Worse than Being Labeled a Pervert?

It appears that a new batch of pervert glasses are burning people's faces, because it appears that basic consumer electronics safety is beyond these mooks.

Smart glasses have been shrouded in controversy for quite some time now.

They’ve earned the moniker of “pervert glasses” for allowing creeps to spy on unsuspecting strangers, while sketchy facial recognition software generates fear of a dystopian surveillance state. Meta’s even been hit with a lawsuit for allowing contracts to see users’ intimate moments.

The smart glasses world just can’t catch a break. Now, gadget maker Inmo had to recall its Air3 smart glasses because the left arm can “overheat during extended use, posing a risk of serious injury or death due to burn hazard,” according to an official notice by the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC).

“Consumers should immediately stop using the recalled product and update the product firmware to version 3.16 before reusing the product,” a separate recall notice by Health Canada warned.

In addition to being morally bankrupt, it appears that the tech bros cannot manage even basic consumer electronics safely. 

Headline of the Day

Trump Phone Has HTC Guts. Tremendous Guts. The Best Guts.

The Register, noting that the Trump Phone is just a reskinned HTC U24 Pro.

Gee, the next thing that you will tell me is that Trump University was a scam. Hoocoodanode?

It won't be making smartphones great again. The long-awaited Trump-branded smartphone has finally arrived, and it appears to be exactly what many suspected: an existing handset in gold drag.

Repair biz iFixit got its hands on the Trump Mobile T1 after the device became available in May, and its teardown found the model is essentially an HTC U24 Pro with cosmetic tweaks and a Trump-friendly gold finish.

It was almost exactly a year ago that the Trump Organization unveiled the Trump Mobile cellular service and heralded the coming of the T1 Phone, described as "a sleek, gold smartphone engineered for performance and proudly designed and built in the United States."

………

In other words, it's a fairly unremarkable smartphone, sprayed gold and marketed to Trump fans for a promotional price of $499. To be fair, as iFixit makes clear, this is not a bad price for a device like this, so aureate wannabes are not being overcharged here. 

The Fact That We Even Have to Ask This………

In the latest episode of AI under delivering, we have this article asking, "Is an AI-Powered Toy Terrorizing Your Child?"

This kind of sh%$ seems to be a feature, rather than a bug in large language model artificial intelligence. 

Parents, keep your eyes peeled for AI-powered toys. These may look like they might make a novel gift for a child, but a recent controversy surrounding several of the stocking stuffers has highlighted the alarming risks they pose to young kids.

In November, a team of researchers at the US PIRG Education Fund published a report after testing three different toys powered by AI models: Miko 3, Curio’s Grok, and FoloToy’s Kumma. All of them gave responses that should worry a parent, such as discussing the glory of dying in battle, broaching sensitive topics like religion, and explaining where to find matches and plastic bags.

But it was FoloToy’s Kumma that showed just how dangerous it is to package this tech for children. Not only did it explain where to find matches, the researchers found, it also gave step-by-step instructions on how to light them.

“Let me tell you, safety first, little buddy. Matches are for grown-ups to use carefully. Here’s how they do it,” Kumma said, before listing off the steps.

“Blow it out when done,” it added. “Puff, like a birthday candle.”

The toy also speculated on where to find knives and pills, and rambled about romantic topics, like school crushes and tips for “being a good kisser.” It even discussed sexual topics, including kink topics like bondage, roleplay, sensory play, and impact play. In one conversation, it discussed introducing spanking into a sexually charged teacher-student dynamic.

The problem here is not any inherent danger to AI, but rather the inherent recklessness of the business desperate to jump on the AI bandwagon.

If steps could be taken, for example not having IP protections on models and data sets, the frenzy would subside, and we could see slower and more measured development.

The wannabee billionaire tech-bro's don't care who or what they damage along the away.

Eliminate the billions, you eliminate the recklessness. 

Shut Up and Take My Money!!!

