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Comment by SoftTalker | Hacker News Reader

> 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 it that they seem to get a pass? Would we feel the same about giant retailers selling tainted food, or unsafe children's toys?

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One of the main value propositions for retailers in a world of endless cheap garbage being sold online, is to vet products so customers can trust that what their buying is from a legitimate company and not junk or stuff like these streaming sticks.

This is the problem with being an “everything store”. “Everything” includes a lot of things most consumers would like to be protected from, and assume they are due to the long history of retailers standing behind the products they sell. That history seems to have come to an end. They only stand behind it enough to offer a refund if there is a problem, not to ensure it’s good before selling it.

interesting bit of information: most EV mower companies now do not provide replacement parts - if a mower dies within warranty, a 'certified' warranty repair shop does basic troubleshooting, and if it's beyond a piece of cheap plastic, the mfr just ships a new mower to the 'repair shop'. Once out of warranty, you're on your own.

Thank you for reminding us that electric mowers are garbage.

Everything is garbage now. It’s the end state of unrestrained capitalism.

Surely not, the invisible hand of the market should crawl up their arse and make them do the right thing any day now.

The invisible hand crawled up the arses of Congress and seems to enjoy it there.

I mean, not all of them?

Mine's a fancy-pants Stihl battery mower, but it works quite well and has been doing so without problem since I bought it ~4 years ago. The other battery stuff from the same brand (trimmer, chainsaw, kombi-tool) have the same story.

Stihl is a commercial product (mostly). They design for people using them as a full time job. You pay the price for quality.

Yeah, mine are the AP ('professional') class ones.

What matters is the amortized cost per year, I think - more expensive up front but cheaper in the long run.

No, they definitely have homeowner grade tools available.

For instance, the MS182 [0] is a $270, 2.2cu in saw with a 16" bar listed "For homeowners and light duty work".

Meanwhile, the MS201 [1] is $1100 for a 2.1cu in saw with a 16" bar listed as "The lightest professional gas chainsaw from STIHL Perfect for delimbing work in forestry".

Service interval on the 201 will be much longer, and it's expected to last longer but is priced accordingly. I ended up having to buy one of their homeowner grade saws 10 years ago when I was up in the mountains and my saw died, that was all that was available locally. I'm certainly not a professional, but at the time my primary heat source was wood and I had always used the stihl pro-grade saws. However, that cheap stihl was an absolute piece of junk, it was half wore out after cutting 2 cords of firewood that first time. Terrible ergonomics and poor power to boot, even after reserving the saw for light-duty work it only lasted 2 years and was miserable to start and run the entire time.

At least they explicitly say that they are for light duty though, a less honest company would market everything as pro-grade. But don't just buy the name, while they make good quality products they also sell cheap crap under the same name. It also isn't that clear in a retail store besides the price which ones are the homeowner grade saws.

[0] https://www.stihlusa.com/en/p/chainsaws-ms-182-gasoline-chai... [1] https://www.stihlusa.com/en/p/chainsaws-ms-201-gasoline-chai...

Why? Mine is great. And light. And QUIET.

They really aren't particularly quiet imo. Yes, there's no motor, but it turns out that the whirring sound of blades rotating and cutting grass is quite loud even without a motor. I would say mine is perhaps 3/4 as loud as a gas mower, which isn't a very impressive reduction in noise.

With logarithmic perception, it's about a 50% reduction in sound energy.

My battery mower is quiet enough that I don't feel terribly rude mowing at twilight.

I love mine.

My wife derides my Home Despot special plug-in mower as a Tonka toy, but it's basically just a motor, a blade and a bag, and I don't have a lot of lawn to mow.

My Makita one is excellent.

My electric mower has lasted longer than the gasoline mower before it, which literally had plastic valves inside the carbeurtator.

Counter anecdote, I've had gas mowers survive decades and EV electrical equipment (in this case, a chainsaw and a battery pack for a mower) both die within 14 months of purchase.

