Comment by PeterStuer

Comment by PeterStuer a day ago

32 replies

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At the start of the eCommerce business, people flocked to Amazon because they had trouble trusting smaller retailers.

These days it is the opposite. These brands went from trusted sellers to whitewashing marketplaces for the most dubious fraudulent drop-shippers by means of things like "sku-pooling" (you by design can not and never will know who shipped your specific item into the giant pool at Amazon).

So now I shop at dedicated local outlets, and avoid the "marketplaces" like the plague.

abdullahkhalids a day ago

Any digital platform (like social media or a marketplace), which satisfies the following conditions

- decides which wares (social media posts or products) by sellers are shown to users by automated algorithms

- Makes money when users engage with said wares

- Is owned by a large number of investors

Will, if you believe standard optimization theory and that sellers are clever, devolve into crap.

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RankingMember a day ago

I'm a big fan of Microcenter for this kind of stuff and hope they can hang on (I was disappointed to see one of the ones near me reducing its store footprint).

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  • MDGeist a day ago

    This is the reason I also go to Microcenter for components. It's too bad there are so few of them and Fry's is defunct. Not many brick and mortar options left.

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  • frantathefranta a day ago

    I like Microcenter a lot but this reminded me that the one thing I had issues with was buying a 256GB M.2 SSD there (I think from their in-store Inland brand) and it only ever showed up as 1GB. I don't know if it was a QA issue or a RMA swap but who knows. Obviously they were fine with me returning it and hopefully they didn't put it back on the shelf.

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    • mmmlinux a day ago

      nah it goes on those discount wire rack shelves they have sprinkled throughout the store.

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  • BizarroLand a day ago

    I just wish Microcenter would come to Oregon or Washington. Fry's is out of business, they would have no competitor other than best buy in either state, and they already have a store in California and Colorado so it's not like it's an enormous distance barrier to overcome.

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morninglight a day ago

Amazon's problems with fraudulent memory products were well documented in 2023 when GRC published their test results for a dozen such drives purchased from the site. In response, GRC developed a free program, called "ValiDrive", to scan and test drives for this growing problem.

ValiDrive performs a quick, random-sequence spot-check across the drive's entire declared storage space. At every location it verifies the successful storage and retrieval of random (unspoofable) test data.

https://www.grc.com/validrive.htm

The program has been extensively tested, is freely downloadable and comes from a well respected site with a long history in the security business. Steve Gibson announced this development in 2023 and it has been downloaded over 600,000 times.

https://www.grc.com/freepopular.htm

In addition to this effort, Steve has been creating an in-depth weekly podcast called "Security Now" for over 20 years. An archive of all 1039 podcasts and transcripts can be found online where they are freely downloadable.

https://www.grc.com/securitynow.htm

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  • p1mrx a day ago

    ValiDrive is Windows-only and closed source. Does it have any advantages over https://github.com/AltraMayor/f3 ?

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    • criddell a day ago

      One advantage - it's much easier to get up and running. If you are on Windows, you can probably download it and be running it in less time than it's going to take to download the source code for f3.

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      • ndriscoll a day ago

        `nix-shell -p f3` took about 1 second to run on my machine. I didn't even have to install Windows or sign up for an online account.

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    • morninglight a day ago

      ValiDrive was designed to be fast and nondestructive -

      In a random, non-repeating sequence, at each of 576 separate evenly spread locations on any drive, ValiDrive reads the current contents of that region. It then fills that region with random “data noise” then reads back the region's contents to verify that the “data noise” was actually stored. ValiDrive then always rewrites the region's original data to restore whatever data may have been originally stored there.

      For in-depth analysis, Gibson's "SpinRite" can be used -

      The two programs are complimentary but very different. ValiDrive quickly checks for the presence of any storage at 576 locations across a drive's storage media. SpinRite thoroughly, deeply and fully examines, verifies, and exercises any drive's storage media, while also performing comprehensive data recovery if necessary.

      So, ValiDrive is a “quickie” test to see whether any storage is present, whereas SpinRite is the heavy hitter that verifies every byte of a drive's storage to verify its integrity and reliability.

      SpinRite is a data professional's tool at a hobbyist price - inexpensive, but not free.

      https://www.grc.com/sr/spinrite.htm

      Validrive is less than 100K bytes! You could download and test it in 10 minutes. That should answer any questions you may have.

