It should be forbidden for all device manufacturers to make apps, tracking, registering, etc. mandatory.
Every TV, phone, camera, tablet, fridge, ... is becoming a spying device like in the worst scifi dystopias. And as soon as the company stops supporting them they become trash to pollute the planet so they can sell you the next one.
Regulations should have come a decade a go. We own nothing, we have no privacy, we are sold products 24/7. I will vote for a goverment that protects me of this total corporate surveillance. It is their duty towards citizens to do so.
And it will happen, like feudalism died this techno-feudalism will die too.
My vote could be swayed by a policy platform making it not merely forbidden, but outright criminal, to market software and hardware that cannot function without assignment of a user id. Everything from drones to games.
In many cases this would thoroughly annoy certain authoritarian regimes that are normalised as totalitarian surveillance states. Their exports would be disrupted. What a pity.
I have been using a linux minipc with debian+xfce for more than 15 years and no regrets.
Yes having a keyboard with touchpad looked like a bit cumbersome at first, but then when al tvs went smart using an onscreen keyboard with a rf mouse is a nightmare.
I use a steam controller for controlling my media PC. Easy to type with and way more convenient than using a mouse. The only potential downside is needing steam running for keyboard capabilities but for me atleast that isn't a big deal.
Which is a genuine shame, since LG's webos was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise monolothic android market for smart tvs. I have an older one ( never updated, never connected ), but.. it is just one of many devices ( during easter yesterday I watched in weird state of drunken realization that the gizmo under tv is a set of cameras embedded into some external speakers ). I am officially out of touch with the current zeitgeist. Like... I knew I was an outlier before, but I honestly did not think it was this crazy.
The more you learn about smart TVs the worse they get. They're not cheap because TV technology got cheaper, they give away the TVs because they sell all your data. They even content match external sources over HDMI.
The Sony TV I have a blaring LED when the microphone is active, and you need to pair it independently of the remote itself so these parts function.
Sometimes during software updates, this pairing is broken, and it never tells me that the pairing has been removed, and never forces me to pair the remote.
I think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure.
If you want to modify GP’s proposal to exclude things that also have a service, how long until DJI adds a service to their drone? (It might even be a negative duration; I don’t own one, but it would shock me if there wasn’t some kind of service associated already, perhaps to prevent flying a drone in unauthorized areas [or justified as such] or allow access to some online component of camera service.)
> I think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure.
You should be able to use your phone and install software on it without signing up for the sellers services, I think there is no reason to not allow that except evil lockin.
See windows for what happens when you don't legally enforce that, its ridiculous windows forces you to sign up to their services.
Even then, almost all online services are susceptible to re-imagining such that user/session identifiers are self-declared and can be rotated/discarded at any time. To this, some folks would be yelling, "that's not how my/XYZ service works", which is a proxy statement for those unwilling to say, "my/XYZ business model is abusive".
And that of course is also why this only happens via regulation.
You may be aware, but you can acquire and use the World of Warcraft client without signing up for anything with Blizzard. You register and pay to connect to their servers.
First, to download the world of Warcraft client, you need to log into the battlenet client, which requires an account. Second, the world of Warcraft client is completely useless without a server to connect to. Alternative world of Warcraft servers are technically possible but illegal to run.
You have to reverse engineer the protocol encryption, which is illegal in some places. Also, lots of copyrighted material such as NPC names and quest text must be stored in the server and transmitted from the server to the client, which is piracy in plain terms.
We don't need new regulations. This is probably covered by commercial fraud statutes, as they represented the sale of the device as a sale of tangible personal property. There is no condition required to complete that purchase - the offer is of the physical device and the implied ability to use that device for its obvious purpose.
we need new regulations - the solution currently would be following what you say and suing the company in I guess small claims court or a class action suit for lots of people mad about the same thing against a single company that they make drag out for years while making money doing the same scam and then the payout will just be the cost of doing business.
The small claims courts solution of course not everybody has the time or resources to do that, so the company wins that way.
We need new regulations that stops it before it gets to the point where you have to go to small claims court or class action to redress the wrong.
No, you need a government that enforces it’s laws.
When people are speeding, you don’t need individuals to sue them in small claims court to enforce the speed limit. Having that requirement for consumer goods is bizarre.
New regulation i.e. more civil law. Which require you to sue in a small claims court to be enforced. How does this change anything, when as GP said there are already civil laws?
many regulations are enforced by government agencies that prevent the product from being sold if they do not match the regulations, the civil laws the GP pointed to are contract laws which means that the buyer if they feel ripped off has to sue.
Omitting a regulator makes enforcement a civil matter and the entire burden is placed on the consumer, which is to say, the legal scales are tipped throughly in favour of rogue manufacturers. Good luck suing DJI; you’ll obtain neither satisfaction nor restitution, and it’ll take years of being strung along by lawyers to realise it.
The even worse outcome of failing to protect the consumer at the point of sale is you’ve tacitly swallowed the tenets of an authoritarian surveillance state.
We need new regulations and they have to bite so bad the surveillance capitalism companys go bankrupt. If its working , the prices for devices go up because the thirsty road between oasis is priced in. We also would get real innovations as the companies would have to develop real USP again .
I live in Europe and I love this kind of regulation, but I hate other stupid over-regulations we have here. Yes, you can have good regulation and over regulation at the same time.
When the governments all over the world are making their citizens download mobile apps I doubt whether there will be any regulation prohibiting hardware manufacturers forcing apps on consumers.
I would go further, it should not be (just) forbidden, but taboo. Just like it is taboo to install a camera in a bathroom or to listen in to private conversations.
If I have a thing, that thing should obey me. Be it a crowbar, a PC, a smart lamp or whatever. It's a value in and of itself that I can trust in my things. What about criminals? Sure, it is convenient a car can spy on a criminal and tell the police where they are, but we shouldn't allow that. Just like it would be convenient to force priests and lawyers to tell there secrets, but we as a society decided that there is greater value in confidentiality.
I mean especially for a society like the US which is traditionally individualistic and distrustful towards government etc., it should be a matter of principle that "my stuff" doesn't spy on my and serves me and no one else.
> Just like it is taboo to install a camera in a bathroom or to listen in to private conversations.
Give it 5 years. The xiaomi or LG above the bed is likely already watching and listening. Interesting how the taboo shifted from "no camera in the apartment" to "no camera in a bathroom". In many short term rentals you have outright always connected IP camera installed inside apartment because of "break ins", "squatters", etc. The owners don't see a problem, don't accept complains.
Oh, there are already cameras in bathrooms. Everywhere that has an infrared sensor near your buttcheeks that auto-flushes, or on a urinal staring into your crotch, or simply on a soap dispenser, blinking impassively until you lather up.
Those IR sensors are basically cameras; they are wired up for power, they trigger with your image.
So don’t act all surprised when they are hacked and subverted to the visible spectrum and recording capabilities.
IR motion/proximity sensors are not basically cameras. You can't get an actual image from them. They are essentially a single, unfocused pixel tuned to a wide angle with a narrow filter tuned to specific wavelengths. Some of them will have a few extra pixels to try and reject background motion, but still we're talking like 3 or 4 pixels for a whole scene.
Sure, you and I can "know this" intellectually, but the end result is that there are conscious machines lurking in every public restroom, and they await our presence, and upon our arrival they awaken and they spring to life and perform their service for the hu-man whose body temperature is somewhat normal.
So it matters not whether it's one pixel or 50 megapixels doing the work there, what matters is that everyone who attends a baseball game or eats at a restaurant is accustomed to a conscious machine that can "see" their buttcheeks well enough to know exactly when to activate the flusher without any pesky hu-man touching it.
And that there is electrical power and, probably, networking available in the restrooms so that the conscious machines can stay alive and discuss buttcheek sightings with one another and their mothership.
If you'd hide your spy camera in the soap dispenser viewing angle you'd hide your camera anywhere. You could choose to only use manual cisterns and you'd still have to worry about cameras hiding to see your junk. Probably even moreso since you're really got something to hide tbh, Streisand effect and all.
I first encountered this pattern in a rare wearable device, over a decade ago. I bought it from someone and had to contact them to deregister the device.
The foot in the door was theft prevention. Crime rates in the targeted regions of those devices was the original motivation and the enabler. From Chesterton's Fence principle, that has to be solved before the zero consumer ownership problem can be solved.
It's been awhile since the populist has risen up and demanded the government actually do their jobs rather than get rich and catering to the rich coasting on the destruction of our privacies, rights, institutions, and freedoms.
The fact nearly zero legislation has been introduced to punish companies for violating the protection of our data with the bazillions of data leaks is telling of which master they serve.
We need to make small claims court far more accessible. But outside of the GDPR, there's also just weirdness in terms of what is covered where. I can appreciate that having laws at the county level, the municipal level can be onerous to comply with, so you want things at the national level -- if not international.
But as soon as you do that, some asshat works to reduce regulation because "regulation bad" without any qualifiers. And then as you say, lack of enforcement, is that alternative to this.
Give them their laws, make them feel as if things have been done, but then don't enforce. You're in the same boat, but people "feel" better.
This is a bit of a tangent, but where I live you have to cook a hamburger to safe temperatures. It is illegal to do otherwise, unless it is freshly ground in house, and we have actual, real inspectors that will ensure safe handling practices.
(This isn't me railing about eating raw meat, I eat my steak med-rare. But that's a steak, if you're going to cook a hamburger that way, you need to wash the outside, grind it up, and cook+eat it within hours. Many restaurants are buying mass produced burger paddies and not even cooking them, which is pure insane.)
Yet when I was in California, it's OK to just present a charred outside, a raw inside, along with loads of parasites. The restaurant is covered if they put up a sign saying something about 'raw meat can make you sick' or whatever.
So every restaurant puts up the sign, then just doesn't care about cooking it to safe temps. Yee-haw, FREEDOM!
Point is, people themselves, everywhere ... whether it's a small business or just their customers, don't even know, understand, or really care.
And this is the true problem. People can't even understand the risks of raw meat, something I was taught in public school when, oh I don't know, freakin' 10 years old!
While it doesn't seem that difficult to people on this forum likely, it surely is for the average person. Clearly.
Right? People need to learn to read the small print. “Needs valid subscription for all features to work” no thanks. If something like this isn’t informed before the purchase you have a valid reason for a return/ refund.
Yeah, everybody here agrees. The main problem is to get this implemented and this will not happen by just venting here. So I'm still waiting for someone with good ideas.
Regulations would absolutely be nice to have, I do like how the EU does actually try to get some good regulations down, my biggest problem with them is though that they don't have any teeth. A lot of the time the cost of the relatively small fines are baked into the cost of doing business if they get caught in breach. It's infuriating. Maybe a fixed percentage of revenue from the services or product that infringes would be more appropriate.
i paid an extra £50 for a washing machine without WiFi, but I'm not sure they'll be around in ten years. my microwave oven has two knobs: how hot and how long.
My washing machine is about 20 years old; I changed the carbon brushes for the second time recently (they last about 7 years); everything else seems fine and I hope the machine will last forever. It's just a drum with a big electric motor, a valve for water in, another for water out.
I’ve been preaching the Gospel of Knobs for decades. When I was a kid, a microwave had a power knob (already at 100) and a time knob (0-45min, with finer gradations for the first 10-20 minutes). To start heating, just twist the time knob to the time required.
A few years later all microwaves had chiclet keypads with terrible user interfaces. They’ve improved from there over the years but never to the convenience of the original knob layout.
A knob is way more annoying than the single button modes on my GE Profile.
I put whatever leftovers in there. Pasta, chicken and rice, soups, BBQ, doesn't matter. I lightly cover it. Press Reheat. Perfect every time. I don't have to judge how much to turn two knobs.
Same goes for potatoes. Stab it with a fork a few times, butter and salt the outside, toss them in and press "Potato". Perfect baked potato every time.
Same goes for steaming veggies. Frozen or fresh, doesn't matter. Toss them in a bowl, put a bit of water/butter/seasonings in it, lightly cover, press Vegetable, and boom perfectly steamed veggies.
The one-touch sensor modes on my microwave are fantastic. And this is a 20-year-old microwave, so it's not like adding this tech made it less reliable. I'll be sad if I ever need to have a different microwave.
how does it know how much stuff there is, does it weigh?
I've only ever left the how high on high, and the time is 3 minutes for chilled, 10 for frozen. so in a way I agree, two buttons saying chilled and frozen would also work for me.
Maybe it has some kind of scale. But it probably mostly handles it by tracking humidity within the chamber. Some of these modes don't even bother showing a time when they start, they'll cook for a bit and potentially power cycle the magnetron for a bit until it then sets a time and finishes. It complains when you open the door.
I've used a number of microwaves with these modes which asked for a weight. Those were pretty untrustworthy on their results, because moisture content and starting temp can vary greatly.
I stumbled upon them, but I strongly think the mid-2000's era GE Profile are probably some of the best appliances ever made. They were at least the best dishwasher, oven, and microwave I've ever used.
Part of the problem is you can't even count on appliances to last 10 years anymore. These industries can force people to accept new indignities by making sure their old device dies prematurely and the only new ones to buy are shit.
Yeah yeah, survivor bias, rose tinted glasses, conspiracy theories, blah blah. I've heard all the canned refutations. It's true. Appliance manufacturers got better at making things worse.
And even if the device doesn't die early, it will eventually have to be replaced for one reason or another. I got 20 years out of my Honda, which wasn't great but not terrible either, but trying to replace it with something new that had comparable reputation for reliability and also no touch screen computer spyware bullshit was a serious problem. My only choice was Mazda and the although my new car does have the physical buttons and knobs I want, they are easily the worst quality buttons and knobs. All mushy with no satisfying clicks. One company holding out and selling cars or appliances without the new horse shit isn't enough, because without comparable competition they are still free to cut corners and make something worse than could be purchased in the past.
