Thanks for caring about my privacy, CNN, sorry I couldn’t be more helpful in facilitating your solid privacy measures.
You can be more helpful, though.
Go to a different website.
If it were working “as intended”, the site wouldn’t know you’re there. 🤌🏼
Don’t let perfect be the enemy of good enough.
“You can totally trust us bro”
Does this crap still appear when you disable JavaScript?
I would never do that to CNN.
It works as it should although not as intended.
Lmao, “required componentes to protect your privacy” 🤣🤣🤣🤣
You see what they’re actually doing there?
“We are by law forced to give you the option to view our ads and accept our tracking, because of privacy legislation in your region. Since you are hindering us from doing so, you can’t come to the birthday party”.
Ok, thank you EU, I suppose! :)
Pretty sure CNN is (willfully) misinterpreting the law. The EU is definitely not prohibiting them from just turning off the tracking without providing a choice.
Yes, but the average reader can’t make that distinction and blames EU.
The joke is that CNN still violates GDPR with this trick.
I thank the LORD for GDPR. I am amazed it actually happened. I voted Pirate Party for EU Parliament every time, or whoever was most loud about privacy protections at the time, I wrote to parliamentarians, one of whom I grew up with, and I sure like to think and hope it made a difference. Never thought I’d see something like this happen. The EU works. Democracy works.
Hahaha! “We need access to your private data to protect your privacy.” We’ve come full circle.
Welcome to the Corporate Internet.
Get ready to play by Their Rules on Their Services.
Good thing a lot of them are useless fucking Dinosaurs like CNN that need to die anyway.
Not today.
Not.
Today.
That’s why places like Lemmy and Mastodon are nice, even if big corpo buys up some instances, there’s still the option to just start free ones elsewhere.
Youtube just recently started giving me issues on Librewolf. I actually paid for Youtube Premium for quite a while, let it lapse a couple of months ago, and I’ve been just watching with the ad blocker on. Having to go back to running stuff through Google Chrome and watching ads made me want to research “how can I watch videos without Youtube being involved” for the first time.
Piped: piped.video Invidious: yewtu.be
Those would be good places to start, if you still want YouTube content without the YouTube front-end.
It might be a little surprising given what I literally just said, but I am not unreservedly in favor of just grabbing someone else’s content from someone else’s server and then playing it without the ads that pay for the hosting bills for the origin server.
I realize I’m probably in the minority in that, but I feel like a fully off-Youtube video hosting solution might be a better way.
I get what you’re saying, but the simple fact is that most of the content is on YouTube. An alternative would be better (and PeerTube might get there one day), but you’d be very limited in your choices if you avoided YT entirely. Also, I can’t personally feel too bad about “stealing” from YouTube.
In this case, the someone else is Alphabet megacorp. I wouldn’t waste any concern on them. The content is still hosted by YouTube, just played through the invidious instance.
To do away with all those concerns, you could self-host invidious, or donate to the instance you choose to use if self-hosting is outside of your technical prowess. If you want to support certain creators, donate to them directly instead.
It really gets to be a lot of edge cases to keep track of nowadays though, am I the only one? I mean the collection of scripts I have to keep track of to keep everything running as normal feels like the beginning of a new operating system.
In hosting invidious or what? I’ve got it running pretty maintenance free in a docker LXC in Proxmox and use Twingate for access to it and everything else outside my home network. There was a learning curve to set up, but there’s plenty of yt tutorials to guide you through.
I’ve got it running pretty maintenance free in a docker LXC in Proxmox and use Twingate for access to it and everything else outside my home network.
Read that sentence back to yourself and tell me there isn’t a lot to keep track of. Remember, this is specifically for solving 1 issue. Sysadmins and hard core masochists will learn every framework and take a scalpel to both software and hardware if needed, but that is not 99% of the world’s demographic.
Am I am hard-core masochistic hobbyist system admin for hosting my own Internet on my server? /s
Yes, it’s a lot of words, but there’s really nothing to keep track of after setup. I just go to my invidious ip rather than youtube.com and it works. There are very good tutorials available if you want to implement these solutions. That’d be a good first step rather than the ‘I’ve tried nothing and am all out of ideas’ approach.
well yeah, you should be familiar with the services you host, means you are competent with them, and are capable of fixing things when they explode.
