Reminds me of old Samsung phone I had. It had IR transmitter and some app to control it as TV remote.
But it wasn't Samsung's app, nor (I assume) one owned by them. Still installed as system app so unable to uninstall tho.
So one day the company decided to monetize on that and just started to display ads on lockscreen. No way to remove it either. So I rooted that POS and never bought any Samsung shit again...
Same. God I miss when handhelds had honest to god infrared transceivers, not just the now-dead "IR Blasters". I could put my old Palm into learning mode and copy an entire remote in less than thirty seconds.
yeah, all the sensors and reality bending futuristic technology in the universe would not be enough for me to switch back to android away from the Apple ecosystem, due to experiences like what you described
Apple would really have to mess something up, and another vendor would need to be more committed to their hardware than I’ve seen
I would probably jump on the dumbphone luddite trend before going back to android
Ask me about the time I tried to put a song on my Apple™ iPod. It was sufficiently customer-hostile that I there's not enough futuristic technology to get me to try Apple again. Something about it requires iTunes, but iTunes sucked for various reasons. I had another way to work around it, but they patched it out in a firmware update. The no-name music players had a better UI. (just drag and drop)
iTunes wasn’t a secret. Apple didn’t bait you. It was well known you needed to use iTunes.
On Android you have regular apps that turn into Malware. Samsung will sell you a phone/TV then introduce/increase the amount of ads/malware with a software update.
The problem isn’t that there are ads. The problem is that the ads are introduced after you’ve already purchased it. This doesn’t happen with Apple, and that’s something many people value more than being locked into a walled garden.
The difference here is that on Apple you can do the research figure out it's OK to use.
On Android with pre-loaded software you can to the research up front, figure out everything is OK and BOOM a year later you're getting ads from a non-removable application.
> iTunes wasn’t a secret. Apple didn’t bait you. It was well known you needed to use iTunes.
Only if you were already in the Apple ecosystem.
Many years ago a coworker was gifted one of the more basic iPods, which was his first experience with the Apple ecosystem. It didn't go terribly badly, but I do remember him not knowing about iTunes at the time.
Lol I remember that. Back when the iPhone came out I was super confused why I had to use the awful iTunes and why it took literal hours to load songs to my phone when my buddy could just drag and drop to his mp3 player.
well you’ll be elated to know that not much has changed on that front, except that generations of people now don't really care for self-custody of music. Compressed formats are good enough, streaming is good enough, and stored formats in walled gardens are good enough.
There is some burgeoning sentiment that some music is disappeared from the face of the earth, but nobody really cares.
Apple has started adding advertisements into their built-in apps, so it's probably not a bad idea to get an idea of what the dumb phone market is looking like. (though spoiler alert, a lot of them actually do still run Android internally.)
AppleTV shows have started displaying ads for other shows before you can watch an episode. It is extremely irritating, considering that it's a paid service.
Just this week I saw a new ad on my iPad homescreen.
At some point an iOS update added a “Smart Stack” widget to my homescreen with some common app widgets (contacts, maps photos) (I assume it was automatically added, I don’t recall ever creating it, it seems to be a new iOS 14 feature.)
In iOS 15, iOS got something called “Widget Suggestions”, so apps you haven’t added to smart stack will automatically appear. (And this got automatically turned on for the smart stack on my home screen.)
Result: I got the App Store automatically suggested in my widget stack and displaying an ad for some Disney thing. (Which I assume I wouldn’t be able to access without either paying, or watching more ads.)
Wallet has a prominent un-dismissible ad for apple pay that sits above any actual items one might add to the app. IMO part of the overall trend towards tasteless and classless growth at any cost mindset from Apple.
Every address you accidentally click opens the App Store for Apple Maps, even if you only have Google Maps installed because Apple Maps has periodically sent you to the middle of a farm field (like it has for me).
The Music app's default screen is nothing but a list of ads for Apple's subscription services. I just switched to a third-party music app because I was tired of constantly getting that shoved in my face. The same subscription options are listed as first category in the settings app too.
News, AppleTV (the tv app, not the device), and the app store and Maps. The app store is understandable but I search for my very local bank’s app and at the top of the results was a big banner for a stupid app that had nothing to do with my local bank. It was like doing a Google search.