Absolutely. But the technocratic system we are moving into requires "smart" everything and being de-anonymised online, at least for governments and corporations.
I bought an android phone that worked and soon it will reset every 3 days, so Im unreachable unless I enter the PIN. What kills the idea of having a secondary phone just in case.
It will only reset every 3 days if you don't unlock it. I'm pretty sure most people unlock their phones within 3 days. There are some concerns from people using their phones as unattended mobile hotspots; this concern is valid there. However you can just disable the device PIN or turn off the feature in this case.
As far as I know an Android phone isn’t unreachable after reboot, it simply has the same locked screen as always. The only difference is the difficulty to unlock it without the PIN. So in your case it would reboot once (not every 3 days) and then just continue doing nothing.
Well after the reboot Android enters the Before First Unlock state which is significantly more secure. I don't know if that influences the ability to receive regular phone calls, but I'm pretty sure Whatsapp/signal calls won't work.
I own an iPhone (and iPad). It forces me to re-enter my device password, every couple of days. Has done that, for ages.
I think that can be disabled, though. I know of a couple of folks that won’t even enable Face ID. I think that’s insane. The phone has our entire life on it. The thought of having that much information available to any pickpocket is sobering.
I refuse to use custom apps for things like banking and store loyalty, etc. I keep a photo of my store loyalty card’s barcode in my Photos app, because it does get me significant discounts, occasionally, but I won’t install their app.
Most of these custom apps seem to be pretty shoddy quality, in my opinion (I’m a snob, though. Many folks don’t seem to mind). They seem to be written with some kind of hybrid system, and some are little more than webviews.
It was not clear from a recently posted article on the matter that this would be a setting, but from the change log it does appear that it can be switched off.
> Enables a future optional security feature, which will automatically restart your device if locked for 3 consecutive days.
What's disingenuous is the opposite: using the excuse of security to force more and more user hostile spying features on every device. Same with children.
I wonder what the "free-market" types will say to minimize criticisms like those in this thread once everything that can possibly be purchased requires bending over for this sort of abuse.
Is the fantasy that some entrepreneurial savior will come along and voluntarily forgo all the massive spying profits in order to cater to the minute proportion of consumers perceptive enough to realize they're getting molested on the daily?
How about smartphones, for example? "Vote with your wallet," says the smirking corporatocrat, "and just buy a mobile operating system that respects your personal privacy." Alright professor, looks like my choices are iOS or Android, so I'm kind of hosed either way? Unless I want to return to a 2004 feature set, or perhaps a GNU/Linux paperweight with a 20-minute battery life that can't use banking apps or place phone calls?
I exaggerate (but in my opinion only slightly), and sincere apologies for tone--but it's quite frustrating to be met again and again with such a smug dismissal of what to many of us feels like an inescapable horror. This depraved race to the bottom, with every MBA-steered ship vying to see who can violate us the hardest, seems to be standard practice these days, and "purchase different products" puts the onus on consumers to fix what isn't their fault in a way that leaves an awful taste in my mouth.
Wow, this was not a "smug corpo" opinion? I renovated a house recently, and had a plethora of choices for cheap smart options, instead after research I found some expensive options with MQTT support for HomeAssistant, they got my money.
I wanted to buy an etablet but Remarkable has a subscription, so I bought a smaller brand, it's worse, but they got my money.
You want a phone that respects your privacy? There isn't a business model that supports that, so don't support it. Yes you can't have your banking app, but that's the deal, you just dont like it. If no one bought it, there would be a market for alternatives.
Nothing will change these companies apart from market forces.
The way I see it, the suggestion that one can simply "vote with their wallet" is absolutely a pro-corporation stance because it pretends that consumers and megacorps have equal footing in the market. This premise is a bit of a spherical cow because it--conveniently for corporations--ignores monopoly, price fixing, anti-consumer corporate fraud at scale and flouting of regulations. Perhaps, in the frictionless vacuum of an Ayn Rand wet dream where every interaction is a transaction between two equals operating perfectly rationally, where there's no governments thus no regulatory capture, no barriers to entry, and so on, this might make sense--but in our world it does not.
You tell me that nothing will change the companies apart from market forces, but in response to another commenter you said it well yourself: "this kind of behavior should be illegal." If we had consumer protection laws, and those laws had teeth, maybe a company would have to consider the possible risk to future profits of engaging in the next abusive, ethically bankrupt scheme. It wouldn't be possible to be, as former FTC chair and antitrust warrior Lina Khan put it, "too big to care."
I'm not so naive as to imagine that more economic guardrails are a panacea for consumer suffering, but to me it seems that the globalized economy and its Western democratic hegemons have spent much of the post-WWII era on a deregulatory death march, and we can see with our own eyes how well it's going.
Hey, you're right. When I said nothing will change them I guess I should have said "nothing will change the goals of a company" apart from your money. The practicalities are hugely affected by law. Maybe I should have originally said "Vote with your money, lobby with your voice"?
Hey, we don't argue like that here. I didn't say that. I said there isn't a business model yet that supports a phone with privacy. There are a few, and they'd force you to be creative on how you interact with certain apps, but you'd have what you wanted at a cost. Hell, I'm sure a Linux Phone with a bunch of crypto apps would work fine, suck for other reasons, but there you go.
Basically impossible, or at best very impractical. Companies change their product after you buy them. This is not a hypothetical - this happens all the time. It happened to you, and to me.
My most recent example: I wanted to calibrate my display using a "calibrite display pro hl" and suddenly got prompted with a software update. After updating, an account is suddenly required. This device is way past its return date. I cannot return it. I'm now stuck with a device that cannot be used with their software without creating an account.
Another example: Philips Hue devices were changed to require an account.
These days I focus on getting commercial variants of devices, since they usually don't have cloud or smart crap in them. For example, there's commercial variants of many TVs. They don't have smart crap in them and are designed for 24/7 usage.
Completely agree that this kind of behaviour should be illegal. My thoughts are products should work from purchase with their offered feature-set (or be forced to recall), have a factory reset mode, and an opt-out of updates.
I always was told that, but I hardly believe that can work. You have to at least also do a viral YT video like the OP too or rather really have competent, independent media with a good reach doing product reviews.
I have a washing machine that won't let me use it fully without installing an app that asks for permission to track my GPS coordinates at all time, in my phone. HomeWhiz.There should be a law against selling new hardware that demands that sort of thing to function, or to have full functionality. But I would be happy if procedures to bring class-auction lawsuits against companies that engage in this kind of bait-and-ransom were somehow simpler.
At the very least, when you the current end user refuse to agree to their terms of service, the model should have to be returned, at the manufacturer's expense, irrespective of condition.
Think of renters stuck in a place with units like that! They too should have the right to require un-tracked appliances and be free from being forced to agree to additional contract overheads that aren't obvious in the price / what should be reasonable terms.
In many countries, the consumer protection laws are strong enough that consumers probably can return such appliances, as long as the facts about app requirements weren't made abundantly clear to them at the store.
Though, it's usually the store who's responsible for that refund, not the manufacturer . Still, stores are motivated to reduce return rates and will put pressure on manufactures to not do stupid things.
For things you can carry back to the store, that works well. When I buy a new washing machine, though, it's a bit more complicated:
- I go to the store and make the purchase.
- A delivery crew brings the washing machine to my house.
- They unhook my old washing machine and take it away.
- They attach my new washing machine in its place.
Even with the strongest reasonable protection laws I can imagine, the most the store would be obligated to do if the new machine is unsatisfactory would be to detach the new machine and take it away. And I've probably had to pay for one or two visits from the installers at that point. Regardless of whether the extra visit from the installers carries any extra cost for me, there's enough hassle associated with this that I can easily imagine keeping a machine where I'm not happy with some app requirement because it'd be too much trouble to make the change.
Obligatory link to Doctorow’s Unauthorized Bread (2019), a DRM-themed, uh… thriller? polemic?… of a novella. Deals with the themes you discuss: large appliance manufacturer malfeasance, intrusive exploitation beyond the scope of the product’s purpose, renters’ relative helplessness for the appliances to service their daily needs.
I am astounded at how much this short, humorous quote from Philip Dick's "Ubik" was prescient:
"The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.”
“I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.”
In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
“You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug.
From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door.
“I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out.
Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
Looking forward to argumentative washing machines.
> Looking forward to argumentative washing machines.
Thanks to all upthread for the reminder.
Last week I was sorta forced to install the app for the laundry room at the place I am renting.
They previously used another big service provider, and had troubles with plumbing and there was undoubtedly finger-pointing between the laundry service and the landlady, and eventually, landlady switched to a new laundry service provider, which has a very generic-sounding app.
So you can pay two ways (no coins and no currency): obtain a stored-value card from the little kiosk in the laundry room (it will cost you, like $10 just for the card with $0 on it.) or you can install the mobile app, and load money into your account. (The account is not shared with any stored-value card, so they'll be separate.)
So last time, I opted for a card, and I immediately punched a hole in it, so I could string it to a lanyard. That disabled the card! It is some sort of RFID/NFC thing which has little spiderweb tendrils, rather than a single chip in one place that can be avoided.
So this time around, I installed the Android app. I loaded money on the card (of course you can't specify the exact amount, but you select a dropdown, and the $10 or $15 or $25 or $40 is never an exact multiple of the cost of a load.)
And the mobile app demands a lot of permissions. It wants camera access, and Nearby Devices, and Location, and probably Precise Location too. And then you need to enable Bluetooth, and you also need to be standing right inside the laundry room in order for the app to go anywhere (yes, you can't even check your account profile, or balance, or add money, unless you're inside the laundry room, so fuck me if I wanted to set this up in the comfort of "my" home before going down there in public.)
And the app relies on a shitty QR code scan anyway. I mean, you can tap the NFC stored-value card, but your phone won't tap-to-pay the fuckin' washing machines. And they don't take credit cards, or coins or bills. And the soda machines here don't take credit cards, or bills either, only coins. LOL!
And the app has a fucked-up self-image. It lists 16 washing machines. There are 6 in the room. So there are 10 "phantom machines". I informed the Support dudes like in Marh 2024, when they first installed everything. I told them the app was a dumbass and listed too many machines. I showed them how I was standing in the correct room and the other two rooms had likewise fucked "phantom machines" too, but I didn't care about them. We went around in circles with Support asking for "more information" and I cc:ed the landlady, and she was rather bemused, but more-or-less a bystander on the whole issue.
I was sort of indignant on behalf of the other residents who may be confused. I wasn't personally too confused, but imagine if Grandma installed her iPhone app or something and tried to start Machine #13.
And it's been 13 months and they still haven't rectified the list of machines.
The old service provider, they used to provide a public website; you could see each machine and whether it was active or not, in a little widget, it was very Web 1.0 but with animation. It didn't use Flash or anything fancy. There was no authentication to see these laundry machines running. I suppose that was too vulnerable, and so they locked it up in the app. And of course the app requires you to be in the fucking location rather than checking from the comfort of your home.
So I used to be able to see availability before I took everything down and went into the laundry room and bugged the other resident ladies. But now I can't see availability until I barge into the fucking room itself. Fuck you app makers. I have a login. Let me see whether I can start my wash or if I can wait in the comfort of my home. Now I need to make a special trip just to check on things, or to add funds or even just to check my balance.
It's a failure of both management, and the developers carrying out management's tasteless design/vision which leads to this sort of shit. Not the kind of world I want to live in, and I wish these organizations would get punished somehow for the shit they put out into the world.
I imagine there are lots of folks here who could answer this question. I like to assume that no individual engineer/developer/product manager is so unscrupulous as to make this sort of kafkaesque nightmare into a reality, but somewhere along the line from concept to implementation, some individual needs to demand, create or at least suggest such hostility to the user. My question is, how does this usually go? Is it a vague implicit target set by management that can only be achieved by abusing the user, giving both the engineers and managers a plausible deniability? "I'm just following orders". Or are there folks during the development phase suggesting and promoting these awful "features"? I'm guessing the answer will be unsatisfying to me, that no individual or group of individuals is really responsible, and it's just the incentive structure of the system that's emerged over time. Which just begs the deeper, but more complicated question, how did we get here?
The same technology used to foist madness upon someone is also used to insulate the creator from feedback. Its a double edge sword.
Virtually every touchpoint of society is being turned into this awful dynamic as its unregulated. All actors with power take their playbook from a familiar guy in a turtleneck on stage pointing to his users and saying " youre holding it wrong". As if every one participating in this "experiment" is indeed a willing "user"
In terms of professional ethics, where should a product manager stand, when the business asks them for a customer-hostile solution like this (or on the opposite end of the developers suggest a customer-hostile technical solution)?
If you don't have enough money to do that, immediately start looking for a new job. If you are feeling lucky you can try weaponised incompetence to try to prevent this from being shipped.
The RFID card will have a chip too. The 'tendrils' are the aerial which is a thick loop (of many wires) round the outside. So punching a hole in one corner is a non-starter, but there's a good chance you could punch one in the middle if you work out where the chip is
Of course, the simpler option is just to get a lanyard with card holder.
I had a high-end dishwasher from the early 2000's in this house when I moved in. It had a lot of smarts to it. It would constantly monitor turbidity to change soap mixtures and would decide when it wanted to drain and add more water in case the tub water was really dirty.
I imagine this is what that "AI" feature is doing.
Unfortunately, governments are highly incentivised to allow mandatory on-device spyware to feed your location into the global information market.
Why run a sophisticated surveillance and information retrieval system when a you can just ask big-tech for the data for free, or buy from the market at a fraction of the running cost of a dedicated system?
Personally I think the best way to combat this is for concerned people to build businesses with privacy as a feature. Dumb TVs, dumb washing machines etc.