This is my experience as well. String trimmer battery went out (still in warranty and replaced) but my gas string trimmer I use at a bigger property came home with me and worked great. She’s only 15 years old, the battery was 6 months. I love my battery blower and string trimmer, but the gas ones are going strong but typically stay at the ranch property due to it being a bigger property to maintain. I would also need 3-4 battery’s out there to keep up with maintaining it, the gas is a whole lot cheaper than a grands worth of battery’s.

Counter counter anecdote, I was just tidying up the yard with my 18V whipper snipper and contemplating the fact that I bought it in 2012 and it hasn’t skipped a beat.

I have a mower that my dad gave to me, which his dad gave to him.

It is in rough shape, but it still cuts grass perfectly fine.

I have a wippersnipper from before I was born which runs perfectly today. It was left out laying sideways in the rain for about a month. Quick clean and a new plug and it was going again.

I'm sure the electric devices can run a long time, but when they fail, they tend to be not repairable.

Makita, amirite?

Ryobi, but I have plenty of Makita gear too. :)

Old Ryobi, or new Ryobi?

Serious question, as I understand the ex-Japanese market rights were sold to a Chinese corp over two decades ago, and the in-Japanese consumer device market rights went to a different Japanse company several years ago too.

Apparently they've gone back to focusing on their roots?

almost all 2-stroke engines have had plastic flapper valves and a plastic fuel pump for as long as I can remember.

There is a big difference in quality levels. If you want a good mower pay the price for a commercial mower, people who use them 8 hours a day need something that lasts.

30 years ago a friend of mine did the mold for a lawn mower. They put an engine on it and it ran for 120 hours before the deck failed. It took 7 more tries until the deck failed after 80 hours. Commercial mowers are expected to run over 1000 hours.

I remember asking a chippie (carpenter tradesman) a while back why he was using Ozito brand power tools (the cheapest Chinese brand from the local tool barn). He said "The good gear like Milwaukee and Makita last years. The cheap Chinese junk lasts maybe six months. Whatever I buy it gets stolen about every 3 months. I'd rather have a spare $40 drill waiting at home when my van gets broken into, than have to go buy another $600 Milwaukee one that I'd otherwise rather be using."

These are the kinds of products I now just straight up refuse to buy.

I think that’s “most mass produced item manufacturers”. It’s just cheaper to ship a new one than waste time trying to troubleshoot.

Costco vets their products very well, if I see something at costco and its something I need I just buy it. No need to research and I've never been burned. They only sell good quality stuff.

Costco isn't perfect, and things slip through still.

For example: this is a minor annoyance, but comes readily to mind.

https://www.costco.com/p/-/orgain-organic-protein-and-superf...

The problem is labeling conventions leading to inaccurate assumptions of what's even IN that "protein powder"...

you would think the protein, being the largest in print, is the primary ingredient but no. A serving is 51grams, and the protein makes up 21grams of that serving: less than half, that's not a 'protein powder' if the primary ingredient isn't protein.

It should be labeled "SUPERFOODS with protein" not the other way around.

There have been other things similar in scope less readily recalled. It may seem minor to some... but labeling accuracy and transparency is something we had to fight for collectively.

Ingredients are listed in order from greatest to least amount. Protein is listed first. It seems it’s the creamer that throws off the ratio you’re looking at, which I’m assuming is there for consistency/taste.

A 51 g serving might contain 40 g of the protein blend, making it a protein powder as the primary ingredient is protein blend.

However, this is plant-based protein, not pure way isolate. A plant-based protein powder from mung beans for example isn't going to be 100% protein. Chickpea powder contains roughly 20% protein.

So I don't know if that helps at all, but it doesn't seem as bad as you and you might be suggesting.

The first ingredient is a plurality, not a majority.