I mean, would you rather have spent 50 hours learning and setting something up, becoming somewhat familiar with it, vs clicking a button and it runs. In the event that it explodes and you need to maintain something?
It’s a price that’s worth paying for, not to mention it’s not like you’ve wasted that time. It’s time that you can use to put into other things that will benefit your life. I am currently running about 4-5 services, aside from game servers, that directly benefit my life. Because i’ve taken the time to learn and understand that stuff. (all of which are free, and run on my own hardware)
Plus it gives me freedom, i’m confident and content that i could self host every service i would need to use, in the event i dont want to use outside services. It wouldn’t be pleasant to learn and or setup, but i absolutely could.
I just bought a Nebula subscription. I can’t say they’re a replacement for YT, but they have good content.
Yeah, I was gonna say something about Nebula / Curiositystream. I actually think that that + somewhere to play music would take care of 95% of what I use Youtube for.
I think that’s a very valid point, because that’s literally what Google does with AMP links…
Haha that’s actually a really good point
being a yt-dlp user myself, who runs a media server for mostly YT content.
I can say that google deserves it. They store like 2-3x the amount of data that they need to be storing per video. 11 files for a single video 1080p to 4k. All different bitrates, some barely different than any others. (i realize it’s for codec support, but like, seriously?)
especially when they run predatory ads, force services into youtube premium that you don’t want, just generally do not respect the creator base and certainly not the viewer base. Honestly i think google deserves to lose money right now.
Google is the 4th richest company in the world… Besides they don’t deserve a dime from you, fuck them.
It’s not about them; it’s about me. They’ll be fine whatever any of us does, yes.
Check if any of your favorite channels are on Nebula. If so, maybe there are other channels worth watching.
When I realized that, I’ve severely reduced my YouTube time. Actually, now it’s split among Nebula, Odsee, YT etc.
is it just me or 3rd party instances really so slow thats unwatchable?
There are other instances for both piped and invidious aside from the ones linked above. I believe the intended usage involves you finding the instance closest to you in terms of network, which may not be those specific instances linked above.
Yew a kind of coniferous tree which has red, berry-ike fruits, most parts of which are highly poisonous.
no issue with firefox and ublock origin just yet over here
Yeah, it seems like it’s intermittent. Like there’s either an arms race going on between uBlock and Youtube system, or else maybe they’re slowly experimenting with the noose to see at what point and with what effectiveness the consumer parts of the equation will start choking up money again.
YouTube has been blocking me for a couple of months now, with one or two short breaks. I have Firefox and uBlock Origin. Even after I whitelisted YouTube, the blocking continues.
It seems that a lot of folk have wildly different experiences on wild variety of browsers and hardware. I use Mullvad VPN and I think their new DNS blockers seem to eradicate advertisements even on Spotify Free. I also don’t think Google made the adblock rollout global, but did if for whatever subsections of the network. Looks like they’ve backed off for now, even, no doubt a time out to calibrate the evil cheater detecting algos…
A super lightweight option for viewing videos that I don’t see mentioned often is drag and dropping the link into MPV.
Is this a thing???
I mean, give it a try. Easiest way is to just open a new mpv window and drag from the url bar into it. There’s also a lua script that allows mpv to still make use of sponsorblock, but I haven’t ever tried it. Youtube-DL is part of a standard mpv install unless you disabled it.
You can also just mpv ‘youtubeurl’ from terminal.
I also recently discovered
mpv --no-video [url]
. Useful for when I just want to listen to a podcast or something. Sadly, I can’t get it to work with Spotify
Freetube
What problems are you facing?
Switch on advanced mode in uBlock Origin, disable everything from third parties on youtube.com, then selectively enable the script for youtube’s content server and a couple more that I don’t remember.
You’ll never see advertisements and issues with playback again
It was just for one day, videos would hang forever when trying to load in Librewolf. From Chrome they played fine.
I may not want to invest all that much energy into the arms race game if it starts recurring; I may just switch to one of the let-us-steal-it-from-Youtube-for-you mirror services.
