Busting Rupert’s Firewall

You can’t help feeling sorry for Rupert.

His hard-wired tendency to accumulate dollars is being threatened by Google, or at least he believes it is.

I don’t buy newspapers. Apart from the fact that very little of what is printed these days is remotely digestible, you have to part with hard-earned over the counter, and the bloody things are full of naff advertisements.

To my way of thinking, anything containing advertisements should be free. This principle holds for free-to-air television after all.

For a while, I was mug enough to buy a couple of subscriptions to The Oz and The Age to read them on my iPad. I must have been dreaming.

It ain’t necessary, dear reader, because you can access everything in The Oz for free on-line. I’ll explain the simple steps –

1. Get on to the Australian Home Page.
2. Find the story you want. They’re all there. Most have the firewall symbol near the top, indicating they are behind the firewall.
3. Highlight the first few words or the first sentence of the story, and paste them into your search engine. I use Google. I haven’t tried other search engines, but it may work for them.
4. Hit the search button. The story will appear in its entirety.

It works every time.

I'll experiment with other firewall protected newspapers and let you know how I get on.

 Subversion rules!