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A comment on We purchased a machine from China and it came with malware preinstalled. Parent comment

Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by chias on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @10:23AM (#30072784)
I bought a bluetooth dongle on Amazon recently. didn't work out of the box, and the instruction booklet told me I had to download and install an unsigned device driver that I should download from a specific dropbox link.

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

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by Datenstrom on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @10:28AM (#30072849)
I very rarely write negative reviews, but every time I have was for something of this magnitude and not once has any ever been left up on any platform.
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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by tempnow987 on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:19PM (#30074594)
Same.

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 :)

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by throwawayboise on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:38PM (#30074933)
I canceled Prime and stopped buying stuff on Amazon over 3 years ago for these sort of reasons. You cannot trust the product descriptions, you cannot trust the reviews, and you cannot trust that what you actually get is the same thing you thought you were buying.
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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by webmaven on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @01:15PM (#30075605)
> 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?

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

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by tempnow987 on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @01:29PM (#30075840)
> Several ways:

> 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.

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by webmaven on Wednesday January 26, 2022 @11:40AM (#30087748)
"Why doesn't Amazon stop this from happening?" is a different question from "How does this happen?".

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.

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by Taylor_OD on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:22PM (#30074650)
I tend to write something like, "Didnt work. 1 star" At least that stays up most of the time.
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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by jacquesm on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:43PM (#30075021)
Reviews and the platforms they relate to should be separated from each other. And Yelp like strategies should be reason for major shunning.
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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by josephcsible on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:28PM (#30074757)
> I tried to write a measured review on Amazon explaining the problem, but Amazon rejected the review.

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.

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by antishatter on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @12:46PM (#30075090)
That's one of the things that's interesting about it being a private company and censoring things. The whole "free speech" vs "not free speech" issues. I certainly understand both sides of the aisle on that one but tend to lean against censorship.
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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by myself248 on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @01:37PM (#30075966)
Huh. I just got some insecure crap from Amazon, composed a pretty scathing review about it, and they put it up:

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

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Re:We purchased a machine from China and it came with malwar... by vkoskiv on Tuesday January 25, 2022 @02:05PM (#30076430)
A chinese USB-C to Ethernet adapter had instructions to download and install a macOS kernel extension for it to work. Thanks but no thanks. This was a product that was (presumably) vetted and retailed by an EU electronics retailer.
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