People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads
arstechnica.com329 points by croes 2 days ago
329 points by croes 2 days ago
We're way overdue to abolish the DMCA, in particular the "anti-circumvention" felonies.
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.
But then what's the point of buying a device like this in the first place? I agree with the sentiment, but I would only buy this device if I wanted to use Amazon's services. If I decided to customize it, I couldn't blame Amazon for refusing the service.
Perhaps there could be a government-mandated requirement to distinguish between "buy" and "rent". If you get a device bundled with a service, then there should be a subscription fee you have to pay for it without the ability to outright "buy" it. That would make it very obvious to people whether they are buying something to own or merely renting it. My take is very simplistic here but I hope I managed to convey the concept.
Better yet: ban hardware vendors from denying the user an ability to customize software.
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".
Better yet: declare hardware and software to be two independent products/markets, and that tying them together is illegal anti-competitive bundling. Software products must be developed based on publicly-available hardware documentation, and using unpublished documentation from the hardware manufacturer should be illegal. The points where this might seem a little wonky (how do you deal with a hardware manufacturer constantly bumping chip revs) is exactly a constraint the market should be optimizing around in order to produce more end-user legibility/autonomy.
Throw away the DMCA and you throw away all safe harbors for websites, and then the internet is truly screwed. There's no way the current congress would ever accept such a thing again -- Section 230 has been weaponized against it already.
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.
> Throw away the DMCA and you throw away all safe harbors for websites, and then the internet is truly screwed
Yet we have plenty of internet outside of the USA where we don't have the DMCA. There are various laws that tackle some parts of it, but there's also consumer-friendly laws as well (e.g. the right to repair although that's for physical goods).
If there is anything good in the DMCA those sections can be reimplemented in law.
But we should not tolerate broken laws because they have some benefits, when we have the power to remove and replace bad laws with good ones.
The anti-circumvention rule is great, just backwards. There should be penalties for companies that try to prevent their hardware from being modified.
A simpler regulation would be to disclose at the time of purchase how much ad content that a given device that one is purchasing will display. That way if you want something cheap and are ok with an ad sponsored device, everything is fine. If you don't want ads, buy a competitor's product that doesn't have ads. If competition isn't broken this model should work fine.
> A simpler regulation [is disclosing] how much ad content
I disagree, it's much less simple in the long run. (A phenomenon I'm sure is painfully-familiar to a lot of software developers.)
First, it's playing whack-a-mole with just one of many kinds of infringement on the user's ownership. It does nothing to protect against aggressive spying "telemetry", against forcing users to make an Acme Fridge Online Account to continue, or against standard/free features being "discontinued" and then introducing a suspiciously similar paid-subscription option.
Second, even in that narrow "showing ads" aspect, there are too many dimensions to lock down by spec. For example, consider the difference between a system that shows X minutes of ads when idle which are instantly-dismissable, versus another system that shows fewer/shorter/smaller ads which are unskippable phases of normal operation.
In contrast, freeing users to fight back--and to share what they've developed--encourages a democratized and counterbalancing force, which will naturally be strongly aligned to consumer interests regardless of yearly electoral changes.
People will study the Amazon devices downfall for decades to come.
Amazon managed to get these things in everyone’s home and people generally liked them. The stage was set for Amazon to knock it out of the park on AI and then they completely blew it. Like epic once in a generation missed the boat.
Now it’s an annoying device that shows ads. Everyone I know is tossing these things in the trash now.
I have an echo show I bought years ago and it sits in a drawer. The constant ads are just too obnoxious and it doesn’t do enough useful to justify putting up with it.
I still have a bunch of standard echo devices and they seem to be getting worse and worse over time. They completely missed the AI boat despite being positioned to be the ones to bring it to everyone’s homes and even the basic stuff seems to be getting worse. The devices misunderstand and fail to hear queries entirely more than they used to.
I’m honestly very tempted to switch to Google home at this point. I’d consider switching to Apple but I have one HomePod specifically for some home automation integration and it seems even worse whenever I try to use it.
