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Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

theguardian.com

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Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#131

Post by thatguy0900 »

xboxnolifes wrote: post #113
thatguy0900 wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well if noone who owns these devices wants to do it it probably shouldn't be done then, right? Or Amazon could give a 5$ credit or something. That would probably be enough.

Reality is, most people who own these devices wouldn't know how or be aware it's even an option, and a mass marketing campaign would need to go into effect to just make people aware of it and why they would potentially want to do it. Or they can just make it automatic.

If Amazon wants to release a feature that they make a bunch of money off of selling it to advertisers, that uses customer resources and doesn't benefit them, and many/most customers actively don't want it, then they need to convince people to say yes. How is people not wanting to do it justification for Amazon doing it? If they want it done they can offer credits

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#132

Post by dv_dt »

shiado wrote: post #7

What will happen is some high profile company that has a few Amazon devices on their network will have these devices exploited to gain network access and get hit with some ransomware/data theft/etc... and then there will be a big legal battle between Amazon and the hacked company and this whole idea will be shut down and consumers will get a $10 class action settlement for each device.

More likely, telecom will think, this is against our residential TOS and we can use that to get a slice of the Amazon’s mesh revenue. Especially because most of the telecoms offer side access to wireless routers of their customer for other customers of theirs too. Maybe this is a play by Amazon to be in a better position in this set of future negotiations - one which the average consumer is really a bystander for all the input they have.

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#133

Post by slownews45 »

thepasswordis wrote: post #72
wnevets wrote: post #27

The Security Now podcast has a great episode [1] about why this isn't as scary as the headlines make it out to be. I'm actually quite disappointed at the sheer amount of fearmongering surrounding this technology here on HN of all places. For some reason I expected HN to be better than the general tech press when it came to these things. [1] https://twit.tv/shows/security-now/episodes/796

It's not "scary". It's my fucking network hardware, the power comes from my house, the data comes from my house. I pay for all of this stuff. Amazon wants to resell it without asking me. NO.

It's very unlikely that you have title to amazon's software. You may have a license to use their device and the related software subject to their terms, but that is VERY different than classical ownership.

All the megacorps have gone this direction.

Amazon is going to give you a constantly improving Alexa system and ecosystem and in return you are going to let them use sidewalk in most cases.

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#134

Post by luma »

beezischillin wrote: post #100
kstrauser wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've seen this, too. Apple: Their device: "Hi, I'm an AirTag! This is my serial number!" Your device: "hey Apple, I was at (X, Y) when I saw this serial number." Amazon: Their device: "Hi, can I send traffic through your network?" Your device: "sure, buddy!" They're so fundamentally different that I pretty much assume a bad faith argument from people who say they're similar.

The other major difference is that you directly benefit from Find My and you can also turn it off any time you want.

Playing devil's advocate here... aren't those same two things true of Sidewalk? If you purchase an Apple tag, then you benefit from other users who have this feature enabled. If you buy a device that uses Sidewalk, same situation. Both can be disabled.

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#135

Post by azinman2 »

gertrunde wrote: post #114

Is this massively different from the way Apple tags are tracked by Apple devices that are not the tag owners devices?

It seems to be. It can use up to 500mb/month of data, and is more than just for tracking something with tiny payloads of anonymized data.

But it doesn’t seem to be sharing your internet like a lot of people seem to claim. I guess the fear is that there’s some security vulnerability that makes that more possible?

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#136

Post by topspin »

siavosh wrote: post #91

Doesn't this break the terms of service for most ISPs? I remember during the last crypto-craze, there were attempts to monetize this resharing with tokens of some sort and the ISP's put an end to that real quick with legal threats against anyone reselling their internet. Even if this is free Amazon sharing, I'm sure some business is being built off of it?

> Doesn't this break the terms of service for most ISPs?

Probably.

Amazon is operating on the premise that it's easier to ask forgiveness than obtain permission.

