[Joeri]

Reminder: Amazon once secretly remotely wiped 1984 from people’s kindles.

https://gizmodo.com/amazon-secretly-removes-1984-from-the-ki...

You don’t actually buy digital books, you rent a restricted right to read for an unspecified duration. I think there should be legislation that sets a minimum standard for the rights people acquire when they “buy” a digital work.

[CapmCrackaWaka]

You know, for a while this seemed like a non-issue for me. I was naive. I just told myself "a company wouldn't do something like that, that's not how this stuff works". Boy was I wrong. 15 years ago I had nothing but glowing admiration for these large tech companies, now I avoid them at all costs. I pay for Kagi instead of using Google for free. I deleted my amazon account, and now just shop at normal retailers. It's not like the price is much different. I sold my Kindle, and just buy my books from Barnes and Noble. Oh, Netflix only has season 2 of Mr. Robot? Guess I'll just pirate that. I got rid of my Nest cameras (Google COMPLETELY ruined that product) and use Blue Iris locally now. Everything these companies touch turns to poison.

Unfortunately, for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps and Gmail.

[bitexploder]

The convenience is great, but I agree. Age has taught me these giant tech companies cannot be stewards of knowledge. The public library system is incredibly important, and under political attack, alas that is a separate discussion. Regardless paper books are a great equalizer. Or companies accepting and ditching DRM. Regardless I have zero moral problems removing DRM from my book libraries on Kindle, etc.

[pettycashstash2]

It’s not just the giant companies. I had good experience with YI cameras from Kami and so I purchased about 7 of them. Suddenly they decided to go to a subscription model, and sent me an email

“After years of growing, we are at the point that our systems can no longer support free 6 second video storage for all our users”

I proceeded to remove the cameras and replaced them with on site NVR. After I did this I receive another email-

“ WE ARE SORRY.

Due to a system error, we sent you an email by mistake expressing that we will no longer support free 6 second video for the Yi/Kami Home app. Do not worry, you will still have this feature.”

Too late. I also find myself moving away from subscription based types of experience whenever I can, where the company can just remove feature or content at will. I wonder if there is a name in marketing circles for this behavior.

[CapmCrackaWaka]

In my mind, I stay away from subscriptions if there are any physical assets or up-front costs involved. Kagi is a good example of a reasonable subscription model. Up-front costs are where companies can really screw you and take advantage of the sunk cost fallacy. That's where I got screwed by Nest. I spent $400 on their cameras, which worked great until Google bought them. After that, no more free storage, the AI automatic object detection went to absolute crap, I have constant authentication issues where the original Nest account and the Google account keep signing each other out, and now I'm stuck with these cameras.

[j1elo]

Hi, I also have a Kami camera, and was entertaining the idea of going off the path with maybe an alternative provider, or just a self-hosted solution. Could you let me know about your new setup?

I was wondering if these cameras are locked-in with the Kami cloud vendor solution, or they use a standard protocol thus trivial to move to another provider, or just something in between those two extremes...

[pettycashstash2]

I went to the 4k wired nvr, by Lorex. Upgradebale self hosted etc. it came with 9 or 10 cameras but I only installed 5

[xigoi]

Ah yes, “system error”.

I'm sorry, this person stumbled and happened to land with their chest directly on the tip of my knife which I was holding in my hand.

[jrib]

I dropped gmail for fastmail when google originally threatened to drop the grandfathered g-suite plans. Has worked great for me.

[SanjayMehta]

I moved to Zoho from Gmail.

https://www.theverge.com/2014/12/28/7458159/encryption-stand...

[CapmCrackaWaka]

Ugh I tried to get off of Gmail and went to Kolab. That did not work for me at all. The formatting abilities were severely lacking. Maybe I'll try again since I've spent so much energy on this rant at this point.

[r3trohack3r]

I successfully migrated to ProtonMail using a strangulation pattern.

I set up a forwarding policy from GMail -> Protonmail. Whenever I would receive a forwarded email, Id go to the sender and update my email address. After about 6 months the only email coming from my Gmail account was spam.

