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I am unable to read the Wall Street Journal (on my tablet)

Two nights ago Microsoft gifted me with a Windows update on my Surface tablet, and now I can't read anything in the Wall Street Journal. Every story looks like this:

Oddly, this is what you get if you don't have a subscription and the Journal paywalls you. But I do, I'm up to date, and I'm signed in. How could an OS update cause this?

Everything is still fine on my desktop. But what happens when Microsoft does its magic there too?

UPDATE: I restored the system to its previous state and now everything is fine. It really was the Windows update that caused this. Very strange.

17 thoughts on “I am unable to read the Wall Street Journal (on my tablet)

  1. brianrw00

    That's been happening on my new Chromebook, as well. No problem on the old one, though. It just passed it's best by date for updates.

  2. clawback

    "Good News is Actually Bad" is the only headline you'd see during a Democratic administration anyway. Or were you being serious? Hard to tell these days.

  3. Mitch Guthman

    I would be inclined to be more sympathetic if I didn’t think that it is a terrible idea for Kevin (or anyone else) to pay for a subscription to a Murdoch publication. You are simply contributing individually in an admittedly small way to the decline of America and the West (although your individual contribution to the Murdoch fortune is small, the cumulative effect of a large number of individual subscribers is disastrous).

    Kevin should take this situation as a sign from god and stop giving money to our country’s enemies.

  4. TKessler

    Does Surface use the Edge browser? To me it appears to be a browser problem, and the browser could have been updated. Can you try a different browser?

    1. Ken Rhodes

      If the stored login credentials were lost, I would expect the Wall Street Journal software would have asked him to either login or subscribe.

      Doctors learn “First, do no harm.” Less famous, but just as important, is the engineers’ dictum, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” Microsoft engineers, upon hiring by Microsoft, must undergo brainwashing to unlearn that rule.

    1. Batchman

      Reader mode has never worked to bypass the WSJ paywall.

      And now the NYT has got wise to reader mode as well, and it no longer works to use it to read a full Times article (except when linked from Google News).

  5. pjcamp1905

    I use an app called WinUpdateStop to put off updates until I am ready for them. It serves the task and prevents data loss through enforced overnight reboots.

    However, if I wait too long, systems begin to mysteriously fail. The Start Menu is empty. Search doesn't work. File Explorer goes missing. The paranoid in me thinks Microsoft is reaching out to make my life miserable until I do as I am told.

    This is a big reason why my last laptop purchase runs Linux. It has its own issues but Corporate Daddy isn't one of them.

  6. Rich Beckman

    A recent update now prevents Audacity from "hearing" the input from the turntable. This is the second time this has happened. The first time I found a fix that worked, but this time around is proving very difficult.

    Digitising albums is one of the primary uses I have for this computer. Thank-you Microsoft for nothing.

    I'd be happy if I could still be using Windows 95. Linux is definitely in my future.

  7. kaleberg

    There was a time, maybe from ten years ago to about five years ago, when just about every web site worked on just about every browser. That time is over. In some ways, we're back to the browser wars at the turn of the century. Back then, it was Microsoft introducing new, incompatible features. Now, I'm guess it's Google.

  8. rrhersh

    And yet "I can do everything I want to with this device running its current software. Please don't fuck it up." labels you as a luddite.

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