Says here the Wall Street Journal, long a fee-to-see site, is now secretly free: …in many cases, the method is drop-dead simple; in some cases, it requires the Firefox browser and add-on software. But in all cases, it’s completely legal, and in fact it’s hard to see how the Journal could object to it at all.
I subscribe to the print Journal, and will continue to do that.
I’ve generally avoided going behind the Journal’s paywall, or even visiting the journal’s website, for several reasons:
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- I never remember my login/password. Nor does Firefox or any other browser I use. Worse, they remember the wrong thing, so I get “We Don’t Recognize Your User Name or Password”, which annoys me too much to screw with.
- I don’t want to get any kind of add-on software to do anything that ought to be free and routine. Especially when Firefox is slow and flaky enough to begin with. I mean, right now, on a brand new laptop, Firefox is sucking up to 48.8% of my cpu, just sitting there with no tabs open. (And yes, I am using 3.0b4. It’s better than the non-beta 3.x was, but also won’t run most of the add-ons I used to have.)
- Too many links take me to “The Page You Requested Is Available Only to Subscribers”, which pisses me off, since I am a fucking subscriber.
- The front page is, in the modern tradition of too many news sites, crowded beyond endurance.
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So, Rupert, hurry up with the free version, but for real this time. Your paying subscribers will thank you.
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