Then I turned off my forwarding policy and noticed something: I don't really get spam anymore. I don't know what it is about Gmail but it receives several of orders of magnitude more spam than any of my other email accounts. To drive that point home, to crack down on spam, I setup my own domain on protonmail and configured a catch-all. Now everyone gets their own email address (like [e-mail]). It lets me reverse track who is sharing my personal info with who for marketing purposes. Turns out: in the 5 years I've been using Protonmail I've had two cases of someone sharing my email address. I had assumed all my spam was from people sharing my email - turns out it was just a Gmail problem.

If your experience ends up being the same as mine, the time you save not dealing with spam on Gmail will cover your migration costs.

[Multicomp]

I can confirm what this poster said about their business emails not actually getting shared around, but that spam just all goes to gmail... I did a very similar setup and got similar results, but I'm using FastMail, though I'm sure protonmail and mailbox.org would work for this, had I chosen them as well.

[uoaei]

Sending decrypted information over an encrypted line makes it relatively much easier to reverse-engineer the private key. If Google has, say, the contents of an email via GMail, and surveillance over the transmission line that carries the encrypted version of that, they would have not much trouble cracking your Protonmail key. It's unlikely that they would gain access to Protonmail's secure servers, but if they can surveil traffic going into and out of Protonmail's servers, they can decrypt the messages they know the keys for. They own more than a few installations and high-throughput (e.g. undersea) cables and it doesn't seem far-fetched to assume they have built systems for extracting information from the massive bitstreams, especially considering all we know about NSA surveillance programs.

[citiguy]

This is a great idea. I've been wanting to move off gmail for years, I'll try this. Thank you.

[raffraffraff]

I went to privateemail + k9. It's been fine.

[calvinmorrison]

fastmail is great. wish they had a platform for docs and sheets

[matkoniecz]

> for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps

In many cases OSM-based solutions like Organic Maps or Mapy.cz are good enough (though for car navigation Google Maps is still clearly better).

[xigoi]

I'm pretty sure Mapy.cz have their own proprietary data.

[matkoniecz]

Terrain shape model is from elsewhere, but I bet that it is SRTM.

In Czech Republic they use data outside OSM, but last time I checked it was entirely/mostly data released by government of that country.

Roads, buildings, hiking trails, landuse, paths shops outside Czechia are from OpenStreetMap.

Can you give example of anything that is "their own proprietary data"? So far I have not noticed anything like that outside Czechia.

[xigoi]

In the Terms and Conditions, they list various different sources and give restrictions on what you can do with them. For example, it's illegal to make screenshots of 3D maps.

https://licence.mapy.cz/?doc=mapy_pu

[ThePowerOfFuet]

> Unfortunately, for now I'm still stuck with google / apple maps and Gmail.

Organic Maps.

Migadu or Fastmail.

You're not "stuck" with anything.

[password4321]

Uh, Organic Maps has live traffic?

[ThePowerOfFuet]

Where do you think the data for that live traffic comes from?

[ramses0]

RMS: "Right to Read" - https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.en.html

[reset2023]

qwant is way better than google

[alexhsamuel]

Then how about banning the word "buy", and any other language that implies the transfer of property? The yellow button in the corner should say "Rent now a restricted right to read for an unspecified duration, which we may later modify... with 1-Click".

[brookst]

Should we eliminate the word “buy” from all licenses and rights-restricted transactions? So like concert tickets (you can’t take video at the concert), physical DVDs (you can’t stream them online for other people), airline tickets (airlines reserve all sorts of rights, and international treaties even more), and houses (even if you pay cash, the local government can take your property for a variety of reasons)?

The ambiguity in digital purchases is a real problem, but if physical goods and services haven’t solved the problem with the semantics of “buy”, I’m not sure that’s a productive approach, unless the idea is to just scare people away from digital specifically by implying it’s materially different than other transactions where “buy” does not mean “receive irrevocable and unrestricted exclusive rights forever”.

