Hosts: Guce domain breakage

[llacb47]

This domain guce.huffpost.com breaks visiting huffpost.com, because of how Verizon Media
have set up their stupid cookie consent system. On any Verizon Media
site, on your first visit from that IP/device in a year (?), you will be redirected to the guce subdomain. If you are in a place with no privacy laws, you will be redirected back to your destination. If you are in EU, you will be redirected to consent.yahoo.com to give consent for cookies to be placed. Otherwise you will not be able to visit any Verizon Media sites. This is hard to reproduce, as they keep track of it server-side I think.

Other sites where this may occur:

aol.com
aol.ca
aol.co.uk
engadget.com
compuserve.com
isp.netscape.com
huffingtonpost.ca
huffingtonpost.co.uk
huffingtonpost.com.au
rivals.com
techcrunch.com
verizonmedia.com
yahoo.com

[lightswitch05]

Thanks for the info, I'll keep an eye on it. Maybe someone else will have some more information to provide

[llacb47]

aol.co.uk redirects to https://guce.advertising.com/collectIdentifiers

So that's another breakage right there.

[llacb47]

Just ran into this:

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/jk-rolwing-transphobic-tweet_uk_5ab77230e4b054d118e3b789

Here's what visiting that page looks like from a US IP, pihole enabled (inaccesible): https://streamable.com/m1lx0o

Here's what visiting that page looks like from a US IP, pihole disabled: https://streamable.com/pxz1aq

Here's a video showing some more inaccessible Verizon Media sites from a UK IP (proxy): https://streamable.com/r08ooo

[lightswitch05]

Thanks for the follow up @llacb47 - really A+ feedback. So the ask here is to whitelist both guce.advertising.com and guce.huffpost.com?

[llacb47]

Yep, think so

Edit: to check if a Verizon Media site is using this, the guce subdomain will CNAME to real.rotation.guce.aws.oath.cloud. I've never seen it on isp.netscape.com or compuserve.com though (probably because those are ancient domains used by almost nobody).

Edit 2: on second thought I think the guce subdomain exists on all Verizon Media properties, but the hard cookie wall is implemented on site-to-site basis and GeoIP.

Edit 3: Rivals.com totally blocks UK. lol

Rivals is not available from your location
You are attempting to access Rivals from a location that is not currently allowed, either due to local laws such as GDPR or for security reasons. If you feel you are encountering this page in error, please email us at [email protected]

Edit 4: even worse, sometimes they do the redirects from client-side with the script https://s.yimg.com/oa/guce.js. (encountered on ryot.org with UK ip)

[lightswitch05]

Whitelisted!

[llacb47]

Thanks!