I remind myself multiple times per week of the ways I compromise by letting questionable service companies into my life. “I really should self-serve this.” — I guess people who don’t fantasise of self-sufficiency to the nth degree, and don’t get angry at being force-fed straight uninterrupted ads, just think of the immediate upside.
Either the marketing people weren't very aware of privacy (specifically, the chatter around that time, about covering webcams against hackers, and about whether adtech was listening in on device mics), or they have a dark sense of humor.
This brings with it all the advantages and disadvantages of a computer. Except that the user is not given any of the advantages they have with a desktop or laptop computer. Companies get away with it because in the normie's mind the smart watch is a watch first and foremost, and who would expect to log into a terminal on a watch? Why would you need security updated for a wristwatch? This is how artificially restricted technology is slowly being introduced into people's live, one appliance at a time.
The major platforms like Reddit and Facebook have restrained them to the maximum people will tolerate and reducing the performance disruption and layout changes that the smaller sites are plagued with.
> “This is getting ridiculous and I'm about to just toss the whole thing and move back to Google,” one Redditor said of the “full-volume” ads for Alexa+ on their Echo Show.
Any article that quotes this and doesn't point out the crushing stupidity of it has failed. Do it politely, if you must, Scharon Harding. But if I wanted to be exposed to Reddit quality ideas I'd be on Reddit.
How should they know? Genuinely asking. Yeah WE know, we've known forever because we're the people who make this shit, both professionally and in our spare time. We know the costs associated with making these little magic devices, and we know the ongoing cost of powering them. Your average consumer does not. Not only do they not know, they do not care, until they feel their privacy is being eroded by it.
Instead of being mad at people for taking a product advertised to them at face value to just be a useful thing for them to use, and not something actively designed to spy on them and then use that collected information to bombard them with ads, why don't we just say to companies: hey, it's no longer acceptable to sell loss-leader products that perform a handful of user-friendly functions that also then double as privacy violations and harass customers with ads?
If we kill surveillance capitalism, not only do we de-fang the advertising industry which is actively making every tech product on the face of the earth worse to suit it's purposes, not only do we permanently end the privacy issue on the side of users, we also reduce climate threatening emissions and hideous power waste that is required to make all this atrocious shit work.
And you might say "well they SHOULD care!" and yeah, I kinda agree, and also I recognize that people have a lot of shit they already have to care about, and frankly, I don't think they should have to care about this. I don't think you should have to worry if your new TV is spying on you, I just think you should be able to buy a fuckin' TV, and take it home, and plug some shit into it, and watch TV. I think that's a better world to strive for than all the consumer awareness we can muster. I am perfectly able to, but don't WANT to have to shop for electronics like I'm actively negotiating a hostage crisis where the hostage is my ability to jerk off in my living room without 3 ad agencies knowing about it, and I don't think that's an unreasonable position to take.
Because they’ve got eyes, memory, and a working brain? Every product Amazon has ever put out has wound up with ads in it, as has Amazon itself, so why in gods name wouldn’t this new one be covered in ads? It’s not 2005, this stuff shouldn’t be surprising anymore - everyone is on Facebook, TikTok, or Instagram, and if you can’t recognize that those are ad platforms from ad companies and you somehow haven’t heard from anywhere anything about the surveillance capital aspect of this (not the term, but the actual practice), I’m not sure what to say at this point except we fucking tried.
And I agree, we _shouldn’t_ have to worry about any of this crap, but were we’re well past the point where that should be considered a reasonable expectation by anyone. We’re a quarter century into this now, anyone who’s still surprised by it, yeah, that’s a “them” problem.
Because not everyone has been immersed in that world the whole time. A whole lot of people don't know fucking anything about Amazon beyond it being the best store on the Internet. I've got relatives who still don't understand email requires Internet access brother, because when you're not a nerd, this computer shit just doesn't matter to you. I get that it's hard to empathize, but like, a HUGE swath of the public just doesn't fucking care. They don't know how computers work, they don't know how surveillance advertising works, all they know is the man at Verizon said email is this icon, and web browsing is this icon, and their grandchildren are in this other icon. That is the extent of their technical knowledge and they desire no more.
