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BostonGlobe.Com Disables Articles When Your Browser's in Private Mode

posted by cmn32480 on Sunday May 21 2017, @07:21AM   Printer-friendly
from the trying-to-get-paid-for-what-they-do dept.

Fnord666 writes:

The Boston Globe website is closing off a hole in its paywall by preventing visitors who aren't logged in from reading articles in a browser's private mode.

"You're using a browser set to private or incognito mode" is the message given to BostonGlobe.com visitors who click on articles in private mode. "To continue reading articles in this mode, please log in to your Globe account." People who aren't already Globe subscribers are urged to subscribe.

Like other news sites, the Globe limits the number of articles people can read without a subscription. Until the recent change, Globe website visitors could read more articles for free by switching to private or incognito mode.

Source: ArsTechnica

Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:33AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 23 2017, @01:33AM (#513890)

    Apparently they can somehow tell that they cannot save permanent data on the local machine. Which is indeed a flaw in the sandbox, as it should not be visible that the data will be deleted when the tab closes. Then again: Just how much trust do you have in the authors of your browser? Why, exactly, do we trust the browser manufacturer's to get this right, when their financial interests are diametrically opposed to doing so?

    I don't trust my browser maker. That's why I use firejail --private --overlay-tmpfs

    Which creates a new private home directory in a ram disk and then overlays a tmpfs layer on top of the entire system. Nothing that gets written to disk should actually go to disk unless the overlay mount is flawed. Sandboxie can do the same on Windows IIRC and MacOS has a similar capability in its sandbox but it's a bit harder to configure because I haven't found any good tools to automate the process.

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