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      • tomxor a day ago

        Spinrite is for HDDs, sure you can use it on SSDs but that's fairly useless in the best case and actively destructive in the worst case. The whole point of Spinrite is exploiting the magnetic nature of HDDs for recovery, that's the only thing that distinguishes it from other generic block device analysis and data recovery software. For SSDs there are plenty of open source software that will work just as well for reading raw data (but what you get for unallocated blocks is at the whim of proprietary SSD controllers anyway).

        Spinrite had utility for combating data loss inherent to the HDD medium... I don't like the idea of ValidDrive because it's a paid user tool to fight fraud, that's a bad incentive, you don't want to benefit from that, it should be free and open.

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      • lmz 16 hours ago

        How is a "write random data and undo it later" test considered "nondestructive"? Unless it has fs knowledge and only does it to unallocated sectors.

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      • multjoy a day ago

        But it's also windows only...

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      • GauntletWizard a day ago

        > In a random, non-repeating sequence, at each of 576 separate evenly spread locations on any drive, ValiDrive reads the current contents of that region. It then fills that region with random “data noise” then reads back the region's contents to verify that the “data noise” was actually stored. ValiDrive then always rewrites the region's original data to restore whatever data may have been originally stored there.

        Does this test actually spot modern fakes? My understanding was that they typically used simple modulo addressing such that any write was immediately readable, and even large continuous chunks operated perfectly fine, it just also "overwrote" that address every 4GB or whatever.

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  • drfuchs a day ago

    Steve Gibson? Now that’s a name I’ve not heard in a long time… Maybe 30 years? SpinRite?

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    • p_ing 21 hours ago

      Steve “RAW sockets Will Destroy the Internet” Gibson

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  • accrual a day ago

    I know Steve Gibson as the author of "Trouble in Paradise", a tool for validating and testing zip disks and drives back in the day. He even aired on one of G4 TV's tech channels once. This guy knows and loves testing storage.

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  • pipes a day ago

    Excellent! I wanted to check a new SD card I bought from Amazon. It's pretty much the best as card available for use with a steam deck, yet often it needs to be reinserted which is making me suspicious

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toss1 a day ago

YUP.

It used to be that people would use local brick & mortar stores to examine the item and then buy it cheaper on Amazon.

I now use Amazon to search, then go buy more reliably at the source company itself, a specialized online store, or locally.

It isn't just about getting ripped off, it's about actual personal and household safety. Many categories such as electronics and batteries, I NEVER buy from Amazon, and I also understand any health & beauty products are so rife with sometimes-dangerous counterfeits that they should be also avoided. This is only going to get worse with the current US regime actively dismantling regulation and H&S systems.

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  • ciupicri 3 hours ago

    I don't understand how someone can use Amazon to search, it's horrible.

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jmclnx a day ago

Same here, got burned from Amazon a HDD with broken pieces, luckily I got a refund. I vowed never to by tech items from Amazon again, you do not really know if you are getting new or some kind of refurbished item.

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  • dylan604 a day ago

    If it's electronic, goes on me, or goes in me, it does not get purchased from Amazon

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Havoc a day ago

Worth pointing out that Amazon is mixed. Not everything is pooled. You can look at the "Dispatches from" field to tell whether its FBA or not

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  • YeahThisIsMe a day ago

    The one that only tells you whether it's shipped by Amazon (pooled) or directly from the seller?

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  • pavel_lishin a day ago

    I'm not willing to do extra work for something that should just be standard.

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lazide a day ago

I don’t remember it as not trusting smaller retailers (as in they would sell you fraudulent goods). I remember it as they would have old stock and try to charge you crazy high prices for it, if they had it at all.

Smaller online retailers, yeah there was trust issues, but a lot of that was due to ‘do they even exist’ and card fraud (due to someone stealing the numbers). That someone would just ship you bullshit was a rare thought. More like they’d just not actually even exist.

And at the beginning (before it got gamified by every scammer under the sun), Amazon was generally quite reliable (it was very rare to have a fake or fraudulent listing), a good way to get almost anything you needed, and quite fast. Not as fast as brick and mortar where you could walk over and get something (if they had it in stock), but WAY faster than almost any other online retailer.

Shipping bullshit/fakes/counterfeit has really taken off as Amazon has killed competition and ‘scaled’, to the point that Alibaba seems like the saner choice most of the time. Which is just nuts.

I agree on the shop local thing. It may be older/somewhat out of date. It may cost more. But you can see in person if it exists and what it actually looks like, and it’s exceptionally rare to have true fraud at brick and mortar because someone can actually go to jail where you live if it happens.

Random online seller? Good luck, even if it may be actual wire fraud or the like.

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  • PeterStuer 14 hours ago

    At the very start it was mostly not trusting a website with your visa card data.

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