Somebody sent me an Echo as a gift. Don't even know who. I buried it in the back yard. Didn't even take it out of the box. Fifty years from now some kid of the family that buys my house will find it and ask his parents what it is. They won't know. They'll have to go on the Interslop to find a "technological anthropologist" to figure it out. Then they'll try to donate it to the Smithsonian Museum of Bad Ideas but they will refuse it because they already have 1000 of the things back in their Indy Jones warehouse.
Nice short story and +1 for Interslop, which I had never heard before today. And now I want to study technoarchaeology.
Sounds like the vision for this stuff was playing into made-up numbers inputted into a financial model on a spreadsheet.
Yeah, Amazon jumped too early. The real business model that's winning the "made-up numbers inputted into a financial model on a spreadsheet" is LLMs marketed as "Just about to turn into Artificial General Intelligence and turn the world into a post scarcity utopia" with the widely known but unacknowledged understanding that what they really mean is post scarcity for people who are already billionaires, not for the people we intend to put out of work -and that they don't need to create AGI for that, just to win the extractive rentseeker race to own the entire economy's productive labour.
> just to win the extractive rentseeker race to own the entire economy's productive labour.
They're already there. Inflation nearly doubled prices for consumer goods while wages have remained static. People are clearly too paralyzed to effectively organize their labor pool against these monopolists.
> Amazon jumped too early.
I disagree. The platform is cheap to manufacture and efficient to operate. They kept the walls on the garden too high. There was never any push to bring third parties or developers onto the platform in a credible way and never on an even footing with Amazon's own offerings.
They clutched it too tightly. It was never going to pan out in the long term. It was a dazzling loss leader right up until Amazon brass realized it was unsustainable. Then the usual conversion into selling your own users data and cramming every spare inch with visual ads came as predictably as it always does.
I recently bought a Kindle/Fire device pre-owned, to save money. But seeing full-screen shitty consumer products ads on the 'covers of my books', sitting around my home was so depressing, I paid the extra $10-$15, to retroactively turn it into an ad-free device.[1]
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.
I worked on Prime during the Prime Video launch. All of the marketing was around it being ad free and a new benefit of the Prime membership. Not too long later they started playing pre roll ads for Amazon Video offerings (maybe Amazon Studios, I don’t remember). I brought it up in a meeting and the business folks said it was OK because it wasn’t in the middle of the selected content. I’m pushed back, but it went nowhere.
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.
I'm always amazed at how little people will care about the customer experience for a shot at a 20k raise.
In all fairness to the MBAs, the "Customer Obsession" commandment could be interpreted multiple ways.
Such a metrics-driven company will surely know something about how incentives drive outcomes.
For a metrics driven company they sure did not cite a single metric or have any data when they forced mandatory RTO without having enough office space or desks to support everyone returning while I worked there.
Not sure they really care about many metrics these days.
The metrics are there and they were driven by them; they just didn’t want to share what those metrics were because they wouldn’t be received well.
“Our primary investors are also leveraged heavily in the commercial real estate market and they’re losing their shirts and we need their money, so…”
Yeah, it is just very humorous such that normally, all of us in the room are used to a specific kind of presentation, where they show metrics and why that's a good thing because all decisions MUST to be data-driven. In this particular case, it definitely "boosted productivity and was helpful" no Q&A, no data, meeting was over.
And then we didn't have enough desks, outlets, and internet was slow. Lmao.
I always wondered about how this fit with the TOS. People paid for Prime with the expectation it was ad-free. Then it got ads, and now it has tons. I never watch anything anymore, which I guess saves them $ because they don't have to pay the content providers. But it sure feels lousy to be a boiled frog. I would ditch it if my wife didn't insist on keeping Prime.
The TOS of almost any online business says they can change the TOS any time they want to, with the minimum legally required notice.
Plus, most TOSes have very little legal effect, in either direction.
Same thing with Audible. Very annoying. When you open the app, it shows you ads for books to buy instead of the books you already have or the book you're listening to now. Of course, they do not care. Whether you actually listen to the book isn't that important to them, as long as you buy it.
I found the Kindle ads particularly infuriating when they advertised books I had already purchased from Amazon. They were insultingly brain dead in their targeting especially given how much Amazon knows about me
>.. insultingly brain dead in their targeting especially given how much Amazon knows about me.
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.
Paid the Danegeld. Hope it works out.