At least a requirement to let customers know in big letters that the device/appliance you're going to buy would not function without App + Wifi + Internet plan + GPS, and that you're not buying an appliance but a limited license to use it.
Out of interest did you know this before buying it? I'm interested in how they would advertise that kind of feature. I feel like that needs to be a regulated warning label on the box.
This is the kind of stuff that I feel a coordinated campaign to have consumers take companies to small claims court over would be very effective in combating.
I'm sure a bunch of elderly magistrates would feel that this kind of requirement is obscene and would readily side with the claimant.
As well, I would say pick a shame domain and make some noise about this, collate feedback from other consumers, etc. Spread that constantly until the manufacturer can justify it or relent. Hassle them for comment and until they reply to your satisfaction, note on the site that they haven't responded despite repeated attempts at contacting them.
The action cam market is a bit weird at the moment. The others have caught up to GoPro, and some say even surpassed. But the field is very messy, you can't trust half the stuff.
Dji and Insta360 are very good at giving away free stuff to influencers, and to tech reviewers with strings attached (like forbidding side-by-side comparisons). Sock-puppets constantly recommending these brands, etc.
As a consumer it's very hard to make an informed decision on what to buy. Can't trust anything you read about the models.
DJI products are extraordinary and way above the competition.
But registration is a huge pain, yes. Two solutions: 1/ Buy used; the previous owner probably didn't do a factory reset -- if they did, return it and try again. 2/ Use a disposable email. On the Action pro, once "registered", nothing happens and the device never asks for anything.
Drones are different, they sometimes need to be attached to a proper account; when that happens, create yet another disposable email and "register" again.
Yeah you watch advertisements and promo videos shot with some professional equipment with people flying around in everything imaginable and explosions all over the place, all in high resolution and crisp quality. Then copy the footage from SD Card and it looks like a turd.
To me, it increasingly seems like the US lacks cultural autonomy.
US companies are A-OK with censoring movies and games to gain access to the Chinese market, for example remember when Blizzard banned a US player in an US tournament to please Chinese censors? But in the other direction, it seems Chinese companies aren't willing to "return the favor" and modify their products to account for American sensibilities when they export to the US. Perpetual surveillance and only little property rights protection is how everyday life in China works, so Chinese consumers won't be bothered by this. It only bothers US consumers, who are used to more privacy and solid property rights.
Isn’t the solution to this to just regulate for American sensibilities in the US market? I don’t think it’s true that US companies respect privacy, but if it is then you can regulate for that and the Chinese companies will have to do the same in the US market. They’re not going to “return the favour” if it’s not regulated for and their products do fine in the market without.
> It only bothers US consumers, who are used to more privacy and solid property rights.
Which US are you talking about? The one I know is a capitalist free-for-all, where the word "regulation" is anathema. The vast majority of Us-based products and services spy on the consumer to make an extra penny, and nobody cares.
It really baffles me to hear someone say that the US isn't under perpetual surveillance, when the NSA literally piped all phonecalls to their servers twenty years ago, before they realized they can just make companies give them all the data.
Which US consumer are they talking about? The vast majority of consumers don't give a damn about their complete lack of privacy. They don't act like they care at all when a corporation leaks their most sensitive data, their own government acts unconstitutionally, and so on. Practically nobody is bothered by any of it.
Until literally today, I was using what’s commonly called a “senior phone” — just a regular mobile phone with a keypad, on which you can’t install any apps. This fact made it impossible for me to use various products and services (e.g. DJI or Meta Quest, which also require an app, or mobile banking transfers that are only accessible via smartphone apps).
I resisted for a long time, but in the long run it became very exhausting (for example, people sending me MMS messages I couldn’t open, or having to reply using that clunky keypad on the phone).
In the end, I chose convenience. I believe we’re all to blame.
You didn't choose convenience, you chose what was necessary to operate in modern society, much like why you were paying for phone service to begin with.
The idea that this stuff is a meaningful choice is laughable. Society requires use of a smartphone now. We're 20 years down this road, there is no going back
Not watching a video, but how is it legal for any company to "sell" something like this? (The video might explain that, but that's my focus of what I care about out of the situation.)
It's about false advertising: they say "our product gets images like this and that", which is Okay and something the buyer uses to base their decision. And there is an expectation that their product will do as advertised. But they never say front-and-center "our product won't function without a valid Internet connection and an approved photo ID, because we use our product to harvest your data."
It’s also not allowed to sell a coffee machine that electrocutes its users every time it’s turned on, then burns down the house for good measure.
Sure, someone will make a video “this coffee machine killed my wife and burned down my house with my children in it”, and you would say it’s the market working as intended…
There are standards the stuff sold need to meet, even if ultimately you are always “free to not buy it”.
They are good at some things (allocating resources, adapting to changing supply and demand, revealing preferences and discovering prices, incentivising innovation and socially useful risk taking, …)
and bad at others (ensuring new entrants don’t repeatedly make the same safety mistakes, preventing exploitation of customers, protecting IP, solving for long term social needs, maintaining national resilience against threats, preventing waste…)
Fetishisation of markets is the issue.
Though markets and generally free trade are incredibly important and have brought (and hopefully will continue to bring) great benefits to humanity, they also have downsides, and other tools (regulation, taxation, industrial strategy, …) are needed to balance these.
This is one such case. The market is creating downsides that society should not tolerate.
It should also be pointed out, that the regulatory laws are what _defines_ the market. They are even more fundamental to a market's existence than the companies producing goods and services, or the consumers buying them.
Without regulatory law, the "market" devolves to a relapse into the warring states era. Why shouldn't amazone hire a mercenary force to blow the vault doors off of Ft. Knox and carry all the gold home to Bozo?
Because there are laws against it! And that would render the action unprofitable. Bozo sure as sh1t doesn't care about stealing from anyone, or even someone getting killed, if it means he gets a bunch more shekels.
The regulatory law is more than just inherent, it's a mandatory component of anything that's going to have more resemblance to a "market" than to Mad Max...
So, the profiting companies actually _require_ a regulatory structure, to prevent the most wealthy and powerful from just taking whatever they have.
The question is in also making these regulations benefit the consumer as well as the supply side.
In the US this part is currently in rather complete failure...
The problem with letting “the market” decide things like this is it requires first that someone gets hurt. Then they need to wage and information campaign against said company. Or we can just have a law that says this is bad and be done with it.
Have you read enough history to know what life was like before we got rid of child labor, established weekends as a norm, regulated food products, etc.? Or do you assume that the free market provides those things because you’ve only lived in an age where you can take them for granted?
We have a terrible system, built around power disparity, dishonesty, unequal and difficult access to remedies for dishonesty, and this obsession with the idea that only individuals should act individually, and not collectively as a governing body, to prevent and punish harms.
Comments like these and knowing people like you are in charge make me fear for the future.
Companies, unchecked, will kill as many people as they can to make more profit. History proves this, it’s not a hypothetical. Laws are the only lever we have to keep profit incentive aligned with the common good.
And the list of companies whose products I won't buy grows. I just hope the next hammer I buy doesn't come with a head that turns to funny putty when it loses internet connection.
Any Australian buyers should be able to get an instant refund under consumer law (goods not as advertised). For those who don't want a refund and have the time and energy, fun could be had with the consumer law around "Unfair contract terms" [1].
Where is the part where he doesn't click "Agree", boxes the thing up, and sends it back?
I've sent stuff back for that sort of thing. Often, I'll look at a EULA and decide I don't want it. Mandatory arbitration with anybody other than the American Arbitration Association is a killer.
1. Most people don't actually read long EULAs. And who can blame them? We have been trained not to read them, and if you do, you are spending a significant amount of your life on a tedious and frustrating endeavor.
2. If you do read it, it is a long document in difficult and intentionally misleading legalese, where you can easily miss something.
3. If you don't agree to the terms, and return it, does the company pay for the shipping? Even if they do, you have now wasted a fair amount of time on this product you won't actually use.
4. Depending on the product there may not be anything on the market that has an acceptable EULA. In part due to the fact that few enough people read the EULA that companies can afford to lose business from the people who do.
I suppose consumers need to be able to pool their effort to read this. We upload it to a site, see the comments others have made and then decide. If there are changes between the comments and now, then those are highlighted as well. A EULAgrokker.
EULAs are not hard to read. You skim them and look for the arbitration clause, the indemnification clause, the privacy and ownership of your intellectual property clauses, and anything that says "sole discretion".
Nice camera, shame about the app - it's pretty bad in and of itself (you need it for remote shutter), but it has a horrific data collection/sharing T&C.
Fortunately, in Android, you can block network access for an app.
If I couldn't do that, I'd need to root e/os/ to install firewall to prevent, or, not use the app - which would mean no remote shutter on the camera.
AFAIK, there is no way to discover the T&C until you have installed the app.
Tell that to Haas, one of the only US based CnC machine manufacturers.
They instruct technicians to disable features for hardware if you haven’t paid the licensing fee for that hardware. Swapped the 10 head tool changer for a 14 head from a downed machine? Sucks to be you buddy it won’t work because you haven’t licensed the feature to have 14 tools! Oh you bought the machine used? And they swapped it for you? Sucks to be you pay up or it’s scrap metal to you.
I got exactly the same kind of things with Xiaomi security camera.
I used to have one and it was not like that, but now you need to pay a monthly plan to have the last day of events available "in the cloud".
It might be ok for me if it was just in the case that you store things in the cloud, but it looks like that if you don't take the subscription, even if you store things on a local sdcard, when there is an intruder alert, you will just receive the alert but you will not be able to see remotely the 10s video of the event like what is done when you use their subscription.
Also you have nag screen for the subscription everywhere. And obviously, there is no way to store things in the cloud anywhere else than using their own service. And especially not using common standard protocols.
What pisses me off is that Chinese brands, like Xiaomi, used to be "you just buy a device", no frill, good value and no need to rely on Chinese services and co.
Now, DJI, Xiaomi, they are following the trend of American and European crappy products selling you licence to products that you don't really own but that requires an all time one connection and subscription to Chinese services.
I saw the change coming hard when used to buy Xiaomi phones regularly, before you got the phone with a very light OS, crap free, it was a big relief coming from Samsung phones.
Now it is probably worse than Samsung, you have hundreds of mandatory apps by default for useless games and utils like bubble war, candy crush, facebook things, and dozens of nag screen to share your data or take subscriptions...
Guess what? Canon has now switched its "Camera Connect" app to a cloud based version, where you need an account first to access to the camera pictures that are available only over WiFi Direct.
Louis Rossmann, the well-known YouTube personality famous for his candid and critical takes on tech and repair issues, dives into a hands-on demonstration with the DJI Osmo Action camera in this clip. He begins by attempting to power on the device—a process that doesn’t work straightforwardly. Instead of simply activating the camera, he’s forced to scan a QR code to download the DJI Mimo app, a hefty 741‑megabyte download, in order to use what he disparagingly calls a “fancy dash cam.” What if their website/app/cloud stops working?
Throughout the video, Louis expresses his frustration with the convoluted setup. He mocks the limitations and mandatory app requirements that not only restrict the straightforward use of a device he spent $300 on but also grant the app intrusive permissions over his phone. This cumbersome process, including reading lengthy and restrictive legal terms like “limited license to use,” underscores his discontent with the system. Ultimately, his sarcastic tone and biting commentary make it clear that he isn’t interested in ever going through such a hassle again, and he’s already planning to return the device.
This is the way. Mass consumer activist action, hundreds or thousands of purchases that turn around and invoke statutory rights and refunds, as protest. It won’t change until we make them hurt.
I'm keeping my gadgets to the bare minimum and if in the future I need to purchase something I truly need I think I will be just fine buying second hand and couple of generations old. There's no other way. Why we don't have more laws protecting customers from these buy-baits I still don't know. People should absolutely boicott and spread the word about these pieces of junk being put in the market. KUDOS to the author for taking the time to document this.
Asking to add an app to use a device is one thing. DJI literally had him install the app and give full camera permissions to activate the device. He tried giving it access once and clicking ask for permission every time. Neither worked, he had to give full phone camera permissions.
Why would a camera need a phone camera access if not for surveillance?
Hopefully you can return it. I also really dislike needing an app for stuff that shouldn't need an app. If only there was a "hide my email" like feature for crap apps... maybe a special highly restricted sandbox.
They say: “Just buy hi-end/expensive products, they are free from this bullshit!”. But this is simply not true. Almost all my home appliances (oven, air conditioners, dishwasher, washing and dryer machines) are from top tier lines and cost me a ton of money, but they still had WiFi and mobile applications. But, one important difference - all of them could work normally without it. I haven’t connected any of them to network and not going to do this ever.
Was just browsing earlier today for some potential upgrades from my GoPro10 and was looking at these too, that’s disappointing, guess wont be looking at these.
Unfortunately this is one of those cases where regulators came in handy. The regular Joe/Jane without the knowledge of the inner works of tech companies simply cannot fathom to which extent those companies go to track and collect data of their customers.
Enshitification at its best. This is all part of the inexorable current sweeping us along to the post capitalist society, where corporations no longer sell anything but rather rent or sell access to their things. We’re already there with phones, most consumer computers, farming equipment, cars, and gradually, more and more consumer goods.
With pervasive automation, we are accelerating towards a future where money is meaningless, but not in a nice humanistic star-trek kind of way… more in a dystopian, no need to pay wages to anyone because automation, so we just need land, natural resources, and energy kind of way.
It’s grey goo, on a macro scale so you have to get into space to see it for what it is.
The current pushes us towards a time, soon, when power is the only currency that matters, and justice is reduced to the will of the stronger.
If we want to have something better than trying to compete for resources as squishy humans alongside technofacist enclaves where humans are sparse and wield unprecedented power through massive robotic capabilities, we need to start making changes now.