[yladiz]

I think there is a clear distinction to be drawn here, the simplest being around a physical object or not. Looking at films or music, if you own the physical media and it can’t just be taken away from you (especially if you use a form of the media that is not internet connected, like a cassette tape). Buying the digital version is basically buying a revocable right to watch/listen to the media, rather than the media itself, so I would agree that the term buy is kind of misleading given the implied meaning of the word when it comes to this kind of thing. As the other commenter points out, buying a concert ticket isn’t implying buying the whole concert, and no one would think so, which is unlike what people think when they “buy” a digital movie from Amazon or Apple.

[xigoi]

For tickets, the use is correct — you buy the ticket, the physical piece of paper, which gives you restricted access to a place.

[josh_fyi]

Yet strangely, the word "buy" is used in the Kindle store. Seems like straight up commercial fraud.

[patrec]

Incomprehensible to me that not a single country's courts put a stop to this. By now this “straight up commercial fraud” has become established industry practice and the corrupted meaning of “buy” (for “lease”) looks set to not only stay with us but gradually replace the old meaning in all walks of life as increasingly everything becomes “smart” (as the oft-quoted Ubik line goes: '“The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.”'). I wonder both how far away we once were from some less dystopian alternative timeline and what the chances of escaping our current apparent trajectory are.

[andsoitis]

It is worth noting that when I buy a physical book, I am not acquiring ownership of the text. I do not have the right to do with the text what I please (e.g. make copies & distribute). The same goes for music. The same goes for software.

What the format (digital+DRM vs. physical) makes possible is more fine grained control by the owner (or their proxy) of the work.

[patrec]

You seem to imply that technological advances have made new forms of contractual agreements about property possible that are not covered well by existing concepts such as "buy" and "lease" and that therefore to extend the meaning of "buy" to cover app store or kindle purchases is reasonable rather than fraudulent.

What an app store or kindle "purchase" provides you with is exactly a lease. You gain a temporary right to utilize a resource (such as a particular physical or digital copy of a work) subject to various restrictions.

By contrast property rights always imply the ability to transfer (via sale, inheritance or gift or voluntary abandonment) as well as to in fact not transfer. Both of which are fundamentally lost here. You can't sell your kindle ebooks, pass them on to your children or even keep them if Amazon decides otherwise (as in the case of 1984).

And there is absolutely no technical or economic reason you can't inherit or sell a DRM protected work.

[dragonwriter]

> You seem to imply that technological advances have made new forms of contractual agreements about property possible that are not covered well by existing concepts such as “buy” and “lease” and that therefore to extend the meaning of “buy” to cover app store or kindle purchases is reasonable rather than fraudulent.

Nope, licenses as a form of intangible personal property long predate the “modern technological advances” being discussed (or, say, the existence of the US, for example), and the meaning of the word “buy” already encompasses buying licenses, which may have a variety of terms, including termination conditions.

It’s just that you seem to be trying to falsely generalize the specialized meaning of “buy” that applies when the object of the purchase is an item of tangible personal property to things which are not tangible personal property.

[patrec]

Do you have a good example of a pre-digital private everyday transaction where people would use "buy" to refer to entering in some complex licensing arrangement which did not grant any transferable rights?

What you write is true and I see where you are coming from. But my contention is that what you refer to as the "specialized meaning of buy" was pretty much the only meaning an average person would have used it in. And that such a person's reasonable and natural assumption when first confronted with a "buy" button for an ebook would be that it pressing it would confer analogous rights of transfer as buying the physical copy. And furthermore that courts and regulators allowing this assumption to be violated was a major oversight. If for no other reason than that it is foolish to the extreme to bring about a system where a single dominant entity having a bad day could in a blink wipe out a large fraction of accessible books.

[vel0city]

It is not a lease though. A lease has a specified time. "Buying" in this context has an unspecified time. I have movies I "bought" on these platforms which have been accessible for well over a decade. If this was forced to be a lease which specified a time (say, 1 year? 5 years?) I would have already lost access to it, massively reducing its value to me.

