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This thread also reminds me of:
a) the recent one about comments in code, and coders who forget to update them when the code changes, and
b) the long term problem of information rot being faced by ChatGPT etc.
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Disabling a paywall to get free access to something that should be paid for is theft, pure and simple. Just because you can pick a lock and steal something doesn't make it ok. The people providing the content you access are doing so to earn a living.
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Yes, I understand that. My professional curiosity means I often ask "how?" when things are done on a website that I visit, be it a paywall, an animation, a particular layout etc. My observations here are that the people who put those "locks" in place are doing a lousy job.
And BTW, if I were to browse to these sites with JScript already disabled I wouldn't even know there WAS a paywall.
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haughtonomous wrote: Disabling a paywall to get free access to something that should be paid for is theft, pure and simple. Just because you can pick a lock and steal something doesn't make it ok.
The major problem with pay sites is that in most cases, the only way to access that single article you want to read is to pay a significant amount for a subscription. Most likely, that will increase the amount of junk mail in your inbox, and there is a significant risk that you'll have to fight for months or maybe years to later have that subscription cancelled. There is a significant risk that your reading habits will be tracked and analyzed.
The major problem, though: In international forums, you may encounter links to hundreds (or thousands, if you browse a lot) of different pay sites. Most of us cannot afford to subscribe to hundreds of web newspapers, or whatever, just to read that one article referred to in some other forum.
If there were a way to pay for access to a single article, or maybe for 8 hours of access, with no bindings and anonymously - somewhat similar to buying a single copy on a newspaper stand - I would probably read a lot more of those pay articles. But noone has succeeded in marketing a system for such micropayments to the web newspapers.
It would not be hard to make one; the big problem is to make the news sites accept it. If I were asked for a solution, I would suggest something based on the logic of Kerberos: I go to a ticket office (TGS, in Kerberos terms), checking out a ticket to a given pay site. The TGS serves a lot of different sites. The ticket I obtain is valid for, say, any one article, or maybe for multiple accesses within an 8 hour period. The site would not need to know anything about me, would need no account to be charged. Every month the ticket office would report to the site: I have sold so-and-so many single tickets and so-and-so many 8-hour tickets to your site. Here comes the payment for it!
The ticket office may invoice me for the tickets I have checked out that month, to any of the sites served by that office, with no knowledge of which articles I read. The ticket office will just know which sites I visited.
I could be anonymous even to the ticket office: In Kerberos, you authenticate yourself to a login server that does not sell tickets, except to the ticket office (a "TGT", Ticket Granting Ticket). So the different ticket offices (there may be several) may all report back: The customer who presented TGT #24568 checked out a total of 43 single tickets and nine 8 hour tickets. The login server would invoices me for those, not knowing the sites, and then forward the payment to the ticket offices, which distributes the payment (for all customers collected) to the sites.
The biggest problem is not to build such a system, but to make the web sites adopt it. They would probably fear that without the subscription tie-in, they would loose (a fraction of) their regular customers, downplaying the effect of 'random' customers. I think they are wrong - their site would be more attractive! Also, they will loose the income from selling tracking data for random customers.
I don't spend efforts trying to scale pay walls. Rather, I have 'blacklisted' several news sites: I used to read the stuff they make available for free, and see links to pay stories that I would have read if they offered a pay-per-view solution. But they don't, so now I have stopped reading even their free stuff. When someone provides links to any of those sites, I skip over the link. When they can't sell me what I want, I do not buy. Not even the 'first sample is free' stories.
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Corporate incompetence affects all levels of corporations, not just web sites.
And I will put the responsibility for it squarely on the Harvard MBA attitude---"What's this quarter's profits?"
Long term thinking/planning is an anathema to immediate profitability.
If I was God/King/Absolute Benevolent Dictator, no corporation would be allowed to have more than 5% market share and no engineer would be permitted to design a product until they have spent at least 5 years in the field using the company products, 5 years in product maintenance and 5 years apprenticing a senior engineer.
But I'm not God/King/Absolute Benevolent Dictator (at least not yet), so, for now, I will only refuse to hire crappy Harvard MBA educated management.
So....would you like to hear how I really feel about Harvard MBA's?
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My bad experiences have been with Stanford MBAs.
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rjmoses wrote: so, for now, I will only refuse to hire crappy Harvard MBA educated management.
You can already do more than me... 
M.D.V. 
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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I don't think it is incompetence playing out here. They just want to have a cookie and eat the cookie at the same time and they somewhat succeed. What I mean is that they would like the full text to be read by bots and indexed in Google and other browsers but they also want most interested users to pay for reading it. Having it protected by JS (that can be disabled) means that bots can read it in full and index. Also, most of the interested users will still pay - either because of not being technical enough or valuing their time more than a few dollars to play with JS, or out of decency.
When it comes to a ton of JS errors - that's the effect of cost-cutting. Corporations try to make stuff faster to be competitive and if hardly anyone sees those errors then it does not matter enough to be fixed.
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There is a technical reason: they have to allow the Google crawler to index the site. 12ft Ladder
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Which is also ridiculously easy to detect.
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Meh, it's a 95%+ solution for them; most people are cut off from the articles.
If they really wanted it secure, they wouldn't load the content; they'd cut it off at the server. Arguably, it takes a bit more work to do that, but is more a management headache when you have dozens or hundreds of content contributors.
That said, corporate incompetence abounds. Researching buying expert user software on sites whose aim is to get you to contact them without giving you enough information to know if it's worth the effort. A pizza site that doesn't show you the cost of what you are ordering until you add it to the cart. (If that's an intentional strategy, it is just silly). Topping that one off, pardon the pun, when we go to pay for it, we couldn't use a gift card so we had to cancel the cart and call in the order. What an ecommerce fail.
