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Comment by 01acheru | Hacker News Reader

Hug of death probably so I cannot read the article.

Anyway that's the reason why I don't buy Chinese crap anymore. I'm not saying that I don't buy anything made in China, almost everything is made in China, but everyone should avoid Chinese crapware.

If something doesn't match the description send it back, if you find random executables that you cannot identify send it back, if you are asked to register on some weird Chinese website send it back, if you are asked to download a sketchy application with a Chinese readme send it back, etc...

After a while you'll notice you are sending everything back.

And it is not only Aliexpress or other Chinese marketplaces or websites, Amazon is full of Chinese crapware just the same.

edit: read the article from archive, well it just confirms to me what I wrote earlier.

View on HN

I bought a bluetooth dongle on Amazon recently. didn't work out of the box, and the instruction booklet told me I had to download and install an unsigned device driver that I should download from a specific dropbox link.

I tried to write a measured review on Amazon explaining the problem, but Amazon rejected the review. I threw it away and composed an angsty tweet [1], but I really should have returned it.

[1] https://twitter.com/ojensen5115/status/1351598563751559169

I very rarely write negative reviews, but every time I have was for something of this magnitude and not once has any ever been left up on any platform.

Same.

What I don't get is that on Amazon I've purchased 10's to 100's of thousands in product (was an early user, business account admin etc). Of all the reviews that SHOULD have credibility, someone who doesn't review a lot and buys a TON of product - you think would be slightly credible?

Instead, for those (few) times I've posted a clearly negative review - gone for whatever reason. If you buy enough from Amazon, especially in last 5 years or so, you got some total absolute trash in there.

"Genuine" Apple products absolutely totally 100% fake trash. How amazon's supply chain thinks these are legit is mind boggling.

I've had such bad luck with "genuine" and "oem" battery replacements I've given up - most of these things are just crap scam stuff.

I'm actually curious how this even happens sometimes, some of the used crap was BADLY used, think of a bunch of electric pencil sharpeners for an office, all "new" that are filled with old pencil shavings, scratches etc etc. Product reviews that when you go back to understand how the piece of trash product got 5 stars you realize the reviews DO NOT EVEN RELATE TO THE PRODUCT you purchased. I mean, how does this even happen?

So you get out the review - hey, this things was garbage, and many of the 5 star reviews were for a knife set it looks like instead of a powerbank. Review rejected :)

I canceled Prime and stopped buying stuff on Amazon over 3 years ago for these sort of reasons. You cannot trust the product descriptions, you cannot trust the reviews, and you cannot trust that what you actually get is the same thing you thought you were buying.

> Product reviews that when you go back to understand how the piece of trash product got 5 stars you realize the reviews DO NOT EVEN RELATE TO THE PRODUCT you purchased. I mean, how does this even happen?

Several ways:

1. Repurposing product listings for something unrelated and keeping the old sales data and reviews

2. Merging product listings to aggregate unrelated sales data and reviews

3. Fake reviews that were unrelated to the product all along

> Several ways:

> 1. Repurposing product listings for something unrelated and keeping the old sales data and reviews

Sure - but this seems trivially solvable by Amazon - you can't tell that a product listing for a knife set is not a tech product??

> 2. Merging product listings to aggregate unrelated sales data and reviews

Again - def happens I think. But can't these go through some type of review? The ones I've seen are WAY off when you look deeper.

> 3. Fake reviews that were unrelated to the product all along

This is harder, I'd have 2 amazon staff review higher volume products.

"Why doesn't Amazon stop this from happening?" is a different question from "How does this happen?".

Any system Amazon puts in place will have a lot of false positives that require human review. And that is entirely aside from the fact that underhanded sellers will try to flood such a system with automated disputes until Amazon relents.

> The ones I've seen are WAY off when you look deeper.

You're assuming these disparate merges happen in a single step.

I tend to write something like, "Didnt work. 1 star" At least that stays up most of the time.

Reviews and the platforms they relate to should be separated from each other. And Yelp like strategies should be reason for major shunning.

> I tried to write a measured review on Amazon explaining the problem, but Amazon rejected the review.

This facet of the Big Tech censorship problem hardly ever gets any attention, but it's no less bad than YouTube and Twitter censoring their political opponents.

That's one of the things that's interesting about it being a private company and censoring things. The whole "free speech" vs "not free speech" issues. I certainly understand both sides of the aisle on that one but tend to lean against censorship.