You can at least root android, use some kind of ad-away or other ad blocking software and also remove 95% of the ads within apps and games.... on apple, you're stuck with those.
I find my exposure to unwanted advertisements to be much greater now that I've bought an Apple device, simply because Apple does not apparently have the tech to effectively block the spam calls & texts.
Yeah, this is wild. Last phone purchase I jumped ecosystems Android->iPhone on account of Google breaking their "free photo storage" promise on my Pixel. There were a number of pleasant surprises in the Apple ecosysem, but the spam situation is shockingly bad. So bad that I will probably go back to Android next hop if they don't figure it out.
Having an amazing experience here on grapheneos. And unlike on iOS, I can sync my files, contacts, calendar events etc. to my nextcloud server, use syncthing to sync stuff in a decentralized manner and play nintendo switch games with the yuzu emulator.
Maybe all unimportant for you, but this amount of security and freedom is amazingly refreshing.
I am content with icloud, I’m not interested in emulators ever since I got a job
I’m glad to hear grapheneos is useful for someone as I was skeptical, sounds like the same “file system freedom” sentiment android users have led with for a decade, to which I should remind all that iOS users are aware and an uncompelled
What the specific difference is, is that on grapheneos I can control the sandboxing myself with storage scopes and contact scopes. On iOS in terms of security the sandboxing is good but the user is treated like a child who shall not be able to customize because they could mess it up. Same exact thing with the installation of apps from unknown sources.
> to which I should remind all that iOS users are aware and an uncompelled
I mean I guess I'm "uncompelled" in the sense that these stupid iOS restrictions aren't quite enough to get me to jump ship, but the restrictions are still pretty insane nonetheless. For example, I'm very happy that the EU is going to force iOS to allow for side-loading.
>>"I would probably jump on the dumbphone luddite trend before going back to android"
There are also foss Linux phone OSs like postmarketOS, however hardware support and os are definitely in alpha or beta depending on the exact combination of hardware and software you use.
However if you don't mind tinkering with Linux they do the basic job.
FYI I wrote this from a PinePhone running postmarketOS (for Linux enthusiasts/tinkerers only, you've been warned)
I tried to buy a phone supported by LineageOS. And I have to say, this is impossible, given the restrictions ("available now" and "costs less than 500 USD including shipping to the Philippines"). So I ended up with a Poco X4 Pro 5G and Pixel Experience as a custom ROM.
Yeah it can be quite limiting. Especially when you start looking for specific phone options. I have the older Pocophone F1 and it's great. Unfortunately can't buy it anymore anywhere.
There is this remote camera app for baby cameras and home survelliance cameras, that all of a sudden started displaying ads in the application that lets you access the camera remotely.
Also these ads are full screen, unskippable 5-10 second ads that occasionally have sound as well.
Upon asking about this, the only reaction from them is a canned response telling about some discount, but there was no ad in the product before, they changed the deal afterwards.
Is this the new trend for companies to extract revenue from already sold products?
How is it legal to add ads into an already sold product afterwards?
How is it legal to add ads into an already sold product afterwards?
I am not a lawyer but I would guess it is probably in an Acceptable Use or Terms of Use page you may have clicked through or maybe there was just a link to it. So it's probably legal but that does not exclude it from being shady, deceptive and crass. If it is not on the outside of the hardware box then maybe there is a case that it was misleading and deceptive since one would have to buy it to know about the Acceptable Use Policy.
Consider asking LegalEagle [1] if he would do a Youtube video on this topic.
Maybe there is a market for a pre-configured Zoneminder [2] RasPi that could optionally use something like tailscale for remote access so people could just buy some cheap onvif compliant cameras and keep their private home security streams private.
Same thing happened to me after I started using Facebook. No ads for the first couple years (around 2004). Now there’s an ad every 5 or 10 posts I read
TBH their appliances were never good quality compared to locally European or American manufactured ones. They always bet on tech enthusiasm and the short term wooing of the users. Their software is almost always short-term supported and degrade in quality very quickly.
> How is it legal to add ads into an already sold product afterwards?
