Turn off tracking protection to resolve “video is currently unavailable” error
cbsi.secure.force.com
cbsi.secure.force.com
They're purposely giving me a better experience for blocking, rather than an inferior one.
But I guess the metrics must show or are being interpreted to show that most users prefer the obnoxiousness.
Most people aren’t looking to read the news- they’re bored and looking for entertainment. So they LOVE all this crap that autoplays, especially when it queues up more clickbaity crap that sounds more interesting than today’s headlines.
Wow the way you put this brings so much into focus. All of these apps and websites with awful ux where you can't find anything because you're drowning in a sea of content and shit is constantly flashing in your face... that is the point. People actually want that, for no other reason than its entertainment and it distracts them from their boredom. They're not actually looking for news, or videos, or pictures, or to learn or anything, they're looking for entertainment. And it's not the content that is entraining them -- the content is just an excuse -- it's the app itself that's entertaining them.
News, social media, video sites, photo sites, they're not content platforms at all, they're just a new type of game. That also explains why I can't comprehend the behavior of these sites, because I'm coming to the site to do something completely different from what it was designed to do.
I wonder what the web will be like after the internet is done spreading and the only new users are young ones... perhaps websites will start behaving more respectfully out of necessity despite any lack of moral standards.
Just like installing a pop-up blocker in the early 2000s.
So they put up with it. Because it’s the only way to read the article they want on the local TV news site. And they are more about the news about their kid’s school than the weather guy pop-up.
I thought all the autoplaying video was because video ads pay more? It doesn't matter to the site if anyone actually watches the videos or not, as long as they count as an ad view and they get paid.
• CBS is being malicious, and it's intentionally refusing to play the video if they detect tracking protection. (It sounds like a lot of people on the thread are assuming it's this one, and it very well may be.)
• CBS is being lazy, and didn't bother to test with tracking protection and work through any technical issues (like implementing graceful fallbacks).
• CBS is being cautious, and knows they haven't tested tracking protection as much, so they're leaving "disable tracking protection" in as a troubleshooting step, since it certainly does reduce the number of variables.
• Firefox is being unreasonable, and makes it enough of a pain to implement a website that works with tracking protection that CBS doesn't want to play ball. As a simple example, if Firefox's tracking protection blocked all cookies, plenty of honest parts of the internet would break (so it works differently, apparently with a domain block list). It sounds like others have had trouble with blocked domains that are sometimes used for tracking and sometimes for legitimate non-tracking purposes (like force.com, apparently), but I don't have a good sense of how common that really is.
Anyone have enough experience with these things to know how likely/reasonable the different explanations are? (Or if there are other reasons that I missed.)
While all scenarios you listed are theoretically possible, basic due diligence suggests that there are pretty significant differences in their likelihoods of occurence. It is disingenuous to treat these as equally likely just to appear fair.
Then it's a good thing that the comment explicitly wasn't doing that, openly unsure of the likelihoods.
If you tell me that the OP had the time, patience, and technical skill to list all those possibilities but could not do a basic check on how Firefox tracking protection works, and instead talks about how with Firefox tracking protection "plenty of honest parts of the internet would break", and how blocked domains are used "sometimes for legitimate non-tracking purposes", forgive me for not buying the "openly unsure" claim.
I don't think a basic technical understanding is good enough to know how it plays out in practice. Computers are complicated, humans are complicated, organizations are complicated, and I've seen many cases where people jump to unfair conclusions because they oversimplified a situation. I think that hearing from people with experience (e.g. people who have worked at a company like CBS or people who worked on Firefox's tracking protection feature or something similar) is much more likely to lead to an accurate understanding of the situation than trying to work off of assumptions.
I found it humorous that they simply call it 'the hamburger', and that they confused vertical with horizontal.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
This is good news.
The amount of friction this inflicts on the site and users makes this strategy non-viable for site operators. If any significant fraction of users start using browsers with similar capabilities, sites will be forced to change their practices, otherwise they will lose too many users.
I think the situation parallels the introduction of UAC in Windows. For the first year or so after its introduction, UAC triggered a huge number of annoying confirmation pop ups. Now they are much more rare, usually only when an app really needs to manipulate a system level thing.
Ads should be blocked relentlessly until companies realize what reasonable, secure and tasteful ads look like, instead of the intrusive malware-ridden pile that interrupt our lives at the current time.
Tracking, on the other hand, will never have a place in this world.
It'd be cool if browsers could send some sort of do not track header, that sites could then use to refuse to serve you any content.
Assuming that they actually do want none of those users to consume their content in that way.
Then IE10 turned it on by default, making it pretty much completely useless as a signal for site owners.
In other words: if most users do not want to get tracked, this should have been a signal to stop fucking tracking. The fact that it didn't doesn't reflect well on sites, to put it mildly.
I totally agree with josteink: this is good news because it means that anti-tracking measures are starting to hurt.
IE10, Safari and Firefox all did sensible things. The industry just doesn't want sensible things, it wants to violate everybody's privacy uninterrupted.
Better than one that tries to trick you, or tries to violate your privacy in secret, but bad none the less.
On medium.com or affiliated site: 40% chance of BS.
Blank page with JS disabled: Built by people who would love 5 GB web pages; 80% chance of BS.
"Please disable your ad blocker": Only people who love ads are real people; 90% chance of BS.
"You seem to be offline." Built by idiots; 100% chance of BS.
