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In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

nytimes.com

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Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#41

Post by jammygit »

mortenjorck wrote: post #25
chris72205 wrote: post #5

Wow I haven't been confident in buying electronics or anything with a battery on Amazon for a while - now I guess I'll add books to the list. Lately even buying the same brand of toilet paper has resulted in differing qualities each time. Amazon is becoming less reputable than eBay at this point... at least with eBay, the seller has individual ratings and is not hidden behind whatever brand of product they are sellin…

I will be adding books to the list now too, but the number of categories I won’t shop for on Amazon has ballooned in just the past couple of years. It’s amazing to browse the reviews of brand-name products ranging from kitchen gadgets to yard tools, to even board games, and see customers saying things like “much cheaper plastic than the one I bought at Target” or “huge downgrade in card printing and game piece qualit…

There have been fake iPhones on eBay for a while, with copycat operating systems full of malware

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#42

Post by [deleted] »

magduf wrote: post #32
chris72205 wrote: post #5

Wow I haven't been confident in buying electronics or anything with a battery on Amazon for a while - now I guess I'll add books to the list. Lately even buying the same brand of toilet paper has resulted in differing qualities each time. Amazon is becoming less reputable than eBay at this point... at least with eBay, the seller has individual ratings and is not hidden behind whatever brand of product they are sellin…

I don't know why people rag on eBay so much. eBay is great. Well, for certain things at least. The thing people don't get is that eBay is basically like one giant outdoor sale that one company has organized, and then leased space to a bunch of small vendors who have all set up their own little tents. Some of those vendors suck, others don't, and you're going to find stuff there that you won't see at a large brick-and…

[deleted]

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#43

Post by weq »

Power corrupts, absolute power corrupts absolutely.

If your in the game of monopolising online sales, your not here for a long time, your here for a good time.

Fake items have made alot of people rich. Amazon needs a cut of that pie. How else do you maintain growth year in and year out?

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#44

Post by austhrow743 »

lsc wrote: post #37
imgabe wrote: post #19

1984 was published in 1949, 70 years ago. The author died in 1950. If it weren't for ridiculous US copyright laws, reputable public domain copies would be available at reasonable prices and there would be no black market for low-quality knock-offs.

>reputable public domain copies would be available at reasonable prices so I read a lot. Mostly on the kindle. Lots of public domain classics; I love Conrad and Melville. I'm also pretty happy to kick in ten or fifteen bucks to avoid spending time finding the best formatted/least incorrect copy, even if the book is public domain. but you know what? when I buy public domain e-books, there's so much crap mixed in that…

Found this here on HN a little while ago. Public domain ebooks but with higher formatting standards than Gutenberg. Less selection as a result but might be worth checking out:

https://standardebooks.org/

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#45

Post by Crosseye_Jack »

filoleg wrote: post #40
magduf wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know why people rag on eBay so much. eBay is great. Well, for certain things at least. The thing people don't get is that eBay is basically like one giant outdoor sale that one company has organized, and then leased space to a bunch of small vendors who have all set up their own little tents. Some of those vendors suck, others don't, and you're going to find stuff there that you won't see at a large brick-and…

I don't know if this is true in 2019, but 2 years ago they didn't have a proper 2FA, only SMS verification. The issue was that someone figured out a way to get around that, and they were able to log in and buy a lot of expensive stuff. I reported it to ebay, they reset passwords and set in motion the case to refund me. I removed the perpetrator's address info, changed everything, and two days later it repeated again…

It’s still SMS 2FA. What I do is don’t have payment cards saved to the account.

You used to be able to use your PayPal football back in the day (a paypal branded verisign hardware 2FA) or the VIP app but they have slowly been removing that in favour of SMS 2FA to the point where I don’t think you can even add a VIP token if you tried (used to be that you could add one, but they would try their hardest to make you use SMS instead).

If you had it enabled back in the day, it’s still active on your account (both on eBay and PayPal) but you will often find your login in flow disrupted if you still use the “old style” 2FA. (Example on some login pages but not all you are able to login by amending your code to your password. But it’s hit and miss and iirc you can’t use the PayPal app at all if you have 2FA enabled and have to do business via the website.

Note: I’m aware that PayPal and eBay are 2 separate companies now. But for the longest time they acted as one that their application flow feels every similar to each other even still.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#47

Post by lsc »

austhrow743 wrote: post #44
lsc wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>reputable public domain copies would be available at reasonable prices so I read a lot. Mostly on the kindle. Lots of public domain classics; I love Conrad and Melville. I'm also pretty happy to kick in ten or fifteen bucks to avoid spending time finding the best formatted/least incorrect copy, even if the book is public domain. but you know what? when I buy public domain e-books, there's so much crap mixed in that…

Found this here on HN a little while ago. Public domain ebooks but with higher formatting standards than Gutenberg. Less selection as a result but might be worth checking out: https://standardebooks.org/

Thank you. I'll check it out. Huh. the format they use doesn't work with the amazon 'send to kindle' functionality.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#48

Post by dogweather »

dmart wrote: post #14

Perhaps we should think about establishing a public listing of checksums for important texts? Not sure exactly how it would work, you'd probably only want to run it against the main text so there would remain some flexibility for chapter headings, forewards, etc.

I've been brainstorming about this, applied to gov't legal texts, and their republication.

Nature, June 6, has a very interesting article on attribution of authorship, that seems relevant and is on my reading list:

Credit Data Generators for Data Reuse, pp. 30-32.

Re: In Amazon’s Bookstore, Orwell Gets a Rewrite

#49

Post by filoleg »

Crosseye_Jack wrote: post #45
filoleg wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't know if this is true in 2019, but 2 years ago they didn't have a proper 2FA, only SMS verification. The issue was that someone figured out a way to get around that, and they were able to log in and buy a lot of expensive stuff. I reported it to ebay, they reset passwords and set in motion the case to refund me. I removed the perpetrator's address info, changed everything, and two days later it repeated again…

It’s still SMS 2FA. What I do is don’t have payment cards saved to the account. You used to be able to use your PayPal football back in the day (a paypal branded verisign hardware 2FA) or the VIP app but they have slowly been removing that in favour of SMS 2FA to the point where I don’t think you can even add a VIP token if you tried (used to be that you could add one, but they would try their hardest to make you use…

I was using PayPal on my account, and they didn't have a legit 2FA back then either (now they do, thankfully). Blows my mind that something as crucial and attack-desirable as a payment system wouldn't have a legit 2FA in 2017, even though random places with way less import stuff to lose like Twitch would.
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