I assume that, unless they advertised it as being free of advertisements, that there is no conflict with them adding them into the product later. They can make even make an argument that those ads add value: wow, you get to learn about all these cool products that are relevant to you! But in general, I don't believe inserting ads into an existing product is against the law on its face. It's a shitty thing to do though.
Assuming there is no legal issue, the opportunities would be to shame them with publicity like this, or make your opinion clear by reviews. Reviews will forewarn other users and (potentially) sway future behaviour of the product creator.
I got a dumb baby camera from vtech and I love it. The system has it's own wireless channel, no wifi. No 'smart' bullshit. Someone is always going to be somewhere nearby the baby so it doesn't need internet.
There is a special circle of hell for business people who try to turn every single product into a continuous revenue stream. It’s just artificial rent seeking and people who involve themselves in it are morally deficient.
I don’t disagree, but also feel that consumers also so price sensitive that they will buy whatever cheap thing appears in front of them and don’t think twice about the results.
The Internet is a great example of that where we demand everything be free and then we get upset when it’s not.
Samsung forces ads and malware down users throats regardless of whether they buy the cheapest phone or the latest flagship. Same goes for their highest end TVs. It’s really hard to blame the consumer for being price sensitive when they get ads on their $5,000 TV.
That’s mistaking an effect for a cause, in my mind (your first paragraph). If companies are constantly changing the rules to squeeze more monetization out of existing relationships, of course consumers will only care about the lowest upfront cost: it’s the only benefit that’s real. If relationships with companies can’t be trusted, paying more to be treated better just makes you a mark.
I think it’s something else. If you sell me a thing and we both agree the price is fair, then I have no problem with that. It’s when you then try to exert ongoing control or establish an ongoing revenue stream from me that I have a problem with.
I wonder if it could be legislated so that if you provide a product monetised by advertising, you need to provide a paid alternative (at a reasonable price) for those who'd rather avoid ads.
And remove options where you get ads in a paid service!
This a hundred times. ONVIF cameras plus Zoneminder can make a great video security system, totally ad and spyware free thanks to 100% open source software.
A firewall is however needed, since the cameras firmware can't be audited, therefore one should assume the worst. Just allow secure connections from trusted sources outside only and block any access from the IP cameras subnet to anywhere else.
Advertising is just one of the problems plaguing consumer surveillance cameras; many of them have been already caught while either phoning home somewhere in China or being so poorly secured that they're wide open to exploitation that can turn them into botnet nodes.
Avoid anything that requires its own app, Internet access, or mentions "cloud" in any way. AFAIK plain old "dumb" IP cameras with widely compatible HTTP/RTSP streams are still available.
Ironically, you used to be able to just Google for publicly accessible IP cameras, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116676 , and those don't need anything more than a browser to view, so that might guide your buying decision.
Fwiw I don't use the app, but I have a Yi 4k camera, which I bought used as a cheap GoPro alternative, and it's surprisingly easy to hack some stuff with.
It has a WiFi connection feature which is primarily meant for use with their app (which is kind of garbage), but it's a Linux system and I can telnet into it with root privileges and mess around with the filesystem. It has an rtsp stream, a fairly ok remote control API with some community libraries in github, and even has Python (2.7, at least until I take the time to figure out how to cross-compile a more recent version, but still).
Just this week I was playing with building a script to hook up the rtsp stream to my PC so I could use an AI model to do bird classification and set it up next to my bird feeder.
It's not advertised as being hacker friendly and I imagine this openness is more due to a lack of the zealousness and resources that more expensive products seem to insist on dedicating to locking everything down, but it's been really fun and I'd definitely get a couple more cheap ones, given the opportunity. No idea what the situation is on their other products though, and it does suck that non-technical users are stuck with an app with ads.
Yi cameras are the worst piece of crap you can get. The app is terrible, constantly pushes you toward the subscription and if you don’t subscribe they intentionally make it worse.
And now you get ads. Just trash these cameras if you have one
Agree with this. Also, the cost of the 24/7 cloud sub jumped up wildly. The event recording always misses the first crucial few seconds off of what ever caused the event to be recorded so they are next to useless. As soon as I have budget, I will scrap my cameras and move to something better.
I didn't look into it but you might be able to flash a custom firmware on it. I do that with the yi home cameras + frigate and they have been super solid.