[patrec]

Leases can be and not uncommonly are of unlimited or extremely long duration (e.g. till the leasee's death or exceeding a single human life span).

[vel0city]

Extremely long duration != unlimited. Stating "until this person's death" isn't unlimited, it is a very exact end condition which will happen.

A 99 year lease still has an end date on it. These licenses do not have an end date. The only time it is generally supposed to become unavailable is "due to potential content provider licensing restrictions or for other reasons."

https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=c...

Buying a limited license which allows "an indefinite period of time" is still inherently different from renting. It is definitely different from buying a physical good, I do agree. But I still don't seem to be convinced that its "renting" or "leasing".

If Amazon had to put an end date ahead of time on all the movies they listed with "Buy", do you think they'd put that date as 99 years or would they make it more like one year? Personally I'm perfectly fine with the tradeoff that sure, some move I "bought" 15 years ago on Amazon might some day disappear from their service, as I knew it ahead of time that was the trade-off of "buying" a license on their Unbox service versus owning a physical copy of the VHS or DVD at the time. But in the end I felt it was worth the tradeoff for the connivence.

For all we know Amazon may continue on forever, offering some kind of version of its streaming service and continue to offer these movies forever. Its not guaranteed Amazon will lose the rights to some of these movies, its not guaranteed they'll stop offering a streaming service, its not guaranteed they'll eventually be replaced by Walmart which will buy out Weyland-Yutani. There's no real pre-defined end condition to it at all, other than until the rights holders say we can't or until some other situation happens that makes it unavailable.

Its definitely different than owning a physical good, I completely agree. Its still very different from renting or leasing.

[patrec]

Uhm, you are aware that the Kindle license is limited by your death, right? (Outside of Delaware, and maybe a few other places which have passed explicit legislation overriding this to allow for inheritance of ebooks). How is this different in any way from a lifetime lease agreement?

[rpigab]

Related : "Games as a service is fraud" by Ross Scott

https://www.reddit.com/r/pcgaming/comments/bhdkvo/comment/el...

[MonkeyClub]

Eh, one “buys” the right to temporarily have the item on their device, until Amazon decides to revoke that right.

As OP said,

> I'm never buying e-books again.

I do something similar.

If the book is worth it, I buy it in material form.

If it’s not worth the bookshelf clutter it’ll cause, I just skip it.

But then again, most of my books aren’t on digital subjects, for that I usually rely on specs and articles, as tech is moving too quickly to be worth being nailed down on paper.

[LudwigNagasena]

> Eh, one “buys” the right to temporarily have the item on their device, until Amazon decides to revoke that right.

Yeah, just like someone can "buy" an empty iPhone box on eBay for $800.

[dspillett]

Those listings are usually honest. Misleading, yes, but nowhere in them does it state you are buying anything other than a box. The even more misleading ones, helped by the product name, are selling x-box boxes.

I'd argue that the “buy now” when viewing a Kindle edition listing, or Audible edition, is noticeably less honest, especially as you are usually at most on click away from the dead-tree editions where buy actually does mean buy. I'd have that iphone box that I'd legally bought for as long as I choose to own it, the seller can not revoke access to it arbitrarily like Amazon can, will, and sometimes has (1984 being the most famous and somewhat ironic example) with ebooks and audiobooks.

[puffoflogic]

PSA that audible encryption can be stripped very easily with ffmpeg (`-activation_bytes`; for archival and interop purposes, naturally), and it's faster and easier to crack your personal encryption key than to figure out how to request it from audible servers.

[dspillett]

Though obviously you have to do that _before_ access is revoked.

As easy as that may be, the shiver-me-timbers route might be even easier.

(I use audible, if they want me to go pirate instead they know what to do!)

[eldaisfish]

What you describe is a lease. Leasing or renting specifically grants you the right to use something for a period of time without a transfer of ownership. If Amazon are leasing you a book, labelling the button "Buy" is fraud. The problem here is that trade laws were not written for digital-only items so Amazon and their ilk get away with this fraud.

