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Why Paywalls Need To Be So Fragile (thestack.com)
An anonymous reader writes: Despite the ferment that occurs when yet another digital publisher paywalls a news-site, most paywalls are absurdly easy to circumvent, even using no other software than a web-browser, because of the need to present unrestricted content to the search engines that publicise it. None of the parties involved are considering anyone else's point of view: Google wants free flow of information funded by merit-based advertising revenue; publishers want to restore consumer lock-in in a network environment of story-led consumers who have completely abandoned the concept; and Apple is fine with content-blocking, since it just wants to sell hardware.
From Getting First Post!
I don't mind paywalls. They let me know these sites don't want me as a visitor. I'm good with that. Such things simply generate a reflexive "okthxbai", and that's the end of that.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Call the paywall a tax on network illiteracy?
In all seriousness though, it is evolving, albeit slowly. Take for instance the experts-exchange.com website. Up until recently, you just open the Google cached page and scrolled to the bottom, where you saw the entire conversation. That changed sometime last year (two years ago? I forget.)
But yeah, I'm sure that content-sellers will still by necessity leave a hole open somewhere for a good long time - you just have to figure out where that hole is (usually by mimicking Googlebot, etc) and pop in if you want to see what's inside w/o the need for paying up.
I am curious as to how the pr0n sites deal with it, though - the curiousity stems from the fact that the competent/popular ones were traditionally at the forefront of anti-circumvention measures.
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
So what happens when the first seven search results for a particular query end up being sites that "generate a reflexive 'okthxbai'"? This happens to me often when I try to search Google for certain linguistics topics: if it's not on Linguistics Stack Exchange, it's paywall, paywall, paywall. I imagine a long string of paywalled results would make web search engines far less convenient to use.
I suspect most people aren't looking for stuff that specialized, and if you are, you probably have an academic/professional reason to be doing so.
Just trying to rule something out: You didn't mean people should refrain from engaging in the conlang hobby unless they're college students, college faculty, or professional SF writers, did you?
Ugh, ads are so bad. I only block them for security reasons...honest.
Oh, what's that? Some sites are using paywalls instead of ads? Hmm.. well those need to be easy to get around too..because of...reasons. Not because I'm self-entitled and gimme gimme gimme. I mean, sites should just go under if I deem they aren't "worth" it, yet somehow they do have some worth since I'm visiting them in the first place. Don't point that out though, I don't want the cognitive dissonance.
Hear, hear!
It's because viewing one single page on each of ten different sites is not worth a separate $60 per year subscription to each site. This in turn is in part because of the transaction fees that the credit card companies charge.
Google supposedly requires news sites to not show different content to Googlebot than it does to users, at least for three articles a day, or be labeled a "subscription" site, in the News listings. There's even a reporting tool for users to notify Google if such shenanigans is going on.
Google doesn't actually seem to act on any of those reports, though, so news sites can be paywalled and Google will help drive traffic their direction. But then again, since nobody is playing by the rules, User-Agent-Switcher doesn't seem like such a bad option either.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
DMCA / TPP to block
ad-block
no script
allow right click
and so on
[Pressuring users toward subscriptions] is in part because of the transaction fees that the credit card companies charge.
How about pay-per-article, think that would work?
It would not work well, except for very high value articles. That's what I was talking about above. The bank charges the merchant a transaction fee for each payment that it processes, typically a constant amount plus a percentage of gross. It's that constant amount that kills microtransaction business models such as pay-per-article. Even Bitcoin has a transaction fee of 0.0001 BTC (currently 2.5 cents USD) to discourage "dust spam".
What terrible system routes resolver requests through the kernel instead of usermode?
AFAIK gethostbyname() only uses open(), read(), socket(), and write(), so it's almost irrelevant where the hosts list goes. (In fact, you could make the argument that if the hosts list is in a browser add-on all of the overhead of the open() and read() calls is done before any browser requests are made and cached for all subsequent requests while the browser is running, so a browser add-on has less overhead per host query.)
When it becomes illegal to use the web sensibly, I guess I'll have to ignore the law. And since I'm in for a few dozen years anyway if I dare to break that law, why bother trying with the rest?
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
The paywalls are likely to be very ineffective against younger users. That's not a big disadvantage for the sites, however, because the younger users (under 50, perhaps) because they aren't likely to fork over money in any case.
It's the older users - people more accustomed to paying for newspapers - who are more likely to be affected by paywalls. It's these people that are targeted by paywalls, because they are the ones more likely to make the decision to pay.
they gonna block us from modifying html on the fly too?
Moderating "-1, Disagree" is simple censorship. Have the guts to post your opinion. -- Spazmania (174582)
MOOO, cows.
