The NYT paywall arrives

Found on Felix Salmon on Wednesday, 16 March 2011
Browse Internet

The website is free, so long as you read fewer than 20 items per month, and so are the apps, so long as you confine yourself to the "Top News" section. You can also read articles for free by going in through a side door.

If you want to read the NYT on both your smartphone and your iPad, you'll need to buy both digital subscriptions separately, and pay an eye-popping $35 every four weeks. That's $455 a year.

If you want to use the NYT's iPad app, you're marginally better off subscribing to the print newspaper on Sundays and throwing it away unread.

There must have been a whole bunch of clueless people at work. So you get some free stories per month, but how are they planning to monitor how much you've read? By logging my IP? I'm on DHCP, oops. By placing a cookie? My browser blocks them, oops. Plus, if you consider a static IP being personal information, then you suddenly enter the realms of privacy laws.