That was the "onion routing" that is used by The Onion Router (TOR) not TOR itself. In fact any browser can report itself to be almost any other browser and this information can used by sophisticated web sites to feed pages compatible with the browser in use.

Cookie Stumbler is a third party app that can be downloaded from WriteIt Studios or the App Store and runs on MacOS, IOS, and Windows. It cleans cookies on Chrome, Safari, iCab, Opera, Firefox, and whatever Microsoft calls its browser these days.

I have no way of knowing about the newspaper, but it sounds as if they have simply gotten smarter in blocking those trying to get something for nothing.

If we knew what it was we were doing, it wouldn't be called research, would it?

— Albert Einstein