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Pay Or Else, News Site Threatens

Posted by samzenpus on from the good-luck-with-that dept.

WED Fan writes "The North Country Gazette, a news blog, says users who read beyond a single page of an article must pay up or they will be tracked down. They don't have a pay wall. If you go beyond page 1, you owe them. From the article: 'A subscription is required at North Country Gazette. We allow only one free read per visitor. We are currently gathering IPs and computer info on persistent intruders who refuse to buy subscription and are engaging in a theft of services. We have engaged an attorney who will be doing a bulk subpoena demand on each ISP involved, particularly Verizon Droids, Frontier and Road Runner, and will then pursue individual legal actions.'"

3 of 549 comments (clear)

  1. Re:not a contract. by funkatron · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    Dude. You mentioned "contract" (a law word) in the same sentence as "dhcp" (a tech word). That automatically means a 3 year court process is needed.

    --
    "Welcome to our world. We are the wasted youth. And we are the future too." Yes, I know these are stupid lyrics.
  2. German TV does the same by SlothDead · · Score: 0, Offtopic

    This is just like in Germany, where you have to pay for a few crappy state funded TV channels if you own a computer with an internet connection, because these channels put a few fragments of some shows on the web for a few days after they aired.

    If you found this comment not that interesting you might want to watch this cyanide&happiness cartoon instead (yes, it's related to this slashdot story): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fcO9svaOahM "The Sign"

  3. I think their site is back up, TIME TO HACK! by francium+de+neobie · · Score: 1, Offtopic

    I'm working in office right now so I'm not sure if I can contribute enough time to make a web crawler for this, and I'm surely not leaving for Starbucks in these few hours... but we can do this in Python...

    http://code.google.com/p/harvestman-crawler/wiki/WritingCustomCrawlers

    My basic idea is this... someone can be installing this crawler package into Python, write an event handler for each crawled URL from the crawler and ask the crawler to continue only for URLs inside the site's domain - which is simply a regex check.

    That should be less than 50 lines of code. Someone write it, test it, and let's go to Starbucks and party tonight.