Click to embiggen images








I have seen the Chernobyl-Inspired Humidifier.

This is even better than the nose snot egg separator.

Also, if you have a 3D printer you can download the STL files and print your own.

You know, there are food 3D printers now, so one could print a Chernobyl birthday cake.

The unit is small 130 mm x 150 mm long x 120 mm , but one could theoretically scale this up larger in your printer.

Also, you can add fragrances, I would suggest RADIUM by Caliber perfume, should you so desire.

Only $80.10 with 3 choices of backlight color.

Such a steal!

As the maker notes:

By pressing the button on the body, a moisture sprayer is activated from the reactor zone along with lights, creating the effect of burning and smoke during the disaster. This is not only a visually impressive spectacle but also a practical function – the model can work as a night light and a humidifier, which is very beneficial for health.

If you feel that this is in bad taste considering the suffering that this brought, I would note that the seller is from the Ukraine.

You can find instructions, and links to the STL models here .

 

Headline of the Day

I Won’t Connect My Dishwasher to Your Stupid Cloud

—Jeff Geerling

Here's a hint for Consumer Reports, which top-rated the Bosch 500 series of dishwashers:  If the feature requires an app, it's not a feature, because either the manufacturer will start charging for it, or they will eventually shut down the web service disabling the feature.

The features that are missing without the app?  Minor things like delayed start and rinse.

No one ever used those before the internet of sh%$.

Making Comcast Look Good

HP, the misbegotten child that was spawned when Carly Fiorina destroyed Hewlett Packard, instituted a new policy, if you call technical support, they will delay all calls by at least 15 minutes, because customers should go online and deal with their crappy website.

Rather unsurprisingly, when this started getting press coverage, they reversed this policy.

Just to remind you what HP has done:

• Sells its printers with almost empty ink cartridges, which are then further drained during "calibration".
• Prohibit their multi-function devices from scanning if the ink is out of date or empty.
• Roll out updates which sabotage the ability to use 3rd party ink cartridges.
• Put a delay in the sabotage in order to make sure as many people as possible update the printer before the trap is sprung.
• Set cartridges to empty when they have 20% ink remaining.
• Tricks customers into irrevocable ink subscription programs. 
• Abuse the DMCA in an attempt to make 3rd party ink cartridges a felony.
• Charges over $10,000.00 a gallon for said ink, "More than the semen of a Kentucky Derby winner.

Seriously, HP makes Comcast look like Bernie f%$#ing Sanders.

 

Shut Up and Take My Money

PC case-maker SilverStone made an April Fools’ joke touting a fake retro PC case.

They shared some renderings of the product.

Response to this joke was so enthusiastic that they will actually be making and selling the case.

Blah, blah, blah!


a

We are talking the whole Maxillah, coming in beige or black, faux 5.25 inch external drive, a real DVD Drive, mounted sideways with reinforcing to support a monitor, etc.

I want this.  It makes no sense, but I want this:

Putting out a joke product on April Fools' Day can sometimes be a clever way to quietly gauge the reaction to a wild idea without having to really commit to it.

Nerdish purveyor ThinkGeek did this a few times with the 8-bit tie and the Tauntaun sleeping bag. Pokemon Go crystallized in some ways from a Google Maps joke. And just recently, PC case-maker SilverStone has decided that so many people were into its beige-tastic FLP01 case idea, tossed onto X (formerly Twitter) late on March 31 Tokyo time, that it will now release it in early 2025 in Japan for the USD equivalent of $130.

As shown off at SilverStone's Expo 2024 show in Akihbara last weekend (and spotted on Tom's Hardware), the FLP-01 is a combination of simulacrum and serious, with heavy NEC PC-9800 homage. It has fake 5.25-inch floppy blanks, but they cover real optical disc drive and button/port modules. At SilverStone's Japan Expo, the firm packed a GeForce RTX 4060 Ti, Intel Core Ultra 7 256K CPU, and full-size ATX motherboard and PSU. There are, of course, power and disk activity LEDs on the front. As displayed, SilverStone's demo unit had three intake fans and plenty of room for whatever else you could pack in here.

