Ha'aretz cracked - Goodbye paywall, it's now a free for all

Spoiler:  If you don't want to hear me rambling, and you just want the Ha'aretz articles for free, drag the link below into your bookmarks toolbar (by holding down the left mouse button and moving it up there), and click on it whenever you're on a Ha'aretz.com article that is asking you to pay.

A very humbling experience, these past few weeks were. As stated in my previous post, my attempt at cracking the ESPN Insider paywall was entirely unsuccessful.  I scoured their javascript code, looking for any sign of imperfection, and all I was left with was a nagging sense of failure.

Which brings me to this post.  I'm going to purge this ESPN Insider fixation by sacrificing a different paywall to the developer gods.  My offering: Ha'aretz.

Now, if truth be told, all Ha'aretz articles, like those on the New York Times website, are already accessible for free relatively easily.  All you have to do is copy the headline of the article in question into Google, then click on the relevant search result and you'll see the whole article.  But for some of us, that's just too many steps.  Hence, my bookmarklet.

As with my previous two successful attempts at cracking online media paywalls (see the New York Times post and the Wall Street Journal post), if you want to read the Ha'aretz "for pay" articles for free, just do as you did before:  Hold down the left mouse button on the link at the bottom of this post (it says, 'Ha'aretz Free'), and drag it up to your bookmarks toolbar.  Then, when you're on a Ha'aretz article which is demanding that you pay, click on that bookmarklet (the link in your toolbar) and the article will magically appear.

Below, the Ha'aretz bookmarklet:

Hitting a (pay)wall with ESPN Insider

After over a week of trying, I can now comfortably (albeit, very irritably) say that I cannot find a good way around ESPN Insider's paywall.

But all is not lost.  As with any failed attempt at doing something, I've gained some insight on what doesn't work.  And so I feel it's only fair to share that consolation prize with you fine people.

Things I've learned from trying to hack ESPN Insider, but failing:

1. ESPN isn't stupid.  They have a lot of good coders there, and they don't make dumb mistakes.  For instance, unlike with the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, they don't accidentally include a URL in their meta tags or script tags which points a person to full version of their for-pay articles.  Meaning, it's impossible to find their article online for free.

2. I can't figure out how or when they populate the article content.  I thought it might be as simple as calling a web service and getting the content that way, but it's not.  Or maybe it is, but i haven't succeeded in identifying where that web service is called and when.

3. Faking being a user through some nifty javascript/jquery doesn't do a damn thing. I'm pretty sure copying a registered user's cookie would solve all my issues, but that's no different than just stealing username/password info.  That's cheating.


And that's it.  I encourage anybody out there to pick up where I left off, and hopefully succeed where I failed.  As for me, I'm giving up.  This site made me waste a week, and that pisses me off.  So I gotta' move on.

Wall Street Journal and my War on Paywalls

Spoiler:  If you don't care about the story, and you just want the Wall Street Journal articles for free, drag the link below into your bookmarks toolbar (by holding down the left mouse button and moving it up there), and click on it whenever you're on a WSJ.com article that is asking you to pay.

After creating a bookmarklet earlier this week which cracked the New York Times paywall, it occurred to me that I wasn't being fair.  After all, what did the New York Times ever do to me?  Why was I just targeting them?

So in the interest of fairness, I've decided to target all of them. If you're a newspaper or media outlet with an online (metered) paywall, I'm coming after you :)  UPDATE:  After further consideration, I've decided that such a mission is not only unreasonable, but just too much damn work.

Today's target is the Wall Street Journal.  If you want to read their "for pay" articles for free, just do as you did before:  Hold down the left mouse button on the link at the bottom of this post (it says, 'WSJ Free'), and drag it up to your bookmarks toolbar.  Then, when you're on a Wall Street Journal article which is demanding that you pay, click on that bookmarklet (the link in your toolbar) and the article will magically appear (after about 6 seconds).

Oh, and I'm taking requests.  If there's an online newspaper that you particularly fancy, but they're making you pay for articles after giving you some of them for free (how dare they), then just tell your Uncle Matty here and I'll take care of it as fast as possible.  UPDATE:  After following up on the below request for ESPN Insider (results to be posted soon UPDATE: results now posted), I've decided that it's a hard "no" to all requests.  They take too much time.

Now without further ado, behold, the link (below)...