If you’re interested in how the Internet has rendered $40 million worth of effort redundant, then read on.

A Quick Word Before We Begin

This article is designed to demonstrate just how easy it is to get around protection like this, and is certainly not meant to deprive the New York Times or its journalists of money. We here at MakeUseOf are not the authors of any such techniques.

We do however feel this is within our readers interests, hence this article. If you do feel particularly strongly about this issue then be sure to have your say in the comments, at the bottom of this article.

Clearing Cookies

Currently the paywall does not use IP (Internet Protocol) addresses to track visits. The site also allows you 20 free articles per month, and these are tracked using cookies. If you were to browse 20 articles using Chrome, you’d then be free to browse another 20 in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and so on as the cookies are browser-unique.

So, by this logic (you probably don’t want to go swapping browsers just to read the news) you can simply clear your cookies and continue browsing. The only problem with clearing all your cookies is that other sites you regularly visit and rely on may forget who you are.

Using JavaScript, Digital Inspiration created a bookmarklet to clear the NY Times cookies alone. Drag the Remove NYT Cookies link into your bookmarks bar and click it every 20 articles or so to reset the counter to zero.

Note: Disabling cookies in your browser altogether won’t work, as the site requires cookies to function.

Removing The Overlay

Once you’ve hit article number 20, any subsequent articles you attempt to access will present you with an overlay, which will stop you being able to scroll the page and view the content beneath the “buy a subscription” box.

Dave Hayes of euri.ca has come up with a bookmarklet that, when clicked, removes that pesky overlay and restores your ability to scroll. Drag the NYTClean bookmarklet onto your bookmarks bar, and every time you hit the paywall, click it. You’ll see the overlay disappear and you’ll be free to read the article again.

The Google Approach

If you really want access to an article behind a paywall, you can (for a few articles) use Google. Searching for the full article title or URL in Google should bring up the article you’re looking for as the top search result.

As many websites consider the “first click free”, you should be able to view the article as you are coming from a search engine result. To read your next article, repeat the process and click through from your search results. You should get 5 free articles a day using this method.

This technique has been known to work on other paywalls, including the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times.

The Social Backdoor

As the newspaper is keen on building up its social networking grunt, for the time being articles that are accessed via Facebook or Twitter are free to read. You don’t necessarily have to follow every story as you can use this page to find Twitter feeds that are relevant to your interests.

It’s worth mentioning that the paper has stipulated if this method of accessing content is abused then this perk will be withdrawn. How soon this will happen remains to be seen – there’s not much point following the paper on Twitter if you can’t click the articles, is there?

You can also follow @freeUnnamedNews for NY Times articles as they’re published.

Browser Extensions

Firefox users can install Greasemonkey (and Safari users Greasekit) to run user scripts (like this one at userscripts.org) that claim to get around the paywall. Just be careful when installing scripts from sources like this, and disable them when you’re not browsing the NY Times.

There was a Chrome extension that did this with 2 lines of CSS, but Google took it down and the NY Times modified a class or two.

Conclusion

The decision to put online content behind a paywall comes with plenty of issues. By hiding content altogether search engine optimization suffers. On the other hand leaving content in an easily accessible online location is bound to result in a similar debacle.

These five techniques probably won’t last for long, as the newspaper is bound to try and protect its content in other ways. This article hopefully provides some insight into the problems faced by traditional print news outlets and the difficulty in protecting content destined for both keen readers and search engine traffic.

What do you think of the NY Times paywall? Have you browsed the site via one of the methods above? Any other techniques? Give us your ethical, technical and financial reports in the comments below.

Image Credit: Shutterstock

Searching through old newspapers is not only about history but also has practical applications for genealogists. Old newspaper records lead to names of places, individuals and obituaries.

That aside, a casual student of history can check back and see how the world perceived a momentous event. Say, how did the depression happen and how does it relate to the recent recession?

Thanks to digitization of data, we no longer have to search haphazardly through reams of newsprint. All we need is a search engine and of course, a site that lets you read old newspapers. Here are six:

Trove (Australia)

You can think of it as Open Source to a wealth of information. It might be Australia centric, but that takes very little away from the information that The National Library of Australia site supplies for free. The portal has a long lineup of newspaper ‘titles’ which you can select individually or even refine by state. Further filtering by year and date gives you access to a digitized format of the paper. You can also download it as a PDF.