[vel0city]

> Leasing or renting specifically grants you the right to use something for a period of time without a transfer of ownership.

What's the stated time period here? 1 year? 5 years?

It is an indeterminate amount of time. It is not a lease.

[garbagecoder]

This is so incredibly wrong I have to comment. Most people's leases roll over into month-to-month. You can easily add clauses to say it goes on for an unlimited time until someone revokes.

[TheCoelacanth]

So, it's even less rights than a lease because you could lose it at any time, you aren't even guaranteed to keep it the full term of a lease.

[vel0city]

Yeah, that's absolutely one way to look at it. It could be less, it could be more. However, I still have access to movies I "bought" well over a decade ago on Amazon Unbox, meanwhile every movie I've "rented" on the service I no longer have access to.

I'd say their record overall points to the license offering potentially more value over the short term defined rentals, if you're planning on watching the content again.

Amazon isn't hiding any of this, there's a link to this that's close to the "Buy" button on their site and they mention you're agreeing to it when you check out. It is pretty easy to read and comprehend, it is not exactly fine print.

https://www.primevideo.com/help?nodeId=202095490&view-type=c...

[xigoi]

The period of time is “until they decide they don't want to lease you the book anymore”.

[vel0city]

FWIW in the above 1984 example it is because lots of people were publishing it when they had no rights to. I do agree that speaks volumes on Amazon not properly policing their platform and that they mishandled it. They should have instead properly credited people access to the properly licensed version.

[_Algernon_]

> Eh, one “buys” the right to temporarily have the item on their device, until Amazon decides to revoke that right.

By that definition of "buy" renters are home owners.

[bumby]

>renters are home owners.

No, they are lease buyers. The lease (like the e-book purchase) is a right to use for a period of time. It's not equivalent to ownership.

(That's not to say I don't think the practice by Amazon is bad)

[ryanbrunner]

Especially on Amazon, I don't think this holds muster when "buying" on Kindle is listed directly next to other options which are genuinely purchasing a book with nothing to differentiate that the Kindle one is not actually a purchase of a book.

[dragonwriter]

> Yet strangely, the word “buy” is used in the Kindle store.

You can buy a license with specific terms, including termination conditions. This…long predates digital anything.

[f1shy]

I wonder if somebody will file a class action... if it didn't happened yet, is maybe because some obscure corner of the law is on their side...

But seems strange that it is legal.

[cogman10]

The issue in the US is harm has to be done first and the compensation is based on the harm done.

You are only harmed when amazon loses rights to media you purchased and that harm is easily measured in terms of the monetary value of the thing they took from you (which, they'll likely refund if you start talking to lawyers because it's not worth it to them.)

What we need is to get corporations out of politics.

[garbagecoder]

"In the US." Not in California. Google B&P 17200.

[cogman10]

Perhaps I'm missing something [1]

I don't read anywhere in here where an unaffected individual can raise a case and collect money. Rather, this sets up how the government can enforce the law at various levels. That's pretty standard stuff everywhere (that's why every state has a department of justice). The government can police, but me, and average citizen, can't raise a case against amazon.

Class action lawsuits are civil lawsuits. You can't raise a civil lawsuit if you aren't harmed.

[1] https://law.justia.com/codes/california/2010/bpc/17200-17210...

[LudwigNagasena]

There absolutely should be a legal clarification of what "buy" means with respect to digital goods. And then fine everyone who uses "buy" instead of "license" for false advertising.

[patentatt]

Or just "rent" because that seems pretty close to the reality of the situation. Just have the rental term be long, and have it 'renew' for free. I'd be ok with that.

[vel0city]

> Or just "rent" because that seems pretty close to the reality of the situation.

Rent has a defined time period. Buying a license in this case has an indeterminate time period. Buying a license is still very different from renting or leasing it.

[quesera]

Some rental agreements include automatic renewal unless cancelled by either party.

So, a rental agreement for a defined period (very short, instantaneous even), with automatic renewal.

