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Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

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Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#191

Post by oilbagz »

trylfthsk wrote: post #85

I think it's a common sentiment here, but I'm turning into a more extreme anti-advertising zealot every day. Even the large ad networks show paid content that violates what I would consider widespread ethical norms - presenting everything from hyperbolic claims to straight fraud to people with little repercussion. I'm reminded of a poignant example in television, where episodes of Jeopardy! are intertwined with their…

It amazes me that we don't charge third parties to use our network resources to retrieve their assets for displaying as ads.

We should be charging vendors for traffic that is only designed to forward their business, when it happens on our own local loop.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#192

Post by izacus »

alkonaut wrote: post #189
izacus wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 4. unify.ui.com is a SaaS The Ad has shown on my locally deployed piece of software that's controlling hardware. It's not SaaS, it's a program for managing physical hardware running on my hardware. And it has replaced USEFUL information (channel utilization and client counts) with a fullscreen unremovable ad. How can you defend this crap?

> it's a program for managing physical hardware running on my hardware. That's not what the article suggests. The article suggests an ad on a page with an ubiquiti url. While it may be the same software under the hood, I agree that seeing an ad when I'm on someone else's hosted page is (somewhat) acceptable unless I'm a paying customer, but seeing it on my own machine isn't. In the end since those are two entirely di…

I don't understand how can you keep things apart when it's the same software?

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#193

Post by yardstick »

luckman212 wrote: post #105

I see a lot of complaints here, but nobody offering any substantive alternatives. Mikrotik is mentioned several times, but always with the caveats that it has glitchy UIs or poorly implemented features. EnGenius... you've got to be kidding. I've been a UI fan for many years and was also dismayed by the 6.x releases and the switch to Mediatek, but every time I went looking around, I saw the same tire fires at other ve…

I’m curious, have you used EnGenuis before or just based on people’s responses? I was thinking of using them for a project but wouldn’t mind hearing an opinion from someone familiar with them.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#194

Post by fy20 »

gorgoiler wrote: post #184

The three stages of an engineer’s relationship with Ubiquiti: 1/ Their APs are so cool! Check out this web interface! I can manage an entire fleet of both of these, all from my home office! 2/ Aha, the APs run Linux and I can ssh to them and upload settings — even cooler! 3/ Er, you know what else runs Linux, has a pair of wired and wireless NICs, and can be managed remotely with plain text files and ssh — literally…

Are there any SBCs which have built in APs that can handle transfers in the hundreds of megabits range?

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#195

Post by piokoch »

trylfthsk wrote: post #85

I think it's a common sentiment here, but I'm turning into a more extreme anti-advertising zealot every day. Even the large ad networks show paid content that violates what I would consider widespread ethical norms - presenting everything from hyperbolic claims to straight fraud to people with little repercussion. I'm reminded of a poignant example in television, where episodes of Jeopardy! are intertwined with their…

This is not that simple, unfortunately. Advertising in itself is not bad. Why informing about a good product is something wrong? How we would have Tesla or iPhones, etc. without advertising. Nobody would know about all of those.

But something went wrong at some point.

Similarly with options - options were a great way farmers could offload risk to the products buyers, who, in exchange could get better prices.

But when options started to be used for something which is not much different from lottery bets, again, something went wrong.

This is important lesson. Capitalism is a great system, but it cannot be narrowed to greed. Capitalism requires working ethics since we are not able to regulate every aspect of life - it is practically impossible.

But ethics no longer works. Big IT companies owners were fixing employees wages, who cared. Amazon owner does not care about warehouses workers miserable work conditions. Facebook owner is ok to steer people into fights, as this increases "engagement", ads clicks and revenue.

Has it happened that Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg was asked to leave his country club or whatever place they are hanging out because of the unethical behavior? Obviously not.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#198

Post by flyinghamster »

Just updated my controller VM (for two access points) to 6.1.71. Good thing it's on a ZFS volume, and that I made sure to snapshot it before updating, because I just rolled it back and dropped a pin in /etc/apt.

Ye gods. Video ads in my management interface? Are you KIDDING? This is ridiculous.

Sigh. Everything is turning to ashes. Every. Fucking. Vendor. has decided that it's perfectly OK to spam you and hoover up your personal data. And no, don't say "Apple" since I don't trust them any more than Microsoft or Google.

In any case, it makes me very hesitant to "update" my EdgeRouter, for that matter. :(

Ubiquiti has been skating on thin ice with me for a while, after their earlier telemetry kerfluffle, where they eventually did the right thing. But this is beyond the pale. The only thing I've seen worse was years ago when Belkin started hijacking HTTP connections to serve ads for censorware. [0]

At least the access points are capable of running OpenWRT, but I don't relish the prospect of reflashing them. The ERPoE-5 is the lone EdgeRouter I don't see in OpenWRT's hardware table. :(

[0] https://www.cnet.com/news/web-hijack-riles-belkin-router-use...

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#199

Post by nicoburns »

piokoch wrote: post #195
trylfthsk wrote: post #85

I think it's a common sentiment here, but I'm turning into a more extreme anti-advertising zealot every day. Even the large ad networks show paid content that violates what I would consider widespread ethical norms - presenting everything from hyperbolic claims to straight fraud to people with little repercussion. I'm reminded of a poignant example in television, where episodes of Jeopardy! are intertwined with their…

This is not that simple, unfortunately. Advertising in itself is not bad. Why informing about a good product is something wrong? How we would have Tesla or iPhones, etc. without advertising. Nobody would know about all of those. But something went wrong at some point. Similarly with options - options were a great way farmers could offload risk to the products buyers, who, in exchange could get better prices. But when…

> Capitalism is a great system, but it cannot be narrowed to greed. Capitalism requires working ethics since we are not able to regulate every aspect of life - it is practically impossible.

Whether it's still Capitalism at that point is an interesting question. Some people seem to call any market-based system capitalism. For others the lack of ethics is definitional.

My own view is that we probably ought to stop using the term "capitalism" entirely for the most part, and be more specific about what we mean.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#200

Post by jjav »

trylfthsk wrote: post #85

I think it's a common sentiment here, but I'm turning into a more extreme anti-advertising zealot every day. Even the large ad networks show paid content that violates what I would consider widespread ethical norms - presenting everything from hyperbolic claims to straight fraud to people with little repercussion. I'm reminded of a poignant example in television, where episodes of Jeopardy! are intertwined with their…

Advertising is the most toxic virus ruining everything it touches. TV, then Cable TV, radio, usenet, on and on. Can anything survive the destructive ravage of ads?

In my dream world, all forms of push advertising would be illegal, full stop. Meanwhile, I'll put whatever effort it takes to block everything.

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