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Yeah, I know, but the article seems to not know about this.

Another avenue could be that they just check the uniqueness of your signature; if it's too generic: block content, and only lift it after installing a first party extension or something, that way, for most people it will just work and for the few that are false positives, you have a workaround. The whole goal of the incognito modus is also a way to detect it.

It's the same for adblockers; just serve a unique content key with the ad and check back via the ad provider if it was loaded before proceeding to serve content.

Only serving ad-free content to crawlers is no problem either, because ip ranges for the big ones are known and you can't spoof them in TCP. It's all a question of effort Vs reward. They probably know just a very small percentage of users will abuse it, so it's not worth it for them to spend a lot of effort blocking it.

For example: in a retail store, if there's a difference in expected vs actual money of ~€4, it's not even worth it to investigate, because it will cost more than you'll get back from resolving it. It's sometimes hard for me to comply because I always want to have stuff match 100%, but it's always a effort Vs reward dilemma that you have to work with.



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