Check their tomato paste. It turns out that nearly every tomato paste in Australia comes from Xinjiang in China, including those marked as Australian or Italian. Simplot (Leggos), the big US company, was the worst offender, so it's possible that tomato paste in Costco's US stores has been produced in Xinjiang using slave labour, irrespective of what the label says.

https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-07-27/australian-tomatoes-l...

According to this none of the samples tested from US retailers contained Chinese tomatoes. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crezlw4y152o It seems like the US ban on Xinjiang is working

Thanks for that informative link. I looked to see if there was any data beyond the ABC article and didn't find it. Some of the truthful brands listed in the BBC article are available where I live. Kudos to the US that their labels match their contents.

The ABC just broke their story a few days ago. There will continue to be fallout over the next few months or years (much like their last one, where they found that many sunscreens did not meet their SPF ratings, a hot topic in the skin cancer capital of the world)

(edit: whoops, Choice did the SPF rating investigation. ABC just did a lot of reporting on it)

The above thread was about quality issues, not ethical issues such as “slave labor” (a term somehow reserved for certain countries, even though most countries use unfree prison labor, including the US and much of the EU).

It's about trust.

Our vocational training program, your prison labor, their slave labor.

> It turns out that nearly every tomato paste in Australia comes from Xinjiang in China

I think that might be a bit of a strong assertion, from your article there -

"It analysed 221 processed tomato products from 39 brands, including paste, passata and diced tomato.

Twenty-two per cent of the products failed country-of-origin testing, while a further 6 per cent were flagged for further testing."

So while 28 percent is scandalous, and those companies need to face consequences, the other 72 percent seem to be genuine.

A big chunk of that 72% are legitimately labeled "Made in China" or niche brands. The brands that failed, plus the products that are actually labeled "Made in China", dominate Australia's four supermarkets with the majority of the market share. I've just done my weekly shop, so trawled their web sites looking for alternatives.

Summarising the Australian situation, taking the 4corners results into account, the following non-Chinese tomato pastes are available:

Coles (29% market share): 1 x 140g premium product in a tube (expensive with reduced market share) out of about 20 products.

Woolworths (38% market share): 1 x 140g premium product (Mutti) in a tube (expensive with reduced market share) out of about 20 products.

Aldi (10% market share): None out of about 4 products

IGA (7% market share): 5 of 16 products, being the same premium brands that Coles and Woolworths sell.

Maybe qualify my comment with "by market share and availability". The effect is that if you stand in front of an Australian supermarket shelf, every product, bar one or two in the corner, come from China. China is a proxy for Xianjing, in that sources say 80%-90% of tomato paste from China comes from Xinjiang.

Hence the assertion I made.

Market share data: https://www.accc.gov.au/system/files/supermarkets-inquiry_1....

Xianjing percentages: https://tomatonews.com/countries/china/

> Woolworths (38% market share): 1 x 140g premium product (Mutti) in a tube (expensive with reduced market share) out of about 20 products.

Eh ...

"Well-known tomato brands that passed country-of-origin testing include Mutti, SPC, Woolworths, Providore D'Italia and Annalisa. Diced tomato cans and passata from Leggo's and Coles also passed."

So here are 4 tomato pastes in woolworths that would seem to pass the test of not being from China and not being liars, just from a quick search (and I have seen all these in my local) -

https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/290303/mut... https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/218066/mut... https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/901431/mac... https://www.woolworths.com.au/shop/productdetails/150875/pro...

I usually buy Mutti stuff because it's low-ish salt, and that claims to come from Italy and wasn't implicated in the report here. And while I understand those are at the 'premium' end, it's not like it's one product on the end of the shelf either.

It's true that "Leggo" occupies a lot of the shelf space and a lot of the cheaper 'own brand' stuff is labelled as coming from China. And coles appears to be in a weirder/worse spot that woollies, with only Providore being Italian and two brands of turkish tomato paste, which is interesting.

It's sad that I can't find an Australian tomato paste that isn't a liar.

So I'm still not fully on board with "nearly every", OTOH thanks for the further information. I shall continue to try to avoid these products!