Huh. I just got some insecure crap from Amazon, composed a pretty scathing review about it, and they put it up:

https://www.amazon.com/review/R2OY2YYNJ3WW4H/

A chinese USB-C to Ethernet adapter had instructions to download and install a macOS kernel extension for it to work. Thanks but no thanks. This was a product that was (presumably) vetted and retailed by an EU electronics retailer.

>I'm not saying that I don't buy anything made in China, almost everything is made in China, but everyone should avoid Chinese crapware.

If you spend just a small bit of effort, you can look for items not made in China. They are usually higher quality. Japanese companies (and increasingly large American ones) are moving / have moved their production elsewhere due to an increasingly hostile business environment in China.

Sony makes their phones in Thailand, speakers/headsets in Malaysia. Panasonic produces a lot of consumer electronics in Malaysia. Samsung makes some of their phones in Vietnam, and the high-end ones in Korea. Their fridges are also made in Thailand/Korea. Google makes their Nest line of products in Thailand/Vietnam now. Some Netgear Arlo products are made in Indonesia, (some?) Netgear switches are made in Thailand.

On the enterprise side, Cisco has moved production of a lot of lines to Thailand for example.

This trend is only going to accelerate after the SARS-COV-2 pandemic subsides.

If you buy a Sony product made in Thailand, what protects you from encountering crap like in the article is not that it's made in Thailand instead of China, but that Sony has a reputation to protect and the expertise to do proper quality control.

If you buy stuff directly from a Thai company that you never heard of before just because their product was the cheapest, you'll have to do your own testing and will likely discover some sharp edges.

> but that Sony has a reputation to protect and the expertise to do proper quality control.

They don't, though. Sony, like many other companies, makes products for developing nations which are not sold in more affluent Western countries. ("World" products)

Trying to buy replacement Bluetooth earphones in India really opened my eyes on this one. The store I was buying from had a strict NO RETURNS policy, but still bent the rule when the headphones weren't iPhone compatible (scratchy distortion). After opening two more pairs of Sony with the same problem, they decided to stop and just gave my money back.

This wasn't a budget model - it's a model which you'll never see in the US or EU. Their products aren't just differentiated by country of manufacture, but by the intended market. Depending on brand name isn't enough.

A lot of Chinese company owners have moved production to Vietnam, Thailand. Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, etc., specifically because they are aware of this changing preference in the West. Chinese owned business is not China-based business, but most Chinese-owned businesses are subject to CCP influences.

As you pointed out: manufacturing standards vary factory to factory and region to region, and quality issues abound in newer manufacturing regions that lack the crazy competitive environment China has (a thousand pots et al).

Counterfeit PPE really revealed a lot about boys these factories operate. Very hard to verify ownership reliably.

There's another, more capitalist reason: wages in most of those countries are lower than wages in China. It's not because of "changing preference".

That’s definitely part of it.

But for context I’m basing part of that opinion on conversations I had with factory owners I’ve done business with in some of those countries running import/export. Many Chinese manufacturers see the conflict between the US and China as bad for business and have optioned third party countries to continue doing business no matter what happens. They’re very smart people.

Why are you being downvoted? Avoiding chinese products is a good thing. Thanks for the tips.

Is there a reliable way to research non-Chinese manufactured products? I know to just look for the “made in” somewhere on the page or product, but it’s not as simple as including a search tag in a field, either.

This might be something to check out:

ImportYeti

https://www.importyeti.com/

I've noticed lately that in the Q&A section of the majority of the items I look at on Amazon, someone asks where the item was made.

That's helpful. I've always wanted to know where my stuff comes from, from my food to my gadgets. So I encourage other people do ask the same questions on Amazon. It helps other people.

This browser addon claims to show the origin country of any item: https://www.wecultivate.us/

I haven't tried it much though (I'm not in the USA).

Sadly Amazon doesn't respect the NOT operator anymore:

https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20069/is-there-a...

> Sony makes their phones in Thailand, speakers/headsets in Malaysia. Panasonic produces a lot of consumer electronics in Malaysia. Samsung makes some of their phones in Vietnam, and the high-end ones in Korea. Their fridges are also made in Thailand/Korea. Google makes their Nest line of products in Thailand/Vietnam now. Some Netgear Arlo products are made in Indonesia, (some?) Netgear switches are made in Thailand.

Made/Manufactured/Assembled in X country doesn't mean not using Made/Manufactured/Assembled parts from Y country in the process. Take the Cisco router manufactured in Thailand. Out of the thousands of individual components on the circuit boards, not a single IC within it was manufactured in China?

"Made in USA" has fairly strict rules. You can sneak some components in but it needs to be negligible and not misleading.

> If you spend just a small bit of effort, you can look for items not made in China. They are usually higher quality.