It’s not going to get better any time soon unfortunately. The technocrats have fully captured the US government. Turns out cyberpunk was the most accurate sci-fi portrayal of our future.
What is there of "post capitalist" in all of that? I see capital and scarcity all the way down. Maybe scarcity is artificially enforced on things that wouldn't be scarce anymore but nothing changed substantially compared to 100 years ago.
What changed is that “the people” are not serfs, they are irrelevant competitors for resources. The only thing you can do with money is pay people for their time. In the end wages is the end consumer of currency. It serves no other purpose.
We are entering a new chapter, where money will cease to be relevant at all. Only land and energy will be relevant. The elite will not need people at all anymore, people and society in general will become annoyances, at best. Everything is better when you have less people to share it with, so “depopulation” will likely be in vogue.
Technofacist enclaves will have the monopoly of coercive force, and will probably fight amongst themselves for resources, but the population of people outside those entities will be a lot like ants.
I thought it meant the change of everything to pay to play… perhaps the meaning is shifting from its original purpose and is expanding to encompass the ruining of everything by corporations in the name of greed? Idk. If seen it used a lot in that context in the last 6 months. I also thought it was just online decay, but I’ve seen it used so much in a broader sense that I think, as a new word, it’s still finding its footing in the greater lexicon.
Wait until physical camera makers not only license you the unit, but also make everything you shoot belong to them, like software camera apps (e.g., Filmic Pro) do now.
DJI can just add some mandatory firmware upgrade process that offloads your footage to the mothership, and 99.9999% will agree to everything without reading.
Canon's high-end DSLRs used to have a module to sign the RAW files as they came off the sensor, for use in law enforcement and other sectors. This was back as far as 2011.
Couldn't you replace the CCD with an adapter, connect the adapter to the video out of a computer, and then use the camera to "take a picture" of your already edited picture?
It seems to me that any "paper trail" scheme of the sort you describe would have to solve the problems of DRM to work: making the elements that report on the real world (in this case, the CCD) tamper-proof, making the encryption key impossible to extract, designing robust watermarks to avoid analog holes, etc.
So the photo print market is really weird right now.
Remember how, in the 1970s and 80s, they used to have little booths surrounded by parking-lot, and you could drive up to the Fotomat booth and drop off your 110 or 35mm film, and they would go develop it and bring back your negatives and prints, and you could drive your Dodge Charger or your Ford Fairlane to come pick them up?
And then, the pharmacies got in on this, because pharmacies are where the chemicals are at anyway. And at a pharmacy, you could have film developed, and you could also get prints, and reprints, and larger-sized prints, and framed photos and albums and greeting cards and all sorts of things.
And this pharmaceutical extension tradition carries on into the present-day. Now you can waltz into CVS or Walgreens or Wal-Mart, you can bring your USB or your microSD card, or just your phone with a cable, and you can plug in your USB or thunk down a disc, and load it into their kiosk computer, and some even have scanners. And then you can order instant photo prints! And they still can sell you albums, and framed photos, and large-format prints, and posters and whatnot.
Here's the trouble, though: phone cameras don't generate the right-sized images.
I was at a Walgreens and they were selling, like, 8x10 and 5x7 and other standard photo-sized frames and prints. And I upload a photo, and the kiosk complains. Kiosk says it's low-resolution. Kiosk shows me a sample preview, and the edges are cut off.
So I chat with the clerk there, and she tells me to just take a screenshot of the image and it'll work. LOL a screenshot, when the resolution is too low already?
And so eventually I figured out that, even if I took a 50 megapixel photograph with the phone's sophisticated camera, it would not print correctly. I told the clerk: this phone takes photos like a TV set. It's in 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios. Those are not the same as 8x10 photos!
So the pharmacies have all this tooling for conventional cameras. I suppose a DSLR could still turn out 8x10 photos. I suppose I could "crop" a photo down in my smartphone on Android. But what I really wanted was to download a PD photo from Commons.wikimedia.org and print that out in an 11x17 or larger. And that was not working out so well.
Phone cameras today are producing really impeccable photos of really impossible aspect ratios. There's a ton of tooling that is specifically made for photographs that were based on the size of negatives and the size of photo paper in the last 70 decades or so. Kodak and Fujifilm and their ilk are still haunting us.
Thankfully there are more online services. Everything I put now into Google Photos. Google Photos will happily generate a photobook and they'll even drop-ship them to my family. I have sent them cool photobooks in the past. I never got to peek at them. No complaints. Google Photos doesn't mind when your photos are a weird aspect-ratio. Google Photos will adapt. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be shown your memories.
> Google Photos doesn't mind when your photos are a weird aspect-ratio.
> ...I have sent them cool photobooks [printed and shipped by Google Photos] in the past. I never got to peek at them.
So you have no idea if the photos are stretched or cut off. (Given how many folks fail to complain about [0] godawfully misconfigured televisions that stretch, squash, or otherwise mangle what they're displaying, I wouldn't take the absence of complaints as evidence of correctly printed images.)
I bought a GoPro last year after reading about a feature HyperSmooth Pro stabilization. Granted, I didn't do an inquisition into the specifics just thinking if I bought their best camera it was supported. Feature is only available if I also subscribe to their $100 per year membership. I think without the membership some lesser, non-Pro version is available. It felt like a bait and switch situation to me when I unboxed it and tried to use the feature the first time.
Right to repair and right to own what we pay for should be supported by all of us. We are entering a dystopian nightmare where corporations and government control everything and we have no freedoms left.
I bought HomeKit camera assuming I can run it having multiple Apple devices and even paid iCloud subscription claiming "HomeKit Secure Video support". Nope! need a HomePod. Walled garden circled back and is bitting. Not so nice, innit?
I used to avoid spyware apps. My antivirus would flag them so I could remove them. Until all of them became spyware. Widely used apps by well known corporations do more intrusive and more constant tracking that the apps that my antivirus used to flag.
Avoiding these brands is one step, but it will not last long. Only the law can deal with total corporation surveillance.
It's not China doing this, it's manufacturers, wherever they are.
DJI happens to be a Chinese company but Samsung isn't, and they have been tracking what people watch on their TV (even if you're using HDMI and your own input) for years.
Big European, Asian and American brands are doing the same, washing machines requiring an account to access basic capabilities, cars phoning home, computers phoning home, phones phoning home, they all want it, they all do it.
Blaming China for this is deflecting the true culprit: the rampant notion that everything that could be sold has to be sold. Privacy doesn't matter, just put a red ribbon over it and force user to create an account and share their data in exchange for the priviledge of accessing what they thought they bought.
China didn't invent that, they sure love it, but they are not responsible for it alone.
... and they have been tracking what people watch on their TV (even if you're using HDMI and your own input) for years.
How? If you didn't give it an internet connection, how is it sending any tracking data back to the mothership? It can't guess your wifi password or anything.
TVs can be aggressivetring to connect to any Wifi network. Apparently some now also come with SIM cards.
My xiaomi TV is making thousands of request per day to their domains. I block them all using adguard/adblock, but imagine the amount of information they can get from a connected TV.
Samsung and LG and many others do this.
Look for Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) in Samsung's privacy
This interesting study from last year: A First Look at Automatic
Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
I’m a layman but have asked this question somewhere once after noticing my “never connected TV” knew who was playing in a sports game it was promoting to me (basically it knew current events that only could have came from an internet connection of some sorts as it was months after its manufacture.) Apparently there a few avenues to consider, probably more than this actually. But this is what I’ve seen discussed so maybe do some more research or perhaps maybe someone will chime in.
For starters, where do you think your router was manufactured? Can you trust it to only allow connections with your WiFi credentials?
Beyond that, there’s a broad range of products and manufacturers in an average house. Assuming none have struck a deal to do a credential-less connection with the router itself, they may be talking to each other, basically asking “do you know the WiFi?” To every device in your home. Then, they share the info with each other even though you haven’t granted it.
One of the comments in my past discussion on this topic noted that he didn’t even have his Wi-Fi setup, had just moved in to a new apartment, yet apparently his TV was knowledgeable about something similar. I don’t remember how he knew/found out but he suggested that it discovered his neighbors TV which was the same manufacturer and his neighbor did have it connected to their WiFi so the commentor’s TV leveraged the neighbors WiFi without being provided the credentials by a human.
More and more devices are coming with SIM cards baked in. You don’t pay for them, the manufacturer does, but they harvest your data whether you give them internet or not. For now I’m only aware of cars having these, but I suspect it’s just a matter of time before even cheap consumer gadgets have this too.
Really, the only answer is privacy regulation. Any other solution (just let the free market handle it, don’t give it internet access, etc) is not workable in the long term.
Only fools think the government is going to save them from corporate abuses, because they're in league. Half the time the government is the one forcing them to do it.
I don't believe it is China's fault. It is result of over-finalization of markets. Line must go up forever. Whatever can be done for that must be done. All theoretical future revenue streams must be presented to justify the line going up.
It should be forbidden for all device manufacturers to make apps, tracking, registering, etc. mandatory.
Every TV, phone, camera, tablet, fridge, ... is becoming a spying device like in the worst scifi dystopias. And as soon as the company stops supporting them they become trash to pollute the planet so they can sell you the next one.
Regulations should have come a decade a go. We own nothing, we have no privacy, we are sold products 24/7. I will vote for a goverment that protects me of this total corporate surveillance. It is their duty towards citizens to do so.
And it will happen, like feudalism died this techno-feudalism will die too.
My vote could be swayed by a policy platform making it not merely forbidden, but outright criminal, to market software and hardware that cannot function without assignment of a user id. Everything from drones to games.
In many cases this would thoroughly annoy certain authoritarian regimes that are normalised as totalitarian surveillance states. Their exports would be disrupted. What a pity.
I agree with this. I have an LG TV it basically forces you to agree to sharing data to function everytime it update.
TVs are used by multiple people too so how does that even track legally.
My partners will fly through menus agreeing to everything if I'm not there.
I'm using a universal remote that doesn't have a microphone and it complains about that too.
My Pi-hole logs are filled mostly with my LG TV and my Roku box. I get literally thousands of hits a day with them trying to phone home.
I have been using a linux minipc with debian+xfce for more than 15 years and no regrets. Yes having a keyboard with touchpad looked like a bit cumbersome at first, but then when al tvs went smart using an onscreen keyboard with a rf mouse is a nightmare.
I use a steam controller for controlling my media PC. Easy to type with and way more convenient than using a mouse. The only potential downside is needing steam running for keyboard capabilities but for me atleast that isn't a big deal.
What do you do about Netflix or other apps? They have reduced video quality without being on a certified device.
This is why I've returned to the seven seas as well
They've sealed their own fate with such a poor decision.
Get a firestick for those apps
Which is a genuine shame, since LG's webos was a breath of fresh air in an otherwise monolothic android market for smart tvs. I have an older one ( never updated, never connected ), but.. it is just one of many devices ( during easter yesterday I watched in weird state of drunken realization that the gizmo under tv is a set of cameras embedded into some external speakers ). I am officially out of touch with the current zeitgeist. Like... I knew I was an outlier before, but I honestly did not think it was this crazy.
old webos you say? https://rootmy.tv/
The more you learn about smart TVs the worse they get. They're not cheap because TV technology got cheaper, they give away the TVs because they sell all your data. They even content match external sources over HDMI.
My next TV will be a big monitor.
Content matching refers to matching refresh rate and resolution on the input source to the TV, not content identification.
there are TVs doing content recognition
The Sony TV I have a blaring LED when the microphone is active, and you need to pair it independently of the remote itself so these parts function.
Sometimes during software updates, this pairing is broken, and it never tells me that the pairing has been removed, and never forces me to pair the remote.
I find a drop of superglue in the remote microphone is very helpful for retaining a basic level of privacy.
>> Everything from drones to games.
And computers. Sure it's a good idea to have a password, but that's not the same as a user ID registered with a company.
Wouldn’t a phone be illegal under that scheme? (Because of the phone number being required for function and being a user-id.)
No, because that is service, not hardware.
I think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure.
If you want to modify GP’s proposal to exclude things that also have a service, how long until DJI adds a service to their drone? (It might even be a negative duration; I don’t own one, but it would shock me if there wasn’t some kind of service associated already, perhaps to prevent flying a drone in unauthorized areas [or justified as such] or allow access to some online component of camera service.)
> I think we can agree that a modern phone is “hardware and software” for sure.
You should be able to use your phone and install software on it without signing up for the sellers services, I think there is no reason to not allow that except evil lockin.
See windows for what happens when you don't legally enforce that, its ridiculous windows forces you to sign up to their services.
They can add all the services they want to their drone. As long as I'm not required to use them.
Even then, almost all online services are susceptible to re-imagining such that user/session identifiers are self-declared and can be rotated/discarded at any time. To this, some folks would be yelling, "that's not how my/XYZ service works", which is a proxy statement for those unwilling to say, "my/XYZ business model is abusive".
And that of course is also why this only happens via regulation.
So, world of Warcraft is illegal now?
You may be aware, but you can acquire and use the World of Warcraft client without signing up for anything with Blizzard. You register and pay to connect to their servers.
This is a dumb take - WoW wouldn’t “function” to a reasonable person’s interpretation of that word without a login.
First, to download the world of Warcraft client, you need to log into the battlenet client, which requires an account. Second, the world of Warcraft client is completely useless without a server to connect to. Alternative world of Warcraft servers are technically possible but illegal to run.
Implementing a network protocol is not illegal. Neither is writing a server.
You have to reverse engineer the protocol encryption, which is illegal in some places. Also, lots of copyrighted material such as NPC names and quest text must be stored in the server and transmitted from the server to the client, which is piracy in plain terms.