In this case, the original retail buyer was offered a choice between paying $X for ads-free or $X-minus-discount for with-ads. And it was disclosed upfront what they were buying into.
Since my priorities were different than the original buyer, I repaid that discount amount.
Nice deal for Amazon because they get to double-dip as the same device served ads for some time for the first owner and then they still get the ad-free uplift eventually.
Maybe one day they'll turn it into an yearly thing to avoid ads.
It was a fair deal to me.
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.
You bought a device that obeys its manufacturer instead of you. A device you have no control over.
Or maybe I'm wrong - did the $X you paid for ads-free also give you root access?
Good question. This is a locked-down device that's controlled more by the company than by me.
Which I bought for pragmatic business reasons.
Don't worry, I have a home full of Debian, OpenWrt, Coreboot, a non-'smart' TV, GrapheneOS, etc.
There are no IoT devices, and I go out of my way to avoid buying devices with IoT shoved in. For reasons obvious to people who know how they work, and who know what their business priorities and track records are.
Also, in startups, I usually use open source, avoid unwarranted vendor lock-in and certain known-jerk companies, and try to work with people who are similarly-minded about such practices (it's a useful signal of better-than-average people who care, IME).
turn off WiFi and transfer by usb.
Amazon no longer allows eBook downloads from their website.
Then don’t buy from them, plenty of venues
Many with trade offs. I recommend the pocketbook 4. You can disable recommendations easily, and the unit mounts as a disk so you can read and write books as if it were an SD card.
No internet required. No sync software required. It’s quite nice!
I really liked my PocketBook InkPad Lite. After the one-time firmware update, I put it into airplane mode permanently, and always just updated DRM-free books on by plugging it in as USB Storage, and `rsync`-ing `~/doc/` to it.
The update script was pretty much this (on a laptop set up not to automatically mount removable filesystems):
#!/bin/sh -x
DeviceMountPoint="/media/pocketbook"
mount "$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 0Ditto. It's also significantly lighter weight than competing readers (at least when I bought mine), has physical buttons, has color models, and has really good battery life possibly because it runs a custom Linux instead of Android.
I’ve purchased and backed up over 700 kindle books over the years. The day Amazon made backups impossible I switched to Kobo and have never looked back.
Amazon can can go forth and multiply with itself.
Backups aren't impossible, its just a bit harder than it used to be.
That said, Kobo is great if they have the book you're looking for.
I can't reconcile Amazon's growing flood of ads with their famous first Leadership Principle: "Leaders start with the customer and work backwards. They work vigorously to earn and keep customer trust."
The main leader is off swanning around on superyachts and giving the customer thing a miss.
"advertisers are customers too"
Exactly. For a company that offers "free", ad-supported services, the customers are the advertisers, not the users.
I've had two different family members complain that now days when they unlock their Fire Tablet, it launches the Amazon Store app to display the product page of whatever product was being advertised when they unlock the tablet.
Is Amazon charging businesses who use their ad platform a fee based on how many times they display a product page?
> the company is working to improve the ad experience on Alexa devices
There is one and only one way to "improve the ad experience" and we all know what it is but for some strange reason the companies showing the ads never seem to figure it out.
These days, the general rule is to avoid buying anything 'smart'. They are all filled with advertisements and data-sharing practices and are designed to target you through their user interface and applications. They bombard you with offers for their other products and deals.
Matrix got it a bit wrong; the machines aren't interested in our body heat, they're going to put us in the goo pods and force use to watch adverts 24/7
I don't have a reliable source, but I've heard that the original script had the machines use us for our processing power, not our energy, but that the studio thought it sounded too complicated and had them change it. Of course, changing it makes it make ZERO sense.
Some not so reliable sources I found:
https://www.reddit.com/r/matrix/comments/q2i0by/is_it_true_t...
https://www.reddit.com/r/plotholes/comments/11khig/comment/c...
Why? What do they or their creators get out of it?
Obviously platforms get advertiser dollars, but the question is what the business paying for that gets. The answer is.. almost nothing? Dedicated marketing/advertising resources at your business is probably just a fifth column, where shareholders and business owners are swindled into paying the salary and other maintenance for people who are actually working for google/facebook/amazon/whatever.
