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by TimMontague 5554 days ago
A referrer is not sent when following a link from a secure website (https) to a non-secure website.

http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616#section-15.1.3

2 comments

Thanks for the information. I had not realised that. There are still plenty of other measure that Ryanair could use, of course, in the case where there was no Referer: header, such putting some unique (and constantly changing) id into a cookie such that links from another site wouldn't have the correct id. As other have suggested, perhaps they are perfectly happy with most deep links into their site, just not from certain sites such as price comparison sites. Far be it from me to speculate about such things, of course.
I would assume that the filter would be implemented to deny/redirect the request if there were no referrer at all.