Edit: Seems like all the Kami ones have an equivalent yi home one. Should be doable from what I can tell. The process is pretty straight forward, flash the SD card with a folder, take it back out and add a file for wifi, then reinsert.
I did that with the Wyze Pan cam we used to keep an eye on our son when he was an infant. Same app functionality but we could also do an RTSP stream out and I could keep an eye on my desktop while working.
The home security or just monitoring camera market is so cheap and thus you get flaky software and bad actors.
There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground between the cheap stuff and the super duper professional expensive stuff where you need to buy a controller and etc.
Ive settled on wyze for now but I wouldn’t have a problem with a middle ground product.
Wyze for the win. Their early stuff was super hackable with open source operating systems. I’m glad they’re challenging the big players with a genuinely good and cheap product. Now I sound like a paid shill but it’s truly one service that I’m glad exists.
What about cameras that operate with Apple's HomeKit Secure Video (aka HKSV)? There seem to be decent cameras that aren't at risk of bad software or bad actors.
Unfortunately, the Yi Home cameras have eroded other functionality too to force their users into an upsell.
Many users are now reporting they are forced to use Kami cloud storage instead of local storage. Their ability to use the local SD card storage has been disabled in newer versions of the app.
Their app has been showing advertisements in notifications for the past few months, where previously a notification was only generated if movement was detected while the cam was in away mode (i.e. a serious matter).
Reminds me of a wifi connected sharp air conditioner I bought. Great device all in all but at some point sharp decided they want more revenue, so now the app to control the expensive hardware I bought is displaying completely random banner ads
I can already imagine the thinking process to hit some arbitrary OKR to somehow increase revenue per user or some crap like that
This is the reason I changed to Amcrest and started entirely local recording. Ads have been introduced in all camera apps recently. Even the Ring app started to bother me because of their product discounts spammed all over the place.
This is terrible, but if we’re looking at things half glass full, a revenue stream gives manufacturers a reason to keep maintaining their products as opposed to abandoning them in 1-2 years
Reminds me of old Samsung phone I had. It had IR transmitter and some app to control it as TV remote.
But it wasn't Samsung's app, nor (I assume) one owned by them. Still installed as system app so unable to uninstall tho.
So one day the company decided to monetize on that and just started to display ads on lockscreen. No way to remove it either. So I rooted that POS and never bought any Samsung shit again...
My OEM HTC keyboard (TouchPal) straight up turned into malware. It was banned from the Play Store... but was unremovable without adb.
There was never a notification either, I just saw it on a news site.
I remember that app. It was great and I used it all the time, before they started adding all the unnecessary bs and ads.
Same. God I miss when handhelds had honest to god infrared transceivers, not just the now-dead "IR Blasters". I could put my old Palm into learning mode and copy an entire remote in less than thirty seconds.
Yes, I used that palm feature. I also had IPAQs with IR.
I know it is not the same, but there are IR learning remotes. I bet those will disappear, too.
https://www.amazon.com/One-All-Universal-Replacement-Learnin...
Yeah, I really liked my Samsung flip phones, but made the mistake of buying one of their smartphones. So much uninstallable garbage. Never again.
yeah, all the sensors and reality bending futuristic technology in the universe would not be enough for me to switch back to android away from the Apple ecosystem, due to experiences like what you described
Apple would really have to mess something up, and another vendor would need to be more committed to their hardware than I’ve seen
I would probably jump on the dumbphone luddite trend before going back to android
Ask me about the time I tried to put a song on my Apple™ iPod. It was sufficiently customer-hostile that I there's not enough futuristic technology to get me to try Apple again. Something about it requires iTunes, but iTunes sucked for various reasons. I had another way to work around it, but they patched it out in a firmware update. The no-name music players had a better UI. (just drag and drop)
Apple doesn't get it right all the time.
These are very different scenarios though.
iTunes wasn’t a secret. Apple didn’t bait you. It was well known you needed to use iTunes.
On Android you have regular apps that turn into Malware. Samsung will sell you a phone/TV then introduce/increase the amount of ads/malware with a software update.
The problem isn’t that there are ads. The problem is that the ads are introduced after you’ve already purchased it. This doesn’t happen with Apple, and that’s something many people value more than being locked into a walled garden.
