
Turn off tracking protection to resolve “video is currently unavailable” error - Animats
https://cbsi.secure.force.com/CBSi/ViewArticle_allaccess?popup=true&aId=kA00L000000Hfaq&categories=CBS_Entertainment%3AAll_Access&template=template_cbsvod&referer=cbs.com/vod&data=&cfs=SFS_FT
======
anonymousab
I've found it amusing that a few news sites disable their atrocious
autoplaying videos (and often, the preview window that follows you when you
scroll an article) when they detect ad blocking or tracking protection.

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.

~~~
albertgoeswoof
> 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.

~~~
infogulch
> people aren’t looking to X- they’re bored

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.

~~~
tokai
I think calling it entertainment is very flattering. I would call it
distraction, or maybe even conditioned response.

~~~
teddyh
I think the word you are looking for is “diversion”.

~~~
tokai
No. I wrote the word I meant. There are numerous synonyms for distraction, and
deliminating between them does not add anything to the discussion at hand.

------
alangpierce
I could imagine a few reasons for this:

• 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.)

~~~
msravi
Firefox tracking protection doesn't block all cookies - just third party
trackers on the disconnect.me basic list [1].

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.

1\. [https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-
protection](https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection)

~~~
Dylan16807
> 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.

~~~
msravi
Understanding how Firefox tracking protection works is one google button press
away.

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.

~~~
alangpierce
As mentioned in my comment, I'm aware that tracking protection uses a domain
block list. (I edited it about a minute after posting to make that more
clear.) I did do some research, I just didn't link to it because the comment
was getting too long.

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.

------
hfdgiutdryg
_Click the hamburger (3 vertical lines) in the top right corner of the screen_

I found it humorous that they simply call it 'the hamburger', and that they
confused vertical with horizontal.

~~~
dataqat
Could be 3 very wide and short-in-height lines stacked vertically?

~~~
paradite
That's not vertical lines.

------
josteink
This means that anti-tracking measures are working.

This is good news.

~~~
LaPollaNegra
Indeed. People need to understand that blocking ads will harm the industry and
doom the economy. I’d go as far as banning ad-block users completely from my
website.

~~~
arghwhat
Great, then I can easily see that I do not wish to access your website!

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.

~~~
EduardoBautista
I mean, if you stop using their website wouldn't it be a good thing for
bandwidth heavy sites like YouTube? It's kind of like a restaurant showing you
the door and then saying "I didn't want to eat here anyways."

~~~
anonymousab
I would be happy to accept denied access to most sites before loading their
content.

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.

~~~
mediumdeviation
DNT headers are a thing. They were proposed by Mozilla originally, and its use
was suppose to be opt in (and of course so is any compliance by the site in
question).

Then IE10 turned it on by default, making it pretty much completely useless as
a signal for site owners.

~~~
gordaco
Changing the default value of DNT to "on", so that you needed to opt in if you
wanted tracking, didn't make the header "useless" for site owners. But it did
make it awfully inconvenient, because it underlined an awfully inconvenient
truth: if a site makes money off tracking users, then the best interest of the
site is at odds with the best interest of the users. Of course, many sites
still wanted tracking, so they resorted to the scummy tactic of just ignoring
the header.

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.

------
danShumway
This is a losing gesture. It used to be that installing an ad blocker was the
weird tech thing to do, and it was their fault that the site broke. Now
tracking protection is the browser default, and it's the sites that are weird.

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.

------
unstatusthequo
Another site I won't miss I guess

~~~
mankash666
Another user CBS won't miss, I guess

~~~
metildaa
Another dying legacy network that few people will remeber.

------
Someone1234
If anyone is interested in CBS All Access, you can also buy it for the same
price via Amazon Digital as an "Add-On Channel."

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.

------
DanBC
They are at least giving people correct instructions to change this, unlike a
bunch of sites that just tell people to turn off ad-blockers.

~~~
kgwxd
I'm glad they're desperate enough to allow the word "Tracking" to be used in
the instructions. This is why I think all "Ad Blockers" should rebrand as
"Tracking Blockers". It would force a more honest terminology to be used.
"Turn off your tracking blocker" is a much scarier request to make.

------
bcoates
This is "have you tried turning it off and on again" not a conspiracy.

