The Globe and Mail still belongs to a [hopefully dying] class of newspapers that tries to charge subscription fees for current news articles. The Globe Insider articles cannot be viewed entirely unless the reader logs into the system, and that temporary login requires isn’t free. Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work …
Open a web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Firefox). Click in the address bar and type http://www.theglobeandmail.com
Press enter.
Find an article of interest underneath the “Globe Insider†banner. Click on the article title.
Highlight the article title and copy to the clipboard. One way to copy text is to highlight the text, right-click on the highlighted area and click on the “Copy†menu item.
Sanity Check: If the article is subscription-only then the web page will feature only an excerpt from the article along with a word count and the option to either subscribe or purchase the article directly.
Click in the web browser address bar and type
http://www.google.com
Press enter.
Click on the Google search box and paste the article title copied from the Globe and Mail page. Click on the Google Search button.
Search the Google results for the insider article. The correct article will have globeandmail.com in the URL and typically appears within the first 5 results. Click on the link to view the page.
The subscription article should appear in its entirety. Enjoy!
Note to the Globe:
Your anticipated annoyance aside, this doesn’t even count as hacking. In fact I discovered it by accident while adhering to the truism that virtually no subscription site allows Google to cache protected content. Anyone who googles the name of a Globe article that they hoped to find elsewhere for free could accidentally come across your so-called protected content. The Google method described above isn’t hacking on our part; it’s bad security on yours.
To your credit, at least you aren’t charging $10 for back articles like Sun Media (whose scheme can be defeated using similar methods – perhaps this is why they’re circling the drain).
(Would you believe the bastards want to charge us for reading their on-line obituaries column? Even after their grieving subscribers paid them to publish the contents for all to read?)