It seems that many companies never use their own damn site!
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MikeCO10 wrote: It seems that many companies never use their own damn site!
That's the key.
M.D.V.
If something has a solution... Why do we have to worry about?. If it has no solution... For what reason do we have to worry about?
Help me to understand what I'm saying, and I'll explain it better to you
Rating helpful answers is nice, but saying thanks can be even nicer.
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That sounds like a lot of work to avoid navigating to archive :-/
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What I tend to find with a vast majority of these ones that are easily worked round, is quite simply that 90% of them are implemented using some kind of CMS, or a 3rd party cloud CMS service that specialises in that area.
As a result, you do often find that the company calling the shots (The telegraph, The New York Times etc) are usually just either just a client, or if they are developing and hosting the site in house, the developers are really only tasked with making sure the base system is running and working alright.
Many of the news papers in the UK for example ALL USE the same CMS system (I forget what it's called) but if you take a lot of them and F12 to look at the code, you'll find the code is 99% identical.
When I was working in Ad-Tech for these companies back in around 2010, the JS and front end stuff, was 99% designed, developed and coded by the "art & design team", the company I was working with where trying to take a new approach to adding Javascript into the page designs to help manage and display Ad creatives, and pretty much every "technical" question we asked was met with a blank stare and a comment along the lines of "No Idea, unless there is a JS/NPM/jQuery plugin for it"
Eventually for a lot of them we had to go to the parent company to find the ACTUAL developers of the CMS, and approaching them with said questions was again frustrating as we where met with "Dunno, no idea we leave our clients to deal with the frontend stuff, we just provide them with a template and an API to work with.
Couple of examples:
https://www.heraldscotland.com/
https://www.darlingtonandstocktontimes.co.uk/
https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/
If you F12 all of those you will see the following
<blockquote class="quote"><div class="op">Quote:</div><body class="sticky-footer allow-skins" data-cache-buster="oKR6iTTL" data-template="" data-template-colour="Blue" data-namespace="mds">
<iframe name="__tcfapiLocator" style="display: none;"></iframe><!-- standard AfterBodyTagInclude --><!--
##+ +## ##: `#####. ####### ### ### ###### `#####. ####### ### ,## +#####
+## ###' ## ####### ######## ### ### ###### ####### ######## ### ,## ######:
.## #### ## ### ### ### ### ###### ##, ### ### ### ### ### ,## ##`
##,#+##:## ### ### ####### ###### #####+ ### ### ####### ### ,## +#####
####`####+ ### ### ###### ####### #####+ ### ### ###### ### ,## ####
#### .###. '## ##' ### ### ### ,##: ##, '## ##' ### ### ### ### '## +##
:### ### ####### ### `##+ ### ### ##, ####### ### `##+ `####### ######+
##: ### ##### ### ### ### ,### ##, ##### ### ### ##### ####+
Developers, designers, testers - interested in working for us?
Contact this guy....https://uk.linkedin.com/in/hillsimon
-->
<pre>
<div style="height: 0px"></div>
<div id="paywallWindowOverlay"></div></blockquote></pre>
The evening Chronicle & Sunderland Echo websites on the other hand look the same as each other, but are obviously from a different company.
So in many cases, the JS code you see that is easily averted are because the company no longer has any programmers itself, and what limited programming work is done is left to the "visual & design" folks to do, many of which understand only NPM and other similar JS tools that do everything for them.
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The AI Assistant beta is removed: you will need to install that from the install manager tool as you install RC1 ... which will remove the previous EAP's.
«The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch
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They explained the reasoning in the EAP10 announcement:
ReSharper 2023.2 EAP 10 Is Here! | The .NET Tools Blog[^]
Also note from the announcement that they'll start charging extra for it soon:
The AI service is free to use during the EAP cycle. We’ll be providing the licensing and pricing model at a later date.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Thanks, Richard,
fyi: your first link is to a recent July blog about the RC1; you can interpret an RC1 as ending the EAP cycle, but you may not  candidate it is.
the second link is to a June blog entry which imho is outdated.
seems like an unambiguous statement from JB about future payment for the AI Assistant, i think we should anticipate the usual evo/devo
subjectively, i experience the RC! as taking longer to "exhaust my tokens."
i am actively sending feedback to the AI Assistant team; they are very busy, but always helpful.
cheers, bill
p,s, are you using ReSharper and the Ai Assistant now ? what do you think ?
«The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch
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BillWoodruff wrote: are you using ReSharper and the Ai Assistant now ? what do you think ?
I'm still on R# 2023.1, so no AI Assistant.
I've played around with the built-in VS2022 IntelliCode, which seems pretty good - until it isn't. It seems like the sort of thing that's most useful for making repetitive edits, rather than writing whole swathes of code for you. 
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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i'm using R# intellicode only right now ... if MS and R# intelli are both on i drown in pop ups and ideas ... 15.6" laptop monitor 4k set to 1920 x 1080 ... lots of things never draw "right."
turning on high-contrast mode ... which i need ... ruins all kinds of app dialogs.
i note recently OriginalGriff has remarked on how good he thinks MS Inteli... is.
i see intelli... as at best an online encyclopedia with automatic completions sometimes flawed.
"so it goes" Vonnegut
«The mind is not a vessel to be filled but a fire to be kindled» Plutarch
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Not out often, no (10)
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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I see what you did there! 
"I have no idea what I did, but I'm taking full credit for it." - ThisOldTony
"Common sense is so rare these days, it should be classified as a super power" - Random T-shirt
AntiTwitter: @DalekDave is now a follower!
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YAUT
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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Oh very clever. I like it.
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Cheers Pete
In a closed society where everybody's guilty, the only crime is getting caught. In a world of thieves, the only final sin is stupidity. - Hunter S Thompson - RIP
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