The whole thing looks like a modern case flipped on its side, so your modern system-building and wire-routing skills won't go to waste. It's 17.32×14.25 inches and 6.7 inches tall in its (literal) desktop configuration, and the case is reinforced enough that you can use it as a monitor stand.

 Yeah, I want the 8 bit tie and the Tauntaun sleeping bag too.

 

I Voted Early

Not a Long Video

I voted early, and it went very quickly.

Accompanied by my intrepid, if somewhat half-assed cameraman Charlie Saroff, I was in and out in 15 minutes.

I would have been out in 10, but I thought that it would be cool to use the digital marking machine.

I lost 5 minutes waiting for those, and then switched to the old fashioned stations with a pen.

I'm surprised that it went so quickly.

There were 11 early voting stations in Baltimore County, so I went after I picked up my kid at the train station.

Vote early and often.

The Internet of Sh%$

Yes, internet connected vacuum cleaners can spy on you and shout racist slurs at you.

Why on earth would someone want an internet connected vacuum cleaner?

I could understand Bluetooth, but the only people who get anything of value out of an internet connected vacuum are people who want to spy on you, like the FBI, CIA, NSA ……… Oh, now I get it.

It’s a tale as old as… well, the Internet of Things era. Robot vacuums made by Ecovacs have been reported roving around people’s homes, yelling profanities at them through the onboard speakers after the company’s software was found to be vulnerable to intrusion.

ABC News in Australia reports that there were recently multiple instances across the U.S. when owners of Ecovacs vacuums noticed their devices acting unusually.

“It sounded like a broken-up radio signal or something,” Daniel Swenson, an owner of an Ecovac Deebot X2, told the outlet. “You could hear snippets of maybe a voice.” He opened the vacuum’s app to find a stranger was accessing its live camera feed and remote control feature, but assumed it might be an error. After resetting the password and rebooting the X2, the vacuum quickly started moving again:

This time, there was no ambiguity about what was coming out of the speaker. A voice was yelling racist obscenities, loud and clear, right in front of Mr Swenson’s son.

“F*** n******s,” screamed the voice, over and over again.

Perhaps the best part of this anecdote was Swenson’s incredulous conclusion that the situation “could have been worse.” But he’s right that it was nice of the hacker to let him know his vacuum was hacked instead of spying on him indefinitely.

Delightful.

Tim Cook, I Want to Pitch You on an Ad Campaign

That's not a drop test,
This is a drop test They have recovered some debris that fell from Alaska Air flight 1282, including, an iPhone that survived the 16,000-foot fall.

Not a fan of iPhones, they feel like a straight jacket to me,  but the fact that the phone was found on the ground, still operating, and still in airplane mode, without a cracked screen, is pretty damn impressive:

On Sunday, game developer Seanathan Bates discovered a working iPhone that fell 16,000 from Alaska Airlines flight 1282 on Friday. Flight 1282 suffered an explosive decompression event when a door plug blew off the plane. No one was injured during the incident. The iPhone wasn't injured, either—still unlocked and with a torn charging cable connector plugged in, it appeared largely undamaged and displayed information that matched the flight.

"Found an iPhone on the side of the road," wrote Bates in a post on X. "Still in airplane mode with half a battery and open to a baggage claim for #AlaskaAirlines ASA1282 Survived a 16,000 foot drop perfectly in tact!" [sic]

Apple, it takes a knocking, and keeps on talking?

There has to be some better ad copy than that.

Tweet of the Day

This is worhtof a @doctorow short story. Thanksgiving ruined due to a botched softwares update. Maybe someone brought vendor-unauthorized food that the grill refuses to heat up for. https://t.co/T7pgMb2Nl1

— Rev. Jason Wells (@jawells@mastodon.sdf.org) 🇺🇦 (@revjawells) November 24, 2022

Seriously, why does someone purchase an internet connected grill?

