Hacker News Reader

amznburnon TikTok admits tracking FT journalist in leaks investigation

What's that about Meta?

amznburnon 'Amazon "search through reviews" is blindly just running an AI model now'

Exactly this. And I'm pretty sure the person that pointed this out was fired.

amznburnon We may Soon have City-Spanning 900 MHz Mesh Networks (2021)

Seems like a serious data privacy concern to me.

Are customers actually able to opt out of Amazon Sidewalk? Or is it the case that Amazon will continue to override customer settings for Ring and Alexa devices in order to achieve this mesh network?

"One must also assume that Amazon will do its best to encrypt its network traffic and make its devices as hard to hack as possible."

So far, Amazon says nothing when large volumes of customer data is leaked via vulnerable Alexa and Ring devices. Will Amazon be forced to disclose that it's systems are successfully attacked?

amznburnon Tell HN: Amazon claims "Zero tolerance for fake reviews"

Do we get to sue Amazon when we discover they've lied (again)?

amznburnon Amazon lobbyists face ban from European Parliament

Excellent news. I hope the US quickly follows suit and shuts their abhorrent labor practices down.

amznburnon Over the edge: The use of design tactics to undermine browser choice

crypto-shilling? you can easily enable/disable the wallet feature.

no offense, but this is an ignorant comment. we're in 2024. come join us.

amznburnon FBI recruits Amazon Rekognition AI to hunt down 'nudity, weapons, explosives'

What's astonishing to me is that the FBI is incapable of making their own solution using OpenCV. Object detection is practically off the shelf at this point. Surely people hired to work at the FBI are not computer illiterate...

amznburnon Amazon plans to charge for Alexa in June–unless internal conflict delays revamp

Thanks to all those scientists from Alexa Entertainment, who have successfully broken all iterations of Alexa. 3 for 3! Great job!

amznburnon AWS Responsible AI Policy

You must not have ever worked at Amazon. The issue you highlight from Google is "a first world problem," as the kids say. Amazon is low brow.

amznburnon Amazon-Unveils-Q

> Can I trust that Q's proposed AWS architecture solutions will be cost-effective?

No. Even in the Solutions Architect an Data Analyst Certification exams there are biases tested to essentially reinforce customers build in ways that ensure they spend more money. This model is no different. Amazon makes it incredibly difficult to opt out of any data collection across its AWS services, making user privacy a serious concern here. And, Amazon continues to fail to disclose to customers when their services/data has been compromised.

The "Q" model is incredibly underwhelming. ChatGPT continues to do a better job of describing and proposing viable solutions using AWS framework, and it's free.

As a customer, the guarantee you'll have with this model is KTLO. No thanks.

amznburnon Amazon Introduces AI Assistant for AWS

nope. It's the same 2020 model, wrapped in another label. Just like they do all their other failed offerings... Rename and resell. Like a used car salesman.

amznburnon Amazon packages reportedly overwhelm small post offices, delaying other mail

I wonder if this is also to drown out smaller vendors who rely on the post office for shipping.

amznburnon Amazon joins AI image creation fray with new model

Amazon AI is 2020. We are almost 2024 now. No one is impressed.

amznburnon I worked in Amazon HR and was disgusted at what I was seeing with PIP plans

I personally enjoy the number of times Amazon's PR has to call out the tens of thousands of complaints from tech and non-tech employees as "not representative of the experience of the vast majority of our employees."

The other employees are too scared to speak up, else lose their job. Or, they are sociopaths.

amznburnon Amazon cuts 'several hundred' jobs in Alexa division

The system was redesigned so that ASR would handle the transcription and the "understanding." It never worked correctly, many many people complained, some people showed counter designs and data driven forecasts of catastrophic loss across multiple major areas. Those people were fired, the data was faked, and here we are today, with a broken Alexa. That said, it can "listen" and "see" quite well.

amznburnon Amazon will cut 'several hundred' Alexa jobs as it ends unspecified initiatives

Anything to get more user traffic to Amazon Music, even when you the customer have specified your personal preferences as non-Amazon Music. Pretty lame.

amznburnon Amazon will cut 'several hundred' Alexa jobs as it ends unspecified initiatives

This is true, now. It is the case that Video, Music, and SmartHome teams took over much of Alexa support in middle of 2022/2023 (many other teams were fired), and the result is basic functionality such as "stop" doesn't work (music, timers, alarms), "play" goes to some random incorrect cache of Music or Video, not News. What happened to the data (including your feedback)? It disappears, of course. Nothing but SMILES (a program designed to only report positive trends and feedback) for Amazon leadership.

