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Times paywall preregistration age View larger picture
It looks rather like lazy coding to allow the newborns to register for your soon-to-be-implemented paywall. Born in 2010?

The announcement on Friday that News International would implement a paywall for the Times and Sunday Times from June has sparked a lot of interest.

And now it's offering people the chance to pre-register for the service. Wow - not only do you get to pay £1 per day, or £2 per week, but you also get to be the target of News International mailshots. Come on, tell us that's not fun. No?

Interesting to have a look behind the site and unravel the code though. Which has a bit of a knife-and-fork feel - especially in its implementation of the age check.

Which is important, of course. "Only private individuals aged 18 years or over are permitted to register for use of the Website and to use the Services." Why? That's not explained. Is it something to do with credit cards? Anyone?

The age restriction is set out in the terms and conditions, which intriguingly is dated 16 March - 10 days before the announcement was made. Oh, and it's 13 pages long. And seems to have attracted comments before the move was made public. Who knew that keeping your eye on Ts+Cs pages was the way to track paywalls? We do, now.

Anyway, rather than do what a smart coder might do, and use some sort of check against the current year in order to set the latest year available in the drop-down menu (pictured above), it has simply started at 2010.

Or possibly it's expecting babies to try to log on. In which case of course they will get turned down by its age check. That's once they've read the 13-page terms and conditions, of course.

It's also full of expectation that all those 110-year old surfers will be logging in too, as the registration offers you a birth year right back to 1900. (Though that would mean Oxfordshire-based Catherine Masters, 110 in 2009, wouldn''t be able to register.) Come on, Rupert, can't centenarians get a break? You get free bus rides once you're on your pension here. That's worth more than £1 per day.

But if - if - that is the way things are being implemented behind the scenes, we don't hold out huge hopes for the quality of the coding there. But go on, Times coders. Surprise us in a positive way. First try was a bit meh, to be honest.

Update: Richard Morrell, who was head of internet security for three years at NTL/VirginMedia, points out that the site doesn't use SSL to collect your personal data - meaning that a "sniffer" in between you and it could pick up all sorts of useful stuff for ID theft.

"If I'd launched something as basic as this without using SSL I'd have expected a fair degree of embarrassment at the minimum," Morrell says. "I just find the whole thing very 1996 in their approach to requesting how this data is collected in plaintext. It was so easy to do this right."

He points to the Information Commissioner's advice about collecting data, where it points out that the cost of privacy failure can be significantly raised by "asking for a full postal address when the service requested does not involve delivery to a physical address and where the full address is not required to validate a transaction".

The preview seems to fail in both ways - it collects lots of personal information but doesn't use SSL; but equally the information collected is far too detailed for what it's actually delivering. You don't, for example, need someone's home address if you're doing a preview of an online service. (You can argue you need the age - yes, even of those babies - because it's an 18-and-over service, which has never been the case with the Times site before.)

Either way it's wrong, basically.

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Times paywall pregistration by age
