Corporate incompetence
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Disabling a paywall to get free access to something that should be paid for is theft, pure and simple. Just because you can pick a lock and steal something doesn't make it ok. The people providing the content you access are doing so to earn a living.
Yes, I understand that. My professional curiosity means I often ask "how?" when things are done on a website that I visit, be it a paywall, an animation, a particular layout etc. My observations here are that the people who put those "locks" in place are doing a lousy job. And BTW, if I were to browse to these sites with JScript already disabled I wouldn't even know there WAS a paywall.
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There is a technical reason: they have to allow the Google crawler to index the site. [12ft Ladder](https://12ft.io/)
Which is also ridiculously easy to detect.
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Corporate incompetence affects all levels of corporations, not just web sites. And I will put the responsibility for it squarely on the Harvard MBA attitude---"What's this quarter's profits?" Long term thinking/planning is an anathema to immediate profitability. If I was God/King/Absolute Benevolent Dictator, no corporation would be allowed to have more than 5% market share and no engineer would be permitted to design a product until they have spent at least 5 years in the field using the company products, 5 years in product maintenance and 5 years apprenticing a senior engineer. But I'm not God/King/Absolute Benevolent Dictator (at least not yet), so, for now, I will only refuse to hire crappy Harvard MBA educated management. So....would you like to hear how I really feel about Harvard MBA's?
rjmoses wrote:
so, for now, I will only refuse to hire crappy Harvard MBA educated management.
You can already do more than me... :sigh:
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Meh, it's a 95%+ solution for them; most people are cut off from the articles. If they really wanted it secure, they wouldn't load the content; they'd cut it off at the server. Arguably, it takes a bit more work to do that, but is more a management headache when you have dozens or hundreds of content contributors. That said, corporate incompetence abounds. Researching buying expert user software on sites whose aim is to get you to contact them without giving you enough information to know if it's worth the effort. A pizza site that doesn't show you the cost of what you are ordering until you add it to the cart. (If that's an intentional strategy, it is just silly). Topping that one off, pardon the pun, when we go to pay for it, we couldn't use a gift card so we had to cancel the cart and call in the order. What an ecommerce fail. It seems that many companies never use their own damn site!
MikeCO10 wrote:
It seems that many companies never use their own damn site!
That's the key.
M.D.V. ;) If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about? Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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Disabling a paywall to get free access to something that should be paid for is theft, pure and simple. Just because you can pick a lock and steal something doesn't make it ok. The people providing the content you access are doing so to earn a living.
haughtonomous wrote:
Disabling a paywall to get free access to something that should be paid for is theft, pure and simple. Just because you can pick a lock and steal something doesn't make it ok.
The major problem with pay sites is that in most cases, the only way to access that single article you want to read is to pay a significant amount for a subscription. Most likely, that will increase the amount of junk mail in your inbox, and there is a significant risk that you'll have to fight for months or maybe years to later have that subscription cancelled. There is a significant risk that your reading habits will be tracked and analyzed. The major problem, though: In international forums, you may encounter links to hundreds (or thousands, if you browse a lot) of different pay sites. Most of us cannot afford to subscribe to hundreds of web newspapers, or whatever, just to read that one article referred to in some other forum. If there were a way to pay for access to a single article, or maybe for 8 hours of access, with no bindings and anonymously - somewhat similar to buying a single copy on a newspaper stand - I would probably read a lot more of those pay articles. But noone has succeeded in marketing a system for such micropayments to the web newspapers. It would not be hard to make one; the big problem is to make the news sites accept it. If I were asked for a solution, I would suggest something based on the logic of Kerberos: I go to a ticket office (TGS, in Kerberos terms), checking out a ticket to a given pay site. The TGS serves a lot of different sites. The ticket I obtain is valid for, say, any one article, or maybe for multiple accesses within an 8 hour period. The site would not need to know anything about me, would need no account to be charged. Every month the ticket office would report to the site: I have sold so-and-so many single tickets and so-and-so many 8-hour tickets to your site. Here comes the payment for it! The ticket office may invoice me for the tickets I have checked out that month, to any of the sites served by that office, with no knowledge of which articles I read. The ticket office will just know which sites I visited. I could be anonymous even to the ticket office: In Kerberos, you authenticate yourself to a login server that does not sell tickets, except to the ticket office (a "TGT", Ticket Granting Ticket). So the different ticket offices (there may be several) may all report back: The customer who