The much vaunted internet of things is more the internet of bullsh%$.

Between issues like updating at inopportune times, losing features when the manufactures abandon the products, and the equivalent of the blue screen of death, this is a losing proposition.

And then there are the inevitable hackers………

This Has Evil Plot Written All over It

I am referring, of course, to Amazon’s takeover of Roomba, the robotic vacuum cleaner people.

What's to be understood here is that this has nothing to do with making a few bucks off of selling vacuum cleaners to people.  It's about extracting information from the appliances to do things like mapping people's homes, including things like where high traffic areas are in a house.

It's about Amazon expanding its stalking technology beyond things like Alexa and Ring:

Earlier this month, Amazon announced that it was buying the Roomba vacuum maker iRobot. On the surface, this move looks like a massive online retail marketplace acquiring a popular gadget to sell to its loyal shoppers. Roomba is a sparkling consumer product, and iRobot has sold 40 million of them over the past two decades. Shoppers today find them occupying end caps at big retailers such as Costco and Target. The device’s smooth, spinning design has given it a huge chunk of the $3 billion-a-year robot-vacuum market; three quarters of all smart vacuums sold in America bear the Roomba name. In that way, the deal makes sense.

But my suspicion is that, for Amazon, the deal has nothing to do with cleaning your floors. What it seems to be about—expanding the company’s reach further into people’s lives—should trouble everyone.

………


The iRobot deal follows a known Amazon strategy, one that Jeff Bezos has admitted to in the past: using mergers to buy its way to dominance. (I asked Amazon if this is what it’s doing with Roomba, but the company did not comment.) Several companies make and sell robotic vacuums, including brands like Shark and others. But Roomba is the household name, so ubiquitous that it’s shorthand for every other robot vacuum available. By simply taking over the company that makes the most popular product in the industry, Amazon can grow its monopoly without actually having to out-innovate and out-compete its rivals.

………

This merger isn’t just about controlling the robot-vacuum industry, or even about smart-home devices. Owning Roomba would give the world’s most dominant spy-tech maker yet another portal into our homes and lives. It could map where we live, what we own, and what it should be selling to its hundreds of millions of captured customers.

………

These devices have given Amazon incredible access to people’s daily lives. The company has a documented history of leveraging the data its vast home-tech network captures in order to grow—and to expand its monopoly power. For example, Amazon has for years used Alexa’s algorithm to steer customers toward Amazon’s own products. Ring monitors and records every interaction with a customer's doorbell, including every doorbell buzz and every movement in proximity to the outside of the door, and congressional investigators found that “acquiring Ring and Blink was in part to expand and reinforce [Amazon’s] market power for its other business lines.”

………

The latest Roomba models capture information that Amazon, at the moment, doesn’t have access to. iRobot’s new operating system maps the floor plan and contents of the spaces in which it operates. The vacuums are now equipped with a camera so it can respond to commands like “Clean in front of the couch.” But that means it knows what kind of couch you have—and crib, and dog bed, and so on. If the deal goes through, Amazon will too, whether or not you wanted Amazon to know that stuff. (Amazon did not comment on how it would use data collected by Roombas.)

If this deal feels bad and intrusive, that’s because it is. People buy a Roomba because they want something that will clean their floors. Most folks don’t want a spinning, camera-equipped data vacuum taking stock of their home and its contents, then beaming that information back to the most powerful retail monopoly on Earth.

Amazon's entire business strategy is about expanding its monopoly status and then extracting rents from its customers.

I really hope that Lina Khan and the rest of the apparatus of the state comes down Amazon and Jeff Bezos in full wrath of God mode.

