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.
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.
I am not fully sure about this, but it might be against the GDPR? From what I understand you aren't allowed to block someone if they opt out of non-essential stuff.
However the GDPR hasn't been tried on anything like this yet, so it'll be interesting to watch in the future, but I am not expecting anything soon.
Ah, then in that case, it's not against the GDPR, but if it was accessible from the EU, then it would be. In a way, this is the sort of thing the GDPR is designed to prevent.
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.
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.
They basically are saying that though - you can disable tracking protection for a single domain using the icon to the left of the URL, but they are itead telling people to turn it off globally in the preferences.
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"
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.
For the record there is a level you can pay for CBS All Access that turns off the ads (at least on original content, which is I assume the only reason anyone would sign up for it anyway). It costs more than the ad-full version, but that's basically what you're asking for, right?
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.
What's this bull-shittery supposed to evoke? Sympathy for your lack of understand of copyright law, or your bull-shit entitlement to CBS' content, or just how disconnected you are from content economics?
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
Since you've persisted in posting flamewar-style comments after we asked you several times to stop, we've banned this account.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Also, enabling Firefox's reader mode (accessed quickly by pressing F9, at least in Windows) gets rid of the "please disable your ad blocker" and similar nagware most of the time.
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.
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."
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.
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.
Rather, people decided that after tracking became opt-in (as it should be), that they suddenly didn't like the game rules anymore now it had turned against them, and chose to violate your privacy regardless of your choice.
IE10, Safari and Firefox all did sensible things. The industry just doesn't want sensible things, it wants to violate everybody's privacy uninterrupted.
No, it's like a restaurant requiring you to sign a privacy waiving agreement to enter, and then deciding that you don't want to support such businesses.
Better than one that tries to trick you, or tries to violate your privacy in secret, but bad none the less.
It harms all the industries where the content is ad supported, which is the majority of the Internet right now. For just what I use every day Facebook, Spotify, Google, almost all news, Youtube, Reddit, and xkcd are all add supported. 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
And also that the majority of techies here work for companies either directly or indirectly ad supported. I include myself in that group and I use as blockers.
I don't think anyone has a problem with ads per se, as long as there aren't that many of them, they are contextual, non-intrusive, non-tracking, etc. So the problem is more about not ads, but who is controlling what ads are acceptable and how they are displayed.
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.
anyone has a problem with ads per se, as long as there aren't that many of them, they are contextual
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.
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.
> It harms all the industries where the content is ad supported
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.
I’m not sure this comment is entirely fair if we consider they’re responding to a comment which refers to the wider internet, multiple times.
> 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..
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.
> For just what I use every day Facebook, Spotify, Google, almost all news, Youtube, Reddit, and xkcd are all add supported.
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.
Oh, whoops I meant smbc for the webcomic, not xkcd. I haven't read xkcd in a while (maybe I've just got old but I feel like the quality of jokes started going down a few years ago)
Ads aren't bad. Self-hosted ads often aren't blocked. Self-hosted ads don't spike my CPU either usually, or attempt to install anything. I'm sure the "massive portion of the modern Internet" will evolve towards a more sustainable advertising model. Additionally, the "modern Internet" may need to steal from the credits scene in Dr. Strange: "there are too many websites"
If only there was a way to list your product on some shopping aggregator, and fight for clients by providing a better product. Too bad it is technically impossible.
The only site I disable ad blocking for is kbb.com (Kelley Blue Book), as it's the only one that restricts that I find valuable enough. If your site is valuable enough, you'll experience the same; if you see fewer visitors after putting such a block in place, that will answer the question for you.
My initial thought was this shows the anti-tracking measures aren’t working. But upon further consideration, I think you are correct.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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.
[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.
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.
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.
I would say users don’t have a choice. Knowing you can install a blocker as well as how to go about it is a high hurdle.
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.
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.
Yes, I guess as a long time internet user it can be quite easy to forget that most of the world is still offline, and as more and more people are exposed to the web for the first time, there are masses of naieve eyeballs to exploit, they've yet to acclimatise and grow protective barrier that is aware of the very real possibility that websites you visit are trying to manipulate you.
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.
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.
I’m not sure what your sources are, but “most users” sounds incorrect. All of this stems from personal experience and is anedoctal, so I’ll leave it at that.
> But I guess the metrics must show or are being interpreted to show that most users prefer the obnoxiousness
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.
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.
• 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.)
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.
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.
I've used Firefox tracking protection since it was release, and I definitely have had occasional issues with "honest" sites not loading. Not super often, but it's happened.
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.
From the perspective of the website ff tracking protection is the same as an adblock user.
I think they are just distinguishing both cases because most ff users don't know that they are using an ad blocker.
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.
129 comments
[ 7.2 ms ] story [ 207 ms ] thread0 - https://cbsi.secure.force.com/CBSi/ViewArticle_allaccess?aId...
I found it humorous that they simply call it 'the hamburger', and that they confused vertical with horizontal.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What exactly are they tracking that Firefox is interfering with?
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.
There’s nothing “entitled” about wanting to maintain your privacy.
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.
This is good news.
Or, you know, someone will get the info and repost it somewhere less restrictive.
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.
ducks rotten veg
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.
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.
Which industry?
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.
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..
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.
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.
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
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.
https://github.com/mps-youtube/mps-youtube
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).
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!
[1]: https://adblockplus.org/en/elemhidehelper
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
• 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.
1. https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/tracking-protection
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.
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.