We don't need new regulations. This is probably covered by commercial fraud statutes, as they represented the sale of the device as a sale of tangible personal property. There is no condition required to complete that purchase - the offer is of the physical device and the implied ability to use that device for its obvious purpose.
we need new regulations - the solution currently would be following what you say and suing the company in I guess small claims court or a class action suit for lots of people mad about the same thing against a single company that they make drag out for years while making money doing the same scam and then the payout will just be the cost of doing business.
The small claims courts solution of course not everybody has the time or resources to do that, so the company wins that way.
We need new regulations that stops it before it gets to the point where you have to go to small claims court or class action to redress the wrong.
No, you need a government that enforces it’s laws.
When people are speeding, you don’t need individuals to sue them in small claims court to enforce the speed limit. Having that requirement for consumer goods is bizarre.
reply above also pertains here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43750123
New regulation i.e. more civil law. Which require you to sue in a small claims court to be enforced. How does this change anything, when as GP said there are already civil laws?
many regulations are enforced by government agencies that prevent the product from being sold if they do not match the regulations, the civil laws the GP pointed to are contract laws which means that the buyer if they feel ripped off has to sue.
Oh, good point.
There's isn't necessarily precedent showing the current behavior violates current laws. New laws can be more explicit
Omitting a regulator makes enforcement a civil matter and the entire burden is placed on the consumer, which is to say, the legal scales are tipped throughly in favour of rogue manufacturers. Good luck suing DJI; you’ll obtain neither satisfaction nor restitution, and it’ll take years of being strung along by lawyers to realise it.
The even worse outcome of failing to protect the consumer at the point of sale is you’ve tacitly swallowed the tenets of an authoritarian surveillance state.
We need new regulations and they have to bite so bad the surveillance capitalism companys go bankrupt. If its working , the prices for devices go up because the thirsty road between oasis is priced in. We also would get real innovations as the companies would have to develop real USP again .
We don't need no regulations.... We don't need no source control... No dark sarcasm in the GitHub comments. Hey Hacker News, leave us code alone.
When Europe tries to do this, many cry as over regulation.
I live in Europe and I love this kind of regulation, but I hate other stupid over-regulations we have here. Yes, you can have good regulation and over regulation at the same time.
When the governments all over the world are making their citizens download mobile apps I doubt whether there will be any regulation prohibiting hardware manufacturers forcing apps on consumers.
dependence on such complex devices is disgusting
I would go further, it should not be (just) forbidden, but taboo. Just like it is taboo to install a camera in a bathroom or to listen in to private conversations.
If I have a thing, that thing should obey me. Be it a crowbar, a PC, a smart lamp or whatever. It's a value in and of itself that I can trust in my things. What about criminals? Sure, it is convenient a car can spy on a criminal and tell the police where they are, but we shouldn't allow that. Just like it would be convenient to force priests and lawyers to tell there secrets, but we as a society decided that there is greater value in confidentiality.
I mean especially for a society like the US which is traditionally individualistic and distrustful towards government etc., it should be a matter of principle that "my stuff" doesn't spy on my and serves me and no one else.
> Just like it is taboo to install a camera in a bathroom or to listen in to private conversations.
Give it 5 years. The xiaomi or LG above the bed is likely already watching and listening. Interesting how the taboo shifted from "no camera in the apartment" to "no camera in a bathroom". In many short term rentals you have outright always connected IP camera installed inside apartment because of "break ins", "squatters", etc. The owners don't see a problem, don't accept complains.
Well, there's value in the case of lawyers. I for one wholeheartedly support legally invalidating whatever privileges priests have.
Oh, there are already cameras in bathrooms. Everywhere that has an infrared sensor near your buttcheeks that auto-flushes, or on a urinal staring into your crotch, or simply on a soap dispenser, blinking impassively until you lather up.
Those IR sensors are basically cameras; they are wired up for power, they trigger with your image.
So don’t act all surprised when they are hacked and subverted to the visible spectrum and recording capabilities.
IR motion/proximity sensors are not basically cameras. You can't get an actual image from them. They are essentially a single, unfocused pixel tuned to a wide angle with a narrow filter tuned to specific wavelengths. Some of them will have a few extra pixels to try and reject background motion, but still we're talking like 3 or 4 pixels for a whole scene.
Sure, you and I can "know this" intellectually, but the end result is that there are conscious machines lurking in every public restroom, and they await our presence, and upon our arrival they awaken and they spring to life and perform their service for the hu-man whose body temperature is somewhat normal.
So it matters not whether it's one pixel or 50 megapixels doing the work there, what matters is that everyone who attends a baseball game or eats at a restaurant is accustomed to a conscious machine that can "see" their buttcheeks well enough to know exactly when to activate the flusher without any pesky hu-man touching it.
And that there is electrical power and, probably, networking available in the restrooms so that the conscious machines can stay alive and discuss buttcheek sightings with one another and their mothership.
If you'd hide your spy camera in the soap dispenser viewing angle you'd hide your camera anywhere. You could choose to only use manual cisterns and you'd still have to worry about cameras hiding to see your junk. Probably even moreso since you're really got something to hide tbh, Streisand effect and all.
Can you please explain how an infrared sensor is remotely reconfigured to see visible light
I first encountered this pattern in a rare wearable device, over a decade ago. I bought it from someone and had to contact them to deregister the device.
The foot in the door was theft prevention. Crime rates in the targeted regions of those devices was the original motivation and the enabler. From Chesterton's Fence principle, that has to be solved before the zero consumer ownership problem can be solved.
In this imagined techno-feudalism future, what will these "monarchs" do? Own and control their entire supply chain?
It's been awhile since the populist has risen up and demanded the government actually do their jobs rather than get rich and catering to the rich coasting on the destruction of our privacies, rights, institutions, and freedoms.
The fact nearly zero legislation has been introduced to punish companies for violating the protection of our data with the bazillions of data leaks is telling of which master they serve.
Most of the abuse is already forbidden under GDPR, it just doesn't get enforced.
There's a lot of this, and it's a real problem.
We need to make small claims court far more accessible. But outside of the GDPR, there's also just weirdness in terms of what is covered where. I can appreciate that having laws at the county level, the municipal level can be onerous to comply with, so you want things at the national level -- if not international.
But as soon as you do that, some asshat works to reduce regulation because "regulation bad" without any qualifiers. And then as you say, lack of enforcement, is that alternative to this.
Give them their laws, make them feel as if things have been done, but then don't enforce. You're in the same boat, but people "feel" better.
This is a bit of a tangent, but where I live you have to cook a hamburger to safe temperatures. It is illegal to do otherwise, unless it is freshly ground in house, and we have actual, real inspectors that will ensure safe handling practices.
(This isn't me railing about eating raw meat, I eat my steak med-rare. But that's a steak, if you're going to cook a hamburger that way, you need to wash the outside, grind it up, and cook+eat it within hours. Many restaurants are buying mass produced burger paddies and not even cooking them, which is pure insane.)
Yet when I was in California, it's OK to just present a charred outside, a raw inside, along with loads of parasites. The restaurant is covered if they put up a sign saying something about 'raw meat can make you sick' or whatever.
So every restaurant puts up the sign, then just doesn't care about cooking it to safe temps. Yee-haw, FREEDOM!
Point is, people themselves, everywhere ... whether it's a small business or just their customers, don't even know, understand, or really care.
And this is the true problem. People can't even understand the risks of raw meat, something I was taught in public school when, oh I don't know, freakin' 10 years old!
While it doesn't seem that difficult to people on this forum likely, it surely is for the average person. Clearly.
Stop buying those products.
Right? People need to learn to read the small print. “Needs valid subscription for all features to work” no thanks. If something like this isn’t informed before the purchase you have a valid reason for a return/ refund.
> is becoming a spying device like in the worst scifi dystopias.
Most companies care more about it being a rental device than a spying device
> It should
Yeah, everybody here agrees. The main problem is to get this implemented and this will not happen by just venting here. So I'm still waiting for someone with good ideas.
Regulations would absolutely be nice to have, I do like how the EU does actually try to get some good regulations down, my biggest problem with them is though that they don't have any teeth. A lot of the time the cost of the relatively small fines are baked into the cost of doing business if they get caught in breach. It's infuriating. Maybe a fixed percentage of revenue from the services or product that infringes would be more appropriate.
i paid an extra £50 for a washing machine without WiFi, but I'm not sure they'll be around in ten years. my microwave oven has two knobs: how hot and how long.
My washing machine is about 20 years old; I changed the carbon brushes for the second time recently (they last about 7 years); everything else seems fine and I hope the machine will last forever. It's just a drum with a big electric motor, a valve for water in, another for water out.
I’ve been preaching the Gospel of Knobs for decades. When I was a kid, a microwave had a power knob (already at 100) and a time knob (0-45min, with finer gradations for the first 10-20 minutes). To start heating, just twist the time knob to the time required.
A few years later all microwaves had chiclet keypads with terrible user interfaces. They’ve improved from there over the years but never to the convenience of the original knob layout.
A knob is way more annoying than the single button modes on my GE Profile.
I put whatever leftovers in there. Pasta, chicken and rice, soups, BBQ, doesn't matter. I lightly cover it. Press Reheat. Perfect every time. I don't have to judge how much to turn two knobs.
Same goes for potatoes. Stab it with a fork a few times, butter and salt the outside, toss them in and press "Potato". Perfect baked potato every time.
Same goes for steaming veggies. Frozen or fresh, doesn't matter. Toss them in a bowl, put a bit of water/butter/seasonings in it, lightly cover, press Vegetable, and boom perfectly steamed veggies.
The one-touch sensor modes on my microwave are fantastic. And this is a 20-year-old microwave, so it's not like adding this tech made it less reliable. I'll be sad if I ever need to have a different microwave.
Huh, my microwave has a 'potato' button but I've never tried it. I'm gonna give it a go.
how does it know how much stuff there is, does it weigh?
I've only ever left the how high on high, and the time is 3 minutes for chilled, 10 for frozen. so in a way I agree, two buttons saying chilled and frozen would also work for me.
Maybe it has some kind of scale. But it probably mostly handles it by tracking humidity within the chamber. Some of these modes don't even bother showing a time when they start, they'll cook for a bit and potentially power cycle the magnetron for a bit until it then sets a time and finishes. It complains when you open the door.
I've used a number of microwaves with these modes which asked for a weight. Those were pretty untrustworthy on their results, because moisture content and starting temp can vary greatly.
I stumbled upon them, but I strongly think the mid-2000's era GE Profile are probably some of the best appliances ever made. They were at least the best dishwasher, oven, and microwave I've ever used.
Part of the problem is you can't even count on appliances to last 10 years anymore. These industries can force people to accept new indignities by making sure their old device dies prematurely and the only new ones to buy are shit.
Yeah yeah, survivor bias, rose tinted glasses, conspiracy theories, blah blah. I've heard all the canned refutations. It's true. Appliance manufacturers got better at making things worse.
And even if the device doesn't die early, it will eventually have to be replaced for one reason or another. I got 20 years out of my Honda, which wasn't great but not terrible either, but trying to replace it with something new that had comparable reputation for reliability and also no touch screen computer spyware bullshit was a serious problem. My only choice was Mazda and the although my new car does have the physical buttons and knobs I want, they are easily the worst quality buttons and knobs. All mushy with no satisfying clicks. One company holding out and selling cars or appliances without the new horse shit isn't enough, because without comparable competition they are still free to cut corners and make something worse than could be purchased in the past.
Absolutely. But the technocratic system we are moving into requires "smart" everything and being de-anonymised online, at least for governments and corporations.
Also changing software and licences.
I bought an android phone that worked and soon it will reset every 3 days, so Im unreachable unless I enter the PIN. What kills the idea of having a secondary phone just in case.
It will only reset every 3 days if you don't unlock it. I'm pretty sure most people unlock their phones within 3 days. There are some concerns from people using their phones as unattended mobile hotspots; this concern is valid there. However you can just disable the device PIN or turn off the feature in this case.
Ah. Now this finally makes more sense than generic 'its for your security'.
I dont unlock the secondary phone. Only charge it every few days.
Disabling the PIN reduces security (what kind of "hacker" gives such bad advice?).
I bet we wont be able to disable that feature in few months.
Pain in the butt with work phone too - take 3 day holidays and it stopps working.
Bad feature created by people who dont think.
As far as I know an Android phone isn’t unreachable after reboot, it simply has the same locked screen as always. The only difference is the difficulty to unlock it without the PIN. So in your case it would reboot once (not every 3 days) and then just continue doing nothing.
Well after the reboot Android enters the Before First Unlock state which is significantly more secure. I don't know if that influences the ability to receive regular phone calls, but I'm pretty sure Whatsapp/signal calls won't work.
I own an iPhone (and iPad). It forces me to re-enter my device password, every couple of days. Has done that, for ages.
I think that can be disabled, though. I know of a couple of folks that won’t even enable Face ID. I think that’s insane. The phone has our entire life on it. The thought of having that much information available to any pickpocket is sobering.
I refuse to use custom apps for things like banking and store loyalty, etc. I keep a photo of my store loyalty card’s barcode in my Photos app, because it does get me significant discounts, occasionally, but I won’t install their app.
Most of these custom apps seem to be pretty shoddy quality, in my opinion (I’m a snob, though. Many folks don’t seem to mind). They seem to be written with some kind of hybrid system, and some are little more than webviews.
Or you can just disable the feature. Let's not brand every security feature as evil, please, it's disingenuous.
It was not clear from a recently posted article on the matter that this would be a setting, but from the change log it does appear that it can be switched off.
> Enables a future optional security feature, which will automatically restart your device if locked for 3 consecutive days.
https://support.google.com/product-documentation/answer/1434... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250421103659/https://support.g...)
You can disable it now.
In few months the option will just disappear?
What's disingenuous is the opposite: using the excuse of security to force more and more user hostile spying features on every device. Same with children.
Vote with your wallet.
