Come era nelle attese la difesa tecnologica del paywall della prossima edizione a pagamento del New York Times sembra sarà debolissima. Basta un bookmarklet con quattro righe di codice per azzerarla. Tuttavia una simile scelta tecnologica debole potrebbe essere intenzionale e far coppia con l’annunciata possibilità di raggiungere gratuitamente gli articoli a pagamento se si segue un link dentro un social network.

Now, the Times paywall is, to a certain extent, defined by its leakiness. The various holes — external links from social media and search biggest among them — are no accident; they’re the result of some (correct, I say) thinking about hitting the right balance between fly-by and dedicated readers, between those who come in the front door and others who arrive from the side. But the tradeoff for those holes is that they’re designed to be a pain to use if you’re a dedicated NYT reader. Click an occasional Times link when it comes up in your Twitter stream? No problem. But if you’re the kind of person who goes to nytimes.com every morning and clicks on four or five articles, you’ll quickly find it’s a big pain to go search for a headline in Google or Twitter every time you want to read another David Carr piece.