The IRS open sourced much of its incredibly popular Direct File software as the future of the free tax filing program is at risk of being killed by Intuit’s lobbyists and Donald Trump’s megabill. Meanwhile, several top developers who worked on the software have left the government and joined a project to explore the “future of tax filing” in the private sector.
Direct File is a piece of software created by developers at the US Digital Service and 18F, the former of which became DOGE and is now unrecognizable, and the latter of which was killed by DOGE. Direct File has been called a “free, easy, and trustworthy” piece of software that made tax filing “more efficient.” About 300,000 people used it last year as part of a limited pilot program, and those who did gave it incredibly positive reviews, according to reporting by Federal News Network.
But because it is free and because it is an example of government working, Direct File and the IRS’s Free File program more broadly have been the subject of years of lobbying efforts by financial technology giants like Intuit, which makes TurboTax. DOGE sought to kill Direct File, and currently, there is language in Trump’s massive budget reconciliation bill that would kill Direct File. Experts say that “ending [the] Direct File program is a gift to the tax-prep industry that will cost taxpayers time and money.”
No paywall for this article yet: “Sign up for free access to this post”, it’s not a free trial.
Its called an authwall
It’s generally for user data collection / sale and adding you to their marketing list.
It’s to prevent scraping/harvesting by AI: https://www.404media.co/why-404-media-needs-your-email-address/
They do not ask for a phone number.
Indeed it is, but I’m concerned about the above, and thus don’t create user accounts willy nilly.
I could use a fake name and fake email, but a lot of sites require that you validate your phone number too, and it’s starting to become a lot of commodifiable data points.
… Have you tried? Been a minute since I signed up for my free “account” but I want to say the only requirement was that the email is a real one because you’ll be sent an auth link whenever you login. No identification beyond that unless I choose to pay.
So… if you are truly concerned then use a VPN and a free email service every time you want to read this or any other independent media sites that use the same model?
I’m not talking about this website specifically, a lot of sites ask for way too much info.
I just click away when I see a login wall, regardless of requirements. If I really want to read it, I use 12ft.io or similar.
Edit: Here’s a wall-less link: https://archive.ph/mFHH8
I really don’t feel like setting up an alt email address just to read a single article.
Still a wall between people clicking the link and the content.
Which is also a wall between bots scraping the articles.
Support independent media.
No it isn’t, they are letting bots scrape the articles just like every other news site for that sweet, sweet SEO. Why do you think the archive.is link has the full article?
This is literally why these sites have the free paywall. Some get bypased. In this case, I suspect 404 gave archive dot org access because they rely so heavily on that site for researching articles.
But. Regardless: if you think a journalism outlet is so evil and are scamming everyone… Maybe just ignore them because you clearly don’t think they are worth your time.
Also: republican love people like you who do everything possible to attack independent journalism.
archive.is/archive.today is not archive.org, and they did it without permission, because they never get permission.
They don’t have to be evil or scamming people for this to be a shitty barrier that prevents people from viewing the information.
You know what an even bigger barrier is? Not existing.
Independent journalism is good. 404 is REALLY good (it comes out of all the best parts of Vice’s tech reporting). They have a very small barrier that basically exists solely to fight bots as a mixture of reducing traffic load (keeping costs down) and encouraging people to actually consider supporting said independent journalism.
Instead we have chucklefucks immediately wanting to remove that paywall or outright accusing them of abusing SEO and data scraping and all that. And these are the same people who will then get mad when EVERYTHING is AI slop.
And this ties in directly to what right wingers want in terms of making the populace even stupider and more uninformed.
There’s other methods of preventing scraping rather than requiring us to give up our data to view the content. Maybe they’re perfect and it doesn’t get sold or abused, but how can we know that for every single site? Also, how to we know it’s secure forever, even when they enahitify in the future?
This has no relevance to politics and I’m not attacking anything by saying forcing sign ups is a barrier to content or that you’re wrong about it having anything to do with bots, you dork.