Times Machine – The New York Times

The “Times Machine” is a browser that can take you from the very first issue of the newspaper (September 18, 1851) to The New York Times of December 30, 1922. It is limited if you consider the number of years it covers, but it still covers a significant piece of history when you see that the time period covers something like the First World War.

Chronicling America

With the help of this huge archive of historical newspapers held by the Library of Congress, you can view pages from newspapers belonging to 23 states. The aim of this project (The National Digital Newspaper Program) is to chronicle the newspapers published between 1836 and 1922 by all states in America. There is also a directory that lists information on newspapers published in the United States from 1690 to the present. You can use the very flexible filters to view newspaper pages from a place and time, using keywords to locate specific places, people, and events. The archive can presently serve up 3308613 pages.

HistoryBuff

This is a site that does not store a continuous archive of old newspapers, but rather a more selective collection that presented important events in American history in the last 400 years. The site is meant for students and educators who want to look at how news has been published since the early days of newspapers. The selection of old newspapers covers the periods from 1700 to 2004. Remember, these are selected news items and not complete newspapers.

The Newspaper Genealogy Archives

The coverage of news items remains selective but the countries covered broadens with newspapers from the U. S., England, Scotland, Ireland & Australia. The site is meant to be a free resource for genealogical & historical research. The archives cover news items from the 18th- through early 20th-century newspapers. The news items are less about globally significant events but of personal announcements (births, deaths, company formations etc) that can be used to trace genealogical clues amongst the citizens of five related countries.

Google Archive Search

By default we head to Google for our entire search. Try out Google News Archive Search to search for that bit of news in the whole historical haystack. The News archive search can also automatically create timelines which show selected results from relevant time periods that’s really useful for spotting news trends.

Thanks to these online digital archives, news can be preserved for posterity and made available with a click. There’s a lot more trawling you can do on the web…like, check out this Wikipedia page for a complete lists of online news archives from around the world. A lot of these publications have searchable indexes. If you are a history buff, then old newspapers are a valuable tool to trace the footfalls of history.

Would you agree that no news is old news when it comes to history?

Image Credit: Wikipedia

The Daily puts all content from the application on the web just in case someone spots something they want to share with their non-iPad mates. This then takes you to a page with the shared news items and a big advert for The Daily, instructing you to get an iPad and subscription for a full edition. The service has purposefully made it difficult to find these shared items, but Andy Balo of Waxy.org has intervened with The Daily: Indexed.

Andy explains: “I love journalism dearly and want to see new models emerge, and charging for content is a great way to align a media organization’s interests with those of its readership. That said, if you do charge for access, you can’t publish free versions to the web and hope that people don’t find them.”

The project provides a completely unofficial table of contents for each edition of The Daily by scouring the web and posting the findings, daily (of course).

As this content is already available online, there is nothing illegal about what Andy’s doing: “I’m also very curious about their reaction. This isn’t illegal or a copyright violation “” all I’m doing is linking to the versions they’re publishing on their site.”

“The ability to link to any webpage without permission is part of what makes the web great, and it should never be discouraged. It’s also worth noting that Google’s slowly indexing all the articles too, and search engines aren’t blocked in their robots.txt file.”

Check out The Daily: Indexed. Have you read The Daily yet? Will you? Is this the saving grace that journalism needs, or a fad that’s on the way out? Let us know in the comments.

It’s these web apps that show clearly what the Chrome Web Store could become, and the direction of the web in general and Chrome OS specifically. If you want a look at that future, here it is.

If you’re less high minded than that, though, and just want to play with some cool new technology, you’re still in the right place. Below are just a few apps that I think bring something new to the web; a few even work without Chrome itself.

News

There were two main newspaper apps on the web store’s launch day: The New York Times and USA Today. Both apps are similar to their iPad counterparts, and both support offline reading.

The New York Times app is my favorite, but that’s mostly because I prefer their content to USA Today. In many ways it’s simply a faster version of the Adobe Air based Times Reader, but without the Adobe Air’s crappiness or the paywall. Launch the app and articles are presented to you:

The real beauty of this app is the keyboard shortcuts. The arrow keys behave exactly as you’d expect them to, allowing you to “turn the page” quickly, as well as to browse the articles. Check out the NY Times app for Chrome here.