Yes. If I had done some research I probably could have learned how terrible iTunes was in advance. I guess it was really my fault all along.
The difference here is that on Apple you can do the research figure out it's OK to use.
On Android with pre-loaded software you can to the research up front, figure out everything is OK and BOOM a year later you're getting ads from a non-removable application.
> iTunes wasn’t a secret. Apple didn’t bait you. It was well known you needed to use iTunes.
Only if you were already in the Apple ecosystem.
Many years ago a coworker was gifted one of the more basic iPods, which was his first experience with the Apple ecosystem. It didn't go terribly badly, but I do remember him not knowing about iTunes at the time.
Yeah but that's Samsung problem, not Android problem.
Lol I remember that. Back when the iPhone came out I was super confused why I had to use the awful iTunes and why it took literal hours to load songs to my phone when my buddy could just drag and drop to his mp3 player.
In 2005 about 20 years ago right?
well you’ll be elated to know that not much has changed on that front, except that generations of people now don't really care for self-custody of music. Compressed formats are good enough, streaming is good enough, and stored formats in walled gardens are good enough.
There is some burgeoning sentiment that some music is disappeared from the face of the earth, but nobody really cares.
[dead]
Apple has started adding advertisements into their built-in apps, so it's probably not a bad idea to get an idea of what the dumb phone market is looking like. (though spoiler alert, a lot of them actually do still run Android internally.)
Where? I haven’t seen a single ad in any of their apps, and guaranteed none to the level described above. Citation needed.
AppleTV shows have started displaying ads for other shows before you can watch an episode. It is extremely irritating, considering that it's a paid service.
They're probably referring to in the App Store, perhaps Apple Music does as well?
e: Yeah looks like Apple Music, Apple News also, soon Apple Maps & Apple Podcasts
Just this week I saw a new ad on my iPad homescreen.
At some point an iOS update added a “Smart Stack” widget to my homescreen with some common app widgets (contacts, maps photos) (I assume it was automatically added, I don’t recall ever creating it, it seems to be a new iOS 14 feature.)
In iOS 15, iOS got something called “Widget Suggestions”, so apps you haven’t added to smart stack will automatically appear. (And this got automatically turned on for the smart stack on my home screen.)
Result: I got the App Store automatically suggested in my widget stack and displaying an ad for some Disney thing. (Which I assume I wouldn’t be able to access without either paying, or watching more ads.)
Wallet has a prominent un-dismissible ad for apple pay that sits above any actual items one might add to the app. IMO part of the overall trend towards tasteless and classless growth at any cost mindset from Apple.
Ugh. They're going to stop being associated with any "Premium experience" by their non-IT end users if they keep going down that track.
Every address you accidentally click opens the App Store for Apple Maps, even if you only have Google Maps installed because Apple Maps has periodically sent you to the middle of a farm field (like it has for me).
The Music app's default screen is nothing but a list of ads for Apple's subscription services. I just switched to a third-party music app because I was tired of constantly getting that shoved in my face. The same subscription options are listed as first category in the settings app too.
I’m curious about it, what Apple apps have ads now?
News, AppleTV (the tv app, not the device), and the app store and Maps. The app store is understandable but I search for my very local bank’s app and at the top of the results was a big banner for a stupid app that had nothing to do with my local bank. It was like doing a Google search.
You can at least root android, use some kind of ad-away or other ad blocking software and also remove 95% of the ads within apps and games.... on apple, you're stuck with those.
This is why I'm itching to go back to Android. I switched to an iPhone because my car only supported CarPlay, and I've regretted it ever since.
You can(could?) jailbreak iOS too.
I find my exposure to unwanted advertisements to be much greater now that I've bought an Apple device, simply because Apple does not apparently have the tech to effectively block the spam calls & texts.
Yeah, this is wild. Last phone purchase I jumped ecosystems Android->iPhone on account of Google breaking their "free photo storage" promise on my Pixel. There were a number of pleasant surprises in the Apple ecosysem, but the spam situation is shockingly bad. So bad that I will probably go back to Android next hop if they don't figure it out.
Oh don't worry, as in any closed ecosystem the bullshit will come.
Android at the very least have OSS options and after installing one on the aforementioned Samsung it was fine.
