How does a free limited digital subscription work without authentication?

Question

I see on every news website that it is limited to a certain number of articles that I can view without logging in. I thought that cookies were involved in this, but now I tried to delete all cookies, and again I am blocked from viewing more pages outside my quota.

So can someone explain to you how this system works?

Answer 1

There are other ways in which websites can store data on your computer other than cookies: cache, local storage, indexed DB, media cache, session storage, history, extension status.

For example, on a Windows machine, the Chrome browser places a ton of data in C: \ Users [user] \ AppData \ Local \ Google \ Chrome \ User Data. You can watch it fill when you browse sites.

Data is mainly encrypted, hashed, or saved as binary files, making decryption impossible.

So, this does not mean that you are displaying a user, user or page. Rather, the site uses your browser memory (i.e., Hundreds / thousands of files on your hard drive) to track activity.

Answer 2

Websites may use different strategies to track your usage.

Cookies are often used for this. The website can also store cookies through sub-requests in other domains it controls (e.g. tracker.com and website.com). To ensure that you must delete all cookies on all sites.

A set of methods allows you to restore cookies even after deleting a user. These cookies are called zombie cookies or evercookies . For example, a website may rely on storage in a Flash plugin.

Even without cookies, websites can collect a lot of information to uniquely identify the user. For example, the browser sends a line for each request with information about the version of the browser, operating system, etc.

Your IP address used to connect to the website is uniquely assigned to you over a period of time. If your ISP has provided you with a dynamic IPv4 address assigned by DHCP , you can free the IP address and try to get another one.

When reconnecting to the website, use the URL without a personal unique identifier. Part of the URL may contain some gibberish to track the user, for example: http://example.com/top/article/how-i-learned-to-love-stackoverflow-ef45gtrzs3ggre2354gre . It’s better to type the site domain again ( http://example.com ) and browse the pages you want to read.

Before connecting to websites that you do not want them to track you, it is recommended to use the "Private" modes for web browsers. In Google Chrome, it's called incognito mode .

Answer 3

Cookies, local storage and session storage. Websites cannot read your cache or (as you say) files on your computer.

Implement, you must delete all cookies (and storage) associated with the page, not just the website (as you know, one page can load resources from many websites) because you don’t know which cookie launches excess. You can see all sites using the developer tools in Chrome. Do not use Chrome Clear Clear, because it only clears the data of the main site.

In addition, immediately after removing the resources necessary to exit the browser: Otherwise, the browser may save the cookie on the unload () page, defeating your efforts.

It's easy enough with something related to the New York Times website (although it's a great resource, so pay a few $$ and support journalism !!!)