As some may have heard, the New York Times is trying once again to get readers to pay for online news. But one New York columnist reports that hackers have blasted through the paper’s “paywall” in a few hours. He writes: “It was obvious from the start that the New York Times (NYT) paywall would be fairly porous. But it’s actually far worse than I originally thought. Eighteen months of intense and expensive planning left the entire scheme open to be completely bypassed in 12 hours by one Twitter feed or four simple lines of code. The Times clearly wants to segment its readers. Light readers would get to see up to 20 articles, blog posts, slide shows, or what have you a month. Referrals from social media, blogs, and search engines wouldn’t count against the monthly quotas — except for Google, whose users would find themselves restricted to five articles a day. Heavy users would face a monthly fee, generating revenue for the NYT to help offset lower online ad rates compared to print. That’s another way of saying that the Times wants to have its subscription cake, but eat all the online ad revenue from casual visitors, too.”
