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 Software products must be developed based on publicly-available hardware documentation, and using unpublished documentation from the hardware manufacturer should be illegal.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).
Any improvement is a change and you can’t just make “improvements” when the changes require politicians. It’s likely they would seize the opportunity to change a lot more than the improvements you feel are needed.
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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."
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.
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.
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 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)?
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).
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.
Readit News
It shouldn't be a crime for me to customize the product I purchased. Or to sell people a kit to do the customization themselves.
They don't have to make it easy, but they should be forced to give a way to opt out of walled gardens and bypass "secure boot".
What we should be saying is Improve the DMCA. You've already clued into the biggest thing that needs to change (DRM/anti-anti-circumvention).
Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. This is unpopular to say in HN-type circles but the DMCA is actually not that bad and mostly works as it should.
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).
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.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
https://koreader.rocks/
Since my priorities were different than the original buyer, I repaid that discount amount.
Is Amazon charging businesses who use their ad platform a fee based on how many times they display a product page?
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.
Time and time again over my career I’ve run into that one.
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...
It’s nothing inherently bad with “smart” devices. Just the business models behind them.
Deleted Comment
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.
(I hope so)
There are directives about transparency in the costs or charges tied to a sale, but it is not immediate that it covers including new ads as an extra burden on the consumer.
Same for other directives regarding misleading advertising and the like, hard to prove that this new anti feature goes against the advertised product. it’s all very indirect and hazy, we’re in need of more protections for consumer to truly own their hardware.
To stick to the metaphor (apologies if this isn't HN friendly)
Smart TV? Fart TV
Smart display? Fart display
Smart fridge? Fart fridge
Dead Comment
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.
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...
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).
I remind myself multiple times per week of the ways I compromise by letting questionable service companies into my life. “I really should self-serve this.” — I guess people who don’t fantasise of self-sufficiency to the nth degree, and don’t get angry at being force-fed straight uninterrupted ads, just think of the immediate upside.
Either the marketing people weren't very aware of privacy (specifically, the chatter around that time, about covering webcams against hackers, and about whether adtech was listening in on device mics), or they have a dark sense of humor.