After posting the article with the ads, I thought that I covered all stupid things that online publications do to force their readers to pay, subscribe or to disable ad blockers.
Well, this was not correct…
The stupidity goes on… with Washington Post.
They request your email address in order to allow you to read any article.
I tried first to add some bogus email address so that I move on.
But, these guys take things really serious. They connect to the SMTP server and try to authenticate if the user exists.
If it doesn’t work, you get an error.
After you successfully enter an email address, they store various system cookies and you’re free to read all articles.
I tried to test this in three browsers
- Chrome – where I registered
- Firefox
- Tor (browsing from USA)
and it worked in all of them. I even erased all cookies above and it still worked. I honestly don’t know how they verify that my computer is authorized to view the content.
Thy definitely stored something on the computer, different than a cookie, and they are checking that from the code of the website.
I will investigate this when I will have more time.
Even if I don’t agree with their practice, I have to agree, , they do a good job here 🙂
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