news-app-events.apple.com, news-events.apple.com, news-notification-events.apple.com, & news-sports-events.apple.com

[celenityy]

Which domain(s) should be blocked?

news-app-events.apple.com
news-events.apple.com
news-notification-events.apple.com
news-sports-events.apple.com

Why should these domain(s) be blocked?

news-sports-events.apple.com is actually already being blocked, as it is a CNAME from prod-event-relay-sports-api.v.aaplimg.com. I originally assumed the events in these domains was referring to events as in just news events, but after noticing the discrepancy of news-sports-events.apple.com being blocked and doing some research, it turns out they're actually referring to events as in analytics/telemetry.

Here is the relevant output of the defaults read com.apple.newscore command on macOS to confirm this:

{
    "com.apple.news.default_event_endpoint" = "https://news-events.apple.com/analyticseventsv2/async";
    "com.apple.news.notification_receipt_event_endpoint" = "https://news-notification-events.apple.com/analyticseventsv2/async";
}

I've had news-app-events.apple.com, news-events.apple.com, news-notification-events.apple.com, & news-sports-events.apple.com blocked for several days now (Much longer in the case of news-sports-events.apple.com due to the CNAME), and have not noticed any issues (or heard any complaints 😅). The News app still appears to function perfectly without issue.

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[github-actions[bot]]

Thank you for your support. The issue is scheduled to be fixed in the next release. You will be notified when the issue is finally fixed.

[github-actions[bot]]

This issue has been fixed in release 2024.319.15397