And like, I don't they should need to have it. I don't need to know shit about plumbing, about electricity, about carpentry, or any one of dozens of specializations utterly crucial to my ongoing existence in this world. I know tech, because it's my job. People who's job it isn't shouldn't need to know shit to move safely through the world.
1. I get a lot more value out of (some) Reddit threads than I get out of most online journalism, including Ars Technica, so I’m never surprised to see really bad quality from journalism.
2. I’ve had two Google displays in my home for over 5 years, and have never seen a single ad on mine (with default settings / no hacking). So it’s not that surprising (to me anyway) to see these reactions from customers (unless you already had higher expectations from Google vs. Amazon).
If you want change, you have to vote and lobby for it. That's what your enemies are doing [2].
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2014/02/13/googles_secret_androi...
[2] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2021/07/isps-spent-235-m...
Though, even with Special Offers disabled, it still puts oversized icons for marketing promotions, bursting out of the search bar at the top of the home screen. This is one of the reasons I find the home screen a little bit unpleasant to look at, and avoid it as much as possible.
[1] If you want to remove Special Offers from your own Kindle/Fire (I don't know about Echo Show), go to https://www.amazon.com/hz/mycd/digital-console/alldevices , click on the icon for your device, and scroll down, to find an option to disable Special Offers by paying some amount. IIRC, it said the amount was the difference between the original retail prices of with-ads and ads-free versions of the device. I've also heard some people can get Special Offers removed for free by customer service, but in my case it seemed like a fair deal, so I just paid the modest fee.
Amazon can can go forth and multiply with itself.
No internet required. No sync software required. It’s quite nice!
The update script was pretty much this (on a laptop set up not to automatically mount removable filesystems):
#!/bin/sh -x
DeviceMountPoint="/media/pocketbook"
mount "$DeviceMountPoint" || exit 1
cd ~/doc || exit 1
rsync -crltv . "${DeviceMountPoint}/."
Status=$?
umount "$DeviceMountPoint"
exit $Status
/dev/disk/by-id/usb-USB-FS_PocketBook_MYSERIALNUMBER-0:0 /media/pocketbook vfat user,noauto 0 0Since my priorities were different than the original buyer, I repaid that discount amount.
Maybe one day they'll turn it into an yearly thing to avoid ads.
I respect that they offered the option at purchase time and then at any point after, and at a reasonable price.
And isn't this an option that the everything-is-a-market HN libertarians would like to have: People who want less expensive, say, TVs, can get the existing market price for that. And people who don't like that ads/surveillance, but want the nice economies-of-scale hardware, can pay what the brand would've made on advertising and surveillance, to opt-out, for that unit?
Ideally, a lot of the current surveillance and advertising (implemented almost entirely by HN's own field) would be outlawed, but paid opt-out can sometimes be a reasonable pragmatic individual compromise, for now.
Or maybe I'm wrong - did the $X you paid for ads-free also give you root access?
Which I bought for pragmatic business reasons.
Don't worry, I have a home full of Debian, OpenWrt, Coreboot, a non-'smart' TV, GrapheneOS, etc.
There are no IoT devices, and I go out of my way to avoid buying devices with IoT shoved in. For reasons obvious to people who know how they work, and who know what their business priorities and track records are.
Also, in startups, I usually use open source, avoid unwarranted vendor lock-in and certain known-jerk companies, and try to work with people who are similarly-minded about such practices (it's a useful signal of better-than-average people who care, IME).
Fascinating isn't it? It continues over decades. I cannot recall ever once opening an overt ad among, what, hundreds of thousands? Google `subverts' in search I've opened, but that only layers their more desperate enshittings. Newpipe escaped and saved me from Youtube's thousands of bearskin hoodies, butter and bowel movements, pink salt trick, something about men's erections and a tomato.