Having an amazing experience here on grapheneos. And unlike on iOS, I can sync my files, contacts, calendar events etc. to my nextcloud server, use syncthing to sync stuff in a decentralized manner and play nintendo switch games with the yuzu emulator. Maybe all unimportant for you, but this amount of security and freedom is amazingly refreshing.
I am content with icloud, I’m not interested in emulators ever since I got a job
I’m glad to hear grapheneos is useful for someone as I was skeptical, sounds like the same “file system freedom” sentiment android users have led with for a decade, to which I should remind all that iOS users are aware and an uncompelled
What the specific difference is, is that on grapheneos I can control the sandboxing myself with storage scopes and contact scopes. On iOS in terms of security the sandboxing is good but the user is treated like a child who shall not be able to customize because they could mess it up. Same exact thing with the installation of apps from unknown sources.
> to which I should remind all that iOS users are aware and an uncompelled
I mean I guess I'm "uncompelled" in the sense that these stupid iOS restrictions aren't quite enough to get me to jump ship, but the restrictions are still pretty insane nonetheless. For example, I'm very happy that the EU is going to force iOS to allow for side-loading.
>>"I would probably jump on the dumbphone luddite trend before going back to android"
There are also foss Linux phone OSs like postmarketOS, however hardware support and os are definitely in alpha or beta depending on the exact combination of hardware and software you use.
However if you don't mind tinkering with Linux they do the basic job.
FYI I wrote this from a PinePhone running postmarketOS (for Linux enthusiasts/tinkerers only, you've been warned)
Unfortunately the only way to have a good Android experience is to go custom ROM. I only buy phones that are supported by LineageOS.
No bloat, no adds, no bullshit. And a solid experience for years on end.
I know some people have issues with banking apps refusing to work but it has never been an issue for me.
I tried to buy a phone supported by LineageOS. And I have to say, this is impossible, given the restrictions ("available now" and "costs less than 500 USD including shipping to the Philippines"). So I ended up with a Poco X4 Pro 5G and Pixel Experience as a custom ROM.
Yeah it can be quite limiting. Especially when you start looking for specific phone options. I have the older Pocophone F1 and it's great. Unfortunately can't buy it anymore anywhere.
I am sick of both.
Jailbroken iOS was heaven though. I hear its more difficult now (which is why Apple has lost my business since IIRC the iPhone 6).
Hi!
There is this remote camera app for baby cameras and home survelliance cameras, that all of a sudden started displaying ads in the application that lets you access the camera remotely.
Also these ads are full screen, unskippable 5-10 second ads that occasionally have sound as well.
Upon asking about this, the only reaction from them is a canned response telling about some discount, but there was no ad in the product before, they changed the deal afterwards.
Is this the new trend for companies to extract revenue from already sold products?
How is it legal to add ads into an already sold product afterwards?
How is it legal to add ads into an already sold product afterwards?
I am not a lawyer but I would guess it is probably in an Acceptable Use or Terms of Use page you may have clicked through or maybe there was just a link to it. So it's probably legal but that does not exclude it from being shady, deceptive and crass. If it is not on the outside of the hardware box then maybe there is a case that it was misleading and deceptive since one would have to buy it to know about the Acceptable Use Policy.
Consider asking LegalEagle [1] if he would do a Youtube video on this topic.
Maybe there is a market for a pre-configured Zoneminder [2] RasPi that could optionally use something like tailscale for remote access so people could just buy some cheap onvif compliant cameras and keep their private home security streams private.
[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@LegalEagle [video channel]
[2] - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Us20t1gQPOE [video][48 mins][zoneminder how-to]
Same thing happened to me after I started using Facebook. No ads for the first couple years (around 2004). Now there’s an ad every 5 or 10 posts I read
Thats true, but facebook is a free product (in a monetary sense), however these cameras are sold at a price.
Samsung TVs show ads. It is an ever expanding list of companies to avoid.
The worst part is they released an update that added this obnoxious behaviour to TVs that were clean.
TBH their appliances were never good quality compared to locally European or American manufactured ones. They always bet on tech enthusiasm and the short term wooing of the users. Their software is almost always short-term supported and degrade in quality very quickly.
Ahhh, cable television... the early years.
> How is it legal to add ads into an already sold product afterwards?
