Bonum Certa Men Certa

CNN Contributes to Demolition of the Open Web

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Dec 05, 2023

Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer.

CNN building at Atlanta, Georgia

CNN Testing Block for Brave Browser, Users of Anti-Cookie Notification Lists. Lies About “Privacy” Law.

CNN is blocking the Brave Web browser, and others who use the “Easylist Cookie Filter” and demanding that they turn off that list or switch browsers.

Further, CNN is lying about what the EU’s GDPR privacy law actually requires. There is no requirement that they load the “consent” screen for cookies. The only requirement is that they don’t set any tracking cookies until the user allows it.

If you have your browser set to hide the consent screen, then there’s no way you can accidentally consent to cookies.

This bothers CNN, because many sites bring up the most annoying possible consent screen with millions of buttons and toggles, and if you have your browser set to forget cookies, it will forget the cookie that kept your cookie preferences, so you’ll just see the same screen on every site over and over again.

So they’ve resorted to lying about “components that are required in order to protect your privacy”.

The good news is that this is trivial to bypass. Just set “cnn.com” back to “default” in NoScript (or in the advanced permissions of your browser as a site rule), and then it can’t run the script that sends you to “Browser Blocked” instead of the “edition.cnn.com” site where you get the articles.

Of course, none of the videos will work, but who cares? Honestly, fuck CNN.

There’s basically no reason to try to play the videos. Many try to load DRM anyway (Widevine) and I have that disabled too.

Their reporting is getting worse all the time. More of what there is, is merely an ad disguised as news, or government propaganda. They lose money and fire people, mostly, because their ratings are bad.

Their ratings are bad because they lie all the time and disgust people who are looking for reporting. Also, smarter people block the ads, quickly skim over it to keep “an eye on CNN”. and there’s just no money to be made out of people who don’t watch ads and who skim over text.

NPR has also become a total spam farm. There’s been a lot of NPR “articles” about “Al Bundy women” in the “fat acceptance movement” that have amused me recently, not much else.

The news in general is dying, and they take these aggressive “Browser Blocked” screens to prevent what little revenue they have from slipping away.

Browser block screens are usually not that hard to defeat, but most people reading CNN probably don’t know what to do except comply.

(Like they did with the illegal house arrest and mass job loss order coming from Democrat governors.)

The part that really rankles my ass about CNN, is that this Browser Block screen shows that their lying really knows no bounds and will not be limited to “only” their “reporting”.

To stay legal with the GDPR all they have to do is default to not setting cookies if they can’t load the consent screen. The user has expressed their desire to not have tracking by using a browser like Brave in the first place.

CNN lies about what the law actually says.

It seems that sometimes I get the screen and sometimes I don’t, so this could just be a test for something they’re planning to go live with. The wording may change. They may change their mind and not do it at all.

The Web improves all the time, doesn’t it?

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