Source? Like 20+ years of ubiquitous surveillance, tracking and micro-targeting.. and yet non-pet owners still get ads for dog food, males get ads for feminine hygiene products, single people are offered deals on family vacations, and people who just bought a car get car advertisements for the next 3-5 years which only taper off when it might actually be time to buy another car.
Apple gets a lot of criticism but one thing I do like is that their devices at least respect me. The AppleTV streaming box has no ads in the OS and OS-level data sharing is opt-out.
It’s nothing inherently bad with “smart” devices. Just the business models behind them.
Is it even possible to buy a non-smart tv these days?
All I really need or want is something I can plug a few gaming consoles into... so HDMI, composite and preferably s-video. No bells or whistles or Internet connection necessary.
Ironically advertising displays a pretty good.
I've read something like 5 or 6 HN threads about a dumb TV, and without fail _this_ is always one of the replies.
Another benefit — advertising displays are also designed to be always-on and last much longer than consumer devices.
The other side of the coin? Because of the first two points, they are also rather cost-prohibitive.
Nevertheless, anyone know where I can pick up a good one?
I don't know how long they are supposed to last always on, but I have done a few always-on displays with cheap-ass consumer TVs. They have always been fine left on for a couple of years. I mean, some of them got turned off on weekends and stuff, but for the price of a commercial display, you can buy 4 cheap-ass displays, and just replace one if it dies. I've also seen lots of these commercial displays die as well... I just don't believe they are really worth spending the money on. Of course, this was back before every consumer TV was a smart TV. I dunno if you can find cheap-ass TVs that aren't smart anymore.
> The other side of the coin? Because of the first two points, they are also rather cost-prohibitive.
Not if you steal one! Which has 3 great benefits, you get a free screen, wherever you stole it from no longer bombards passersby with intrusive advertising, and whoever though doing that was a good idea is now out the cost of their expensive screen.
> Nevertheless, anyone know where I can pick up a good one?
Your local shopping mall late at night...
<All jokes. Honest. Although as Hunter S. Thompson said “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me,”>
I'm technically ignorant on this but would GDPR apply to this type of thing as well?
(I hope so)
Not really. GDPR deals with privacy and personal data handling.
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.
I wonder what they expected when buying such a device from Amazon.
I think a lot of normies still think that when they buy a smart appliance they are buying an appliance like from yesteryear, except with more features. In reality they are buying a computer shaped like an appliance of yesteryear. Your smartphone? That's not a phone, it's a computer shaped like a phone. Smart TV? Computer shaped like a TV. Smart watch? Computer shaped like a watch.
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 term "smart appliance" has changed radically since the 1960s [0]; it didn't necessarily mean "ubiquitous connectivity, data collection, building a profile on the occupants and monetizing it with advertisers/data brokers". We only end up at that through decades of legislative inaction.
Your second point is about the extent to which manufacturers are allowed lock their product behind proprietary interfaces (protected by the excesses of the DMCA, and lack of compliance with Right to Repair). Remember the 2023 bankruptcy of e-bike manufacturer VanMoof, locking out its customers, even ones who had purchased it? Probably legislatures will only pass meaningful consumer laws after a wave of smart bankruptcies and data asset transfers. If even then. Perhaps one flashpoint will be the rise in subprime auto lenders using "kill switches" as a high-tech repossession alternative. How are consumers protected when the company itself fails (as is currently happening with Tricolor [1], likely followed by others)?
[0]: https://www.impulselabs.com/blog/the-past-and-future-of-smar...
[1]: https://www.kbb.com/car-news/a-big-auto-lender-went-bankrupt...
Don't get me wrong, I'm not a fan of the trend.
But one could argue that a computer is just a cheaper implementation of the yesteryears discrete electronics. Which was itself a cheaper implementation of old school mechanical gears, switches and timing wheels, etc.
A locked down computer, could have been mechanical for all the user cares.
Fixing a dishwasher a while my dad told me that back in the day, they operates with a timing wheel that switched between different stages, and they had a lot of wires.
Todays dishwashers are cheaper and have fewer mechanical control parts (if any).
which should in theory make them more dependable but I've seen friends go through a few yet my 25 year old whirlpool has only ever had the door seal replaced and it works fine if loud as hell compared to modern ones.
