This gets really tiresome to rebuke. He supported a proposition that was supported by the MAJORITY of the citizens at the time and that was already six years old when we became Mozilla CEO. Some people wrote hit pieces even though he even distanced himself from it. He was not fired, he stepped back voluntarily.

I haven’t done this myself, but I have discovered that it is not allowed to ship or mail items with lithium ion batteries that are likely or suspected to be or actually are damaged, which came in handy when I discovered that a previously working device suddenly stopped charging within the return period. Amazon said I had to work with the seller directly through Amazon, which I did, and when they offered to replace the item and I desired a refund, they refused and stopped responding. I elevated the issue to Amazon and they asked me to return the item, which I was unable to in good conscience do, as I could not attest to the shipper that it was safe to mail, as it had a non-removable battery that would now no longer charge. So Amazon said please don’t ship it, but to dispose of it according to my local disposal regulations.

In the interest of public safety, I told a lot of people about this important issue at my own freebooted unaffiliated DEF CON 30 talk outside while a bomb threat or something caused Caesar’s to be on lockdown. At this talk, I gave away the affected device, a Ledger Nano X which would work when powered via USB C but would not charge or work unplugged. All features and functions still worked otherwise.

> You might want to work on your pitch, it comes across as a little crazy haha

It’s funny you mention that, as I really had to almost haggle to give it away, it was really a kind of comedy routine that occurred to me in the moment, and it was hilarious. Think about the tone of delivery of spam emails. The delivery mechanism itself is worded in such a way that it weeds out folks not receptive to the message. The message is the medium. It’s the multi sensory experience of being appealed to which is the payload that runs on vulnerable processors of susceptible minds, if you ingest it in the way presented and intended.

Thank you for coming to my socially engineered TED Talk re-enactment. I had a lot of fun that year and will be going to DEF CON again this year in a month or so too!

One of these Results of X is still selling the actual quality product, but there is no way for you to ascertain it because you can't trust the reviews, nor the sold amount because they might as well just be good at tricking people.

Aliexpress just fake it themselves. Search for anything, sort by the number of orders, open the product page for the first result.

Next to the number of sales there's going to be a tooltip saying "Sales and ratings are calculated based on all identical products from the platform."

Under reviews there's going to be a message saying "The reviews displayed are from various sellers for similar product in AliExpress."

In other words, they might as well say that these numbers and reviews have absolutely no relation to the specific product you're thinking about buying, they're just there to increase your confidence.

(average aliexpress review on many tech items)

I don't think there's a typical delivery speed at all as it depends massively on how close you live to one of their distribution centres. I can get most shit from Amazon next day where I live, some times same day if I pay extra (I don't) as I live only a few miles from one.

So it really depends where you live.

Similar with Temu - my wife ordered some homeware that was awful and looked nothing like the pictures - Temu provided a pre-paid returns label for some of it, and the rest just refunded and said 'please donate locally'.

I forget the clothing company (wasn't Shein but similar) again same - she kept some, but most of it needed retuning - within minutes she had a refund and 'please keep or donate the unwanted clothing' - simpler than many UK companies returns policies.

It's similar for "shark attorneys," who will typically hail from tier 2 and 3 schools. They're the aggressive hustlers.

That's a general social media thing and it's annoying as hell. Means every statement that corrects falsehoods and misconceptions against something that you yourself don't like needs to come with a disclaimer that you don't actually like it.

Perhaps not 'complicit', but with a reckless disregard towards fraud.

They have every byte of data ever gathered from all their platforms: IP addresses, network scans from Echo, information from caching servers at ISPs, device fingerprints, site/API access patterns, typing cadences, mouse dwell fingerprinting, timing analysis of orders vs reviews, customer data access patterns vs customer reviews, description text and image analysis, product change timelines, buyer and reviewer clustering, banking details, registration and tax documents, all of it and more. They are one of the biggest data processing technology companies in the world (various flavours of "AI" and otherwise). They even have regulatory carve-outs for using PII for fraud prevention.

I am completely sure you could shine a great big data science floodlamp at all that data and have a vast number of scammers stand out in stark relief. It does feel a bit like the scammers are being tolerated to the extent that they don't drive customers away (and I am very sure the data for that is carefully monitored) or attract regulatory attention they can't lobby away.

Then again, who would win, one of the world's biggest AI company or the word "without": https://www.amazon.com/s?k=shirt+without+stripes

Well that's on Amazon then. They could go the Walmart route and enforce in-house random testing on the stuff they sell. Walmart, for all the rightful hate they get, Aldi, Lidl, Costco, Coop, they all have very strict and extensive negotiations for purchase, and they can, do and will refuse shipments from vendors that fail to meet QA.

But they don't, that's how Bezos got one of the richest men in the world. And Amazon got entrenched way too fast for regulators to ever meaningfully catch up.

And let me flag this is a that. Many years ago I reported a search that returned three pages of results for one product that only comes by the box and by the case. Last I looked it was still three pages.

Do they? I have seen tons of reviews complaining that it's the wrong material -- that a tablecloth is polyester rather than advertised cotton, that something is chrome-plated plastic rather than stainless steel. And I've left my fair share myself, and never had one taken down. I've avoided buying many products precisely based on other people's reviews pointing out the wrong material, the wrong size, etc. So what you're describing does not match my experience at all. In fact, that's one of the main reasons I use Amazon, that there are enough reviews to find out what's real and what's fake. Other sites don't have enough reviews, and of course a site run by the brand itself can delete whatever bad reviews it wants.

The point remains that you don't need to "buy" reviews. You don't need to give out coupons, or gift cards, or rewards or in fact anything. Hence why I said "it's not that complicated" as per:

> You've got stores that would include a $5-$20 coupon/gift card in the item in exchange for a positive review.

Why pay for what you can get for free?