It looks like they may be using Perimeterx Bot Defender. Note Bloomberg is not blocking any access without Javascript or cookies enabled. Perimeterx is a serv

It looks like they may be using Perimeterx Bot Defender. Note Bloomberg is not blocking any access without Javascript or cookies enabled. Perimeterx is a service that purports to stop "bots" by using heuristics to produce a "risk score". The result is that it allows some bots (e.g. Googlebot) and blocks others (e.g. Archive.org_bot). It gives preferential treatment to some http clients such as Chrome while blocking others such as curl or wget. Not only that, as you mention, these blocks are bypassed simply by using an open redirect. The page you quoted is telling the user to enable Javascript and cookies, making it sound like that is the reason for the block. The truth is that javascript is only needed so the user can solve captchas and send data to Google. One does not need JS or cookies enabled to read Bloomberg articles.