6
votes
How do you read NY Times? Subscription? Other?
I see a lot of posts referencing NY Times articles.
NY Times is behind a paywall.
Are there a large number of folks paying to subscribe to NY Times? Are there other more nefarious methods for reading the occasional article?
Incognito mode
Apparently they are A/B testing ways to stop incognito from working:
http://www.niemanlab.org/2019/02/your-favorite-way-to-get-around-the-new-york-times-paywall-might-be-about-to-go-away/
But regardless, IMO using multi-account containers in Firefox works better than incognito mode for getting past cookie based paywalls like the NYT uses, since it segregates your cookies just like incognito but can be done in a new tab (by right clicking the link + "open in new container tab") rather than having to open a separate private browsing window.
p.s. Setting your referrer to facebook or google, or your browser's user agent to googlebot sometimes works to get past paywalls, too. And even though it doesn't work for NYT, Bypass Paywalls works for a lot of other sites... Just fair warning, it was removed from addons.mozilla about 6 months ago when they cracked down on paywall bypass extensions... so the only way to install it now is with that already compiled xpi file on their github page, which has risks.
That looks really interesting, does it also prevent the sites you visit from being saved in your history like incognito? Or is it just cookies?
Check if your local library offers a subscription! Mine offers access to many newspapers and publications, NYT included.
You can always open it in incognito.
I subscribe to that and the Washington Post.
You can use outline.com for specific articles. Certain ad-blockers also seem to prevent the method they use to track free articles.
Outline are returning a "Not Supported" message on nytimes.com URLs:
But not the Times's URL minifier domain.
Seems like some of the sites finally caught on about outline and (I'd guess) made them disable it for their articles. It doesn't work for Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal any more either.
I get the NYTimes for free through my university's library, which offers it as a free benefit to all students who apply for it. You can also read it for free by using tricks like a VM that you can rollback to a clean slate or a browser's private mode. Many people also pay for it; the NYTimes is one of the most popular papers in America after all, and it's pretty high quality. But if you can't afford it, either a technical workaround or checking your local library might yield some fruitful results.
My brother pays for print Sunday NYT + digital, and he shared the digital access with me. You can add people to your account, just like amazon prime.
I use a plugin in Firefox because I don't have the money to subscribe to half the sites that get posted here, but I don't know if I'm allowed to plug it here.
Apple News. I don't know if what's available there is the full feed. I imagine they'll eventually want to be part of Apple News+, and then I'm fairly certain I'll have access to everything. And of the articles I've read via the Apple News app, there are no / very few ads. This may be because I have the News+ subscription, I'm not sure.
That said, they do offer a student discount which is really reasonable, so get on that if you want it.
Does switching user-agent to googlebot still work? That's how I used to do it (usually via
curl -Lwhen possible). Now I usually just avoid paywall sites. Most content on them can be found elsewhere.