Easiest New York Times paywall workaround 'ever' detailed

Websites keep putting up paywalls, but the New York Times is perhaps the easiest to tear asunder. There are so many ways to break through it, it is laughable. The latest way discovered involves simply removing part of the URL.

The latest workaround (discovered by Gizmodo) is to remove the part of the URL from the ? to the end. For example, you might see an URL such as http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/26/us/xxxyyyyabc.html?_r=1&hp. Get rid of the ?_r&hp and you're good to go.

To be honest, it's not unusual to see a bunch of seemingly incomprehensible text at the end of an URL. For example, copy-and-paste some text from a Daily Mail article, and you'll see a "read more" blurb with an URL like http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2008352/xxx-yyy.html#ixzz1QQEM987Y. You can remove everything after and including the # and things will work fine.

It's not the first time the New York Times paywall has been ripped apart. Earlier, a NYTClean (now NYClean) bookmarklet was created to do so.

Another workaround,it's been reported, is to simply clean your browser cookies when you reach the NYT 20 article limit (The NYT allows users to read 20 articles per month. After that, you are "prompted" to subscribe) if you want to continue reading.

Meanwhile, the Wall Street Journal's paywall was ripped down recently when a free Chrome browser extension was created to allow users past it.

The Chrome extension still works, by the way.