Difficult to distinguish between actual slave labour and China-is-bad propaganda.

Harm to the end user: none^

Benefits to the end user: more affordable tomato paste

Government action to prevent slave labour products entering Australia: none^

^close enough.

Negatives to end user: unknown pesticides or banned pesticides.

No propaganda - lack of validation, evidence and trust

What does slavery, real slavery or anti-China propaganda fake slavery, have to do with the with the presence or absence of pesticides, banned or otherwise?

It is perfectly legal to sell Chinese tomatoes in Australia (which is not necessarily a good thing, re: forced labour in Italy and China). The fraud is mislabeling them as Australian or similar, denying consumers from making their own ethical choice. Which is your harm to the end user and generally enforced by the ACCC.

If you're going to start talking about mislabelling products, you're going doing a rabbit hole of hundreds if not thousands of products sold in reputable stores. Look up how FDA labels for Organic, Grass fed, Pasture raised, etc. are used through out the industry in the US and the world. You should also look up the requirements for "Made in X" labels for consumer products. Playing with word and people's emotions on what those labels mean when making a purchase decision is as old as commerce itself. Don't for a moment think of the US or a Western country being rightious about this.

How the FDA and US labels things is not relevant to Australia with its more consumer focused laws and the ACCC.

The information this is based on is reporting from the Australian ABC TV program Four Corners.

The ABC is a know, as in they don't even try to pretend propriety, propaganda outlet of the Australia Albanese federal Government.

I'm not saying this is definitely propaganda, but there's a non-zero chance it is.

The Albanese government has been very open about attacking industry.

It is anti-industry to report fraud and provide evidence to government enforcement bodies and shame them into acting? This is anti-government propaganda if anything, given the lack of proactive monitoring and serious enforcement. If anyone in politics benefits from this it will be One Nation or maybe the Nationals if they pick up on the Protect Australian Farmers angle, while sitting government gets to explain why they had failed to acknowledge the problem or act. The forced labor issue will be a particular thorn in their side, given it is one of the excuses for the latest round of US tariffs.

Chinese workers earn more than workers from latin America. At least their government isn't slave for billionaires

While it could of course be produced in Xinjiang without using "slave labor," the US government banned those tomatoes in 2021 because of that risk:

https://www.cbp.gov/newsroom/national-media-release/cbp-issu...

If Costco were circumventing the ban it'd be a pretty big deal. I couldn't google up any indications that they are, so on balance I'd say it's "possible" in the same way my winning the lottery is possible. Can't rule it out, but reasonable people should probably bet against it.

TIL: Xinjiang tomatoes are something like 15% of the global market!

> TIL: Xinjiang tomatoes are something like 15% of the global market!

China consumes 37% of the world’s tomatoes. 80% of China’s processed tomatoes are from xinjiang. Fresh tomatoes are generally grown locally, but that is true around the world.

China _produces_ 37% of the world's tomatoes, not consumes.

Compared to the big e-commerce retailers, Costco's total number of sku's isn't even a rounding error.

And most of Costco's sku's are food, clothing, housewares, bulk consumables, and such - vastly easier to test and vet than computer & internet-connected electronics.

Sounds like you're agreeing that Costco is well curated?

Compared to Amazon and other e-tailers with hundreds of thousands of sku's of computer & internet-connected electronic stuff, 99% of which they do nothing whatever to curate? Yes.

But that's kinda like saying that Random Pond is safer for swimming than a lava lake.

Do I just assume nothing can go wrong when I myself shop at Costco? NO.

I don’t disagree, Costco has a reputation for selling well vetted products, but that’s not a good comparison. I trust Costco (even their online only sales), but in no way do I trust the other merchants listed.

We’re specifically taking about merchants that have a super shady online presence. They will basically sell you anything and everything and don’t care if it harms you.