It's fitting that the hyphen site's theme song is "Communication Breakdown" by Led Zeppelin.
Browser-based add-ons avoid even the transition from user mode (the browser) to kernel mode (the IP stack) to look up the host. And unlike most operating systems' IP stacks, a browser-based add-on can use an efficient approximate cache for 0.0.0.0 entries.
I use uBlock Origin, Flashblock, and uMatrix. I couldn't even unblock ads if I wanted to. I'd have to disable Flashblock, disable uBlock, and figure out which 10 different ad sites I need to allow on uMatrix.
On a system without DNS cache the hostfile way of adblocking slows down the resolver noticeably.
Browser adblocker instead make use of JIT and regex, giving more fine grained control and performance.
Then don't make it ridiculously hard to set one up! I'm looking at you, New Scientist. This UK site invites readers to access its premium articles by setting up a free account that requests some demographic information. Fine as a concept, until you get to the point where you choose a password. Acceptable passwords are filtered through a set of complexity rules more appropriate for James Bond 007 License To Kill clearance than a site for socially conscious pop science articles. So far as I'm concerned, a site that won't accept the studiously randomized passwords generated by password managers is not a site I'm interested in accessing.
i remember the good old days when newspaper inspectors used to roam the trains and if they found anyone skipping the ads, they'd inject them with ebola and rip the articles out of the paper.
People just grab stuff from Reuters and propagate it. Why would this be a real profession? I worked for a radio once, they basically churned through unpaid interns who vaguely retouched the crap they got from Reuters and then read it outloud in the sound room. It's not exactly highly skilled labor. And then half the reporting world is fucking dishonest. Sensationalism, clickbait, etc. ?
It's not like you need a huge investment to copy information these days. You don't need giant printing presses and distribution chains.
Can I just get it straight from Reuters without intermediaries? Thanks.
See subject: Browser addons = usermode & layered over usermode slower browsers. They don't use a filtering driver in kernelmode so there's no way they can avoid the context-switch transition operating in usermode ONLY.
APK
P.S.=> Unless you can SHOW ME conclusive evidence of that? There's NO WAY they can - they're usermode & slow up browsers (try it yourself in FireFox sometime - load a bunch of addons & see what happens - & the slowup you'll see is DUE TO MESSAGEPASSING OVERHEADS added by addons - not just usermode slower-ness)... apk
See subject: Hosts blow past it (as hosts != browser addon) & APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit http://start64.com/index.php?o...
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FREE & not 'souled-out' to advertisers + adds speed, security & reliability & does FAR more w/ FAR less more efficiently vs. redundant browser addons & locally installed DNS servers @ home + fixes DNS' many security issues!
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It obtains its data vs. many types of online threats & for adbanner blocking from 10 reputable sites in the security community!
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It SPEEDS YOU UP 2 ways (adblocking + locally cached in RAM favorites placed @ the TOP of hosts for fastest resolution speed vs. remote DNS also aiding reliability) vs. other "so-called security 'solutions'" SLOWING YOU!
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It does all that via something you already natively have vs. "bolting on browser addons 'MOAR'" that's usermode slower & increases messagepassing, cpu + ram overheads!
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MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus per this VERY recent testing of them all http://www.av-test.org/en/news...
&
It's safe proven by 57 antivirus programs recently in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
+
In its 32-bit model too https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
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* "The premise is quite simple: Take something designed by nature & reprogram it to make it work for the body rather than against it..." - Dr. Alice Krippen: "I am legend".
APK
P.S.=> By "yours truly" - "The Lord of Hosts" so-to-speak:
PERTINENT QUOTE/EXCERPT:
"The image this title brings to mind is of a mighty military commander, one who can at a mere word summon rank upon rank of protective power" from https://answers.yahoo.com/ques... & THAT WORD = hosts!
(Accept NO substitutes!)
...apk
See subject: It's your resolver of host-domain names to IP addresses & 1st source queried by default = hosts (over DNS, especially remotely, as it's slower & prone to many security issues such as the Kaminsky redirect poisoning flaw, Open DNS (no, NOT "OpenDNS", they're great & filter vs. threats too - they're what I use in fact combined with hosts locally first)).
Hosts are part of the IP stack - in fact, hosts are a "firewall BEFORE the firewall" (operating on the MOST used threat vector in host-domain names vs. ip addresses by malware in MOST forms by FAR) since firewalls use layered drivers BEYOND the ipstack (ipstack resolver = tcpip.sys in Windows), & hosts operate WITH the ip stack itself as a filter...
SOURCE = MICROSOFT -> https://support.microsoft.com/...