Could be survivorship bias ;)
But yes, the don't make them like they used to -- in fact they never did!
People said the same thing 25 years ago, and 25 years before that.
A modern fridge is probably cheaper (corrected for inflation) and more energy efficient.
Moreover, few appliances lives to be 30 years old just because they don't break.
Case in point: my better half is looking for a new oven. Because the 10y old one we have is noisy, compared to the new smart ovens. (I personally hate the fact that the top models are so smart, I must spend a second or two watching animated Siemens logo, before it's ready for input).
I never thought the leopard would eat MY face!
Yet people get leopards as pets.
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.
IIRC, when it was launched, with the camera, the Web page had a top image of the product sitting on a bedroom night stand, naturally pointed at the owner's bed.
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.
Amazon sucks. They are one of the greediest companies there is. What they do with online shopping, logistics, AWS is incredible. They are in a different league and could generate more revenue than any company could ever need by just doing those things well. But that’s not enough. They have to stuff ads into everything and find every possible way to piss off customers all in the name of another buck.
How do you measure greediness? I worked for companies 4 levels removed from the consumer and they were all very motivated to get financial results for the current quarter. Despite their advantages, I assume Amazon is now short-term focused as well.
Having said that, I finally tossed my Alexa devices.
> How do you measure greediness?
I think a decent first indicator might be "Is the Founder and/or CEO a billionaire?"
That only indicates if they got in early or not. As notorious as CEO pay packages are they won't make you a billionaire.
Really 'greed' in many cases is just envy projected. It doesn't matter how efficient or lazy the subject is, just that it makes the observer mad.
Same with any Amazon device. I wish there was a way to recycle Alexa so it’s not just a e-garbage… after all my personal data and insights were mined
Don't stress about it. The junk was created the moment you bought it. Take it to the dump, they usually have some kind of electronics recycling so maybe less than 100% goes to the landfill ultimately.
Thank you and agree! I am waiting for a good moment to get rid of that ad display listening device. Life gets its way!
Benjamin Franklin was so close.
"Nothing is certain but death ̶a̶n̶d̶ ̶t̶a̶x̶e̶s̶.̶"̶, taxes, and ads."
Franklin was a publisher, and sold advertising, no?
Washington wasn't much of a Temperance preacher neither.
Now I'm wondering, the first news papers were sold out on the street. How long was it before there were ads in them? And was there the same intellectual hand-wringing about it at the time?
The first newspaper ad was for a book and in the 1620s. I am not certain about intellectual handwringing but there were people who considered making money through commerce at all as morally wrong due to it involving neither toil as they recognized it nor might-makes-right. Based upon some truly stupid ideas of "fair price" and assumptions of fixed universal prices meaning that any merchant had to be a scammer.
>people who considered making money through commerce at all as morally wrong due to it involving neither toil as they recognized it
How very puritanical! That was the style at the time though.
This shouldn't be surprising. Amazon is known for such non-customer friendly behaviors.
I sometimes wonder whether there’s an eu vs us difference here. At least when it comes to tv, I found the hard way ( a long time ago ) that the amount of ads Americans are exposed to is simply unbearable. This extends to youtube and similar services.
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)
I still think the eu user is correct, no amount of ads when using a product is ok.
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.
Imagine buying a tennis racket and being interrupted, as you are playing, to be told to buy something else.
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.
Always seemed suspicious to me. Pricing seems very low for the hardware provided, requires continuous cloud services over years and the claim that it'll boost amazon sales always felt a little thin
I’m afraid to upgrade from my ~6 year old LG OLED with a damaged corner because I pair it with an Apple TV and only see Apple ads occasionally on the Home Screen. I don’t know if a newer tv would give me the same experience.
All TVs with an hdmi input (where the input is the default input used) will work for you. If the TV doesn’t show the last used input (so it could show you ads), that would be a major problem. Thankfully, I don’t think we are there yet for TVs that aren’t marketed ad supported … yet.
Sceptre TVs. They sell large, dumb TVs that do not contain any networking equipment at all.
https://www.sceptre.com/TV/4K-UHD-TV-category1category73.htm...