The ones mentioned (Amazon, Best Buy, New Egg), it’s going to be hard to argue they vet (or care about vetting) the digital products they sell. You might as well throw Walmart into group too, their online offerings have gotten super sketchy if you really do into it.

Target as well. It was one thing when it was just Amazon acting as a sketchy third party storefront, but now everybody’s doing it.

And third party listings on Walmart or Target (and throw eBay in here too) often end up being fulfilled by Amazon. These sellers just list their stuff on all the sites and effectively use Amazon as their drop shipper.

We bought a Bosch dishwasher from Costco in January. It was defective and wouldn’t start after 10 days. Costco replaced it. The replacement came with a big gash on the front off the truck so we refused it and Costco sent a third replacement. Again, it was the same model and again it wouldn’t start after another 30 days. Costco took it back. No cost to us for any of these delivery or install attempts.

We bought a different model from Costco and it’s been rock solid. I expect I will never buy a major appliance from any other retailer as long as Costco continues to care like they do today.

> I will never buy a major appliance from any other retailer

Weird. You experienced failures of the manufacturer (failure to start) and the warehouse (huge scratch), and are still singing someone’s praises.

It sounds to me like the brand’s quality assurance is low and the retailer also isn’t taking care of their stock.

If I had to take three days off work to accept these deliveries, doubtless I would have a very different conclusion from yours.

He's singing the praises of CostCo, which made him whole.

Any dishwasher could have these problems; any warehouse could. How the seller handles the situation is key to whether you use them again.

CostCo has built a huge reputation for being trustworthy as a retailer. If they get purchased by private equity, I will stop renewing my membership, and think about how close the country is to decorating lampposts.

The issue is that with a sample size of one (or three), then it is basically bad luck. If you get a bad unit (or a good unit) it doesn't really tell you much how reliable the other 100,000+ units are and how reliable the brand is. If you have a product get damaged during delivery, it doesn't really tell you much how reliable the other 100,000+ deliveries are.

But most people have had a problem with some product they purchased and a company that stands by things and gives no questions asked support is very valuable.

> I will never buy a major appliance from any other retailer

That's called stinking thinking.

What is the alternative? Trust has been built, as long as the trust is not eroded it is safer than any other retailer?

No one means that in the literal sense BTW it is shorthand for.

"The next purchase I make will be through X to avoid having to search for a new retailer"

Yep, I'm pretty much a lifetime member of Costco if this sort of prioritization doesn't change. A recent article put it well "Costco is the anti-Amazon".

I say this as a happy customer of both, though. I don't seem to have the problems others do with horrible products from Amazon, but I suspect my purchasing habits might be different as well.

arguably it's part of their main value proposition: bulk, but not terrible, and generally decent.

fixed fee membership also means a very stable revenue stream and they can take the time to do this, while other places like newegg are herding 3rd parties to get cuts of ever cheaper 3rd party crap

I have to disagree, costco often has custom worse versions of better products, we recently had a costco air conditioner fail just to find out it wasn't built quite as robustly as the $50 more expensive midea sold elsewhere with an almost identical model number. Similarly had my costco GE washing machine fail last year right out of warranty. There's a real quality problem going on with costco right now.

They’ll replace them if they break and the return policy is very good as well. It’s safe to buy from Costco

You go to an online store to buy a hard drive. It's listed as "in stock" and you buy it and pay for it. A week later you get an email from the store that the specific hard drive is now available at a third party warehouse and they can order it from there, but the price is about 10% higher.

The above actually happened to me. That's what online retailers were like before Amazon's reach properly extended here. That's also the main value proposition for these retailers for me.

Also, online retailers are far more likely to accept returns compared to regular stores. If you get a bad product from a regular store you're often just screwed.

The late-Amazon process for this is to just send you whatever's marked as the hard drive in their warehouse, which may be that actual product, a counterfeit, or a brick in the hard drive's package.

Later, when you want to try the return, a black box algorithm asseses your transactional value to Amazon and decides whether your concerns are worth attending and to what degree.