APK
P.S.=> Hosts get CACHED into memory, like any file (the way I do it is to TOTALLY bypass SLOWER usermode in the faulty with large hosts files dnscache clientside service & instead, I opt to use the kernelmode diskcache - THIS MEANS NO TRANSITIONS TO USERMODE & context switch overheads involved) - plus, I "up" the priority of the read in the registry (ask if you want those settings)
+
I put my FAVORITE SITES @ THE TOP OF HOSTS cached in RAM as noted above for more speed & reliability!
(They are where I spend a GOOD 95++% of my time online like most people do so they resolve MEGA fast - far faster than calling out to remote DNS servers - between that & adblocking? I fly using hosts & do it FAR safer + more reliably via this very technique as well which proofs you vs. DNS exploits)... apk
AdBlock's SLOWER vs. hosts: http://superuser.com/questions... & THEY SUSPECT AS I DO & HAVE KNOWN FOR A LONG TIME NOW - adblock's rulesets are SO big now, they slow it down, massively (as well as bloat RAM + CPU consumption like MAD) - they're redundant junk.
* :)
(You guys should read my posts in detail - I list that in most of them!)
The way I set it up, IF YOU'D READ HERE -> http://it.slashdot.org/comment... also shows how I use KERNELMODE caching (faster than usermode by FAR, even with indexing done, which I beat also a GOOD 95++% of the time too via topmost placement of the sites I go to MOST online) for hosts in RAM locally via the kernelmode diskcache acting in combination with the tcpip.sys (IP Stack resolver driver) kernelmode subsystem also - no context switch overheads to SLOWER USERMODE that way either... triple BONUS!
APK
P.S.=> & there ya go... apk
See subject: WHY do it 2x if once via IP stack + hosts gets the job done (hosts go 1st) as far as resolution & same w/ adblocking!
* As far as caching goes, as I said - I simply cut out the faulty with large hosts files usermode SLOWER dnscache clientside service in Windows (& do the BEST POSSIBLE SPEED + RELIABILITY literally 95++% of the time here since I spend most of my time @ my FAVORITE sites @ the TOP of hosts (which assures fastest possible reads for the 20 I use, which equates or exceeds 2-3 MILLION indexed lookups!)).
APK
P.S.=> That's a "rhetorical question" tepples - You can answer if you like but it basically answers itself - & PER MY SUBJECT:
There's NO WAY they can be using kernelmode MINUS A DRIVER http://it.slashdot.org/comment... & they aren't using one tepples (not browser addons) ->
... apk
Can ublock do 16 things hosts do for speed, security, & reliability:
1.) Protect vs. malicious sites (past ads)
2.) Protect vs. fastflux botnets + stop C&C communique
3.) Protect vs. dyndns botnets + stop C&C communique
4.) Protect vs. DGA botnets + stop C&C communique
5.) Protect vs. downed DNS (4 reliability)
6.) Protect vs. redirect poisoned dns
7.) Protect vs. trackers
8.) Protect vs. spam
9.) Protect vs. phishing
10.) Protect vs. caps
11.) Get you by dns blocking
12.) Keep you off dns request logs
13.) Speed up surfing by adblocks & hardcoded favs
14.) Work on anything webbound (ie email programs) multiplatform.
15.) Give you easily controlled data
16.) Do those & block ads better than addons more efficiently in cpu + memory use
* ANSWER ="NO" to each on UBlock doing it as well or @ all!
APK
P.S.=> UBlock does less than hosts & less efficiently - hosts do MORE w/ less + Hosts start w/ the IP stack before REDUNDANT inefficient addons BEGIN to operate (as 1st resolver queried):
Ublock's NOT as efficient:
Hosts @ 3mb-11mb w/ current data vs. threats + ads - test yourself using my program.
UBlock uses 63++ MB -> http://www.ghacks.net/2014/06/...
SCREENSHOT -> http://cdn.ghacks.net/wp-conte...
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ClarityRay defeats it detecting it by dumping addons in use in a browser via native browser methods to do so!
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UBlock adds complexity/room for breakdown/exploit + from a slower mode of operations (usermode = more messagepassing overheads vs. hosts in kernelmode).
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What's better?
APK Hosts File Engine 9.0++ SR-2 32/64-bit -> http://start64.com/index.php?o...
MalwareBytes' hpHosts Admin (MalwareBytes employee) hosts & recommends it -> http://hosts-file.net/?s=Downl... & MalwareBytes = BEST antivirus http://www.av-test.org/en/news...
It's GUARANTEED safe & clean per it being checked by 57 antivirus programs recently in BOTH its 64-bit model https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
+
In its 32-bit model also https://www.virustotal.com/en/...
... apk