I wonder what the "free-market" types will say to minimize criticisms like those in this thread once everything that can possibly be purchased requires bending over for this sort of abuse.
Is the fantasy that some entrepreneurial savior will come along and voluntarily forgo all the massive spying profits in order to cater to the minute proportion of consumers perceptive enough to realize they're getting molested on the daily?
How about smartphones, for example? "Vote with your wallet," says the smirking corporatocrat, "and just buy a mobile operating system that respects your personal privacy." Alright professor, looks like my choices are iOS or Android, so I'm kind of hosed either way? Unless I want to return to a 2004 feature set, or perhaps a GNU/Linux paperweight with a 20-minute battery life that can't use banking apps or place phone calls?
I exaggerate (but in my opinion only slightly), and sincere apologies for tone--but it's quite frustrating to be met again and again with such a smug dismissal of what to many of us feels like an inescapable horror. This depraved race to the bottom, with every MBA-steered ship vying to see who can violate us the hardest, seems to be standard practice these days, and "purchase different products" puts the onus on consumers to fix what isn't their fault in a way that leaves an awful taste in my mouth.
Wow, this was not a "smug corpo" opinion? I renovated a house recently, and had a plethora of choices for cheap smart options, instead after research I found some expensive options with MQTT support for HomeAssistant, they got my money.
I wanted to buy an etablet but Remarkable has a subscription, so I bought a smaller brand, it's worse, but they got my money.
You want a phone that respects your privacy? There isn't a business model that supports that, so don't support it. Yes you can't have your banking app, but that's the deal, you just dont like it. If no one bought it, there would be a market for alternatives.
Nothing will change these companies apart from market forces.
The way I see it, the suggestion that one can simply "vote with their wallet" is absolutely a pro-corporation stance because it pretends that consumers and megacorps have equal footing in the market. This premise is a bit of a spherical cow because it--conveniently for corporations--ignores monopoly, price fixing, anti-consumer corporate fraud at scale and flouting of regulations. Perhaps, in the frictionless vacuum of an Ayn Rand wet dream where every interaction is a transaction between two equals operating perfectly rationally, where there's no governments thus no regulatory capture, no barriers to entry, and so on, this might make sense--but in our world it does not.
You tell me that nothing will change the companies apart from market forces, but in response to another commenter you said it well yourself: "this kind of behavior should be illegal." If we had consumer protection laws, and those laws had teeth, maybe a company would have to consider the possible risk to future profits of engaging in the next abusive, ethically bankrupt scheme. It wouldn't be possible to be, as former FTC chair and antitrust warrior Lina Khan put it, "too big to care."
I'm not so naive as to imagine that more economic guardrails are a panacea for consumer suffering, but to me it seems that the globalized economy and its Western democratic hegemons have spent much of the post-WWII era on a deregulatory death march, and we can see with our own eyes how well it's going.
Hey, you're right. When I said nothing will change them I guess I should have said "nothing will change the goals of a company" apart from your money. The practicalities are hugely affected by law. Maybe I should have originally said "Vote with your money, lobby with your voice"?
"everyone should just learn to live without a phone" is exactly the kind of bullshit that is clearly not feasible
Hey, we don't argue like that here. I didn't say that. I said there isn't a business model yet that supports a phone with privacy. There are a few, and they'd force you to be creative on how you interact with certain apps, but you'd have what you wanted at a cost. Hell, I'm sure a Linux Phone with a bunch of crypto apps would work fine, suck for other reasons, but there you go.
They will say what they said before. The market spoke. Your concerns are abnormal. Stop complaining.
Basically impossible, or at best very impractical. Companies change their product after you buy them. This is not a hypothetical - this happens all the time. It happened to you, and to me.
My most recent example: I wanted to calibrate my display using a "calibrite display pro hl" and suddenly got prompted with a software update. After updating, an account is suddenly required. This device is way past its return date. I cannot return it. I'm now stuck with a device that cannot be used with their software without creating an account.
Another example: Philips Hue devices were changed to require an account.
These days I focus on getting commercial variants of devices, since they usually don't have cloud or smart crap in them. For example, there's commercial variants of many TVs. They don't have smart crap in them and are designed for 24/7 usage.
Completely agree that this kind of behaviour should be illegal. My thoughts are products should work from purchase with their offered feature-set (or be forced to recall), have a factory reset mode, and an opt-out of updates.
People voting with their wallets is exactly how we got where we are today.
I always was told that, but I hardly believe that can work. You have to at least also do a viral YT video like the OP too or rather really have competent, independent media with a good reach doing product reviews.
I have a washing machine that won't let me use it fully without installing an app that asks for permission to track my GPS coordinates at all time, in my phone. HomeWhiz.There should be a law against selling new hardware that demands that sort of thing to function, or to have full functionality. But I would be happy if procedures to bring class-auction lawsuits against companies that engage in this kind of bait-and-ransom were somehow simpler.
At the very least, when you the current end user refuse to agree to their terms of service, the model should have to be returned, at the manufacturer's expense, irrespective of condition.
Think of renters stuck in a place with units like that! They too should have the right to require un-tracked appliances and be free from being forced to agree to additional contract overheads that aren't obvious in the price / what should be reasonable terms.
In many countries, the consumer protection laws are strong enough that consumers probably can return such appliances, as long as the facts about app requirements weren't made abundantly clear to them at the store.
Though, it's usually the store who's responsible for that refund, not the manufacturer . Still, stores are motivated to reduce return rates and will put pressure on manufactures to not do stupid things.
For things you can carry back to the store, that works well. When I buy a new washing machine, though, it's a bit more complicated:
- I go to the store and make the purchase.
- A delivery crew brings the washing machine to my house.
- They unhook my old washing machine and take it away.
- They attach my new washing machine in its place.
Even with the strongest reasonable protection laws I can imagine, the most the store would be obligated to do if the new machine is unsatisfactory would be to detach the new machine and take it away. And I've probably had to pay for one or two visits from the installers at that point. Regardless of whether the extra visit from the installers carries any extra cost for me, there's enough hassle associated with this that I can easily imagine keeping a machine where I'm not happy with some app requirement because it'd be too much trouble to make the change.
Obligatory link to Doctorow’s Unauthorized Bread (2019), a DRM-themed, uh… thriller? polemic?… of a novella. Deals with the themes you discuss: large appliance manufacturer malfeasance, intrusive exploitation beyond the scope of the product’s purpose, renters’ relative helplessness for the appliances to service their daily needs.
https://craphound.com/unauthorized-bread/
Discussion here (2020, 123 comments):
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23985140
Just yesterday I saw an ad for an "AI enabled dishwasher". I suspect things are about to get even worse.
I am astounded at how much this short, humorous quote from Philip Dick's "Ubik" was prescient:
"The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
Looking forward to argumentative washing machines.
> Looking forward to argumentative washing machines.
Thanks to all upthread for the reminder.
Last week I was sorta forced to install the app for the laundry room at the place I am renting.
They previously used another big service provider, and had troubles with plumbing and there was undoubtedly finger-pointing between the laundry service and the landlady, and eventually, landlady switched to a new laundry service provider, which has a very generic-sounding app.
So you can pay two ways (no coins and no currency): obtain a stored-value card from the little kiosk in the laundry room (it will cost you, like $10 just for the card with $0 on it.) or you can install the mobile app, and load money into your account. (The account is not shared with any stored-value card, so they'll be separate.)
So last time, I opted for a card, and I immediately punched a hole in it, so I could string it to a lanyard. That disabled the card! It is some sort of RFID/NFC thing which has little spiderweb tendrils, rather than a single chip in one place that can be avoided.
So this time around, I installed the Android app. I loaded money on the card (of course you can't specify the exact amount, but you select a dropdown, and the $10 or $15 or $25 or $40 is never an exact multiple of the cost of a load.)
And the mobile app demands a lot of permissions. It wants camera access, and Nearby Devices, and Location, and probably Precise Location too. And then you need to enable Bluetooth, and you also need to be standing right inside the laundry room in order for the app to go anywhere (yes, you can't even check your account profile, or balance, or add money, unless you're inside the laundry room, so fuck me if I wanted to set this up in the comfort of "my" home before going down there in public.)
And the app relies on a shitty QR code scan anyway. I mean, you can tap the NFC stored-value card, but your phone won't tap-to-pay the fuckin' washing machines. And they don't take credit cards, or coins or bills. And the soda machines here don't take credit cards, or bills either, only coins. LOL!
And the app has a fucked-up self-image. It lists 16 washing machines. There are 6 in the room. So there are 10 "phantom machines". I informed the Support dudes like in Marh 2024, when they first installed everything. I told them the app was a dumbass and listed too many machines. I showed them how I was standing in the correct room and the other two rooms had likewise fucked "phantom machines" too, but I didn't care about them. We went around in circles with Support asking for "more information" and I cc:ed the landlady, and she was rather bemused, but more-or-less a bystander on the whole issue.
I was sort of indignant on behalf of the other residents who may be confused. I wasn't personally too confused, but imagine if Grandma installed her iPhone app or something and tried to start Machine #13.
And it's been 13 months and they still haven't rectified the list of machines.
The old service provider, they used to provide a public website; you could see each machine and whether it was active or not, in a little widget, it was very Web 1.0 but with animation. It didn't use Flash or anything fancy. There was no authentication to see these laundry machines running. I suppose that was too vulnerable, and so they locked it up in the app. And of course the app requires you to be in the fucking location rather than checking from the comfort of your home.
So I used to be able to see availability before I took everything down and went into the laundry room and bugged the other resident ladies. But now I can't see availability until I barge into the fucking room itself. Fuck you app makers. I have a login. Let me see whether I can start my wash or if I can wait in the comfort of my home. Now I need to make a special trip just to check on things, or to add funds or even just to check my balance.
This makes me so angry just reading this.
It's a failure of both management, and the developers carrying out management's tasteless design/vision which leads to this sort of shit. Not the kind of world I want to live in, and I wish these organizations would get punished somehow for the shit they put out into the world.
I imagine there are lots of folks here who could answer this question. I like to assume that no individual engineer/developer/product manager is so unscrupulous as to make this sort of kafkaesque nightmare into a reality, but somewhere along the line from concept to implementation, some individual needs to demand, create or at least suggest such hostility to the user. My question is, how does this usually go? Is it a vague implicit target set by management that can only be achieved by abusing the user, giving both the engineers and managers a plausible deniability? "I'm just following orders". Or are there folks during the development phase suggesting and promoting these awful "features"? I'm guessing the answer will be unsatisfying to me, that no individual or group of individuals is really responsible, and it's just the incentive structure of the system that's emerged over time. Which just begs the deeper, but more complicated question, how did we get here?
The same technology used to foist madness upon someone is also used to insulate the creator from feedback. Its a double edge sword. Virtually every touchpoint of society is being turned into this awful dynamic as its unregulated. All actors with power take their playbook from a familiar guy in a turtleneck on stage pointing to his users and saying " youre holding it wrong". As if every one participating in this "experiment" is indeed a willing "user"
In terms of professional ethics, where should a product manager stand, when the business asks them for a customer-hostile solution like this (or on the opposite end of the developers suggest a customer-hostile technical solution)?
"Don't do this or I quit".
If you don't have enough money to do that, immediately start looking for a new job. If you are feeling lucky you can try weaponised incompetence to try to prevent this from being shipped.
Sounds really shit.
The RFID card will have a chip too. The 'tendrils' are the aerial which is a thick loop (of many wires) round the outside. So punching a hole in one corner is a non-starter, but there's a good chance you could punch one in the middle if you work out where the chip is
Of course, the simpler option is just to get a lanyard with card holder.
Depending on the card design, you can sometimes shine a bright lamp or flashlight through it and see the antenna shadow...
I had a high-end dishwasher from the early 2000's in this house when I moved in. It had a lot of smarts to it. It would constantly monitor turbidity to change soap mixtures and would decide when it wanted to drain and add more water in case the tub water was really dirty.
I imagine this is what that "AI" feature is doing.
Unfortunately, governments are highly incentivised to allow mandatory on-device spyware to feed your location into the global information market.
Why run a sophisticated surveillance and information retrieval system when a you can just ask big-tech for the data for free, or buy from the market at a fraction of the running cost of a dedicated system?
Personally I think the best way to combat this is for concerned people to build businesses with privacy as a feature. Dumb TVs, dumb washing machines etc.
At least a requirement to let customers know in big letters that the device/appliance you're going to buy would not function without App + Wifi + Internet plan + GPS, and that you're not buying an appliance but a limited license to use it.
Out of interest did you know this before buying it? I'm interested in how they would advertise that kind of feature. I feel like that needs to be a regulated warning label on the box.
This is the kind of stuff that I feel a coordinated campaign to have consumers take companies to small claims court over would be very effective in combating.
I'm sure a bunch of elderly magistrates would feel that this kind of requirement is obscene and would readily side with the claimant.
Collectively this would cost the company a lot.
As well, I would say pick a shame domain and make some noise about this, collate feedback from other consumers, etc. Spread that constantly until the manufacturer can justify it or relent. Hassle them for comment and until they reply to your satisfaction, note on the site that they haven't responded despite repeated attempts at contacting them.
There are laws. Get a refund. Tell them why. If we all do this it won't be profitable.
The action cam market is a bit weird at the moment. The others have caught up to GoPro, and some say even surpassed. But the field is very messy, you can't trust half the stuff.
Dji and Insta360 are very good at giving away free stuff to influencers, and to tech reviewers with strings attached (like forbidding side-by-side comparisons). Sock-puppets constantly recommending these brands, etc.
As a consumer it's very hard to make an informed decision on what to buy. Can't trust anything you read about the models.
