Are we to understand that Telegraph readers are too thick to use a proxy to appear to be in the UK?
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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Thursday 1st November 2012 18:38 GMT FartingHippo
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).
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Thursday 1st November 2012 18:38 GMT Anomalous Cowshed
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.
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Monday 5th November 2012 09:10 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.
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Thursday 1st November 2012 18:56 GMT DrXym
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.
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Thursday 1st November 2012 21:34 GMT James 100
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?
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Friday 2nd November 2012 09:41 GMT Anonymous Coward
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.