Alexa devices are spyware; they listen in on you, and if your device has a camera the camera can be accessed without your knowledge too.

Unplug this stuff already...

amznburnon FTC unredacts some evidence against Amazon in monopoly trial

"Amazon pursues a pay-to-play scheme forcing sellers to buy ads. Worse, many of these ads are junk ads that aren’t relevant to what users search for. Jeff Bezos and co. call these Junk Ads “defects,” and sellers pay big bucks for them."

To be sure, it's Andy Jassy as CEO.

amznburnon Amazon Boosted Junk Ads, Deleted Messages to Thwart Antitrust Probe, FTC Says

"Amazon.com Inc. doubled the number of junk ads to boost profits and deleted internal communications to thwart a federal antitrust probe"

Everything the FTC is saying here is true.

I monitored customer engagement across services including ads. I was instructed via numerous ticket streams and by numerous direct and skip managers to forge and delete data, for much of 2021 and 2022 [1]. Those tickets were then augmented and destroyed. We were also informed of new "30-day retention policies" with respect to internal communication threads on platforms such as Slack in 2021 (in addition to Signal). It's all true.

Anyone who tried to push back, escalate to senior leadership, and/or do their job successfully without committing federal/international crimes such as this was fired.

Amazonians, don't forget to blow the whistle: https://www.sec.gov/whistleblower

[1]https://www.mediapost.com/publications/article/380156/amazon...

amznburnon Global Coalition for Trusted Reviews

These companies made billions of dollars via fake reviews. Only now they want to launch a global coalition? This is similar to how big tech wants to self-govern AI advancements; trust me bro. I am also concerned that Amazon is trying to leverage its auto-generation of review summary technology, without ever addressing the underlying concern: garbage in, garbage out. Further, this signals Amazon is going to have access to even more customer identifying information. As a consumer, this is unsettling.

amznburnon Amazon's new CEO Andy Jassy “is being forced to clean up Jeff Bezos' mess”

There was a series of grotesque missteps before that which, in part, led to the layoffs. I think there's a few lawsuits that describe it. Forcing employees to either break federal/international laws or be fired is not a good look. Forcing employees to endure harassment, retaliation, and psychological abuse for a paycheck is not acceptable.

amznburnon Apple Watch knows when I wash my hands Does it also know when I'm jerking off?

https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/14puei4/alexa_voice_...

amznburnon The “faces of Amazon” ex-employee stories site has mysteriously vanished

I got it. A little over 900 posts. What do we think... Host on Github to ensure GPT gets its training data?

amznburnon Apple Watch knows when I wash my hands Does it also know when I'm jerking off?

Here's a great example of how Amazon Alexa uses "ambient" settings to watch and listen whenever: https://www.reddit.com/r/alexa/comments/12s32gz/does_alexa_l....

From 2 years ago: https://www.reddit.com/r/amazonecho/comments/lsqti3/very_lon...

"Very long time Echo user starting to have a pretty negative (and questionable) experience"

"Over the past couple months, I’ve noticed all of our more recently purchased devices have suddenly started reacting very erratic with voice commands. It’s not one or two devices in particular, but almost all of them. Saying ‘Alexa’ even when standing next to the Show 10 will oftentimes trigger responses to a device across the house as if the spacial detection is off, but it makes no sense as the device reacting couldn’t have possibly heard you. Additionally, we’ve had a lot of false activations and pulling up the history usually presents “Audio was not intended for this device” or “audio could not be understood”, but the recordings have absolutely nothing to do with Alexa, nor is anything remotely close to it present, and sometimes there simply isn’t anything listed for review. In the past the false triggers were uncommon, but when they occurred, they were consistently presented in the app to review and generally made sense. I even had a situation this week where the device in my kitchen kept activating and I was repeatedly yelling “cancel” and the damn thing kept going. I ended up muting the mic for a day as it was so frustrating."