The USA Today app is similar, albeit with a more feature-filled home page:

The addition of weather and sports scores is a very nice touch, particularly because you can customize both. For example, in the above screenshot the scores are from my sport of choice: ice hockey. Great perk, and very well presented app. Check out the USA Today app for Chrome here.

Weather

Remember The Weather Channel? Me neither. The web is simply the best way to stay up-to-date about the weather, and Chrome’s webstore had two great apps for seeing it at launch. As you know, Wunderground is the best weather site on the web. Well, they’ve got a Chrome app now:

As you can see, there’s not much here. Just a pretty picture reflecting the area you life in and a little bit of information. Check out the Wunderground App for Google Chrome.

If you want a little more detail, I recommend WeatherBug’s offering. Sporting a similar “pretty picture” interface, this app gives you one-click access to forecasts and maps, making it a little more useful than Wunderground’s offering:

Check out the Weatherbug app for Google Chrome.

TweetDeck

Oh TweetDeck. Such a great program, but based on the always-slow Adobe Air.

Until now.

TweetDeck is a great tool for managing multiple Twitter/Facebook/Buzz/Foursquare accounts, and it works beautifully in Google Chrome. Launching in seconds and combining your social networks, this new app just might be the highlight of the Chrome store’s launch. Check out the TweetDeck app for Google Chrome here.

Writing

I like this one because it’s simple, and shows what Chrome Apps can do. Write Space is a minimalistic text editor, similar to FocusWriter. It runs in the browser, but stores no information on any server; everything is contained within Chrome. Here you can write something, close the tab, and find it back later.

There’s really not much else to this, but it’s a good example of how desktop applications might work on Chrome OS. Check out Write Space on Google Chrome.

Conclusion

I could go on and on, of course, but that would take a long time. The point is, these apps are cool and point to the sort of future Google imagines the world of computing heading in. In many ways I’m reminded of Jolicloud, the web-centric OS for netbooks.

Do you guys have any favorite apps for Chrome? Share them below. Also feel free to discuss the coolness of the Chrome Web Store, or its suckiness if you prefer. I look forward to hearing what have to say!

Calibre can download entire websites and convert them to any eBook format, meaning you can read your favorite news articles or blogs on practically any eBook reader, from the Kindle to the Nook to the Kobo and everything in between. Heck, it even has easy built-in connectivity for iPhone/iPad app extraordinaire Stanza.

Or, if all you’re looking for is a great way to download your favorite websites for offline reading, Calibre’s got a great built-in reader for your computer as well.

Simon wrote all about Calibre’s superb function as an eBook manager in an article in which he called Calibre mighty eBook management software. In the article he mentioned Calibre’s amazing ability to download entire online newspapers, but didn’t go into any depth. Having said that, let’s take a look at this amazing function.

Getting Started

If you read Simon’s article, you should be familiar with installing Calibre on your machine. If not, check out the download page here for Windows, Mac and Linux downloads (though as always, Linux types should check their repositories before downloading from the web).

The first time you start up the application you’ll go through a simple setup wizard and then you’ll be ready to use the program. As I said, check out Simon’s Calibre article for more information on day-to-day usage; I’m going to focus here on downloading news.

Find Your Publication

Downloading news from many websites simply could not be easier. Just click the “Fetch News” button (pictured above) to bring up the list of many websites built into the program. When you do you’ll be presented with the many sites, broken down into categories.

For example, here’s everything you can find under Canadian English:

All the major daily newspapers are there, ready to be downloaded and read offline. If the category function is too overwhelming, simply search for your given website by typing the name in the search box.

I like to read the entirety of The Economist every week if my schedule allows for it, and Calibre helps nicely with that. I can download the entirety of the print edition to my computer for offline reading, or for reading on any eBook reading device.

Note that, for some of these publications, you will need a subscription to the website in order to make use of Calibre’s downloading function. This is because these sites do not offer access to the full paper without a subscription. Even in these cases, however, it’s nice to be able to download content you’re paying for for offline reading, isn’t it?

Roll Your Own

Can’t find the application of your choice? If you consider yourself fairly tech-savvy you might consider simply rolling your own. A Calibre recipe, you see, is little more than a script that explains how to download the content from a given website and convert it into an e-book. Calibre allows for you to add your own custom recipes if you like. Find out more about creating custom recipes over at the Calibre user manual.

If you create any useful recipes you should share them; it just might end up being integrated into Calibre itself!