Yes, this is the answer in an ideal world. In practice, it's nearly impossible to buy Sceptre dumb TVs these days.
They are listed right there on the website. Add one to your cart and check out. What's impossible about that?
Most new TV's are fine if you just never connect them to network.
Except FireTV's. They complain constantly about the missing internet connection because they REALLY want to show you those ads.
New LG OLED TV’s are fine. You can keep them disconnected and just use external HDMI inputs without any nagging or issue.
I had buyers regret after getting a Mycroft II device a few years ago. Lots of drama there. I still think it was an inspiring vision but you can't spell hardware without hard.
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.
> “This is getting ridiculous and I'm about to just toss the whole thing and move back to Google”
"This pan is very hot, I gotta get outta here!"
* jumps into fire *
I’m of the mind to stop using consumer tech entirely. TV’s with ads before ads when you just want to watch a show. Tablets opening store pages on their own. Alexa listening in on every conversation. Smartphones tracking your every movement, app, contact, network, website you visit.
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.
And, the prices of these malware boxes kill the market for any civilized competitors.
I make an explicit decision not to get any Amazon hardware within my household. I don’t even trust the Eero brand.
They got me by the balls with Kindle.
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.
I've been working on exactly this! After buying a book and having an awful exerience in their native reader I realized they no longer let you download your ebooks. Thus began the war on their web reader, they have some interesting defenses on how they encode the book, its basically a bunch of SVG paths that render to letters that are mapped to IDs that change on every request to fetch book data (the most you can fetch at once is 5 pages) the SVG paths also contain micro variations so an A on one page will never have the same path on another, you have to render and fill in every unique letter in the book and compare it to every other to create a unified mapping and THEN compare it to the letters of the actual font its using to actually find out what letter each character actually is. The only thing I have left to do is get newlines working properly and package it all up nicely for release.
Damn, that's an impressive obfuscation and debugging. If you get around to releasing it I would be interested.
Buy the ebook, then download a beautiful DRM-free and guilt-free version from Anna's Archive? win-win.
Simple enshitification, literally everything is going down that road. Somewhere a VP with a dashboard is super happy: they will get their $1M bonus and "après moi le déluge".
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 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.
Please elaborate.
More socialism, less capitalism.
Believe that governments are capable of more than venal corruption and committing violence against their citizens and build a society in which people have value beyond what the market can extract from them.
This is part of why I refuse to purchase things that further enshittification on principle, even if it means "putting up with" an open-source alternative.
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.
Do the "smart displays" monitor the behavior of people in the room say and do to determine what to pitch to them? They're already aware of whether someone is near the device. What else are they monitoring?
Unfortunately, they don't need to. Besides the troughs of data from third-party sources, the likelihood that an Echo user is also an Amazon shopper is probably approaching 100%. They get so many good ad signals just from retail, books, Prime Video, etc. that they really don't even need to actively monitor you with a mic or camera...
It’s like willingly increasing your own attack surface when you are already under attack. Also, let’s face it, it’s not just Amazon.
The most egregious thing for me is that companies aren't disclosing that these devices are used to advertise to you before you purchase them.
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 absolutely should be illegal for a company to push a software update to an individual's device designed just to enrich themselves - certainly not without informed consent.
Advertising will expand to the point where we won’t take it anymore. And ultimately it comes down to power. If we can’t stop it ads will arrive. On the display on your fridge. (Unless you can stop it) on the display in your car (unless you can stop it) Where’s the line for you? And have you preserved your power so you’re in a position to stop it?
It's already happened. Most news websites are so loaded with ads now that it's impossible to use them. No one clicks the links and reads the actual articles anymore. And if you do you'll be fighting against constant full screen adverts and getting sent off to new tabs when you accidentally click them.
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.
I was thinking just today how nice it would be if I had a private AI that I could just ask "What streaming network that I already pay for can I watch Superman on without paying extra for it or watching ads?" and have it simply answer "HBO."
And now, after reading this comment, somebody is on the phone setting up a meeting with VCs for Monday morning to pitch this idea. Only the VCs are gonna insist that the AI make me listen to an ad for rainbow sparkle toothpaste before it tells me "HBO." And this is why we can't have nice things.