I assume that, unless they advertised it as being free of advertisements, that there is no conflict with them adding them into the product later. They can make even make an argument that those ads add value: wow, you get to learn about all these cool products that are relevant to you! But in general, I don't believe inserting ads into an existing product is against the law on its face. It's a shitty thing to do though.
Assuming there is no legal issue, the opportunities would be to shame them with publicity like this, or make your opinion clear by reviews. Reviews will forewarn other users and (potentially) sway future behaviour of the product creator.
I got a dumb baby camera from vtech and I love it. The system has it's own wireless channel, no wifi. No 'smart' bullshit. Someone is always going to be somewhere nearby the baby so it doesn't need internet.
VTech stuff has always been awesome. Indestructible, simple, etc. We have a bunch of their stuff.
It's the drug dealer strategy. First hit is free... get em hooked then hit em with the ol' pricing one-two
I absolutely hate that tech has been overrun with these shitstains
Why would it be illegal? Deterrents don’t have to come from the state
There is a special circle of hell for business people who try to turn every single product into a continuous revenue stream. It’s just artificial rent seeking and people who involve themselves in it are morally deficient.
I don’t disagree, but also feel that consumers also so price sensitive that they will buy whatever cheap thing appears in front of them and don’t think twice about the results.
The Internet is a great example of that where we demand everything be free and then we get upset when it’s not.
Samsung forces ads and malware down users throats regardless of whether they buy the cheapest phone or the latest flagship. Same goes for their highest end TVs. It’s really hard to blame the consumer for being price sensitive when they get ads on their $5,000 TV.
And yet there are alternatives and people still buy them.
I don’t know that people care, sadly.
That’s mistaking an effect for a cause, in my mind (your first paragraph). If companies are constantly changing the rules to squeeze more monetization out of existing relationships, of course consumers will only care about the lowest upfront cost: it’s the only benefit that’s real. If relationships with companies can’t be trusted, paying more to be treated better just makes you a mark.
Does it matter?
If consumers choose the cheapest thing it is a race to the bottom regardless.
[flagged]
I think it’s something else. If you sell me a thing and we both agree the price is fair, then I have no problem with that. It’s when you then try to exert ongoing control or establish an ongoing revenue stream from me that I have a problem with.
> It’s when you then try to exert ongoing control or establish an ongoing revenue stream from me that I have a problem
That's the behavior that market forces encourage. If you don't want that behavior you either need to remove the incentive to do it or make it illegal.
I wonder if it could be legislated so that if you provide a product monetised by advertising, you need to provide a paid alternative (at a reasonable price) for those who'd rather avoid ads.
And remove options where you get ads in a paid service!
I thought for a moment you had typed cannibalism.
That word doesn't mean what you think it means. Bonus irony given this context; a company based out of a communist country...
Wrong Korea. :)
This is why I strongly encourage people to only buy cameras that are ONVIF compatible, which makes the cameras viewable with an open protocol.
This a hundred times. ONVIF cameras plus Zoneminder can make a great video security system, totally ad and spyware free thanks to 100% open source software.
https://zoneminder.com/
A firewall is however needed, since the cameras firmware can't be audited, therefore one should assume the worst. Just allow secure connections from trusted sources outside only and block any access from the IP cameras subnet to anywhere else.
Advertising is just one of the problems plaguing consumer surveillance cameras; many of them have been already caught while either phoning home somewhere in China or being so poorly secured that they're wide open to exploitation that can turn them into botnet nodes.
https://blog.zositech.com/unsecured-network-cameras-list/
Avoid anything that requires its own app, Internet access, or mentions "cloud" in any way. AFAIK plain old "dumb" IP cameras with widely compatible HTTP/RTSP streams are still available.
Ironically, you used to be able to just Google for publicly accessible IP cameras, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116676 , and those don't need anything more than a browser to view, so that might guide your buying decision.
Fwiw I don't use the app, but I have a Yi 4k camera, which I bought used as a cheap GoPro alternative, and it's surprisingly easy to hack some stuff with.
It has a WiFi connection feature which is primarily meant for use with their app (which is kind of garbage), but it's a Linux system and I can telnet into it with root privileges and mess around with the filesystem. It has an rtsp stream, a fairly ok remote control API with some community libraries in github, and even has Python (2.7, at least until I take the time to figure out how to cross-compile a more recent version, but still).
