Google and Mail and Guardian Paid Subscriptions

Posted on the July 10th, 2005 under Uncategorized by Tohir

Here’s some bad news for the Mail & Guardian website, but shows how easy it is to read subscription news on your website. I’ve been doing so for Zapiro for months, but only realise that it is possible for other news as well.

I’m putting this information up just to show how vulnerable paid subscriptions can be if they are not carefully planned. Hopefully someone at M&G will take note.

View Zapiro Cartoons:

To view Zapiro for the 6th Jult 2005, the URL will probably be: http://www.mg.co.za/zapiro/imagePage.aspx?YearId=2005|MonthId=7|DayId=6.

Check the properties for the cartoon image, and it will be: http://www.mg.co.za/ContentImages/2561/06-jul05x.gif

The link is hardcoded, doesn’t check for access to the image. Now imagine, I change 06 to 07 or any other date. I get to view today’s Zapiro cartoon without having to wait tomorrow. It is a workaround, but something M&G should have thought about. The answer, which I’m giving away for free, is:

Having the link as something like <img src=”http://www.mg.co.za/zapiro/image.aspx?id=##” />

Viewing News

M&G has some news that you have to pay for to read. One such article was: Women-led weddings: No big deal by Naeem Jeenah. To view this story on M&G’s website, you have to pay. Workaround…

Pop the title into Google. Instead of clicking on the result, click on ‘Cached’. This is Google’s cached view of the page. The URL will probably be:

http://66.249.93.104/search?q=ca..

Just goes to show how wonderful and problematic Google’s cache can be.