How to access Wall Street Journal articles for free

I have a WSJ subscription, but the discounted rate will probably run out soon and I'll need this, too. In any case, here's how:

The Wall Street Journal site, which I'm sure you all know requires a subscription, is set up to allow access through Internet news searches. Presumably, this is because more and more people are getting their news through Google News, et al, instead of choosing one or two favorite sites and sticking to them. This was the ultimate reason the New York Times scrapped its Times Select plan -- because it wanted to allow people to access stories through Web searches.

So anyway, if you Google News a Wall Street Journal article and click through that way, you will be able to access the site. It's only when you try to click through on the WSJ splash page that you're required to log in.

That means you can circumvent the subscription process in one of two ways: First, if there's a story you want to read and know the headline, you can Google News the headline and click through that way. But according to Salon, the search engine doesn't always bring up the story.

The other method (and this is also pulled from Salon) is to *convince* the Wall Street Journal that you're clicking through a news search engine. You can do this by downloading a Firefox add-on, which you can access here.

Once you install it, you'll see this addition to the Firefox toobar:
Then go to wsj.com, and follow these directions from Salon's machinist:

• In the refspoof toolbar's "spoof:" field, type "digg.com."
• Also in the refspoof toolbar, click the R icon, and select "static referrer."

By doing this, you fool the paygate into thinking you are accessing the site through digg, another news search engine.

And the machinist assures us that it's totally on the up-and-up, noting that if the Wall Street Journal didn't want you to have free access to its stories, it wouldn't provide that free access through search engines. They say it better than I can:

I'll grant you that setting your browser to spoof Digg is slightly deceptive. But it's a minor fib, on the order of, say, handing a cashier an expired coupon. The Journal adds Digg buttons to all of its stories, encouraging you to open its articles to everyone (including you) for free; by pretending that you're coming from Digg, you're simply taking advantage of that implicit offer.

The Journal no longer really has a pay wall. It's a pay curtain, useless and flimsy, and you're committing no transgression in dancing around it.

So there you go. Have at it...