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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

#201

Post by m_eiman »

patrickk wrote: post #171
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…

Building your own router with pfSense is one prosumer solution I've considered, by shied away from due to lack of time[1]. Not sure how a pfSense setup would work with wireless APs though. [1] https://www.pcgamer.com/i-built-my-own-super-router-out-of-o...

pfSense might have a lot of features, but the UI is terrible in all possible ways. They should stop letting their programmers "design" the UI; dumping the raw database into an HTML table is not a good user interface.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#202

Post by vetinari »

anyfoo wrote: post #54
jonpurdy wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for that input. My AP AC Lite has been absolutely rock solid so I wouldn't want reduced reliability; it's the reason I went with Unifi in the first place. Not that it matters; no chance I'll be going with Unifi in the future.

Yeah, and thanks to your comment it actually got me thinking that I can (at least temporarily) mitigate my current situation by taking the nanoHD out of the loop entirely, as I do have another spare AP AC Pro in my closet. I also got the nanoHD because of extra MIMO speed (among other things, it's feeding my home office setup wirelessly), but the egregious loss in stability is not worth it.

Downgrade your nanoHD back to 4.x firmware. That way you get to keep your MIMO speed with stable device, you will only lose WPA3 support (if you use it, it is a new thing in the latest controller).

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#203

Post by pseudalopex »

noahtallen wrote: post #185
andremedeiros wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How is pegging and selling the successor to what I have not making ad revenue? The difference is that they’re not selling pixels for money, they’re trading pixels for sales.

The main difference in my opinion is that typical advertising is a lot more privacy invasive and malicious. Tons of cross-site tracking, ads of dubious quality, getting 3 ads per 5 minutes of YouTube, etc. I’m not frustrated when I get an email or dismissible banner ad from a company regarding a new product. It’s possibly interesting to me, and easily dismissible if not. Sure, technically, this is advertising. But th…

They said it can't be dismissed.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26630127

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#204

Post by GuB-42 »

Is self-promotion considered ads? My opinion is "yes" but it is not universal. For example the EasyList policy[1] states "Self-promotion should not be specifically removed by EasyList, although equally should not be allowed if it is blocked."

I asked myself the question when Wikipedia does its calls for donation. One may argue that it has a noble goal but technically, it is a huge ad banner of the annoying kind, and I would have expected indiscriminate ad blockers like uBlock Origin to block them, and they don't. And the reason is doesn't isn't because it is Wikipedia, it is because it is self-promotion and is therefore allowed.

[1] https://easylist.to/pages/policy.html

Edit: the definition of an ad by EasyList is "the promotion of third party content in return for goods or services" https://easylist.to/2011/07/11/the-definition-of-advert-and-...

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#205

Post by pseudalopex »

lilyball wrote: post #178
justinjlynn wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's really sad. I used to recommend UniFi and their other hardware without a second's hesitation to all of my friends and the software and hardware quality control has just gone so far down hill. Now they're putting ads and privacy violating code in the admin user interface? What a complete disregard for user security and privacy in one of the most important places for it. Ugh. Add that to their GPL violations ( htt…

What privacy violating code?

Google Analytics at least.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26629518

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#206

Post by phlo »

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…

> That's not what the article suggests. The article suggests an ad on a page with an ubiquiti url.

It's both. UniFi is product line of network hardware which is managed by a central controller. The controller is available as a software download, and Ubiquiti sells a few devices that are pre-configured to run it (the "Dream Machine" from the ad, and their "Cloud Key", which is just a PoE-powered mini-appliance that runs the controller). The controller's UI can be accessed either directly, or via a Ubiquiti-run cloud service. The tweet shows the latter, but having recently upgraded my controller, I can confirm that the ad also appears when directly accessing the UI. What's worse, there's a link offering to go back to the "Classic Dashboard" on my install, but it doesn't appear to work.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#207

Post by FridgeSeal »

jjav wrote: post #200
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.

I dread to think what happens when ads collide with cryptocurrencies. They’ll either wipe each other out or merge into something far horrible.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#208

Post by reportgunner »

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…

Advertising itself is bad.

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#209

Post by pseudalopex »

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…

They removed local management apparently.[1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26631513

Re: Ubiquiti starts serving ads in their management interface

#210

Post by donmcronald »

SideburnsOfDoom wrote: post #181
wyuenho wrote: post #139

I'm going to go out on a limb here to point out the inconsistency of this entire thread. For the following reasoning, I'm going to use the word "ad" in the broad sense. 1. Everybody is excited with Github's new features that they promote on the dashboard. Sometimes popups and flashes too. Are they not ads? 2. Nobody ever complains about Github showing ads. 3. Github is a SaaS. 4. unify.ui.com is a SaaS 5. OP is compl…

> unify.ui.com is a SaaS As far as I am concerned, UniFi is a set of compatible hardware products. Physical goods. Expensive, high-quality physical goods that I have already paid for. None of that is like GitHub. But it looks like they want to be a SaaS instead, maybe because that's where the ad revenue is. But that's not what I as a buyer of WiFi APs want from them in any way whatsoever.

I think they’re trying to position themselves for a buyout. The massive effort to push everyone onto unifi.ui.com is the hint. The subscriptions tab in that portal is the second hint. Eventually they’ll try again and again and as soon as they have enough people locked into the cloud version they’ll pull the trigger and force subscriptions.

Even if they burn the brand, they won’t care. It’ll become SonicWall Cloud or some BS sub brand of a bigger vendor.

Look at the UDMP. There’s no reason that thing couldn’t have let’s encrypt integration for people that want external access without the cloud BS. Plus, local access over http is a bad design IMO. So if it’s a worse product and less secure, why do it? Usually when things don’t add up it’s safe to assume something is amiss.

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