I try to do this when I can, and they're definitely higher quality, but for some products, finding a version not made in China is almost impossible, a problem that's exacerbated by stores like Amazon not being required to disclose where their products are made.

Buying from China, as a westerner, is akin to buying the rope that will hang you. Regardless of the quality or price of their products.

We should have never allowed them to become this powerful. Their ideology is toxic and incompatible with ours.

"Their ideology is toxic and incompatible with ours."

But it's okay to buy Oil from regimes that kill gay people or cobalt mined by Child slave labour?

Lets place the blame where it actually belongs: our corporations will sell our values, our kidneys and the entire planet down the river id they can. China is just one of the few countries that beat them at their own game.

> We should have never allowed them

What does this mean?

Trade ban and sanctions in the early 2000s when it should have become clear their ambition and dirty tactics would put us on a collision course. Instead, we were blinded by the cheap cost and outsourced everything there. To a country that doesn't respect IP, or even basic human rights, and, on top of that, is now ready and able to export their world vision and order.

Now it's a bit too late to stop them. NATO/West id too preoccupied by Russia when, imo, China is the bigger threat, by far.

Sorry, but we did this to ourselves. We moved our manufacturing capability to China in a hundred thousand tiny transactions and a couple of smaller ones for better quarterly earnings, the kind of stuff that Wall Street drools over.

Early 2000’s?

Here’s Joe Biden in 2011 fawning over King Xi and calling for a rising China.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaBdlu4rL4

Nixon, really

I think the person you're replying to meant that China should not have been allowed to join the World Trade Organisation without further requirements.

Or stay in it when it became clearly asymmetric.

I think the hopes were that China would benefit from trade and developed its own industries in a largely decentralized fashion (which happened). What didn’t follow was the assumption that this would cause them to become less authoritarian and more democratic.

Quite the gamble in the end; I don’t think those responsible over many decades realized what the consequences would be for getting this wrong. They all were championed by equally blind stock-market driven CEOs who wanted cheap labor, low/no environmental laws, no unions, a helpful and competent government, and new large markets who didn’t already have lots of stuff.

The US has gotten terrible at long term vision, while China has nothing but long term vision and long term memory.

The UN was also giving them subsidized shipping rates via the UPU. And as they exploited the subsidies in increasingly-vast numbers, domestic shipping had rates to be increased yet more to compensate. It was cheaper to ship from China than domestically in the US. Basically a tarriff on domestic goods. What do you expect businesses to do? Even if manfacturing wasn't cheaper, it would still be cheaper overall to manufacture there.

Trump finally withdrew from the UPU in 2018 and ended the subsidies.

Trade deals, foreign investment, joint ventures, etc.

China got powerful by doing business with the rest of the world.

Yes, that's like Europeans signing contracts to buy natural gas from Russia. Amazingly short-sighted.

that's the reason why I don't buy Chinese crap anymore. I'm not saying that I don't buy anything made in China, almost everything is made in China, but everyone should avoid Chinese crapware.

This is one of the big reasons that Apple locked down its Lightning/USB ports so hard.

There were tons of fake Apple chargers flooding the market that contained exfiltration circuitry, among other problems. It was a huge topic in tech circles, and on HN, at the time. I even have a few "data condoms" leftover from those years. (If you don't remember, they're little dongles you put between your USB cable and the USB charger that only have the power lines connected.)

The fact that it also locked out bad cops was a bonus.

>There were tons of fake Apple chargers flooding the market that contained exfiltration circuitry, among other problems. It was a huge topic in tech circles, and on HN, at the time.

source? I've heard of fake charges being planted with exfiltration circuitry as part of a targeted attack (eg. by red teams or actual bad guys), but I haven't heard of aliexpress vendors shipping them out en-masse.

in ~2005 whilst I was the IT manager at Lckheed Martin's RFID division - we were implementing TLS on Exchange for all email... among other security measures...

We had a compromised machine (linux) and had to un-plug it...

BUT

On the security calls was an interesting conversation about the Chinese infiltration of Lockheed.

Lockheed, had at the time, only (3) three egress connects to the internet.

The chinese did the following:

1. They did phishing attacks on those who worked at Lockheed + plus their orbit who attended various conferences and events... giving them seemingly valid contact info (business cards and such) of their agents who also attended said events.

2. Would email the Lockheed Targets and in the emails contain links to military phishing links which would install malware on said target's machine...

3. Would trickle out data so as not to be exposed...

4. Would attack known international suppliers of Lockheed's sub-components through air-gap measures (meaning that Lockheed epoxied USB ports in machines and suppliers were (ironically) then required to transfer data via USB sticks... and China was infecting the machine which the supplier was loading the USB sticks with such to infect Lockheed employees once they received and connected said sticks...