It's not conspiracy or hypothesis that the only point of these products is ads, it's the straight up business model. When are we going to hold people accountable for being surprised by the obvious actions of these companies? It wastes our time and it's boring to keep responding with, what did you think was going to happen? We've tried not shaming these people, will shame get them to stop buying this stuff and actually creating change in the world? What will work?
> “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.
To be fair:
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).
Solving problems by waiting for people to collectively stop making stupid choices (while well-paid marketing and research departments look for ways to trick them into making stupid choices, and business deals are struck to deprive them of better choices [1]) has a poor track record.
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...
> When are we going to hold people accountable for being surprised by the obvious actions of these companies?
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.
> How should they know?
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 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?
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.
I completely agree with what you wrote.
There is this, though:
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.
That's the crucial difference. In each of these cases you can contact a specialist to make sure your basement doesn't flood or you don't get decapitated by your roof caving in. More to the point: you know when it's time to contact a specialist and you can easily find one. With everything around consumer electronics and hostile practises neither is the case, so you somehow have to impart that information to the uninitiated with whatever means necessary, so they - at least - recognise the limitations of their knowledge. Then regulate away the extremes.
If we don't act on these practises - and soon - we'll drown.
I have tried building 'apps' for Alexa on a few occasions over the years. The developer experience has always been such trash that I've simply given up in some combination of frustration, despair, and disgust.
I'm not surprised that the end user experience has continued to get worse and worse.
I've never had a "smart" speaker or a "smart" display or a "smart" fridge and the only "smart" TV I've had has been intentionally not connected to the Internet. I have got a Nest and a "smart" washing machine and dryer. Some random thoughts:
1. I've literally never wanted a cloud-connected always-on microphone in my home and I'm surprised anyone does;
2. All of the home automation software is awful, bar none. The only thing it's going to impact in society is being the source of future DDoS attacks most likely. Every time I've tried to use it I'm met with unhelpful error messages, networking software that can't get a DHCP IP address or a million other faults. Or the hardware is just deprecated in favor of the newest, shiniest softare or API (I'm looking at you, Google Matter);
3. "Smart" displays are probably most akin to "smart" TVs. No good comes from connecting TVs to the Internet. It's just uploading data about your viewing habits to sell as well as inserting ads. Some TVs get pretty aggressive about this too. I've heard tales of them trying to find an open network. If any TV did that to me I'd put a drill through the Wifi chip. But "smart" displays have to be connected to the Internet. I have no control over such a device so I'll simply never get one.
I honestly don't know who buys this stuff.
> All of the home automation software is awful
I understand that you’re referring to major vendor software, but Home Assistant is pretty decent, if not amazing. Try it out, check the success stories; it’s mind blowing what you can do with it.
Amazon has really gone downhill in quality lately. It feels worse and worse and is more expensive all the time. They need competition. Walmart doesn't seem to be a true threat.
I'm really confused as to what is the point of that thing and why anyone would ever want one in the 1st place?
Holy crap, I thought "full volume" was metaphorically speaking until I clicked on the link. I'd smash the thing with a hammer.
I see many comments that express the same level of disgust I have for modern TV's, of nearly every brand, having mutated into intrusive digital signage with integrated behavioral tracking in my home.
The question is: Would you pay $1000 to $3000 more (depending on size, etc.) for a TV with none of that. Zero.
I would.
No need to connect or use any smart tv feature.
How much is your time worth? Apple TV is the best experience (not even close to FireTV) for the cost of it. There are ways to get completely ad free if you have time. I've been using a HTPC for close to 20 years for example.
I think that if you want a modern 70+ inch screen I am not sure that plugging anything into and HDMI input will do it. You need to lobotomize the TV. I could be wrong. I am probably going to explore this to some depth next year.
Depends on the TV brand. I use an LG OLED TV and it’s 100% fine being used as a “dumb” TV. I keep it disconnected and use an AppleTV. I never see the TV’s operating system unless I want to adjust picture settings.
"Good" TVs are so cheap these days, that premium wouldn't be acceptable in my mind. The fix the other posters mention about banning it from the internet and just using HDMI works well enough for me.
Can we stop posting amazon content here? i'm addicted to that damn site.
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