Conclusion

Calibre isn’t just a great eBook manager; it’s a fantastic way to download your favorite newspapers or websites to your computer or eBook reader. In this way it reminds me of Plucker, a service I used to use to download news sites and RSS feeds to my Palm Pilot. Calibre, it seems to me, does a much better job than Plucker ever did (and Plucker was really, really good).  This is in large part thanks to the recipes tailor-made in order to give end users the best reading experience with a given site.

What do you awesome people think? Is Calibre’s ability to download entire publications and blogs useful to you, or would you rather just read everything online? Is this a threat to advertising models on the web, or does it encourage reader loyalty?

Most importantly, will any of you write a recipe for MakeUseOf? Sharing is caring, or something. Whatever. Just comment.

Image Credit : ShironekoEuro

In my father’s time, subscribing to a couple of newspapers, if not more, was common, as was having a relaxed debate over the latest news on the front page.

Welcome to the 21st century, where reading a newspaper from Page 1 to Page Last is a rarity in itself. Blogs, Twitter, headlines masquerading as RSS feeds, and startup pages have taken over.

Will newspapers survive or will they end up as fish wrapper?

Even now, when information is just a keyword away, newspapers have retained their charm. We may not flip the paper pages as often, but we do click on their online ones.

With online newspaper websites we can connect to other sources of information that can make us see a news story in a different way. With a click we can see what’s happening in some other part of the world. Newspaper reporting is dyed in the wool reporting. As opposed to blogs which can be more personally expressed. Online newspaper websites are great sources for research because of their archival news stocks.

These five online newspaper websites are not standalone news sites. They are a jumping point to find local and national newspapers around the world. With any of these websites, you can access news as it is published in newspapers (or their online forms) around the globe.

Newspapers.com

Newspapers.com is not a very attractive site. The site’s purpose is to connect the reader to US and world newspapers. World newspaper links are arranged by area and can be further selected by country from a dropdown. US newspapers can be selected by state from a dropdown to find local newspapers. Additional search options let you filter your search by categories (business, college, entertainment, specialty etc). You can dropdown to search for weeklies or dailies.

Newspapers.com is a simple listing site for newspapers, radio stations, movie showtimes and jobs. It’s a place to get to know some links on newspapers that cover specific areas around the globe.

Onlinenewspapers.com

Onlinenewspapers.com takes a similar dropdown selection approach to newspapers and magazines around the world. Reading too much of frontpage breaking news is a damper, so what’s great is the access to magazines from around the world. You can jump straight to the links of the Top 50 newspapers for the United States, or of the world, or the Top 50 magazines for the world. You can also use the site’s feedback form to let them know of any new online newspaper link that can be added to their index.

The Paperboy.com

A listing of 6,371 newspapers is too much for even the diehard news junkie. So, it’s better if you know your subject of interest. That will help you to narrow down the news source when you select magazines by subject from a dropdown. The website also has a Google Custom search with an advanced search option.

Newspapers24.com

Newspapers24 is an even larger index of worldwide newspapers. There are 12,000 from 216+ locations, categorized by region, as an alphabetical list, by circulation, and also newspapers from the top 400 cities of the world. To top all that, you can even browse by language. You can use the geographic links or the neat little map to go to region specific newspapers. Searching by country gives you not only the land’s national newspapers but also the local regional ones.

Newseum

The Newseum is the online portal of the brick and mortar Newseum, which is a 250,000-square-foot museum of news. The center is about letting visitors have a first-hand understanding of the impact of news on our lives and culture. The online site has sections that follow the activities at Newseum like exhibits, theatrical shows, educational events etc. When it comes to newspapers and news, Newseum also has a section called – Today’s Front Pages.

Newseum presents these daily newspaper front pages in their original, unedited form. The display amounts to 743 front pages from 78 countries. Clicking on the thumbnail takes you to the full size view. You can follow the newspaper site’s link and go to the official newspaper website.

A PDF link downloads the front page in the format. For research reasons, you can click on the View Archived Pages link to check out past newspaper snippets chronicling events of historical significance. Each link brings up the front pages from varied newspapers which have covered the event.

Even for a news junkie, so many varied sources could be a horn of plenty and totally impractical for day to day reading. But access to a global perspective on news is a serious research tool. We may live in a connected world, but when it comes to news we consume what our local publications and networks dish out. Why not check out a few links from these sites and see what the world is taking about, and how?

Image Credit: ImageChef