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#137

Post by ryanianian »

remarkEon wrote: post #127
nanidin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time this Sidewalk concern style story crops up (which it has several times over the last 6-12 months), I have rechecked that Sidewalk is disabled. So far I have not found it set to anything except for disabled. I hope Amazon isn’t doing a gradual roll out to enable, as if I find it enabled at any point in the future, I am done with Amazon devices in my home. As far as I’m concerned based on Amazon Logistics pe…

I bought my mom an Echo for Christmas last year for the kitchen, since she likes making lists and setting timers for baking and her hands are starting to show their age (she’s 63, ‘bout that time I guess). Really grating that what was at one time a helpful device for older folks is now retroactively being turned into yet another internet surveillance device.

> retroactively being turned into yet another internet surveillance device.

Oh, and an ad-delivery mechanism. Ask Alexa to set a timer, and sometimes she'll rebut with "while you wait why not try Amazon Music!" It's absolutely infuriating.

I emailed jeff@amazon.com (VIP support team) and they confirmed it could not be disabled by normal means. They disabled it on their end but then had to do it again when somehow it got unset.

The "start with the customer and work backward" mantra that used to be strong in the company is now completely ignored for Alexa it seems. The first domino has fallen. I suspect we'll see many more fall as a result.

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#138

Post by bellyfullofbac »

FredPret wrote: post #116
Scoundreller wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be honest, I find these ad hoc mobile mesh networks fascinating. With cheap flash, we could do a lot of high-latency high-bandwidth data transport with just existing movements. We could eliminate telecoms overnight but we just don’t have the organization to do it. Like, every house used to have a VHF/UHF receiving tower on it.

A content “delivery” network running on human movements. Now that’d be an interesting routing problem.

Hah. Well, humans have easily predictable movement patterns right? Home, work, grocery store.

Imagine wanting to move data from city A to city B, so they'd decide to do a Tinder match of a girl from City B to this guy from City A, so he'd visit her a lot and be the data conduit...

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#139

Post by philwelch »

remarkEon wrote: post #127
nanidin wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time this Sidewalk concern style story crops up (which it has several times over the last 6-12 months), I have rechecked that Sidewalk is disabled. So far I have not found it set to anything except for disabled. I hope Amazon isn’t doing a gradual roll out to enable, as if I find it enabled at any point in the future, I am done with Amazon devices in my home. As far as I’m concerned based on Amazon Logistics pe…

I bought my mom an Echo for Christmas last year for the kitchen, since she likes making lists and setting timers for baking and her hands are starting to show their age (she’s 63, ‘bout that time I guess). Really grating that what was at one time a helpful device for older folks is now retroactively being turned into yet another internet surveillance device.

With all due respect, it’s a microphone connected to the internet that you are meant to install in your home. How are you surprised to see it used as a surveillance device?

Re: Amazon US customers given one week to opt out of mass wireless sharing

#140

Post by sokoloff »

mercora wrote: post #122
sokoloff wrote: post #105

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dedicated SSID(s) with that/those SSID configured as a guest network goes pretty far. I happen to use Ubiquiti gear, but most any router is likely capable of creating a dedicated guest SSID (or multiple). That covers wireless devices (which is all the IoT stuff that I have). The one aggravation I had was trying to get the Chromecasts to work correctly (where I wanted to be able to cast from a machine on the main LAN…

> I would periodically get it working and then it would periodically break. wait a second... it worked sometimes? without doing any routing trickery or something? If you did some trickery maybe the devices sometimes chose to speak ipv6 but could not?

Oh no, I was trying different bits of routing trickery. I'm pretty sure if I sat down and gave it a solid 3 hours straight of methodical effort, that I'd have figured it out once and for all. Instead, I would have 5-10 minutes total per attempt, try something, see if it worked or didn't, then the next time I tried the Chromecast (possibly weeks later), it wouldn't always be repeatable. I also had the Casts being powered off the TV, so they got hard shutdown and cold-booted pretty often.

In short, I never really cared enough to get it working right as the FireTV was "winning" the convenience battle by enough to make it not matter most of the time and I always had an HDMI cable for the times when I really had to get a screen "sharing" to work.

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