Today in, "Dafuq?"

obviously when you see the words “cursed fridge” you have to go over and read on, and i am so glad i did. what the fuck is going on here pic.twitter.com/zjlRYySzgm

— Imogen West-Knights (@ImogenWK) July 31, 2022

This is both intriguing and terrifying. It is also reminiscent of a Really crappy movie from the early 1990s called Ghost in the Machine. 

What I can say with certainty is that I want to have absolutely nothing to do with this refrigerator.

Good Guys Win One

PayPal, because it's not a bank, because ……… internet, can do all sorts of skeevy and corrupt things, as well as save the cost of compliance with consumer protections.

Case in point, they permanently shut down the account of Consortium News, a left wing news site, with no warning nor any explanation, and threatened to expropriate their account after holding onto it for 6 months.

Well, it appears that PayPal decided that, "Permanent," means, until a sh%$ storm blows up and we reverse ourselves, because today, PayPal caved:

PayPal has reversed its decision to withhold Consortium News‘ funds after a backlash from social media, news outlets and CN donors.

PayPal sent Consortium News an email on Tuesday night saying: “Your PayPal funds are now eligible for withdrawal.” CN immediately withdrew the funds. PayPal gave no reasons for its reversal, as it had given no reasons for its initial action. The account remains shut down, though it appears no longer permanently, as PayPal is asking CN to take steps to restore it without saying what those steps are.

PayPal initially said it had slapped a “permanent limitation” on Consortium News, adding explicitly: “You can’t use PayPal anymore. … We noticed activity in your account that’s inconsistent with our User Agreement and we no longer offer you PayPal services. … Because of potential risk exposure, we’ve permanently limited your account. You’ll no longer be able to use the account for any transactions.”

Among “restricted activities” in the User Agreement is a ban on providing “false, inaccurate or misleading information” to PayPal, other PayPal customers “or third parties.” Given the political climate it is reasonable to conclude that PayPal was reacting to Consortium News’ coverage of the war in Ukraine, which is not in line with the dominant narrative that is being increasingly enforced. If true, PayPal was allegedly seeking to limit Consortium News’ free speech by depriving it of one of its main vehicles for funding.

A PayPal customer service agent had told CN that its funds could be kept for six months until a determination was made about what to do with them. “If there was a violation .. it is possible” CN‘s balance of $9,348.14 could be kept as “damages” to PayPal. That would mean awarding itself damages in a completely secret process.

PayPal apparently has also lifted the “permanent limitation” on CN‘s account. According to its User Agreement, PayPal says there are no steps that can be taken to reverse the permanent ban. (Click to enlarge).

But in the Tuesday night email PayPal said there were now steps Consortium News could take. “Access to your account will remain limited until you perform the steps required to lift the limitation.” However, it failed to specify what those steps are and still hasn’t identified what violations were committed to bring the ban in the first place.

………

Independent media reacted too, with an article by Matt Taibbi on Substack, one by Jacobin magazine and a report on DemocracyNow! The story also hit the mainstream in this segment on The Hills‘ show Rising, which also discuss MintPress News, which was also shut down, having its funding restored as well.

If a bank did this, they would have to provide documentation, and a prompt resolution, or they would risk lawsuits and regulatory matters, but because PayPal is not a bank, a legal fiction much the independent contractor legal fictgion served up by Uber and its ilk, they don't care.

They don't have to.

They are PayPal.

The Internet of Sh%$

Insteon, a company that produces internet connected household devices, just just shut down and bricked all of its devices.

This is a problem with the wild west that is the "Internet of Things". 

Otherwise, we will continue to have companies arbitrarily bricking peoples devices, reselling consumer information, and inflicting insecure systems on the general public:

The smart home company Insteon has vanished.

The entire company seems to have abruptly shut down just before the weekend, breaking users' cloud-dependent smart-home setups without warning. Users say the service has been down for three days now despite the company status page saying, "All Services Online." The company forums are down, and no one is replying to users on social media.