[pixxel]

> A company called MobileReference, who did not own the copyrights to the books 1984 and Animal Farm, uploaded both books to the Kindle store and started selling them. When the rights owner heard about this, they contacted Amazon and asked that the e-books be removed. And Amazon decided to erase them not just from the store, but from all the Kindles where they'd been downloaded. Amazon operators used the Kindle wireless network, called WhisperNet, to quietly delete the books from people's devices and refund them the money they'd paid.

I’m adding this detail because it’s not as sinister as you alluded.

You are correct with regard to renting, not buying. This is why I only buy paper books (with cash), and grab the corresponding digital version from the high seas.

[ensignavenger]

Hogwash, the button on Amazon.com is clearly labelled "Buy". Amazon trying to take away something you have clearly bought is theft and fraud, and should be prosecuted as such.

[nulbyte]

> You don’t actually buy digital books...

From Amazon and the likes, no, not usually. But there are some sites that offer DRM-free copies to buy, rather than perpetually rent.

Even on Google Play, authors/publishers can choose to go DRM-free. You can download those copies without having to be tied to the Google app. Sadly, however, I don't recall Google making it clear which ones were DRM-free before making a purchase.

[rootusrootus]

> You don’t actually buy digital books, you rent a restricted right to read for an unspecified duration.

Which is fine, as long as you know that going in and set your price expectations accordingly. If those terms are unacceptable, walk away. If you do decide it's worth it, keep a backup with the rest of your digital data.

[turminal]

It's not fine, it's precisely the kind of thing that needs to be regulated because the average consumer is not capable of understanding the non-obvious long term consequences.

[Robotbeat]

It’s not just “not understanding,” it’s a massive revocation of rights that consumers enjoyed with physical goods. That needs to be changed. If you buy a digital good, it’s yours. You own it, are able to resell it, and no later revocation of rights by media conglomerates should be allowed to change that.

[MonkeyClub]

Exactly, it’s a play on a metaphor people know (“I bought a book”), yet one that’s doesn’t really apply (we “buy” nothing, it’s just revocable access).

So it’s ever so slightly fraudulent.

[thecrash]

It's fine that the bar could occasionally serve you poisoned whiskey, as long as you know that going in. If those terms are unacceptable, walk away. If you do decide it's worth it, keep a friend with poison antidotes close at hand at all times.

[ryanbrunner]

I don't think that a reasonable person would assume that Amazon can and will (as evidenced by the OP) remove your entire library at their sole discretion.

[rootusrootus]

So improve the documentation then so it's more clear what you're getting. Instant access to a digital version of a book, for a non-expiring rental, from an organization that could go defunct in the future. It does not have a perfect analogy in the physical world.

[xigoi]

> from an organization that could go defunct in the future.

If only there was a way to preserve digital data even if the company you got it from no longer exists…

[sidlls]

This isn't fine, because the language used in the purchase is "buy", not "rent". People buy these e-books thinking it's the same as buying a physical book, except they can read it on their e-reader. It's deliberately misleading on the part of the sellers.

[rootusrootus]

There is no perfect analogy though, it is not the same as renting either. It is buying, with an asterisk. The company could go defunct. We can regulate the bit about their ability to revoke access to digital goods already purchased, but it's tough to do anything about the company itself going tits up.

I just treat it as a open end rental. The ability to revoke my access to the book lowers the value. The ability to instantly get the book in seconds adds to the value. I keep my expectations clear from the beginning.

Yes, we can argue that regular people are just too stupid to understand that. I don't really agree with that attitude.

[TheCoelacanth]

Any company using the word "buy" for DRM-encumbered media should be required to put keys in escrow so that the DRM can be removed if the company fails to permanently maintain access.

We shouldn't let marketers tell outright lies just because regular people are smart enough to recognize them for lies.

[rootusrootus]

I don't disagree. My Kindle books are DRM free already as delivered by Amazon. If they were encumbered, I'd add that to my list of 'things which would reduce the value to me.' So I just back up the data.