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Am I the only one amazed at the corporate incompetence displayed by some websites? I'm thinking not just of the huge number of broken links, missing images and all the rest, but also of completely useless paywalls. I used to have a (free, trial) subscription to the Daily Telegraph. When it ended and I got presented with a paywall, it took precisely ONE CLICK on my browser to get past it. The DT paywall is entirely dependent on Javascript and with my "One-click Javascript toggle" Chrome plugin, I now have full, unrestricted access to DT content (should I want it). Exactly the same with the New York Times website. Disabling JS at the Guardian stops all the nags AND the cookie requests. At other sites (even with JS enabled) if there's a pop-up blocking the screen just use the HTML inspector and delete the hiding DIV; (you may also need to remove the "position:fixed" attribute of the main content div). But it's generally ridiculously insecure. BTW I don't make a habit of reading stuff I'm supposed to pay for. If I come across a paywall on a site I may see if it goes with JS off, maybe read that article, and not return to the site. If you're a web developer, do you find that your organisation actually checks what you deliver? As in testing links, forms, and security? Or is it entirely down to the IT department?
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That sounds like a lot of work to avoid navigating to archive :-/
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Am I the only one amazed at the corporate incompetence displayed by some websites? I'm thinking not just of the huge number of broken links, missing images and all the rest, but also of completely useless paywalls. I used to have a (free, trial) subscription to the Daily Telegraph. When it ended and I got presented with a paywall, it took precisely ONE CLICK on my browser to get past it. The DT paywall is entirely dependent on Javascript and with my "One-click Javascript toggle" Chrome plugin, I now have full, unrestricted access to DT content (should I want it). Exactly the same with the New York Times website. Disabling JS at the Guardian stops all the nags AND the cookie requests. At other sites (even with JS enabled) if there's a pop-up blocking the screen just use the HTML inspector and delete the hiding DIV; (you may also need to remove the "position:fixed" attribute of the main content div). But it's generally ridiculously insecure. BTW I don't make a habit of reading stuff I'm supposed to pay for. If I come across a paywall on a site I may see if it goes with JS off, maybe read that article, and not return to the site. If you're a web developer, do you find that your organisation actually checks what you deliver? As in testing links, forms, and security? Or is it entirely down to the IT department?
Telegraph marker posts ... nothing to do with IT Phasmid email discussion group ... also nothing to do with IT Beekeeping and honey site ... still nothing to do with IT
What I tend to find with a vast majority of these ones that are easily worked round, is quite simply that 90% of them are implemented using some kind of CMS, or a 3rd party cloud CMS service that specialises in that area. As a result, you do often find that the company calling the shots (The telegraph, The New York Times etc) are usually just either just a client, or if they are developing and hosting the site in house, the developers are really only tasked with making sure the base system is running and working alright. Many of the news papers in the UK for example ALL USE the same CMS system (I forget what it's called) but if you take a lot of them and F12 to look at the code, you'll find the code is 99% identical. When I was working in Ad-Tech for these companies back in around 2010, the JS and front end stuff, was 99% designed, developed and coded by the "art & design team", the company I was working with where trying to take a new approach to adding Javascript into the page designs to help manage and display Ad creatives, and pretty much every "technical" question we asked was met with a blank stare and a comment along the lines of "No Idea, unless there is a JS/NPM/jQuery plugin for it" Eventually for a lot of them we had to go to the parent company to find the ACTUAL developers of the CMS, and approaching them with said questions was again frustrating as we where met with "Dunno, no idea we leave our clients to deal with the frontend stuff, we just provide them with a template and an API to work with. Couple of examples: https://www.heraldscotland.com/ https://www.darlingtonandstocktontimes.co.uk/ https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/ If you F12 all of those you will see the following
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