your opinion here.

Fuck off to /p/, kiddo. Nobody wants your opinion here.

>Why are so many paywalls for news sites so sloppy?
because the amount of opportunity cost, monetary cost, effort and manhours to create, deploy, monitor, update, and maintain such a project doesn't increase the profits for the site in any significant way

Fuck off to /an/ kiddo. No one wants your opinion here.

absolute 10/10 bait, derailed the thread beyond repair

If you don't comply you lose the ability to sue, which is fine for me. Fuck paying into their extortion.

Clearly you don't understand client certificate authentication. How does the web server know when/which client to make the handshake with?

...

Because it's easier, covers 99% of users and stops 99% of the other 1% looking for security holes.

>>/out/

that has to be the worst illustration of T-I and T-II error I have seen in my life.

I prefer my news in the form of leaflets

Why?