111–120 of 575 posts
Instead they're banning stuff willy nilly left and right without really solving the problem.
But there's good stuff coming out of China as well. I recently bought a cheap e-reader which has no WiFi or internet connection and it works stellar. And I bought some cheap Chinese sport cams which also lack internet and work great.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
If you offered most people free streaming for a $37 USB stick but directly told them it would be faking ad clicks when the TV is off, would any of them really care?
No, and that's is the root of the problem. The buyer is happy and so is the seller. They don't care to understand what they're allowing and everyone is allowing it to happen.
If they were using the system to rip off random people, I'd be 100% against it, if they are fucking Google and the giant corps that advertise with them, ehh.. not my problem and can't be assed to care. Google is not a positive force in the world. Hasn't been for many years.
Defrauding ad networks doesn't seem like a bad thing, although using my internet connection as a proxy is obviously terrible. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my connection is being sold as a VPN service by the vendor.
It'll be a marginal effect, but fake clicks impacts the ad buyer, which then impacts their financials and pricing. The only winner here is the scammers running the fake affiliate sites on which these sticks are "clicking". Or, am I missing some facet of this enterprise?
Looks like cheap small computer with a remote control.
We purchased a Chinese-made projector from Amazon, which was surprisingly inexpensive (~40 USD). Upon connecting it to the internet, it placed a constantly running feed of ads on the corner of the screen, even while movies were playing. There was no way to disable it either. Even though it's not a stick, it's a similar principle.
I hesitate to blame the victim here, but why on earth would you do that? “$40 Chinese-made” didn’t give you pause?
Defrauding ad networks doesn't seem like a bad thing, although using my internet connection as a proxy is obviously terrible. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that my connection is being sold as a VPN service by the vendor.
why is running a proxy a bad thing? someone profiting off it could be bad maybe, but even that is good if it pays for my subscription. but compare running tor nodes, and especially exit nodes. that surely would be a good thing, so at least if you think tor is good then running a proxy should be the same and it should be normalized. doing it in secret without the user knowing is what's bad
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Another winner is the person who gets to watch cheap digital TV, without putting together a usable antenna and limiting their reception to the broadcast channels that are nearby. I mean: They just pay the money, plug the thing in, push some buttons, and: TV happens. Right?
You really don't want fraudulent clicks ("invalid traffic", per industry lingo) coming from your home network, because any publishers (apps and websites, per normal-people lingo) who use tools designed to block invalid traffic might start flagging legitimate traffic from your network.
Also, visitors on my wifi started getting strange ads. Yes I threw off the algo, but I'm a guy with wife, I'd rather get car ads than like divorce lawyers + gay dating sites.
> generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee I don't want to blame the purchasers of these things - who are some of the victims - but at the same time, it does seem like a Too Good To Be True situation.
OTOH - TV, radio, and YouTube are all unlimited and free. Why not streaming? There are lots of people alive who grew up during the days of broadcast TV and radio. I get why they might not understand the difference.
So where can I get an actual privacy focused streaming box, even if the apps (Neflix etc) running on it are not?