Companies

Back-in-the-day, roughly three years ago, I wrote a JavaScriptlet for breaking trough a press website's paywall. At the time I promised not to "piss" into their proverbial coffee pot and not publish updated versions of my hack. I kept my word. It was surprisingly easy! They didn't change a thing. Until now.

This particular ICT-media finally realized their client tell to contain mostly smart people with good computer skills. Just clicking a button on your shortcuts-bar of your chosen web browser after reading 5 articles was too easy. They finally went into full-blown hedgehog defense and enabled two measures:

1. Without authentication, your IPv4-address is tracked.
   • No cookies required
   • Doesn't care which browser on which computer you're using
   • There is a very small number of free-of-charge articles you can read per day. I'd say 5.
   • Unfortunately their AWS-setup doesn't have IPv6 enabled. With that I'd have much more IP-addresses at my disposal.
2. With authentication, the number of free-of-charge articles is limited. I'd guess to 10 of them.

For proper paywall breakage, lots of IPv4-addresses would be required. I do have some, but I'd rather not play this game anymore. I'll call it quits and stick with the headers of their RSS-feed. Obviously, they'll limit the feed into last 10 articles, but if you keep reading and accumulating the data 24/7, you'll get all of them.

Good job! One potential customer lost.