After over a week of trying, I can now comfortably (albeit, very irritably) say that I cannot find a good way around ESPN Insider's paywall.
But all is not lost. As with any failed attempt at doing something, I've gained some insight on what doesn't work. And so I feel it's only fair to share that consolation prize with you fine people.
Things I've learned from trying to hack ESPN Insider, but failing:
1. ESPN isn't stupid. They have a lot of good coders there, and they don't make dumb mistakes. For instance, unlike with the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal, they don't accidentally include a URL in their meta tags or script tags which points a person to full version of their for-pay articles. Meaning, it's impossible to find their article online for free.
2. I can't figure out how or when they populate the article content. I thought it might be as simple as calling a web service and getting the content that way, but it's not. Or maybe it is, but i haven't succeeded in identifying where that web service is called and when.
3. Faking being a user through some nifty javascript/jquery doesn't do a damn thing. I'm pretty sure copying a registered user's cookie would solve all my issues, but that's no different than just stealing username/password info. That's cheating.
And that's it. I encourage anybody out there to pick up where I left off, and hopefully succeed where I failed. As for me, I'm giving up. This site made me waste a week, and that pisses me off. So I gotta' move on.
YOU CAN DO IT!!!!
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