The New York Times latest among publishers that put up a registration wall

US newspaper The New York Times has become the latest publisher to put up a registration wall, following extensive registration and log-on tests recently. Visitors to any of the publisher’s articles are now met by a request to keep reading by creating a free account, or by logging in. Many of the articles are still free to view, but it appears that access to metered articles will now be registered to the account rather than the browser. The introduction of the registration wall comes just after Google’s release of Chrome 76, which remedied a loophole allowing sites to detect and block people who are browsing in Incognito Mode.

Chrome’s Incognito window is used for private browsing, where users can visit websites without their browsing history being stored. Incognito Mode also temporarily blocks a website’s ability to read or write cookies, so it has become a popular way of getting around metered paywalls, which rely on cookies to know how many articles a reader has left. A number of publishers including The New York Times, The Washington Post and Boston Globe had recently taken measures to block users from accessing content at all if they were using the private browser.