Or just wait a little while, purge the filter cache, update your filters, and try again.
Tangentially, CNN does have a text-mostly version: lite.cnn.com
Huh. Must be leftover from the early days of the mobile Internet. Kinda like Reddit’s old mobile site (which now just redirects to Reddit’s current mobile site).
old.reddit.com’s not working for you? How about reddit.com/.i?
It might be that second one. I was thinking it was m.reddit.com.
Wow, I didn’t know this existed. Thanks for sharing!
Nah I’m good.
CNN Management: I’m worried that since our purchase by a right-wing nut job and our spectacular idiot explosion of the last CEO, that we’re still in danger of being considered a valid corporate news outlet. What can we do?
CNN Schmuck: We could force mandatory tracking and ads on all website visitors.
CNN Management: Brilliant!
toilet flushing noises
I’m pretty sure you could argue that CNN is a lot of things but right wing is not one of them.
Yeah, that.
right compared to actual leftists (not liberals)
The current criticism is that they’re trying to turn into Fox Jr, with that clown show of a Trump town hall and such.
I think they are the fox of the left for sure.
Oh no! Anyway…
Ha ha hah!
Turning off Java script worked when this happened to me. Firefox and ublock origin. It breaks some things but you can do it on a per site basis.
I haven’t really looked into it too much, but… Aren’t they actually right in this case?
Sure, reading “we can’t protect your privacy because you’re using privacy-centric extension…” feels like bullshit, but from how I understand it based on the screenshot, the issue is that you have blocked the cookie permissions pop-up, whose main reason is to give you an option to opt-out of any tracking cookies, thus protecting your privacy. While also being required by law.
However, this depends on how exactly is the law formulated. How does it deals with a case where you don’t accept, nor decline any cookies, and just ignore it? Are they not allowed to save any cookie until you accept it and specify what exactly can they save? Or should they not let you use the site until you accept it?
I vaguely remember that it used to be enough to just have a OK-able warning that this site is using cookies, but then it changed to include a choice to opt-out. Which could indicate that unless you opt-out, which they are required to give you a chance to, they can use whatever tracking cookies they want. And if that is the case, this message is actually correct.
In the EU they must assume you have opted out until you explicitly opt in. blocking the popuip by law, must be treated as opting out. or to be more specific, its aconsent thing. they must assume they do not have consent until you explicitly give it.if this popup is in the EU, its a violation to my knowledge as it is forcing the user to change theirbrowsers settings or opt into something not necessary.
Right? About what? Legally? Morally? Not-being-cunts-ally? Fuck CNN man, laws schmaws, they are doing everything they can to skirt it, please.
I’m afraid that protection might not last long.
We are just rocks tumbling down a cliff side.
An interesting note-
Another issue is that Strict mode is used by roughly 0.5% of Brave’s users, with the rest using the default setting, which is the Standard mode.
This low percentage actually makes these users more vulnerable to fingerprinting despite them using the more aggressive blocker, because they constitute a discernible subset of users standing out from the rest.
That’s what I’ve always said, you got no out, if youre a big black blob on the map, the connections show exactly who you are.
Fingerprinting is tricky, you have to be as big standard as possible. Ironically privacy plugins make you more identifiable sometimes
Thanks to the CNN overlords for caring about privacy. Blatant liars.
CNN might be the only site I’ve seen that actually checks if you have made a cookie choice then. The whole cookie acceptance thing is dumb, but they are following the law.
Thankfully there is a plan that EU will make changes fo current policy so those popups might go away.
The plan should be “Tracking opt-in required - no banners or notifications allowed.”
Could probably try spoofing the user-agent of you really need to use their service (I mean, I wouldn’t, this is wholly unethical). The Floorp browser (a fork of Firefox) comes with the ability to spoof to other browsers easily
Why is it unethical?
I think they mean it would be wholly unethical reading CNN articles. :)
That is indeed what I meant (since they block the viewers based on browser haha)
I use a spoof agent, that could be the problem, if, as you say, anyone would really consider it a problem not reaching fucking CNN.
The world turned upside dooooowwwwn 🎵
I’ll counter with
I don’t want to set the world on fire