How this was discovered:

Lockheed employees bitches about machine being slow. Investigation ensues and the trickle malware is discovered;

The chinese know they have been discovered and they open the floodgates on all their bots within Lockheed...

HUGE firehose...

Lockheed had to shut down all three egress until resolution...

Yeah, china is in EVERYTHING.

Hey, this is a really interesting anecdote, you should write it up and publish as a blog post or submit it to HN.

No thanks - the last time I did an anecdote about being on the design team to FB MLPW building and what they were doing WRT security - the legal team submitted a cease+desist order and threatened to ruin me, which they did and I have had a zero tech career since, per se...

There is so much dark in tech. Spying on all levels. Every single thing you say is now not only subject to legal action, but also dark pools of intel action...

Anyone ever notice that palantir has dropped off the HN map? Yeah...

Look at reddit driving the narratives these days... I have stories about exactly when and how reddit began to drive the negative narrative....

Fuck them all...

Reality is being coopted by ...

> There were tons of fake Apple chargers flooding the market that contained exfiltration circuitry, among other problems.

I think you're conflating two separate issues. IIRC, I think the exfiltration concerns were more for "in place" chargers at places like airports. There's definitely a separate retail "fake Apple charger" problem, but that has more to do with safety and quality control.

It wouldn't make much sense for a retail fake Apple charter to have exfiltration circuitry, because then you run into the problem of how to exfiltrate some rando's data from some random charter. Also I'm guessing that stuff would be expensive. It really only makes sense to me for a thing like that to be a targeted attack (e.g. swap out some research scientist's charger at a conference, and place an exfiltration receiver near his hotel room).

> I even have a few "data condoms" leftover from those years. (If you don't remember, they're little dongles you put between your USB cable and the USB charger that only have the power lines connected.)

Those are useful for other things. For instance, I have some devices that deactivate and switch to transfer mode when they connect to data, so I use those for charging those devices while I'm still using them. Also, I think they can allow faster charging from a data-enabled port in some cases.

Given the vast financial incentive apple has for keeping its chargers proprietary, I find it difficult to believe Apple is doing this for the primary reason of benefitting their users.

I don't think phone chargers register even a blip in the financials of a trillion-dollar company.

But the bad press and bad customer experience from people having problems with "Apple" chargers probably does.

It's called protecting the brand.

DO IPhones automatically trust things plugged into them? My Android mobiles and tablets always ask me before allowing anything other than charging.

Has Apple had any USB chargers prior to the USB C ones on recent macs? I think in the past it was all magsafe on macs and lightning or the 30 pin thing on iPhones.

"If you find random executables that you cannot identify send it back, if you are asked to download a sketchy application"

That means I should send back laptops made by Sony and Dell too though?

Ideally. But life is short, so choose your battles.

> After a while you'll notice you are sending everything back.

What about shipping costs? When you're buying something the seller is usually paying for that in bulk and including it in the retail price to boast "0-cost shipping". Surely buyers can't possibly afford sending everything back.

He offers a simple solution in the first paragraph.

>everyone should avoid Chinese crapware.

> Surely buyers can't possibly afford sending everything back.

What country you live in with so poor online protections you can't return things within the return window without incurring extra costs for doing so? Sounds broken.

> What country you live in with so poor online protections you can't return things within the return window without incurring extra costs for doing so? Sounds broken.

The sellers are in China and the products are ordered internationally. The sellers don’t care about your local return laws.

Then the fix is simple. Buy it locally or from a company from there. They might not care but then the local seller (amazon for example) is on the hook (in any country with a proper customer protection at least).

In France, for example, it's legal for the customer to be on the hook for return shipping. This is often the case with smaller merchants, but even bigger ones have this policy. Example: Darty [0]

So if you have to pay for the crap to be shipped all the way back to China, I can see how that may become expensive.

[0] Darty return policy, in French: https://www.darty.com/achat/services/retour-retractation/ind...

Return shipping is usually up to the customer and shipping back to China is much more expensive than the initial China to the US charges. Sometimes it exceeds the cost of the item itself to try to send it back so it's just cheaper to eat the loss.

> Return shipping is usually up to the customer

Not for orders from Amazon or Wal Mart, the two biggest places you'd tend to buy cheap Chinese products from.

That's down to store policies though not any legal requirement. And in the case of Walmart you're not shipping back to China anyways you ship back to some distribution hub/return center in the US. Amazon too often the products are staged and returned to the US.

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