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 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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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'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.
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.
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 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.
So, world of Warcraft is illegal now?
When Europe tries to do this, many cry as over regulation.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
[flagged]
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.
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.
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.
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)?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.Well then it seems only fair that I pay for the camera license with a license to use my money.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
They thought they sold me a camera but no I'll invoke my statutory rights and get a full refund.
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.
and the next step is a monthly subscription fee to use your camera...
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...
If market needs it people will develop ways to pass AI generated through the camera circuitry.
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).
>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/
This has existed for a while and it does not require licensing your footage to camera maker.
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.
When all the manufacturing was moved to China decades ago, I bet no one predicted China would do this!
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'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.
Like China was the first doing that. They learned from the US.
Subscriptions all the way
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.
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.