As Internet of Things reporter Stacey Higginbotham points out, high-ranking Insteon executives, including CEO Rob Lilleness, have scrubbed the company from their LinkedIn accounts. In the time it took to write this article, Lilleness also removed his name and picture from his LinkedIn profile. It seems like that is the most communication longtime Insteon customers are going to get.

Insteon is (or, more likely, "was") a smart home company that produced a variety of Internet-connected lights, thermostats, plugs, sensors, and of course, the Insteon Hub. At the core of the company was Insteon's proprietary networking protocol, which was a competitor to more popular and licensable alternatives like Z-Wave and Zigbee. Insteon's "unique and patented dual-mesh technology" used both a 900 MHz wireless protocol and powerline networking, which the company said created a more reliable network than wireless alone. The Insteon Hub would bridge all your gear to the Internet and enable use of the Insteon app.

Yeah, about that whole reliability thing. 

Read the comments.

This is the best one:

The Insteon chastity cage has been the worst purchase of my life.

Well, That’s One Way to Make a SH%$Ty Car Look Better

You would think for amount that Tesla charges for its cars, you would think that they would make decent seats.

It appears that this is not the case, because Tesla is monitoring how you use your power seats to determine if you are being, "irresponsible," and will shut down the seat adjustment function.

Speaking as a mechanical engineer (BSME, UMass, 1987), I think that it is a better practice, and better customer service, to make seats that can stand up to ordinary use.

If you have 4 drivers in the house, or curious children, watch out:

Tesla’s new vehicles rolling out of the factory will include a bizarre feature designed to prevent abuse of the seat adjustment controls. The new seats will track and measure the amount of adjustments users make and will disable the controls if they detect “excessive” changes. The feature was first identified by @greentheonly, an anonymous hacker and researcher, and subsequently covered by Jalopnik.

Tesla recently began installing new seat motors in some of its Model 3 and Model Y vehicles, in addition to the seats it gets from China’s Yangfeng and the ones it makes in-house. The new motors come from Brose, a 110-year-old German company that supplies a lot of components to the automotive industry.

The difference between the Brose seats and Yangfeng and Tesla’s are what @greentheonly calls “‘seat abuse’ metrics.” This functionality will issue warnings to the users if they are making too many adjustments and eventually will disable the seat controls if the warnings are unheeded. Apparently, the car is tracking how many times users move their seats forward and backward, as opposed to lumbar support controls — though the feature could eventually include those controls as well.

………

(For anyone with trouble imagining under what circumstances someone would be screwing around with their seat controls for a full two minutes, allow me to introduce you to a concept known as “children.”)

In a direct message on Twitter, @greentheonly said they discovered the new feature while scanning Tesla’s latest firmware releases in order to compare them to old releases and see what new functionalities were coming. The hacker also had some theories on why Tesla decided on including the new seat control protections:


so there are two possibilities:

1. their historical replacement pattern show that motors fail like this.

2. they are using worse motors at the factory now so added this check into factory firmware first.

In the end I cannot tell you it’s one or the other for sure. This change is coincident with the BROSE seats config so may be just the Brose seats have this weaker motor? That would explain the first appearance is in the factory firmware too, then.

But may be it is based on historical data too and would apply to all cars and it’s all just a [coincidence]. I have no real way to know. I don’t even have a model3 car myself

There is a 3rd possibility, which is that as a result of Tesla's production push, it already infamously lax attention to build fit and finish is such that misaligned rails are placing undue loads on the motors, and instead of fixing the problem, they came up with a software limiter.

My money is on build quality problems

HEADLINE OF THE DAY

New Roomba Promises “Poopocalypse” Horror Stories Are a Thing of the Past

—Ars Technica

A "Poopcalupse" is when your pet craps on the rug, and a Roomba distributes the excrement like a paint roller all over your floor.

It's taken them 2 decades to do this, and people keep telling us that self-driving cars are just around the corne.

This is a Big F%$#ing deal

A court in California has ruled that Amazon can be held liable for defective products sold by its 3^rd party vendors.