To prove your point, looks like Insta360 started a big campaign today. This popped up in my YouTube stream:
* Best Motorcycle Camera Review - Insta360 X4 vs X5 (FortNine)
* I Tested the Next-Gen 360 Camera (Mrwhosetheboss)
* The IMPOSSIBLE Camera (CaseyNeistat)
And if even Casey Neistat graces us with a new video, you just know there was a good reason for him.
DJI products are extraordinary and way above the competition.
But registration is a huge pain, yes. Two solutions: 1/ Buy used; the previous owner probably didn't do a factory reset -- if they did, return it and try again. 2/ Use a disposable email. On the Action pro, once "registered", nothing happens and the device never asks for anything.
Drones are different, they sometimes need to be attached to a proper account; when that happens, create yet another disposable email and "register" again.
> way above the competition
did you test them all or are you basing it on the reviewers the other commenter just pointed out are useless?
Yeah you watch advertisements and promo videos shot with some professional equipment with people flying around in everything imaginable and explosions all over the place, all in high resolution and crisp quality. Then copy the footage from SD Card and it looks like a turd.
To me, it increasingly seems like the US lacks cultural autonomy.
US companies are A-OK with censoring movies and games to gain access to the Chinese market, for example remember when Blizzard banned a US player in an US tournament to please Chinese censors? But in the other direction, it seems Chinese companies aren't willing to "return the favor" and modify their products to account for American sensibilities when they export to the US. Perpetual surveillance and only little property rights protection is how everyday life in China works, so Chinese consumers won't be bothered by this. It only bothers US consumers, who are used to more privacy and solid property rights.
Isn’t the solution to this to just regulate for American sensibilities in the US market? I don’t think it’s true that US companies respect privacy, but if it is then you can regulate for that and the Chinese companies will have to do the same in the US market. They’re not going to “return the favour” if it’s not regulated for and their products do fine in the market without.
Yes, but regulations cost companies money, and the US isn’t a real country of the people by the people, it’s three corporations in a trenchcoat.
US consumer protections are just absolutely awful and companies know they can do what they want
I am guessing this particular scenario is the same in the UK but I at least have a hope they will regulate it at some point
"just stop being poor and buy the quality product without tracking"
> It only bothers US consumers, who are used to more privacy and solid property rights.
Which US are you talking about? The one I know is a capitalist free-for-all, where the word "regulation" is anathema. The vast majority of Us-based products and services spy on the consumer to make an extra penny, and nobody cares.
It really baffles me to hear someone say that the US isn't under perpetual surveillance, when the NSA literally piped all phonecalls to their servers twenty years ago, before they realized they can just make companies give them all the data.
Which US consumer are they talking about? The vast majority of consumers don't give a damn about their complete lack of privacy. They don't act like they care at all when a corporation leaks their most sensitive data, their own government acts unconstitutionally, and so on. Practically nobody is bothered by any of it.
Well it certainly strongly bothered the US consumer who made that video.
Well if it bothers enough people, there will be regulation against it.
This is very funny
Until literally today, I was using what’s commonly called a “senior phone” — just a regular mobile phone with a keypad, on which you can’t install any apps. This fact made it impossible for me to use various products and services (e.g. DJI or Meta Quest, which also require an app, or mobile banking transfers that are only accessible via smartphone apps).
I resisted for a long time, but in the long run it became very exhausting (for example, people sending me MMS messages I couldn’t open, or having to reply using that clunky keypad on the phone).
In the end, I chose convenience. I believe we’re all to blame.
I have a DJI Mavic mini pro 4 with the remote control with a screen.
I do not have a phone app.
The app is required to "activate" their gimbals. I'm not sure about other products.
Not on my mini pro 4
You didn't choose convenience, you chose what was necessary to operate in modern society, much like why you were paying for phone service to begin with.
The idea that this stuff is a meaningful choice is laughable. Society requires use of a smartphone now. We're 20 years down this road, there is no going back
That would be acceptable, insisting on using iOS, Android or whatever is that Chinese OS - outside of USA / China - is not.
Not watching a video, but how is it legal for any company to "sell" something like this? (The video might explain that, but that's my focus of what I care about out of the situation.)
It's about false advertising: they say "our product gets images like this and that", which is Okay and something the buyer uses to base their decision. And there is an expectation that their product will do as advertised. But they never say front-and-center "our product won't function without a valid Internet connection and an approved photo ID, because we use our product to harvest your data."
You’re free to not buy it, that’s why. This video is the market working as intended.
It’s also not allowed to sell a coffee machine that electrocutes its users every time it’s turned on, then burns down the house for good measure.
Sure, someone will make a video “this coffee machine killed my wife and burned down my house with my children in it”, and you would say it’s the market working as intended…
There are standards the stuff sold need to meet, even if ultimately you are always “free to not buy it”.
Markets are tools.
They are good at some things (allocating resources, adapting to changing supply and demand, revealing preferences and discovering prices, incentivising innovation and socially useful risk taking, …)
and bad at others (ensuring new entrants don’t repeatedly make the same safety mistakes, preventing exploitation of customers, protecting IP, solving for long term social needs, maintaining national resilience against threats, preventing waste…)
Fetishisation of markets is the issue.
Though markets and generally free trade are incredibly important and have brought (and hopefully will continue to bring) great benefits to humanity, they also have downsides, and other tools (regulation, taxation, industrial strategy, …) are needed to balance these.
This is one such case. The market is creating downsides that society should not tolerate.
> Fetishisation of markets is the issue.
Well said.
It should also be pointed out, that the regulatory laws are what _defines_ the market. They are even more fundamental to a market's existence than the companies producing goods and services, or the consumers buying them.
Without regulatory law, the "market" devolves to a relapse into the warring states era. Why shouldn't amazone hire a mercenary force to blow the vault doors off of Ft. Knox and carry all the gold home to Bozo?
Because there are laws against it! And that would render the action unprofitable. Bozo sure as sh1t doesn't care about stealing from anyone, or even someone getting killed, if it means he gets a bunch more shekels.
The regulatory law is more than just inherent, it's a mandatory component of anything that's going to have more resemblance to a "market" than to Mad Max...
So, the profiting companies actually _require_ a regulatory structure, to prevent the most wealthy and powerful from just taking whatever they have.
The question is in also making these regulations benefit the consumer as well as the supply side.
In the US this part is currently in rather complete failure...
The problem with letting “the market” decide things like this is it requires first that someone gets hurt. Then they need to wage and information campaign against said company. Or we can just have a law that says this is bad and be done with it.
Unchecked lawmaking hurts a lot more people than bad consumer products.
We have a good system, and this video shows it functions well.
Have you read enough history to know what life was like before we got rid of child labor, established weekends as a norm, regulated food products, etc.? Or do you assume that the free market provides those things because you’ve only lived in an age where you can take them for granted?
We have a terrible system, built around power disparity, dishonesty, unequal and difficult access to remedies for dishonesty, and this obsession with the idea that only individuals should act individually, and not collectively as a governing body, to prevent and punish harms.
Comments like these and knowing people like you are in charge make me fear for the future.
Companies, unchecked, will kill as many people as they can to make more profit. History proves this, it’s not a hypothetical. Laws are the only lever we have to keep profit incentive aligned with the common good.
We have laws about false advertising and such things. At a minimum, there's a case to be made with respect to the warranty of merchantability.
And the list of companies whose products I won't buy grows. I just hope the next hammer I buy doesn't come with a head that turns to funny putty when it loses internet connection.
Or when banging unregisterd nails!
Bring on the nails with individual RFID in their heads. I'll just go back to using my solid metal pre-2000 25oz claw hammer.
Any Australian buyers should be able to get an instant refund under consumer law (goods not as advertised). For those who don't want a refund and have the time and energy, fun could be had with the consumer law around "Unfair contract terms" [1].
[1] https://consumer.gov.au/sites/consumer/files/2016/05/0553FT_...
Where is the part where he doesn't click "Agree", boxes the thing up, and sends it back?
I've sent stuff back for that sort of thing. Often, I'll look at a EULA and decide I don't want it. Mandatory arbitration with anybody other than the American Arbitration Association is a killer.
1. Most people don't actually read long EULAs. And who can blame them? We have been trained not to read them, and if you do, you are spending a significant amount of your life on a tedious and frustrating endeavor.
2. If you do read it, it is a long document in difficult and intentionally misleading legalese, where you can easily miss something.
3. If you don't agree to the terms, and return it, does the company pay for the shipping? Even if they do, you have now wasted a fair amount of time on this product you won't actually use.
4. Depending on the product there may not be anything on the market that has an acceptable EULA. In part due to the fact that few enough people read the EULA that companies can afford to lose business from the people who do.
I suppose consumers need to be able to pool their effort to read this. We upload it to a site, see the comments others have made and then decide. If there are changes between the comments and now, then those are highlighted as well. A EULAgrokker.
Aren't consumer associations already doing this ?
EULAs are not hard to read. You skim them and look for the arbitration clause, the indemnification clause, the privacy and ownership of your intellectual property clauses, and anything that says "sole discretion".
In the comments, he mentions that he will be returning the unit as defective.
But he clicked "Accept" on the EULA. On camera.
Of course he does. Nobody can be expected to actually read those, much less for them to be legally effective at enforcing anything.
I bought a Ricoh GR III.
Nice camera, shame about the app - it's pretty bad in and of itself (you need it for remote shutter), but it has a horrific data collection/sharing T&C.
Fortunately, in Android, you can block network access for an app.
If I couldn't do that, I'd need to root e/os/ to install firewall to prevent, or, not use the app - which would mean no remote shutter on the camera.
AFAIK, there is no way to discover the T&C until you have installed the app.
A01GR2 is a pretty good open source alternative available on the play store. Miles better than Ricoh's own app.
I thought briefly about writing an app for remote shutter, but obviously a lot of work.
Did not cross my mind would already exist!!
Thank you very much.
Appalling Ricoh T&C now in the bin.
> Fortunately, in Android, you can block network access for an app.
Not in stock Android. If you have that option it's an added extra.
Shittiness aside, there's no such thing as a license for a physical product. Licenses are for things that are copyrighted, like movies or software.
A company can't force you to use a physical product in a certain way; a "license" won't hold up in court.
Tell that to Haas, one of the only US based CnC machine manufacturers.
They instruct technicians to disable features for hardware if you haven’t paid the licensing fee for that hardware. Swapped the 10 head tool changer for a 14 head from a downed machine? Sucks to be you buddy it won’t work because you haven’t licensed the feature to have 14 tools! Oh you bought the machine used? And they swapped it for you? Sucks to be you pay up or it’s scrap metal to you.
What argument would hold in US court though? Camera is not working without an app be valid?
> won't hold up in court
Does that even matter? because at 4:50 on the video you can clearly read:
... in the "binding arbitration and no class action" terms that you need to Agree to.is that clause even legal/enforceable in "normal" jurisdictions?
Well then it seems only fair that I pay for the camera license with a license to use my money.
I got exactly the same kind of things with Xiaomi security camera.
I used to have one and it was not like that, but now you need to pay a monthly plan to have the last day of events available "in the cloud". It might be ok for me if it was just in the case that you store things in the cloud, but it looks like that if you don't take the subscription, even if you store things on a local sdcard, when there is an intruder alert, you will just receive the alert but you will not be able to see remotely the 10s video of the event like what is done when you use their subscription.
Also you have nag screen for the subscription everywhere. And obviously, there is no way to store things in the cloud anywhere else than using their own service. And especially not using common standard protocols.
What pisses me off is that Chinese brands, like Xiaomi, used to be "you just buy a device", no frill, good value and no need to rely on Chinese services and co.
Now, DJI, Xiaomi, they are following the trend of American and European crappy products selling you licence to products that you don't really own but that requires an all time one connection and subscription to Chinese services.
I saw the change coming hard when used to buy Xiaomi phones regularly, before you got the phone with a very light OS, crap free, it was a big relief coming from Samsung phones.
Now it is probably worse than Samsung, you have hundreds of mandatory apps by default for useless games and utils like bubble war, candy crush, facebook things, and dozens of nag screen to share your data or take subscriptions...
Guess what? Canon has now switched its "Camera Connect" app to a cloud based version, where you need an account first to access to the camera pictures that are available only over WiFi Direct.
Louis Rossmann, the well-known YouTube personality famous for his candid and critical takes on tech and repair issues, dives into a hands-on demonstration with the DJI Osmo Action camera in this clip. He begins by attempting to power on the device—a process that doesn’t work straightforwardly. Instead of simply activating the camera, he’s forced to scan a QR code to download the DJI Mimo app, a hefty 741‑megabyte download, in order to use what he disparagingly calls a “fancy dash cam.” What if their website/app/cloud stops working?
Throughout the video, Louis expresses his frustration with the convoluted setup. He mocks the limitations and mandatory app requirements that not only restrict the straightforward use of a device he spent $300 on but also grant the app intrusive permissions over his phone. This cumbersome process, including reading lengthy and restrictive legal terms like “limited license to use,” underscores his discontent with the system. Ultimately, his sarcastic tone and biting commentary make it clear that he isn’t interested in ever going through such a hassle again, and he’s already planning to return the device.
appreciate the summary
They thought they sold me a camera but no I'll invoke my statutory rights and get a full refund.
This is the way. Mass consumer activist action, hundreds or thousands of purchases that turn around and invoke statutory rights and refunds, as protest. It won’t change until we make them hurt.
Please drink verification can. https://imgur.com/please-drink-verification-can-dgGvgKF
reality is stranger than 4chan fiction https://patents.google.com/patent/US8246454B2/en
I'm keeping my gadgets to the bare minimum and if in the future I need to purchase something I truly need I think I will be just fine buying second hand and couple of generations old. There's no other way. Why we don't have more laws protecting customers from these buy-baits I still don't know. People should absolutely boicott and spread the word about these pieces of junk being put in the market. KUDOS to the author for taking the time to document this.
