Daily Telegraph punishes expats with paywall
There'll be grumbling in Costa del Sol tonight after the Daily Telegraph started charging expats and other folk overseas to read its website. The broadsheet newspaper today introduced a porous, or "metered", paywall similar to the schemes successfully operated by the Financial Times and the New York Times. The Telegraph will …
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Are we to understand that Telegraph readers are too thick to use a proxy to appear to be in the UK?
Given the telegraph is read by retired colonels and other 'outraged of Tunbridge Wells' types, I think IT literacy is in very short supply.
Although to be fair only a small majority of all people would know to use a proxy, and a smaller proportion still would be able to do it (I know, it's not tricky, but there are a shit-load of people who think that a blue 'e' means the internet, and errrr, that's it).
Noscript
Either the pay-wall is not working or else noscript disables it.
Expats will already have proxies for viewing BBC iPlayer.
Shurely shomeone told the Torygraph...?
"Expats will already have proxies for viewing BBC iPlayer"
Well I know I have !
Re: "Expats will already have proxies for viewing BBC iPlayer"
I haven't. There's nothing worth watching that can't be sourced elsewhere probably before it even appears on iPlayer.
Re: "Expats will already have proxies for viewing BBC iPlayer"
Well, we haven't got a TV in Switzerland so the occasional dip into Mastermind, University Challenge, Only Connect etc.makes it well wothwhile
Re: "Expats will already have proxies for viewing BBC iPlayer"
Just to add - all that's necessary to set the proxy up from the remote computer is :
ssh -C -D 9999 -pSSHPortNumber -N Username@MyIPAddress
Password
Change Firefox proxy to 9999
Re: "Expats will already have proxies for viewing BBC iPlayer"
"There's nothing worth watching..." In your very humble opinion !
Re: "Expats will already have proxies for viewing BBC iPlayer"
>"There's nothing worth watching..." In your very humble opinion !
Congratulations, you've just shown you can comprehend the first four words of a sentence. Just think, with a great deal of effort, one day you might be able to comprehend a complete sentence.
Wow a step forward for the liberation of people's minds
At last, this despicable, fearmongering Internet publication does something positive, cutting down on the number of people who, out of sheer boredom or cluelessness, access its site and gorge their minds with the garbage that it spews out, turning themselves into fearful, biggoted fools. This is a great example for other dismal rags to follow, including the Guardian: make money off fools while setting other people's minds free. What a positive decision, I say.
As this is in the context of the Telegraph
Shouldn't you be referring to their readers on the Costa etc. as being 'economic migrants'?
Re: As this is in the context of the Telegraph
If they aren't already they will be soon.
25.3% unemployment and rising...
Re: As this is in the context of the Telegraph
I would have thought that most ex-pats on the Costa Del Sol wouldn't recognize the Telegraph even if you hit them over the head with it, either the paper version of a tablet whilst browsing the ET. They are mostly DM readers.
Re: As this is in the context of the Telegraph
As one of the many erudite, handsome and well-hung ex-pats living on the Costa(ish), I shall attribute your remarks to jealousy.
The funny part is
The Telegraph has been pandering to the US market for years now with various stories against global warming, evolution and the usual US talking points. Evidence of the success of that can be measured by the frothing batshit insanity in some of the discussion threads.
I wonder if they're spiting themselves with a paywall since people will just go elsewhere. Its not like there is any shortage of news sites.
20 stories a month?
No worries - I doubt that there's 20 stories worth reading in a month on the paper anyway. It used to be a good paper about 10 years ago but it's been sinking faster than the Tory Party for a while now.
Re: 20 stories a month?
Sod the stories, that's 20 Matt cartoons. The newsworthiness of the ET and Alex have been going downhill for quite a long time.
Re: 20 stories a month?
The Gardening Section is quite good but the comments sections - oh dear - so many people wanting to protect "the rights of the Indigenous British People" - I didn't know the PIcts had so many fans.
Cool!
Well that should hopefully put an end to the comments from the foaming mad expats going on about how great it was that they had left Britain. I always thought it couldn't be that great if they still felt the need to comment in the columns of a paper from a country they had left.
I still remember, years ago, stumbling across a gaping hole in the Times's implementation of a similar approach, years ago ... just off the plane to the US, I hadn't yet changed the timezone setting on my laptop, and happened to open a Times article - which worked fine, unlike on the desktop machine on the same ADSL line. "Hm, not geotargetting after all" - yep, they were actually using Javascript to check if the machine was set to GMT/BST rather than a foreign timezone! On the plus side, I suppose, that wouldn't be fooled by the obvious approach of using a proxy...
A weird approach, though: if ads aren't cutting it, why impose charges only on foreign readers? Surely currency etc will be a bigger overhead and barrier there than within the UK! Charging £2 to everyone, I could understand - but why discriminate by country?
is this even legal
Won't Brussels have something to say about such blatant discrimination?
Bypass
The nytimes.com paywall can be bypassed in Firefox by installing the RefControl addon, and telling it to forge the referer on all requests for nytimes.com to something like http://www.google.com/fuck.you.ny.times. This is because they allow people who find their articles via Google, straight through.
I wonder if something similar works for The Daily Telegraph.
Re: Bypass
Or you could just pay if you want to read their articles? People don't write them out of the goodness of their hearts you freeloader. There are plenty of free sites if that's what you're after. Where do people get this sense of 'I should get everything for free' entitlement from?
This is going to be interesting
Given that I write for the Telegraph sometimes but am indeed in foreign.
So I won't be able to read the paper I sometimes write for?
Re: This is going to be interesting
>So I won't be able to read the paper I sometimes write for?
I'm sure more than a few of us have sometimes not had clearance to read documents we've written
the pink 'un porus paywall is breachable in Android browser by simply erasing history n'cookies, but I stopped reading it ages ago. I haven't bothered to go to all this trouble & expense with the DT!
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