My apologies. It’s a long story but we were testing a new re-direct with a company called Barometric. The pi-hole, NextDNS, (and I’m guessing other ad-blocking filters) see the redirect through adentifi.com as connecting to an ad server - which it’s not, it’s for ratings not tracking - and block the download.
We’re working on changing the redirect now. You might get a second copy of TWiT, but the downloads should work from now on.
Stay tuned for a further explanation of what we were trying to do. Again, apologies. It’s should be fixed tonight.
All affected feeds have been regenerated. Depending on your app or software, you may see the fix immediately or it may take a little while…but the fix is in place.
Thanks for the quick reaction and explaining what happened and to @PDelahanty for getting the feeds changed so quickly. That is very much appreciated.
@Leo, you have a very tech aware audience and many of us are also very privacy consciousness.
I/we understand that TWiT needs to make some decisions commercially in order for it to survive. We even had a long thread about how willing many of your listeners would be to pay a subscription to help the network.
As you have always stated that you don’t do tracking and never want to, it was a bit of a shock to find that the downloads were being blocked, because they were going through a tracking link (personally, I don’t block advertising per se, just tracking). It felt almost like a betreyal of your principals.
May I respectfully suggest that something as big as this decision be announced in advance. If you had explained exactly what information you want to collect and if you had a custom domain, such as twit.adentifi.com, I think many of us would have been willing to whitelist such a domain to help TWiT remain in business. Either in advance at the end of the last episode of each podcast before the change or on the community, as well as the TWiT.tv site (I download the podcasts and visit the main website rarely, but come here daily, whereas other listeners/viewers possibly do it the other way round).
Again. we understand TWiT has to do things to stay in business, but please communicate things like this in advance in the future.
I’m confused. @Leo said the redirect was not for tracking. Was it just being used to count the download? Or maybe they’re being used as a redirect service that’s been flagged since they offer tracking as well? Based on Leo’s post this change does not sound like it had anything to do with privacy. Could someone clarify?
Also is this why there are now 2 Security Now! Feeds in Pocket Casts? I’m always worried I’m subscribed to a feed that isn’t getting counted.
This thread was from back in March. We’re not using Barometric. (We’re counting downloads internally, but also have Chartable as our backup.)
Ad for 2 feeds, I see Security Now audio listed once in Pocket Casts (iOS) and our 3 different video feeds, but don’t see anything inappropriately duplicated there.
Since you’re about the only one complaining, it would seem likely the problem is on your end. Check into your settings to find out why your configuration is blocking the downloads. Do you have some configuration that blocks Chartable? (It has been added to some block lists.)
This has cropped up before and it looks like one of our redirects has been recently added to an ad block list. Like many podcasts we redirect through several services for download measurements and ad tracking.
To continue providing podcasts free to you, ad tech and dynamically inserted ads are necessary tools for TWiT. Please ad the following URLs to your ad blocker’s whitelist:
Sometimes i see unsure sites eventhough i know their ok will have that issue. for exepull my macs webower unsdertannds Steam.com and will let though even though i marked it melware site, but not gog.com even though it’s my ok list. So i sees the DRM free gaming store gog.com as a bad site.
