There is this remote camera app for baby cameras and home survelliance cameras, that all of a sudden started displaying ads in the application that lets you access the camera remotely.

Also these ads are full screen, unskippable 5-10 second ads that occasionally have sound as well.

Upon asking about this, the only reaction from them is a canned response telling about some discount, but there was no ad in the product before, they changed the deal afterwards.

Is this the new trend for companies to extract revenue from already sold products?

How is it legal to add ads into an already sold product afterwards?

I am not a lawyer but I would guess it is probably in an Acceptable Use or Terms of Use page you may have clicked through or maybe there was just a link to it. So it's probably legal but that does not exclude it from being shady, deceptive and crass. If it is not on the outside of the hardware box then maybe there is a case that it was misleading and deceptive since one would have to buy it to know about the Acceptable Use Policy.

Consider asking LegalEagle [1] if he would do a Youtube video on this topic.

Maybe there is a market for a pre-configured Zoneminder RasPi that could optionally use something like tailscale for remote access so people could just buy some cheap onvif compliant cameras and keep their private home security streams private.

[1] - https://www.youtube.com/@LegalEagle [video channel]

I assume that, unless they advertised it as being free of advertisements, that there is no conflict with them adding them into the product later. They can make even make an argument that those ads add value: wow, you get to learn about all these cool products that are relevant to you! But in general, I don't believe inserting ads into an existing product is against the law on its face. It's a shitty thing to do though.

I absolutely hate that tech has been overrun with these shitstains

Edit: Seems like all the Kami ones have an equivalent yi home one. Should be doable from what I can tell. The process is pretty straight forward, flash the SD card with a folder, take it back out and add a file for wifi, then reinsert.

https://zoneminder.com/

A firewall is however needed, since the cameras firmware can't be audited, therefore one should assume the worst. Just allow secure connections from trusted sources outside only and block any access from the IP cameras subnet to anywhere else.

Advertising is just one of the problems plaguing consumer surveillance cameras; many of them have been already caught while either phoning home somewhere in China or being so poorly secured that they're wide open to exploitation that can turn them into botnet nodes.

https://blog.zositech.com/unsecured-network-cameras-list/

But it wasn't Samsung's app, nor (I assume) one owned by them. Still installed as system app so unable to uninstall tho.

So one day the company decided to monetize on that and just started to display ads on lockscreen. No way to remove it either. So I rooted that POS and never bought any Samsung shit again...

I know it is not the same, but there are IR learning remotes. I bet those will disappear, too.

https://www.amazon.com/One-All-Universal-Replacement-Learnin...

Apple would really have to mess something up, and another vendor would need to be more committed to their hardware than I’ve seen

I would probably jump on the dumbphone luddite trend before going back to android

e: Yeah looks like Apple Music, Apple News also, soon Apple Maps & Apple Podcasts

At some point an iOS update added a “Smart Stack” widget to my homescreen with some common app widgets (contacts, maps photos) (I assume it was automatically added, I don’t recall ever creating it, it seems to be a new iOS 14 feature.)

In iOS 15, iOS got something called “Widget Suggestions”, so apps you haven’t added to smart stack will automatically appear. (And this got automatically turned on for the smart stack on my home screen.)

Result: I got the App Store automatically suggested in my widget stack and displaying an ad for some Disney thing. (Which I assume I wouldn’t be able to access without either paying, or watching more ads.)

No bloat, no adds, no bullshit. And a solid experience for years on end.

I know some people have issues with banking apps refusing to work but it has never been an issue for me.

I’m glad to hear grapheneos is useful for someone as I was skeptical, sounds like the same “file system freedom” sentiment android users have led with for a decade, to which I should remind all that iOS users know that and dont care

I mean I guess I'm "uncompelled" in the sense that these stupid iOS restrictions aren't quite enough to get me to jump ship, but the restrictions are still pretty insane nonetheless. For example, I'm very happy that the EU is going to force iOS to allow for side-loading.

Android at the very least have OSS options and after installing one on the aforementioned Samsung it was fine.

Apple doesn't get it right all the time.

iTunes wasn’t a secret. Apple didn’t bait you. It was well known you needed to use iTunes.

On Android you have regular apps that turn into Malware. Samsung will sell you a phone/TV then introduce/increase the amount of ads/malware with a software update.

The problem isn’t that there are ads. The problem is that the ads are introduced after you’ve already purchased it. This doesn’t happen with Apple, and that’s something many people value more than being locked into a walled garden.

Only if you were already in the Apple ecosystem.

Many years ago a coworker was gifted one of the more basic iPods, which was his first experience with the Apple ecosystem. It didn't go terribly badly, but I do remember him not knowing about iTunes at the time.

well you’ll be elated to know that not much has changed on that front, except that generations of people now don't really care for self-custody of music. Compressed formats are good enough, streaming is good enough, and stored formats in walled gardens are good enough.

There is some burgeoning sentiment that some music is disappeared from the face of the earth, but nobody really cares.

There are also foss Linux phone OSs like postmarketOS, however hardware support and os are definitely in alpha or beta depending on the exact combination of hardware and software you use.

However if you don't mind tinkering with Linux they do the basic job.

FYI I wrote this from a PinePhone running postmarketOS (for Linux enthusiasts/tinkerers only, you've been warned)

Jailbroken iOS was heaven though. I hear its more difficult now (which is why Apple has lost my business since IIRC the iPhone 6).

There was never a notification either, I just saw it on a news site.

Many users are now reporting they are forced to use Kami cloud storage instead of local storage. Their ability to use the local SD card storage has been disabled in newer versions of the app.

The Internet is a great example of that where we demand everything be free and then we get upset when it’s not.

If consumers choose the cheapest thing it is a race to the bottom regardless.

I don’t know that people care, sadly.

That's the behavior that market forces encourage. If you don't want that behavior you either need to remove the incentive to do it or make it illegal.

And remove options where you get ads in a paid service!

There doesn’t seem to be a middle ground between the cheap stuff and the super duper professional expensive stuff where you need to buy a controller and etc.

Ive settled on wyze for now but I wouldn’t have a problem with a middle ground product.

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https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33336722

Even with a subscription the ad-free honeymoon won't last.

I can already imagine the thinking process to hit some arbitrary OKR to somehow increase revenue per user or some crap like that

Very frustrating

Ironically, you used to be able to just Google for publicly accessible IP cameras, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5116676 , and those don't need anything more than a browser to view, so that might guide your buying decision.

It has a WiFi connection feature which is primarily meant for use with their app (which is kind of garbage), but it's a Linux system and I can telnet into it with root privileges and mess around with the filesystem. It has an rtsp stream, a fairly ok remote control API with some community libraries in github, and even has Python (2.7, at least until I take the time to figure out how to cross-compile a more recent version, but still).

Just this week I was playing with building a script to hook up the rtsp stream to my PC so I could use an AI model to do bird classification and set it up next to my bird feeder.

It's not advertised as being hacker friendly and I imagine this openness is more due to a lack of the zealousness and resources that more expensive products seem to insist on dedicating to locking everything down, but it's been really fun and I'd definitely get a couple more cheap ones, given the opportunity. No idea what the situation is on their other products though, and it does suck that non-technical users are stuck with an app with ads.