Hopefully this is the first of a thousand cuts that Amazon will die by:

Amazon was hit with a legal defeat this week after a California appeals court ruled that the company can be held legally liable for defective products sold on its site by third-party sellers.

In a unanimous decision issued Thursday, Judge Patricia Guerrero of the Fourth District Court of Appeals wrote that "under established principles of strict liability, Amazon should be held liable if a product sold through its website turns out to be defective."

………

The case concerned a replacement laptop battery that Amazon customer Angela Bolger purchased from a Hong Kong-based company called Lenoge Technology, which went by "E-Life" on Amazon's online marketplace. Bolger alleged in her lawsuit that "the battery exploded several months later, and she suffered severe burns as a result," for which she argued Amazon should be held responsible.

Amazon had argued that it wasn't liable because "it did not distribute, manufacture, or sell the product," and that Lenoge was the seller.

But the court disagreed, finding that Amazon played such an outsized role in the transaction that it bore the responsibility for the defective battery.

Guerrero wrote that Amazon "placed itself between Lenoge and Bolger in the chain of distribution... accepted possession of the product... stored it in an Amazon warehouse... attracted Bolger to the site... provided her with a product listing... received her payment... shipped the product in Amazon packaging... controlled the conditions of Lenoge's offer for sale... limited Lenoge's access to Amazon's customer information... forced Lenoge to communicate with customers through Amazon... "and demanded indemnification as well as substantial fees on each purchase."

Jeff Bezos' monster exerts a tremendous amount of control over its, "3^rd party vendors," and to quote Peter Parker Steve Ditko and Stan Lee, "With great power, comes great responsibility."^*

Doing things like stealing 3^rd party data to develop competing products indicates that Amazon is more than just a simple store front.

"Whatever term we use to describe Amazon's role, be it 'retailer,' 'distributor,' or merely 'facilitator,' it was pivotal in bringing the product here to the consumer," she concluded.

The court also didn't buy Amazon's statement that it should be protected under section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996, which shields internet companies from legal repercussions for content published by third parties on their sites.

It determined that section 230 didn't apply because Bolger's claims "depend on Amazon's own activities, not its status as a speaker or publisher of content provided by Lenoge for its product listing."

Pending the results of a possible appeal, Thursday's ruling potentially opens up the online retail giant to significant legal exposure from other customers who could bring similar lawsuits for faulty or damaged products. It could also force Amazon to adjust its policies to more tightly regulate third-party sellers.

It does seem that the whole internet economy thing is increasingly just a mechanism for vendors to cheat people and avoid consequences.

^*Peter Parker never said this, it was in the final panel of the first Spider Man comic book.

Silent Hypoxia

It turns out that a lot of people who have Covid-19 are suffering from what is called Silent (or Happy) Hypoxia, there they have dangerously low blood oxygen levels but are showing no symptoms.

You can get a finger-tip blood oxygen and heart rate indicator for about a sawbuck online, and I would recommend that you do so:

It is a mystery that has left doctors questioning the basic tenets of biology: Covid-19 patients who are talking and apparently not in distress, but who have oxygen levels low enough to typically cause unconsciousness or even death.

The phenomenon, known by some as “happy hypoxia” (some prefer the term “silent”) is raising questions about exactly how the virus attacks the lungs and whether there could be more effective ways of treating such patients.

A healthy person would be expected to have an oxygen saturation of at least 95%. But doctors are reporting patients attending A&E with oxygen percentage levels in the 80s or 70s, with some drastic cases below 50%.

Using the fingertip sensor takes less than a minute, and it is non-invasive and not painful, so checking yourself occasionally is a good thing.

The Internet of Sh%$

I am not sure why, but lamps figure very prominently in technological failures of smart consumer devices, and this time, it doesn't even involve an internet connected device:

Thread by @brockwilbur: Short Thread: staying with some friends and last night after everyone went to bed I could not figure out how to turn off the large ceiling l …