The New York Times decided to adopt a pay-wall subscription based access to its online content. It rolled out subscriptions for users in Canada on 17th March and plans to implement them in the US and other parts of the world, starting 28th March. However, it appears that the pay-wall has already been breached. It can be easily bypassed with just four lines of code, according to Joshua Benton of Nieman Journalism lab. He mentions that a Canadian coder, David Hayes, has already released a bookmarklet dubbed as NYTClean, which allows readers to access articles even after bypassing their monthly limit of 20 articles. It is interesting to note that NYTimes just puts an overlay on an article accessed after crossing the limit which can be easily circumvented. This, Benton feels, might even be intentional. With web browsers like Firefox, Safari and Chrome that support extensions (there are extensions to remove Facebook ads), a plethora of add-ons that bypass this pay-wall will emerge soon. The NYTimes has set a monthly limit of 20 free articles on NYTimes.com for users who don't buy a subscription plan. After crossing this limit they will have to buy a digital subscription. However, the home page at NYTimes.com and all section fronts will remain free to browse for all users at all times. Also, trying to adopt a 'social media' friendly approach, readers who land on NYTimes articles through search engines, blogs and social media including Facebook and Twitter, will be able to access them, even after crossing their…
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