Loads almost 500k in 0.75 seconds, CSS looks a decade old, uses no obvious JS: 95% likely to be exactly the content I want with none of that nonsense because it was written by a domain expert for fun, not ad revenue.
ducks rotten veg
Instagram and Facebook ads are the worst.
Also: everything on my PC is English, everything. I am using English keywords only. WHY THE FUCK IS STILL EVERY AD IN GERMAN
Which industry?
I don't like ads.
But I positively loathe underhanded tactics ad networks utilize, all the way from the "I can disagree but see their point of view" tracking, to "what the fuck are you doing" drive-by malware installs.
Fuck them, unequivocally. They're incapable or unwilling of effectively policing the content they serve, so they don't get to serve it to me.
Maybe I'm just a freak or something, but I've been pretty happy as a monthly-paying Spotify subscriber. It's not my impression that the ad-supported version of Spotify is the "core" product.
Nearly all content online is user-generated. The publishers simply rip off contributors, slap ads on their content, and sell the content back to the same public that created it.
> It harms all the industries where the content is ad supported, which is the majority of the Internet right now... almost all news... absolutely massive portion of the modern Internet is monetized right now..
Out of all of those xkcd is the only one I like and I don't see any ads on it... The author does writes books though.
> I get why people don't like ads but it's clearly how an absolutely massive portion of the modern Internet is monetized right now
Maybe it just doesn't need to be monetised, everyone who defends intrusive internet ads talks about no alternative - Here is the alternative: If people aren't willing to pay for it, it probably shoudln't be monetised, there are plenty of things on the internet which are free, cost little to run and don't make a profit: search, social networking and video, all decentralisable in an affordable way... they don't need to be monetised, their corporate future is short.
Imagine a web browser that doesn't let publishers decide how ads are displayed, where and how many of them. It can choose an acceptable ad format for the user, like textual non-tracking ads below the content, and if publishers want, they can use that format to put an ad here, but nowhere else. It will still permit a lot of ad supported content, but will remove all those ad surveillance capitalism incentives and clickbaity user engagement.
The ad industry 100 years ago solved this problem. Wanna sell widgets? Take out an ad in Widgets Weekly and you know you will perfectly target an audience of widget-fans. All this tracking stuff is totally unnecessary and everyone must know it.
Or, you know, someone will get the info and repost it somewhere less restrictive.
It's a small distinction, but an important one. When stuff doesn't work, the default reaction is to blame whatever the weird tech thing is. In this case, CBS is moving from a position of being able to say, "well, you messed with your browser, and you broke it" to, "we're doing something odd, and it requires an instruction manual to make it work."
It's the same reason, for better or worse, that people were worried about secure boot for systems like Linux. When you hand someone something, and it doesn't work, and your response is, "well, you just have to mess with some config settings"... well, sometimes that works. There will be some people who do it. But now you're in "Linux territory". It's doable, but you have a prerequisite now to slightly educate people on tech literacy before you can ask them to do the thing you want. And none of your other competitors have that prerequisite.
In essence you get CBS All Access's content but via the Amazon Digital Web-Site/Apps, it is a massive improvement in reliability and performance. CBS's actual streaming player and web-site is a hot mess.
These extremely generic troubleshooting instructions have nothing to do with anything CBS all-access is or isn't doing.
Further down the page they tell you to clear your cache and history!
What exactly are they tracking that Firefox is interfering with?
There’s nothing “entitled” about wanting to maintain your privacy.
But like sibling said, they are presumably still tracking you. I don't think consumers have really become aware enough of tracking for "no ads, no tracking" to be a viable thing yet.
CBS, whose 'B' stands for 'Broadcasting', historically has used electromagnetic radiation ("radio waves") to transmit a variety of media, more-or-less continuously, for many decades. As a result, they have become known for publishing large amounts of content under a fairly permissive and flexible scheme.
Since CBS's content is already widely publicized, by the nature of broadcasting, CBS is effectively but one of many republishers of their already-broadcast media. While CBS is free to charge a premium for access to their archives, there's no good reason why other members of the public must charge or force users to jump through hoops.
I will grant you that the law gives CBS some ability to remove competitors from the market, but since CBS does not charge for access to their initial broadcasting, it does not follow that delayed rebroadcasts which do not charge are inherently violating the spirit of copyright. It seems particularly insulting to imagine that my entitlement to something broadcast decades ago might rest solely on whether or not I had remembered to program the VHS tape deck as a teenager.
Ever run a content business? I bet no. Ever run any business? I guess not - fundamental rules of economics relies on a quid-pro-quo transaction that you seem to not understand.
Or, since geniuses like you have cracked the media market - you should start your own channel - where content is free of copyright and there's zero need for return on investment. Apply to YC while you're at it
If you don't want to be banned, you're welcome to email hn@ycombinator.com and give us reason to believe that you'll follow the rules in the future. That means posting civilly and substantively, or not at all.
Proliferation of such poor advice — which may just be copied and pasted by other sites as-is — could make lay people vulnerable to tracking outside of CBS properties too, since they may forget to turn it back on (or may not be even understand the need to have it on in the first place).
https://adblockplus.org/filters#elemhide
https://github.com/gorhill/uBlock/wiki/Procedural-cosmetic-f...
[1] Before browser based adblockers existed (late 1990s), we used to use filtering proxies like Privoxy (formerly Internet Junkbuster). Of course, at the time, text filtering was usually Perl regex instead of CSS selectors.
0 - https://cbsi.secure.force.com/CBSi/ViewArticle_allaccess?aId...