I paid for a perpetual license of TeamViewer. Stop calling and emailing me

Linus went over this on the WAN show. Apparently the option to hide pop-ups is only available to subscribers in the new subscriber version and is not an option for those on a perpetual license.

> Seems the only correct way of using TeamViewer is to uninstall it and never use it again.

For anyone seeking alternatives, I found NoMachine[0] to be the closest free remote desktop experience similar to TeamViewer. My criteria was essentially:

- free tier like TeamViewer, but with no nagging

- needed to "feel" fast and responsive like TV, which I wasn't getting with every VNC/RDP flavor

- autoscaling resolution, or the option to have native resolution with "black bars" viewport when window is maximized

- option for shared clipboard (so copy/paste works between machines)

- file drag/drop between machines

The only thing NoMachine doesn't support is automatic tunneling; you need to connect with IP:Port similar to RDP. But I let that slide because all the other TeamViewer-like features were supported.

[0] https://www.nomachine.com/

Dark patterns are just that. They should be opt in, not opt out.

Agreed totally to just uninstall it.

> Even though I had been a (long time, non-family subscription) premium user of Spotify, they started playing ads during podcasts (music was fine). How is that a "premium" service? Canceled the sub.

This is interesting to me because besides ads that are hardcoded into the podcast by creators, I have never heard an ad in Spotify premium, not a single time for years I've been using it. Not sure if country of origin has something to do with it, but I'm from Poland.

Even as a premium user with all notifications in the settings switched off, I still get popups for albums that I'm assuming artists have paid Spotify extra to push towards me.

> Even though I had been a (long time, non-family subscription) premium user of Spotify, they started playing ads during podcasts (music was fine). How is that a "premium" service? Canceled the sub.

In the beginning of time (well, maybe not that far back), there was TV. Soon, TV had ads in them, but fear not, because you can pay extra each month and get access to premium channels that don't show ads, because you are paying extra. Soon after, they started showing ads as well. But then came the streaming services, promising Ad-free lands if you just subscribed to their service. And people did, but soon thereafter, found that the streaming services also added ads when you decided what you wanted to watch. Amazon Prime is a prime example of this.

Funny you mention this! I noticed about a month ago and will also not renew later this year because of this. I don't want podcasts on my MUSIC player to begin with, never mind them playing a single ad on a premium subscription. On principle it is wrong, so shame on them. I will not renew because of this, simple as that.

Reminds me of using Hulu's free service with commercials, then buying a Roku to get Hulu's 'premium service' which confusingly had fewer shows available. Returned the Roku and haven't used Hulu in years.

Interestingly, I paid for premium pretty much since it started until about a year ago but it seems that with a pihole and or Ad block, there are no adverts anyway … so yea I can still listen and no adverts

They will always add advertising to paid services. Not doing so is leaving money on the table. Eventually some executive is gonna realize that and do it. Actually paying for stuff just makes us even more valuable to them.

They also serve you ads by promoting music that they get paid to promote - or where the artists agree to even less royalties in order to be promoted more. Which, for a service I paid for specifically for the great music discovery just destroyed the reason for using it. I'm on apple music now despite not owning a single apple device.

(Just to clarify a question raised in the child comments)

Those were Spotify ads promoting other podcasts, not sponsors promoted in the podcast itself.

I have the same issue with podcasts. Spotify bakes in ads that are in my native language, not english like the podcast I am listening to.

We can only conclude that this must be profitable; i.e. enough customers actually pay money to try and make these bothersome people go away ­– enough customers that is pays to emply special customer-botherers to do this.

This should be considered harrassment.

We spent 20 years seeding the web and our phones with popups, and now we are surprised when we have popup people?

I still get over 100 paper letters a year from Spectrum (previously Time Warner) about various deals even when I already had their service. I've had Google Fiber for awhile now, but they keep coming. I've been storing them all in a box to eventually mail them all back to their HQ. It's quite a hefty box a this point.

We have the "don't call me register" - https://www.dncm.be/nl/

If businesses call you and you're on it. You can file a complaint.

The annoying thing is if you ever need to contact these sort of companies then you will find they will go out of their way to avoid talking to you.

Yep. The practice of spying on user behavior and phoning home is far past my line for acceptable software behavior. It doesn't matter if TV cost $0 or $10,000, it should not be used by anyone who respects their self.

How is TV better than RDP?

> they cancelled my connection because of commercial use

How did they even know?

If I receive an email I didn’t sign up for I’ll contact the email service provider directly. They act quickly because it’s their servers reputations that are at stake, and many times they’ll drop their customer over it.

This never happens because they send through services like Sendgrid with thousands of source IPs which never get onto the block lists because they also send some mails which are not spam.

Quote from their website:

> If you are on one of our shared IP plans and you notice a block message from Spamhaus based on one of our IP addresses, please know that we are already working with Spamhaus directly to address the issue.

I encourage you to start marking them as spam on the first strike. When I give a company my email, I only do it because it’s necessary for creating an account, making a purchase, or something like that. I’ve never clicked a checkbox inviting a company to send me emails that are not directly related to me using their product, like tracking updates or password resets. If there was an obvious box to uncheck, I would have unchecked it. I would never, ever consent to receiving company newsletters, product updates, marketing, or anything else. Ergo, it’s spam, and I do my little part to harm their deliverability.

There is a follow up, where he get another popup: https://nitter.42l.fr/linusgsebastian/status/148185562555858...

If they keep pestering you for a review then give them what they want, except just one star.

It would horrify a lot of people to discover that clothing and personal care businesses that market specifically to women send 10-100x as many emails per month to their customers as other businesses.

I don’t exaggerate; in my testing with fresh email addresses, registering as a woman at fashion-linked retailers would generate up to 4 emails per day from certain well-known retailers, while registering as a man simply would not (or maybe one a week, or month).

It’s bad enough that brands are so thirsty for our wallets, but they had to find a way to be even more greedy and cruel about it.

Modern email clients don’t comprehend the concept “I want one thread in my email listing for all Nordstrom emails”, so retailers just bombard us all to death with emails to flood our inbox. There’s a simple fix, of course: threading by ‘sender’, where you just mark a given email as sent-by Nordstrom or whatever, and all future emails go into that thread, and it shows newest-first and defaults to “mark all older messages read”. This would utterly destroy the relevance of email bombardment and crater open rates, especially if the client doesn’t show the unread count for the thread, since older unread content from that sender doesn’t matter.

This doesn’t make it right for TeamViewer, but at least it would be one step closer towards neutering greedy marketing.

IIRC there's a setting to disable that

You can disable update checks using the setting `"update_check": false` if you do not wish to transition to ST4. Note that only licenses older than 3 years require an upgrade (3 years relative to the release of any future ST update). Additionally any previously purchased license will still prevent the nag popup even if it's not valid for that version.

It's a circle of life in remote admin apps.

First there was Citrix. Good, but ridiculously expensive.

LogMeIn appeared, offered free tier and inexpensive subscriptions, got some users.

LogMeIn matured, dropped free tier, jacked up subscription fees.

People left for TeamViewer because of - you guessed it - a free tier and inexpensive subscriptions.

TeamViewer matured, clamped things down, jacked up the fees.

People will now leave for the next thing that - if properly managed - will follow in LMI and TV footsteps.

The reason behind this is that the $$$ are in large enterprise subscriptions. But you can't get them without having a name and a reputation. So you first build yourself up using smaller users, picking up larger ones along the way and then shed the small fish by raising prices. The end result - a handful of large clients, lower operational and support costs, higher margins. The end.