Maybe that really is better than whatever you were used to in your own market, but it's a profound regression on the traditional retail experience for most of us here.

Crooks will be crooks, but that the lawmakers let them get away with it is something that should change.

Amazon even have big "people commonly return this product" warning on some product pages. Anywhere halfway sensible would maybe reconsider stocking a product worthy of that but because they've set themselves up as a middleman without any of the risk they can just churn junk out of their warehouses.

Online it still seems like for the most part if you buy from something a bit more specialty (e.g. McMaster, Digikey, etc) you still get really good vetting and high quality stuff, but amazon is more than happy to be filled with absolute garbage.

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 do this though, sure - block/suspend/prosecute.

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?

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?

There's also always the flip side: When the police shows up because of your illegal acitivities, you have a rogue proxy server running. All bought in good faith of course.

Not legal advice.

(It would surprise me greatly if we as a society let these gadgets be sold openly from here on.)

That shows the problem or trying to link an IP address to an individual.

Believe it or not, that is what happens when the police show up to the house of a primary school teacher. They will think they have the wrong address. Even US police.

The cybercrime raids happen when they run into someone who looks like a hacker and has a lot of computers.

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.

You call them malicious apps but what is the evidence they are more malicious than the things they fight against?

Really? You'd be ok with me putting a proxy server on your home network then, which anyone with a few bucks can use to attach your IP address and subscriber details to anything they choose to request from the internet? How about a Tor exit node?

Its incredibly obvious to anyone applying any thought at all to this that its a malicious to sell a product that labels itself as a TV streaming stick which is in fact a paid for relay server with the money made from providing the internet connection to a random third party unrelated to the person who bought the thing without ever telling the customer.

Yeah I actually do several of those to earn a few bucks.

The typical consumer has no idea what they're buying, and they shouldn't have to because the retailer selling the product should have done some basic due diligence before stocking the thing. People aren't going to some clearly shady Chinese website and buying a device labelled "cheap TV streaming stick, will sublease your internet connection to criminals", they're putting "FireTV" into amazon.com and somehow being presented with these things alongside the Amazon FireTV they expect to find, or maybe "streaming stick" which really shouldn't be surfacing clearly malicious products.

If the average consumer did get a disclaimer it would sublease their internet connection to a few criminals and a lot of people who aren't criminals, would they care?

> 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.

While there would be oversight, it is highly unlikely that a person opening a home improvement store would perform any meaningful safety testing. They simply would not be qualified. The oversight would lay in selling certified products, pulling recalled products off the shelf, and (perhaps) removing products if there is a reason to suspect safety issues.

Now consider streaming sticks. There are safety standards for the physical device but, to my knowledge, there are no such standards for the software itself. Heck, there aren't even standards for the engineers who work on the software. One can make highly prejudiced decisions based upon the country of origin. Perhaps there are even good reasons to avoid products from certain countries. Yet the lack of standards also means that products from trustworthy sources can be suspect, since all it takes is a management decision to change things.

But these products aren't dangerous. And proxying internet traffic isn't illegal. Fake ad clicks may be illegal but that falls on whoever is providing that service, which isn't the proxy or the resident. On what basis would you ban them?

But it is a retailer's responsibility to know what they are selling. If it was added after they started selling it and hidden in secret, sure a retailer might have an excuse. But it isn't really hidden, most often its put in their marketing materials as a benefit and have been knowingly doing it for many years now.

US retailers can be told they can't sell it here. If you buy it outside of that, well that is buyer beware, but 99% of people aren't buying things from Alibaba or ordering from some random foreign store, they are buying them off US Amazon, Walmart, big box retailers, etc. You don't have to ban things consumer level to deal with 99% of it, you just gotta tell big corporations no and stop dismissing any ideas that put responsibility or liability on big business.

The problem is that Amazon, Walmart & friends have said the "we are a platform, not a retailer" magic incantation, which means that through the power of friendship and unicorns they are now suddenly no longer responsible for the stuff they sell.

