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dave562 writes: "There was an interesting article posted on Zero Hedge lately on the throttling of Netflix.
'For years, the Netflix streaming business has been growing like a parasite, happy to piggyback on established broadband infrastructures, where the broadband companies themselves have becomes competitors to Netflix for both distribution and content. Until now. Emboldened by the recent Net Neutrality ruling, which has put bandwidth hogs like Netflix which at last check was responsible for over 30% of all downstream US internet traffic, broadband providers are finally making their move, and in a preliminary salvo whose ultimate compromise will be NFLX paying lots of money, have started to throttle Netflix traffic. The WSJ reports (Paywall) that the war between the broadband-ers and the video streaming company has finally emerged from the "cold" phase and is fully hot.'"
(Score: 5, Informative) by Angry Jesus on Friday February 21 2014, @01:02AM
It is pretty easy to get past these "leaky" paywalls. I read the article without any hassle at all.
Here's what I do:
(1) Install "self-destructing cookies" -- It is an add-on that deletes all of a site's cookies 10 seconds after you leave the site (close the tab or just follow a link to somewhere else). The default settings are pretty good, if anything you might want to turn off notifications because it works so well that you can just install it and forget about it for any site that you don't want to remember you. (It has a white-list for the sites you do want to remember you.)
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/sel f-destructing-cookies/ [mozilla.org]
(2) Install RefControl -- Lets you change the http-referer header on a per site basis. Then set it to use "http://google.com/" as the referer for 3rd party requests (first link to a website but not any internal links).f control/ [mozilla.org]
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/re
That's enough to get past most of these semi-paywalls like NYTimes, WSJ, etc.
FWIW, discovering this was a side-effect of trying to protect my privacy. It's just serendipitous that their desire to track the crap out of you makes them vulnerable to people who don't want to be tracked.