A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game

Re:A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game by llao on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @06:36AM (#16636845)

Paywalled.

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Re:A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game by dang on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @02:13PM (#16640852)

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10178989

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsfaq.html

People usually post workarounds. There's one elsewhere in the thread.

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Re:A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game by fwdpropaganda on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @07:10AM (#16637005)

Firefox add-on that fakes the referrer when accessing the WSJ and the FT in order to remove the paywall. Five lines of code.

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/read-ft-wsj/

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Re:A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game by 1024core on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @10:11AM (#16638102)

I don't like downloading random extensions, and Mozilla makes it hard to view the source of this extension. What's the trick to avoiding the paywall? Use Facebook as a referer?

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Re:A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game by fwdpropaganda on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @10:31AM (#16638259)

Correct.

If domain is WSJ or FT, set referer="facebook.com".

That's it.

EDIT: BTW in case you don't know, Firefox add-on extension .xpi is actually just a zip in disguise. Rename it to .zip and open it as normal. You can then investigate the source. But I agree that it would be neat if the addons.mozilla.org allowed to see this directly on their page. Although on the other hand, this loses usefulness for larger addons.

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Re:A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game by 1024core on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @05:09PM (#16642441)

But Mozilla doesn't let me download the files directly. I copied the XPI link and tried to download it with curl, but got an empty file.

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Re:A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game by spapas82 on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @12:27PM (#16639645)

Can you explain why there's no paywall when the referer is facebook? (I don't use facebook)

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Re:A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game by grzm on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @12:30PM (#16639684)

Because WSJ (and other sites) filter access based on the referer header. They've made a business decision to allow access to people following links from Facebook, likely in the hopes that the readers will find the article useful and be more inclined to subscribe. They also benefit from the views such links generate.

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Re:A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game by fwdpropaganda on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @12:30PM (#16639691)

Facebook de-ranks publishers that have paywalls. Since these publishers want Facebook traffic, they don't show paywalls for people that come from Facebook. One way to implement this is by looking at the referer.

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Re:A Man Who’s Spent $70k Playing a Mobile Game by shawabawa3 on Wednesday March 21, 2018 @06:39AM (#16636864)

This should get around the paywall https://www.google.co.uk/url?sa=t&source=web&rct=j&url=https...

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