421–430 of 575 posts
I get that these products are personally inconvenient to Brian Krebs and his work, and to companies that make money blocking people from accessing the internet, and to companies that make money spewing ads in people's faces. So? Why should anyone care about any of those? In fact I think some people would get one of these sticks just to inconvenience the latter two groups!
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Trust me, I really wish it were that easy. We're based out of Spain, so to sell in the US (or other countries) we either need to figure out assembly of the device there, or we need to solve cross-border payments, logistics, customs clearance, tax remittance to individual states, and hardware compliance. That said, we're working hard on all of it and plan to go D2C as soon as possible.
I haven't used them myself, but it seems that services such as paddle.com takes care of the payment and tax compliance. There are probably similar sevices for logistics as well.
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Just being realistic here; many of these are of Chinese make so how exactly would you stop it other than blocking them from being sold. They certainly don't advertise to the big box retailer that buys them "and it uses the customer's internet connection for fraud." Hell, there's a section of comments that would probably going "hey, RELAX guy" because it's not US companies doing this. For any American companies that d…
If I open my own line of home improvement stores and do no oversight on what I sell and wind up selling really dangerous lawnmowers, I'm partly responsible. Or if I open up a gas station and allow any company without oversight to sell "supplements" through my shelves and cops arrest me for selling heroin, I don't get a free pass. Why should amazon or Walmart get a free pass just because they sell more items?
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One problem I see with your analogy is that the dangerous lawnmower can cause an easily quantifiable harm. You have to be able to show damages you incurred and assign a dollar value to them to sue people. That doesn’t work at all for a something that sells your bandwidth to a proxy service. People wouldn’t even be aware that it was happening they weren’t told.
What about when the police show up because some highly illegal content was traced to your IP address? Will they believe that you were the unwitting victim of a rogue proxy server running on your streaming stick? Would you have even been aware of that possibility?
The cybercrime raids happen when they run into someone who looks like a hacker and has a lot of computers.
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Except the devices are not dangerous. Its the software installed on the device. Consumers have a choice. Pay for the trusted Apple TV or Amazon firestick, or go the wild west and see what's on offer.
with the devices mentioned in the article, there is no consent requested, and the malicious apps are installed either before the box is sold or after as a requirement for getting the streaming services to work.
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I would very much be in favor of grocery stores sharing responsibility (and regulatory penalties) for selling tainted food! It's kind of mind boggling that this is controversial. "Buyer beware" is not an acceptable basis for society to function.
This is unfortunately exactly how society operates in China. It is basically on the buyer to confirm that they're getting something acceptable. Once they've paid, it is what it is.
> Despite repeated warnings from the FBI and security industry leaders about the security and privacy risks of using these streaming devices, major e-commerce providers like Amazon, Best Buy, Newegg and others continue to sell hundreds of different models and brands I scanned the comments and I didn't see anyone suggesting that these companies should share any responsibility for selling these harmful products. Why is…
Tainted food and unsafe children’s toys kill people. Sketchy devices on your wi-fi don’t really harm anyone. They’re a minor inconvenience at best, mostly to large corporations that like to discern residential connections from business/corporate ones.
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I agree fully with your assessment of USSR but basically any nation state with the power does such things. Show me a COTS smartphone where the end-user can burn the OTP fuses for his personal public key, so they can have it boot their own custom signed firmware, and control exactly what runs in TrustZone's SW Secure World?
You can flash yourself GrapheneOS with your own keys for the bootloader. Then again "I can't make sure all manufacturers aren't in collusion" when FBI sues Apple and others (and fails) over suspects' phone access is quite different from "every device sold in the country must have government malware", as it is in China.
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I think it's really far fetched to say capitalism is bad idea. It's great system, it has some problems, but the upside is so big and alternatives are so bad that it's really unfair to call it bad system.
I think that encouraging corporations to destroy our environment (e.g. climate change) as fast as possible to maximise profits is a very good reason to call it a bad system. Yes, some goods and services become much more efficient, but now we're all going to have to pay the price for it.