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!

~~~
apk-d
I don't know, this sounds extremely specific to me. I mean, you'd think they'd
know exactly whether or not their website works on Firefox, especially in
these enlightened auto-update times.

------
dredmorbius
If this is all that's necessary to disable autoplaying video, I'm all in.

------
chris_wot
Well this is a brilliant way of shifting people to PopcornTime.

What exactly are they tracking that Firefox is interfering with?

~~~
mankash666
Yes indeed. There era of entitlement is upon us - "unless CBS gives away all
their free content without tracking and monetizing me, I'll illegally pirate
their content - because in 2018 I'm entitled to CBS content without frills"

~~~
chris_mc
The problem is that there's no alternative to "free plus ads or tracking" for
most services. If I could pay a reasonable fee for all the content and
services I need, I'd do it. I can do it some places, but other things just
aren't available.

~~~
SargeZT
That's not the case with CBS. You can absolutely pay for CBS All Access.

~~~
acdha
Do they turn off the ads if you pay? Many sites don’t offer a no-ad option at
any price.

~~~
monochromatic
Even if they don’t display the ads, I’d expect them to keep tracking.

------
pfschell
Anyone have an alternate source? Force.com itself is a tracking domain that I
block.

~~~
fencepost
I believe subdomains on force.com are used for support portals by companies
using Salesforce for customer contact. I've seen it used by Western Digital
and a bunch of software or SaaS companies.

------
xfitm3
I really hope this isn’t malice on CBS’s part. Either way it’s a arms race and
it’s interesting to see the introduction of a social component.

------
kgwxd
Do they also require EME be enabled?

------
newscracker
This kind of advice puts lay people at risk (if they see it).

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).

------
amaccuish
I have yet to see an adblocker, that removes embedded text that came with the
page, like the old days of Google. Maybe that could be a direction.

~~~
thinkingemote
Could you elaborate, I'm not sure what you are describing.

~~~
amaccuish
I.e. when a website just sticks pure text in <p> in a page, no images, maybe
just an <a> for further info. Not HTML5 taking up 2/3s of the page, flashing
and jumping about etc.

~~~
HenryBemis
I am using Firefox with AdBlockPlus (older version that supports the -->), and
one extra add-on called "Element Hiding Helper for Adblock Plus" [1]. This
extra add-on doesn't block, but merely hides bits and pieces of the page. It
mostly use it to cut-out/hide all "Related/Suggested" columns and tables, so
when one article loads, I only see that on the page and nothing else.

[1]:
[https://adblockplus.org/en/elemhidehelper](https://adblockplus.org/en/elemhidehelper)

~~~
bscphil
Incidentally, uBlock origin has this feature built in. uBlock is also better
respected than ABP these days I believe, though of course you're free to use
whatever addon you prefer.

------
leptoniscool
Is this legal?

~~~
johnchristopher
Their site, their rules. Just like you can't read some forums unless you
registered.

~~~
saagarjha
I’m assuming that this is paid access, right? Does the signup process mention
this “hidden fee”?

~~~
eslaught
There are two levels. One has ads. One doesn't. Presumably they're doing this
to force their ad-viewing users to actually watch the ads.

~~~
johnchristopher
Even though, paid printed newspapers have ads so I am not sure we should
expect a paid subscription to be ad-free. But again I wouldn't like those ads
to track me across other medias.

------
joeyh
youtube-dl

~~~
dredmorbius
mps-youtube for even more win.

[https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube](https://github.com/mps-
youtube/mps-youtube)

------
kodablah
I'm not sure "demands" fits here, but it is funny to see. Similarly, they
"demand" you disable ad blocking or enable popups [0]. So, clearly, this
company suffers from idiocy more than malice.

0 -
[https://cbsi.secure.force.com/CBSi/ViewArticle_allaccess?aId...](https://cbsi.secure.force.com/CBSi/ViewArticle_allaccess?aId=kA00L0000004xn6)

~~~
sctb
We've updated the headline to “requires”, which is a bit more idiomatic.

------
rolltack
I’m thinking maybe you can r

------
microcolonel
I think the poor quality and restrictive distribution of news media these days
is largely a matter of efficiency. I've taken an interest in tools to make
honest reporting more efficient, so that more of it can be done per dollar,
and I wonder what others on HN think would be useful.