These must be smart people who engineer this, this `inverse' offensive ad targeting, it must be for some brilliant objective, but I remain completely lost at what it could possibly be.
Thinking about it now, he probably meant it was OK regarding their contracts with studios. Our engineering chain of command was completely obsessed with customer experience. The business side, not so much.
Such a metrics-driven company will surely know something about how incentives drive outcomes.
(I hope so)
There are directives about transparency in the costs or charges tied to a sale, but it is not immediate that it covers including new ads as an extra burden on the consumer.
Same for other directives regarding misleading advertising and the like, hard to prove that this new anti feature goes against the advertised product. it’s all very indirect and hazy, we’re in need of more protections for consumer to truly own their hardware.
To stick to the metaphor (apologies if this isn't HN friendly)
Smart TV? Fart TV
Smart display? Fart display
Smart fridge? Fart fridge
Now, everything is global - so are we looking at European users or American users complaining ? If an American user says it’s an unbearable, then it’s unusable. If a European user complains… it depends ( and these days, it’s at least to me unusable, but I obviously can’t speak for everyone)
Imagine buying a tennis racket and being interrupted, as you are playing, to be told to buy something else. That would be ridiculous but that's we're been told is a valid business model today.
Sadly I've come to believe the pendulum is going to have to swing about this far before it might have a chance of swinging back.
Even local businesses get snatched by PE firms left and right, prices skyrocket, customers are pissed....
Is the business-consumer relationship valued at exactly $0?
There is no system we can think of to avoid that?
There is, but it requires thinking outside the box of "free market" capitalism, something most Americans are incapable of.
It shouldn't be a crime for me to customize the product I purchased. Or to sell people a kit to do the customization themselves.
They don't have to make it easy, but they should be forced to give a way to opt out of walled gardens and bypass "secure boot".
What we should be saying is Improve the DMCA. You've already clued into the biggest thing that needs to change (DRM/anti-anti-circumvention).
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is unpopular to say in HN-type circles but the DMCA is actually not that bad and mostly works as it should.
Is Amazon charging businesses who use their ad platform a fee based on how many times they display a product page?
Anecdotally, I think that open-source software/hardware only ever gets better (because if it got worse, someone would fork it, etc...) while proprietary software will eventually succumb to rent-seeking and decline. I've seen many open source projects go from barely usable to matching their proprietary counterparts.
Shoutout to Immich, full-featured self-hosted Google Photos alternative and my new favourite open-source project.
I agree self hosting your photos is the way to go, though.
Someone(/me if I had enough time) should make some kind of LLM scraper extension for Amazon's Web Reader. Run it on your own ebooks while you're signed in and you get the EPUBs. Maybe this already exists...
I know there was some kind of cutoff earlier this year for unDRMing your Kindle books, but I definitely missed that by a mile.
But then I recently found neon which allows me to repurpose the device. And, it is incredible.
I recall trying to build something for the Google devices and it was an awful experience. Getting root ssh access on my Mycroft device is amazing, and I have tailscale on it to boot.
And, no ads, ever.
It’s completely fucked.
I got rid of social media a couple years ago and never looked back. I think I might take it even further and just remove all consumer tech from my life. Just a linux box.
"Nothing is certain but death ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶a̶x̶e̶s̶.̶"̶, taxes, and ads."
Washington wasn't much of a Temperance preacher neither.
Nowhere on the Amazon Echo Show product page is there any mention of advertisements. The product screenshots don't show advertisements nor does the product video.
It's one thing if someone buys a product after being informed they're going to use it for ads, it's quite another to buy one which does not mention the existence of ads at all or worse.
Updating the software to show advertisements years after you purchased a device and well after the return date? Unacceptable.
dotcoma•6h ago