CNN's site is god-awful, it utilizes tons of JavaScript for the simplest of things and one of those is the player (and it even crashed my desktop FF once, which didn't happen to me in a very long time). They actually think they are protecting their video content that way (loading core player, then getting the video links through JS) when in fact they are not, but that overhead is enough to kill a weak processor such as ARM Cortex-A8, and it will actually in most cases issue 'web page not responding...' prompt on the N900. In rare cases it will get to the player, but then again the content is encoded in higher resolution than N900 can handle without hardware acceleration, so...

But it's not the fault of Flash Player, it's a fault of CNN's crappy developers. I actually haven't seen that badly organized site for a long time, just went to check out what is the problem. I'd fire any developer that would develop the way cnn.com is developed if he was working in my company.