Just this week I was playing with building a script to hook up the rtsp stream to my PC so I could use an AI model to do bird classification and set it up next to my bird feeder.
It's not advertised as being hacker friendly and I imagine this openness is more due to a lack of the zealousness and resources that more expensive products seem to insist on dedicating to locking everything down, but it's been really fun and I'd definitely get a couple more cheap ones, given the opportunity. No idea what the situation is on their other products though, and it does suck that non-technical users are stuck with an app with ads.
Yi cameras are the worst piece of crap you can get. The app is terrible, constantly pushes you toward the subscription and if you don’t subscribe they intentionally make it worse.
And now you get ads. Just trash these cameras if you have one
Agree with this. Also, the cost of the 24/7 cloud sub jumped up wildly. The event recording always misses the first crucial few seconds off of what ever caused the event to be recorded so they are next to useless. As soon as I have budget, I will scrap my cameras and move to something better.
Sounds like Spotify.
I didn't look into it but you might be able to flash a custom firmware on it. I do that with the yi home cameras + frigate and they have been super solid.
Edit: Seems like all the Kami ones have an equivalent yi home one. Should be doable from what I can tell. The process is pretty straight forward, flash the SD card with a folder, take it back out and add a file for wifi, then reinsert.
I did that with the Wyze Pan cam we used to keep an eye on our son when he was an infant. Same app functionality but we could also do an RTSP stream out and I could keep an eye on my desktop while working.
The home security or just monitoring camera market is so cheap and thus you get flaky software and bad actors.
There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground between the cheap stuff and the super duper professional expensive stuff where you need to buy a controller and etc.
Ive settled on wyze for now but I wouldn’t have a problem with a middle ground product.
Wyze for the win. Their early stuff was super hackable with open source operating systems. I’m glad they’re challenging the big players with a genuinely good and cheap product. Now I sound like a paid shill but it’s truly one service that I’m glad exists.
What about cameras that operate with Apple's HomeKit Secure Video (aka HKSV)? There seem to be decent cameras that aren't at risk of bad software or bad actors.
YI Technology must be one of the stupidest companies we've seen in a while. Those guys need a "never go full retard" poster somewhere in the office.
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Can’t disagree. Also I enjoyed the “ never go full retard" clip on YouTube https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=X6WHBO_Qc-Q
Well, it's a PRC-based company.
well known as the originators of the SaaS model /s
The primary reason any company forces users into an app as opposed to a web interface is for monitization.
Unfortunately, the Yi Home cameras have eroded other functionality too to force their users into an upsell.
Many users are now reporting they are forced to use Kami cloud storage instead of local storage. Their ability to use the local SD card storage has been disabled in newer versions of the app.
I posted about the bait and switch 7 months ago. I see they have steered the wrong way and in a bad way.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33336722
Their app has been showing advertisements in notifications for the past few months, where previously a notification was only generated if movement was detected while the cam was in away mode (i.e. a serious matter).
> "Is there a way to get these away without purchase cloud subscription?"
Even with a subscription the ad-free honeymoon won't last.
Reminds me of a wifi connected sharp air conditioner I bought. Great device all in all but at some point sharp decided they want more revenue, so now the app to control the expensive hardware I bought is displaying completely random banner ads
I can already imagine the thinking process to hit some arbitrary OKR to somehow increase revenue per user or some crap like that
Very frustrating
Are you sure you bought the air conditioner, or just a perpetual license to use it? Check the EULA, and you may find you have a license to cool.
This is the reason I changed to Amcrest and started entirely local recording. Ads have been introduced in all camera apps recently. Even the Ring app started to bother me because of their product discounts spammed all over the place.
This is terrible, but if we’re looking at things half glass full, a revenue stream gives manufacturers a reason to keep maintaining their products as opposed to abandoning them in 1-2 years
If they've sold you out to advertisers who is to say they're not selling the image/video feed data too.
What a shitty move.. someone told me about these cameras..I guess I'll have to pass
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If I have to make my own app then I don't wanna pay another subscription lmao
Did you made the account just to advertise the company ?