And the "retailer" on record is of course not a real company. They'll just pay some third-party to file a bunch of paperwork in Delaware, pay the $110 fee, and let it go bust if anyone tries to investigate it or make it liable.

>If it was added after they started selling it

While it's great we're getting the manufactures to just stop sending out straight malware and it should be stopped the next most obvious means of attack is just having the device update and add superaids to it's new functionality.

So, no, it won't stop 99% of it at all.

And honestly this isn't that much different from what US companies are already great at by providing updates that take away features we bought with the device.

And not just updating really doesn't save you, instead of being part of a factory botnet, you're just open to become part of some other botnet.

> 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.

You already answered it: block it from being sold.

1) Make Amazon responsible for the products they are selling. 2) Introduce a law banning malware tv sticks 3) Sue Amazon for a percentage of their yearly revenue when caught violating it 4) Amazon will finally start caring and do some kind of review on the crap they sell.

And if the first time you get it online it just updates itself to malware?

That's the biggest problem with any device that updates.

Yea, this will work for the moment and the seller will be covered in the sense that "well, it wasn't infected when we sold it".

The law is not software. It would be very easy to argue that a streaming stick that automatically downloads malware is no different from one that came with malware.

And that's where the retailer is no longer in the loop, which is what this thread was about.

If it's malware, maybe existing laws apply already. I think the bigger problem is enforcement. In China, it's easy to close up shop if anything goes wrong and then just start over. Any liability dies with the brand name.

I think a law that makes a marketplace responsible for items being sold if the qty of items is above a threshold would be a great idea.

You don't want to penalize someone selling their Xbox or lawnmower on Ebay but you want to stop what is going on here. A place like Etsy where people are selling their crafts is an interesting edge case but I think they should probably be a little regulated.

The FCC tests electronics for radio interference. Perhaps they could test electronics for Internet behavior like this too?

Some manufacturers will try to cheat on the tests, but we have AI security checking now, so maybe that would make it harder to cheat?

That sounds like a fast track to government control of what operating systems are allowed. These aren’t just electronics, they are low power computers that happen to have an OS and software preinstalled.

(I’d be open to a rule that devices must allow users to wipe the devices and install their own OS.)

On the other hand, I suppose if the OS on a TV stick ran in a hardware-enforced sandbox that restricted network access to certain necessary domains, it couldn't be used for scraping websites and ad fraud? It's not being sold as a general-purpose computer so maybe it shouldn't be one.

Simple. Buy one, put it on a test stand, and look at connection log.

Buying in bulk for a resell without testing even one product is kinda insane.

In the US at least there is a lot (and by that I mean like maybe more than half) of civil case law around seller liability for defective or 'dual use' products. In the 70's some cities tried to sue hardware stores for selling spray paint that taggers were using, in several jurisdictions you can find authorities trying to sue vendors of lock picking and/or safe opening tools, etc. My non-lawyer reading of all that is that if it is reasonable to assume that the vendor didn't know, at the time of sale, what the customer was going to do with it, they aren't liable.

Once a vendor has been notified that these units are doing these sorts of things they will stop selling them. Its sadly very prescriptive in that if Newegg gets a notice that "WatchFunTV" streaming sticks are doing this, they will remove that brand but if the same hardware shows up from the same vendor as "SuperTVStreamer" or some such, that product won't be banned until someone does the test and then notifies the sellers. It's cat and mouse all the time.

Now the people who could do something about it, the ad networks like Google, do not do anything because ad revenue is ad revenue, people buying the ads cannot prove that the click was false so hey who can say it was? Which is why ad fraud is a perennial favorite of crooks. The people being ripped off don't have any way to prove it without a lot of support from the ad network traffic data which is "proprietary". Really stupid ad fraud gets shut down, but put a bit of care into it so that the Ad network and claim ignorance? You can do that all day. Just don't get greedy and try to pull in more than say 30 or 50 thousand dollars a month. Remember, the IAB said in 2025 alone Ad Revenue was $300B[1] so 2% of that is only $6B and any network with 2% or less of undetected fraud is considered a "high quality" ad network.

