News fatigue? Switch from push to pull

Written on 20 April 2020, 01:26pm

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Just a quick note about the way we consume information during this time. My approach is to reduce the number of sources pushing information to me, and relying more on the sources where I can pull information myself.

Concretely, I unsubscribed from all the newsletters (even though most of them were pretty good) and I trimmed the list of people I follow on Twitter. At the moment, my sources of information are:

Pull:

  • The Atlantic
  • Wired.com
  • Vox.com
  • Daring Fireball
  • The Guardian
  • statnews.com
  • kottke.org
  • The Athletic

Push:

  • Twitter (90%)
  • Reddit
  • Quora
Pull, not push

PS: a tip for reducing the time spent on Twitter is to save the interesting stories in Pocket. The goal is to read them when I pull them from Pocket, not when they are pushed to me by Twitter.

Stock market news is (almost) never breaking news

Written on 19 January 2019, 12:09pm

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Did anyone notice how every drop in the stock market is reported as breaking news but the subsequent recovery is completely ignored?

3rd of Jan 2019: breaking news after the Apple shares plunge 9%
19th of Jan 2019: the Apple shares are back to the level before the plunge

Later edit, 1 October 2019:

1st of October 2019: stock news is never breaking news

The drop from 158 to 142USD was breaking news. But 9 months later the price is 226USD, thank you very much.

Working around a metered paywall

Written on 11 March 2017, 10:20pm

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Back in 2011, when I started this blog, I had a list of things I wanted to talk about. I recently reviewed this list and I noticed that one of my questions back then was about the restriction of content: after reaching a certain number of free articles, some websites ask to pay before continuing. This system is named metered paywall and one example of website using this mechanism is NYTimes.com.

I was curious about the technical implementation of this system and I did a little research (fun Saturday evening project 🙂 ). After reaching the maximum number of free articles, I tried to see how easy it is to continue reading.
First, with the stateless design of HTTP in mind, I tried clearing the browser storage:

No success, so moving on.
Second, I noticed that I could bypass the metered paywall by opening articles in incognito windows.
Third, I also noticed that disabling JavaScript in a normal browser window also turned off the paywall:

This only means one thing: that the NYTimes metered paywall is client-side only, meaning that it can be overridden by disabling JavaScript. I was expecting a server side implementation, but it looks like the client-side was enough for NYTimes.
With this in mind, it took me only a few minutes to find the JS file implementing the metered paywall and adding it in AdBlock Plus. I will not disclose it here; the plan is to get in touch with NYTimes to confirm this is the intended behavior. I’ll update this post if I have more news.

PS: Yes, I do have a NYTimes subscription 🙂

Update April 2017: I cancelled my NY Times subscription: