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

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 :)

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

> 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.

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.

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.

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

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

Also, the book "Poorly made in China" is extremely interesting.

ImportYeti

https://www.importyeti.com/

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.

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

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

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?

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.

We should have never allowed them to become this powerful. 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.

What does this mean?

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.

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

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

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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 ...

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.

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

It's called protecting the brand.

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

Unless you’d like to take the time to specify the truths you’ve been saying and that everyone else has been ignoring?

Science always evolves so dont listen or jump on the early science bandwagon until year(s) down the road. The CDC has changed their guidance ... i was forced to get vaxed and i loathe it(past month ive had a metallic taste in my mouth wth). Got the flu shot after decades on the market already admin(ed) to millions over years time. Covid vaccines we already see the J&J shot isnt the one to get but the CDC said we should in March but said something different in December ... same with masks updating things. They don't have a true real clue about this or you think they know everything about it? IF so why do they keep updating the guidelines that we were told to follow early 2021?

Where is the conspiracy in what i just wrote? THat i don't believe and loathe early science... ever seen those hernia mesh lawsuit commercials i am victim to such as well an early drug damaged one of my organs. I live by experience not bias media political early science b.s.!

Personally I think china is the enemy to the world .. that's just an opinion. You can think they are friends to the world thats up to you .. your opinion.

Granted, the official response wasn't good. But a virus pandemic was ever only a question of time. It's unlikely it could have been prevented wherever it had started.

The right official response would've been to not start a cover up (and the rest of the world could've hopefully prepared better). Even the WHO was carrying water for China in Feb 2020.

The lab in Wuhan was not scientifically isolated, funding came from abroad. Similar research has been conducted elsewhere.

Of course it's still important to find out the truth on the matter.

Insane is what they do to animals in their so-called "wet markets". Take a look at some footage if you still have any respect left for the CCP.

Depends on how you define free. The US population is definitely not free either when seen from Scandinavia. The US is only more free if freedom is defined as Free to be unprotected from big business etc.

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.

>everyone should avoid Chinese crapware.

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.

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...

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