Asking to add an app to use a device is one thing. DJI literally had him install the app and give full camera permissions to activate the device. He tried giving it access once and clicking ask for permission every time. Neither worked, he had to give full phone camera permissions.
Why would a camera need a phone camera access if not for surveillance?
Rossman is the wrong guy to irk. He has money and spite, has caused a lot of deserved grief to companies that play dirty tricks.
Hopefully you can return it. I also really dislike needing an app for stuff that shouldn't need an app. If only there was a "hide my email" like feature for crap apps... maybe a special highly restricted sandbox.
They say: “Just buy hi-end/expensive products, they are free from this bullshit!”. But this is simply not true. Almost all my home appliances (oven, air conditioners, dishwasher, washing and dryer machines) are from top tier lines and cost me a ton of money, but they still had WiFi and mobile applications. But, one important difference - all of them could work normally without it. I haven’t connected any of them to network and not going to do this ever.
Was just browsing earlier today for some potential upgrades from my GoPro10 and was looking at these too, that’s disappointing, guess wont be looking at these.
Dupe:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43742229
I really wish more people felt this way about the invasive connectivity of devices.
Unfortunately this is one of those cases where regulators came in handy. The regular Joe/Jane without the knowledge of the inner works of tech companies simply cannot fathom to which extent those companies go to track and collect data of their customers.
Enshitification at its best. This is all part of the inexorable current sweeping us along to the post capitalist society, where corporations no longer sell anything but rather rent or sell access to their things. We’re already there with phones, most consumer computers, farming equipment, cars, and gradually, more and more consumer goods.
With pervasive automation, we are accelerating towards a future where money is meaningless, but not in a nice humanistic star-trek kind of way… more in a dystopian, no need to pay wages to anyone because automation, so we just need land, natural resources, and energy kind of way.
It’s grey goo, on a macro scale so you have to get into space to see it for what it is.
The current pushes us towards a time, soon, when power is the only currency that matters, and justice is reduced to the will of the stronger.
If we want to have something better than trying to compete for resources as squishy humans alongside technofacist enclaves where humans are sparse and wield unprecedented power through massive robotic capabilities, we need to start making changes now.
It’s not going to get better any time soon unfortunately. The technocrats have fully captured the US government. Turns out cyberpunk was the most accurate sci-fi portrayal of our future.
What is there of "post capitalist" in all of that? I see capital and scarcity all the way down. Maybe scarcity is artificially enforced on things that wouldn't be scarce anymore but nothing changed substantially compared to 100 years ago.
What changed is that “the people” are not serfs, they are irrelevant competitors for resources. The only thing you can do with money is pay people for their time. In the end wages is the end consumer of currency. It serves no other purpose.
We are entering a new chapter, where money will cease to be relevant at all. Only land and energy will be relevant. The elite will not need people at all anymore, people and society in general will become annoyances, at best. Everything is better when you have less people to share it with, so “depopulation” will likely be in vogue.
Technofacist enclaves will have the monopoly of coercive force, and will probably fight amongst themselves for resources, but the population of people outside those entities will be a lot like ants.
Technically not an Enshitification.
Enshitification is a decay of online platforms.
I get it, it's fun to throw such words around, but just like a nazi, it has a specific meaning.
I thought it meant the change of everything to pay to play… perhaps the meaning is shifting from its original purpose and is expanding to encompass the ruining of everything by corporations in the name of greed? Idk. If seen it used a lot in that context in the last 6 months. I also thought it was just online decay, but I’ve seen it used so much in a broader sense that I think, as a new word, it’s still finding its footing in the greater lexicon.
Wait until physical camera makers not only license you the unit, but also make everything you shoot belong to them, like software camera apps (e.g., Filmic Pro) do now.
DJI can just add some mandatory firmware upgrade process that offloads your footage to the mothership, and 99.9999% will agree to everything without reading.
Might be a realistic way for manufacturers to to implement a certified-taken-by-camera-not-AI photo feature.
it's called C2PA and it's coming to most picture-taking devices, eventually, although it doesn't require the data to be processed off-device.
Wouldn't be surprised if some will tout a "better and safer experience" if you use their cloud services...
What's old is new again.
Canon's high-end DSLRs used to have a module to sign the RAW files as they came off the sensor, for use in law enforcement and other sectors. This was back as far as 2011.
>Might be a realistic way for manufacturers to to implement a certified-taken-by-camera-not-AI photo feature.
How would that work? I would imagine that any system to implement this would necessarily be something that AI tools could replicate, wouldn’t it?
Using encryption. When you take a picture, the device or app creates a signature using the photo data and metadata.
Then you can check the signature using the company’s public keys.
If you make edits to it, the editing app will package the new metadata, edited photo data, the original signature, and sign it again.
Now you have a chain of “changes” and can inspect and validate its history. It works for video and audio too.
As long as the private keys aren’t leaked, there’ll be no way to fabricate the signatures.
https://c2pa.org/
Couldn't you replace the CCD with an adapter, connect the adapter to the video out of a computer, and then use the camera to "take a picture" of your already edited picture?
It seems to me that any "paper trail" scheme of the sort you describe would have to solve the problems of DRM to work: making the elements that report on the real world (in this case, the CCD) tamper-proof, making the encryption key impossible to extract, designing robust watermarks to avoid analog holes, etc.
Sure, you can also take a picture of the screen.
I don’t think C2PA’s goal is to completely prevent this type of thing, but to make it hard enough to stop low-effort attempts.
This, like DRM, will probably be an arms race, and future solutions will look nothing like what I described.
But then again, the spec has been out for more than a year, and I haven’t seen anyone big bothering to implement it. Maybe it’s a flop already.
An ordinary person might be not able to fool this technology but I am sure 3-letter agencies can easily sign any picture.
This has existed for a while and it does not require licensing your footage to camera maker.
If market needs it people will develop ways to pass AI generated through the camera circuitry.
And then extort you to get access to "your" images.
So the photo print market is really weird right now.
Remember how, in the 1970s and 80s, they used to have little booths surrounded by parking-lot, and you could drive up to the Fotomat booth and drop off your 110 or 35mm film, and they would go develop it and bring back your negatives and prints, and you could drive your Dodge Charger or your Ford Fairlane to come pick them up?
And then, the pharmacies got in on this, because pharmacies are where the chemicals are at anyway. And at a pharmacy, you could have film developed, and you could also get prints, and reprints, and larger-sized prints, and framed photos and albums and greeting cards and all sorts of things.
And this pharmaceutical extension tradition carries on into the present-day. Now you can waltz into CVS or Walgreens or Wal-Mart, you can bring your USB or your microSD card, or just your phone with a cable, and you can plug in your USB or thunk down a disc, and load it into their kiosk computer, and some even have scanners. And then you can order instant photo prints! And they still can sell you albums, and framed photos, and large-format prints, and posters and whatnot.
Here's the trouble, though: phone cameras don't generate the right-sized images.
I was at a Walgreens and they were selling, like, 8x10 and 5x7 and other standard photo-sized frames and prints. And I upload a photo, and the kiosk complains. Kiosk says it's low-resolution. Kiosk shows me a sample preview, and the edges are cut off.
So I chat with the clerk there, and she tells me to just take a screenshot of the image and it'll work. LOL a screenshot, when the resolution is too low already?
And so eventually I figured out that, even if I took a 50 megapixel photograph with the phone's sophisticated camera, it would not print correctly. I told the clerk: this phone takes photos like a TV set. It's in 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios. Those are not the same as 8x10 photos!
So the pharmacies have all this tooling for conventional cameras. I suppose a DSLR could still turn out 8x10 photos. I suppose I could "crop" a photo down in my smartphone on Android. But what I really wanted was to download a PD photo from Commons.wikimedia.org and print that out in an 11x17 or larger. And that was not working out so well.
Phone cameras today are producing really impeccable photos of really impossible aspect ratios. There's a ton of tooling that is specifically made for photographs that were based on the size of negatives and the size of photo paper in the last 70 decades or so. Kodak and Fujifilm and their ilk are still haunting us.
Thankfully there are more online services. Everything I put now into Google Photos. Google Photos will happily generate a photobook and they'll even drop-ship them to my family. I have sent them cool photobooks in the past. I never got to peek at them. No complaints. Google Photos doesn't mind when your photos are a weird aspect-ratio. Google Photos will adapt. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be shown your memories.
> Google Photos doesn't mind when your photos are a weird aspect-ratio.
> ...I have sent them cool photobooks [printed and shipped by Google Photos] in the past. I never got to peek at them.
So you have no idea if the photos are stretched or cut off. (Given how many folks fail to complain about [0] godawfully misconfigured televisions that stretch, squash, or otherwise mangle what they're displaying, I wouldn't take the absence of complaints as evidence of correctly printed images.)
[0] Or even notice.
That way already exists and it does not require licensing your footage to any third party.
Frankly, I find the justification you provide preposterous and dangerous.
The sad reality is that apparently many customers will find it believable (in the .0001% of cases when they actually read what they are agreeing to).
I didn't mean to imply it's not preposterous!
Then I misread it. To my defense, it seemed like replies took you seriously.
and the next step is a monthly subscription fee to use your camera...
I bought a GoPro last year after reading about a feature HyperSmooth Pro stabilization. Granted, I didn't do an inquisition into the specifics just thinking if I bought their best camera it was supported. Feature is only available if I also subscribe to their $100 per year membership. I think without the membership some lesser, non-Pro version is available. It felt like a bait and switch situation to me when I unboxed it and tried to use the feature the first time.
If you’ve read this first here, mark the day. This is coming.
If you want to activate Air Unit 4O DJI Assistant 2 installs kernel extension (HoRNDIS).
Right to repair and right to own what we pay for should be supported by all of us. We are entering a dystopian nightmare where corporations and government control everything and we have no freedoms left.
9 times out of 10, all these IoT devices really do is add another node to a botnet.
I bought HomeKit camera assuming I can run it having multiple Apple devices and even paid iCloud subscription claiming "HomeKit Secure Video support". Nope! need a HomePod. Walled garden circled back and is bitting. Not so nice, innit?
This bothers me about DJI equipment too. I use disposable throwaway email VPN accounts to activate the products then uninstall the apps.
I avoid DJI when and where I can now.
The only DJI product I have purchased since experiencing this same shit is the Osmo Pocket 3. I know of no comparable product.
> I avoid DJI when and where I can now.
I used to avoid spyware apps. My antivirus would flag them so I could remove them. Until all of them became spyware. Widely used apps by well known corporations do more intrusive and more constant tracking that the apps that my antivirus used to flag.
Avoiding these brands is one step, but it will not last long. Only the law can deal with total corporation surveillance.
When all the manufacturing was moved to China decades ago, I bet no one predicted China would do this!
It's not China doing this, it's manufacturers, wherever they are.
DJI happens to be a Chinese company but Samsung isn't, and they have been tracking what people watch on their TV (even if you're using HDMI and your own input) for years.
Big European, Asian and American brands are doing the same, washing machines requiring an account to access basic capabilities, cars phoning home, computers phoning home, phones phoning home, they all want it, they all do it.
Blaming China for this is deflecting the true culprit: the rampant notion that everything that could be sold has to be sold. Privacy doesn't matter, just put a red ribbon over it and force user to create an account and share their data in exchange for the priviledge of accessing what they thought they bought.
China didn't invent that, they sure love it, but they are not responsible for it alone.
... and they have been tracking what people watch on their TV (even if you're using HDMI and your own input) for years.
How? If you didn't give it an internet connection, how is it sending any tracking data back to the mothership? It can't guess your wifi password or anything.
TVs can be aggressivetring to connect to any Wifi network. Apparently some now also come with SIM cards.
My xiaomi TV is making thousands of request per day to their domains. I block them all using adguard/adblock, but imagine the amount of information they can get from a connected TV.
Samsung and LG and many others do this. Look for Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) in Samsung's privacy
This interesting study from last year: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
I’m a layman but have asked this question somewhere once after noticing my “never connected TV” knew who was playing in a sports game it was promoting to me (basically it knew current events that only could have came from an internet connection of some sorts as it was months after its manufacture.) Apparently there a few avenues to consider, probably more than this actually. But this is what I’ve seen discussed so maybe do some more research or perhaps maybe someone will chime in.
For starters, where do you think your router was manufactured? Can you trust it to only allow connections with your WiFi credentials?
Beyond that, there’s a broad range of products and manufacturers in an average house. Assuming none have struck a deal to do a credential-less connection with the router itself, they may be talking to each other, basically asking “do you know the WiFi?” To every device in your home. Then, they share the info with each other even though you haven’t granted it.
One of the comments in my past discussion on this topic noted that he didn’t even have his Wi-Fi setup, had just moved in to a new apartment, yet apparently his TV was knowledgeable about something similar. I don’t remember how he knew/found out but he suggested that it discovered his neighbors TV which was the same manufacturer and his neighbor did have it connected to their WiFi so the commentor’s TV leveraged the neighbors WiFi without being provided the credentials by a human.
It's still possible to watch television without an Internet connection?
More and more devices are coming with SIM cards baked in. You don’t pay for them, the manufacturer does, but they harvest your data whether you give them internet or not. For now I’m only aware of cars having these, but I suspect it’s just a matter of time before even cheap consumer gadgets have this too.
Really, the only answer is privacy regulation. Any other solution (just let the free market handle it, don’t give it internet access, etc) is not workable in the long term.
Only fools think the government is going to save them from corporate abuses, because they're in league. Half the time the government is the one forcing them to do it.
What is your solution then? The free market? That’s the status quo, and it’s not working well at all to protect consumers.
Like China was the first doing that. They learned from the US.
Subscriptions all the way
I don't believe it is China's fault. It is result of over-finalization of markets. Line must go up forever. Whatever can be done for that must be done. All theoretical future revenue streams must be presented to justify the line going up.