So yeah, ad fraud is the gift that keeps on giving.

[1] https://www.iab.com/insights/internet-advertising-revenue-re...

This is why I hate the "marketplace" of these stores. In many cases these products never hit their inventory at all, they are functioning like a search engine and payments processor.

That’s generally in their definition. “Amazon Marketplace” came out in 2000 allowing 3rd party sellers on their platform. However, until maybe the mid 2010s, they favored product sold by Amazon over 3rd party in their results and recommendations. I remember numerous forum and Reddit posts from the late 2000s about “How Amazon scams 3rd party sellers” by only wanting them there to give the illusion that they have everything but once some category starts selling, they will vendor it too and steal your customers.

At some point in the second half of the 2010s Amazon figured out they can’t compete with a million foreign randomly-generated companies on price, and their users didn’t seem to mind too much. They figured their users cared about delivery times, ease of returns, ease of dealing with Amazon instead of dozens of online sellers, etc and they leaned heavily into that. They will handle fulfillment and take their cut and let people buy whatever garbage they want. They still screw sellers too btw. Ask any one who is trying to sell something on Amazon and they will fill your ear with how much leverage amazon has over them. You can check r/FulfillmentByAmazon/ Or r/AmazonSellers for stories.

Probably because we have little to no way to punish those companies. We can't even stop DJI from shipping their drones under other brands to get around the ban.

Our government chooses to not punish those companies. Unfortunately, the lawmakers have decided that the donations to their PACs are more important than actually doing something about it.

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.

I can't think of a case where a supermarket, upon becoming aware of a problem with a food product, didn't immediately pull it from the shelves, post a notice to customers, and offer a full refund to anyone who had purchased it.

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.

Not exactly. In 2008 there was a huge scandal where melamine was in baby's milk, so it isn't always what it is.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2008_Chinese_milk_scandal

Yes, if your malfeasance is large enough to be on the front page of the New York Times, you'll be sentenced to life in prison or even death. But killing babies is a bit more heinous than fraudulent ad clicks!

(Also of note: WHY melamine in the baby formula? Because they knew the buyer would check the nitrogen content, because it's a caveat emptor culture.)

Probably because doing so would mean a lot fewer product categories. It's a trade-off, to be sure. But if you need that odd thing — a screw of a certain type, a power supply that's 56 volt DC or whatever — then if there's only going to be sold, say, a few thousand of those a year, if Amazon was required to do product safety testing on them, they probably wouldn't be able to sell that category at all. And so the trade-off is they are not required to.

Now that's very different from "we are selling things that we know, or have good reason to know, specifically are dangerous" — here they might very well be liable.

Probably because most people don’t equate the damages from causing bodily harm to whatever these ad clicking networks do.

Voters don’t like seeing themselves or their kids get hurt, but they do like lower cost live sports.

This is one of those things where I, as a suburban white kid, am so happy I discovered Public Enemy and similar bands as a kid.

"Money talks. And bullshit brothers walk a marathon."

Yes, fascinating that this is apparently all the fault of Chinese companies, and not the American companies distributing and retailing these products.

Um...If I make an app that reroutes people's payments so that I can skim a percent off the top and release it for Android and IPhone as a shopping app, how would it be Google and Apple's fault?

Sure they try to vet the app but how does that absolve me from the liability?

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.

I don't know why this is such an unpopular opinion on HN.

you don't get why a news aggregator for tech bros have problems with crappy devices hacking them?

What is being hacked? The ad industry? I didn't know the average HNbreader had such deep compassion for the ad industry.

Being on your LAN isn’t “hacking” anyone otherwise every hotel, airport, conference, and airplane would be unsafe.

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