When I started to write this post, the initial title was 'Discrimination Charging', but later I realized that sounded too political and had no relationship with what I want to discuss.
I am talking about a product that is priced differently based on geographical region, or even the know-how of the end-users. The former is not uncommon, as the companies wish to position their products for a particular market segment and target consumers.
The example that I can draw will be the prices of ThinkPad by Lenovo (ThinkPad previously was owned by IBM).
In US, a R61 14.1" laptop can be bought at as low as $620. In Singapore, the cheapest model of R61 comes with a whopping price tag of $2112 (S$2957). Though these two models have different specifications and comparing prices isn't exactly fair, the point is Singapore consumers are not given a choice (e.g. 'customize and buy' link is absent from SG site). Personally I disagree with this kind of pricing policy, and sorry, although I love ThinkPad, I won't buy any Lenovo product in the foreseeable future.
Now let's shift to the second part of the topic, on pricing base on the know-how of individual users.
NOTE: The ideas below are not from me. The original article is here. I paraphrase them so that I can refer to the instructions later even if that site is down.
Indeed, there are websites that will let you view the full article if you know what you are doing, or you have to pay $80 per year for subscription.
Here I am talking about viewing the full articles legally, and the website actually silently encourage people to view the articles. Weird? Read on.
To simplify things, I will name an arbitrary site X. This site used to be subscription-based, but this model doesn't really work out because there are just too many alternative sites available. If you want me to pay, I will just go to other thousand of sites which provide similar news for free. Realizing this, site X actually hopes to get page hits so that it can serve ads and get some commissions. In fact, advertisement income is lucrative. It is the major income for google, and when do you see Google charges for anything except the ads?
I mentioned Google? Good, because this is where we are going. Where do most page hits come from? Two types of sources, first is search engines like Google, and the news rating site like Digg. It seems site X lets users referred by these two sources to view the full articles.
With this understanding, we can install a firefox extension that 'spoofs' the referrer URL and make the site X believe we are from the full-article-served sites.
From the surface it seems we are kind of in a gray area because we are faking ('spoofing') something. However in each of the site X articles, there is actually a 'Digg it' or similar links. In other words, anybody can read those articles by clicking the corresponding link in digg.com. What we are doing is just making a short-cut, instead of the usual digg.com => siteX.com route.
To start, you need to have firefox.
Next, download and install the refspoof extension. By using this extension, you can modify your referral source.
After you have refspoof up and running, there will be a 'R' at the right hand side and a new tool bar. At the 'spoof:' bar, type digg.com, and click on 'R' and choose 'static referrer'. From now on, all websites you visit will think you are from digg.com.
Just for record, other firefox extensions I am using:
All-in-One Sidebar
DownThemAll!
Google Browser Sync
refspoof
Snap Links
All the above I found are very useful. Try them.
No comments:
Post a Comment