If you read a lot of articles at SMH then you may find that you’ve already hit the limit of thirty free articles per month before being stopped and forced to sign up and pay in order to read more articles. No doubt, news organisations are having to find ways to monetise their business as paper sales decline and the move to digital news sources continues without relent.
However, SMH attempts to use some basic methods to prevent you reading the news comprising of a cookie and some JavaScript but this is easily bypassed.
If you’re using Firefox, you can disable JavaScript and you can read as much as you like but if you disable it in your browser then no other website will have JavaScript available to it. A better solution would be to use NoScript for Firefox or ScriptNo for Chrome and then whitelist JavaScript on the sites that you are comfortable in allowing.
Personally, I’m not a big fan of paywalls on news websites and SMH isn’t the cornerstone of journalism by any stretch of the imagination but if they are going to make it easy to bypass they are shooting themselves in the foot as far as the savvier readers are concerned.
Follow Us!