Posts by biddibiddibiddibiddi

HP's CEO spells it out: You're a 'bad investment' if you don't buy HP supplies

Re: IP enforcement

Their "IP" is "capable of talking to an HP printer's controller" so it's pretty easy to confirm when something violates it, if it doesn't also contain the embedded and encrypted HP identifier.

Re: Where Is The Profit?

Yeah but Netflix used to be $0.10 per hour of use not that long ago. (And of course that depends on an individual's usage.)

Re: Retarded, or What?

Heroin is sold by the gram, and one recent page says 1 gram (10 doses) is $60 to $100, or a kilo for 10,000 doses is $50k to $100k. Hard to units of weight to units of volume, and doses to pages printed per mL. Typical inkjet cartridges only have 8mL or less (and that's an XL) and print 300 pages.

https://boingboing.net/2009/12/30/graph-compares-price.html

https://www.consumerreports.org/printers/the-high-cost-of-wasted-printer-ink/

Both of those seem to be off, because $0.70 per mL, or $13 to $95 per ounce, would make a cartridge only cost $4 to $25 at the highest, and no OEM ink cartridge has ever cost $4. A cheap cartridge these days, or even in 2018, was $30 to $40 and that would be lower than average volume. If we call it a 5mL cartridge that's $6 per mL or $176 per ounce. Gasoline at $5 per gallon is $0.04 per ounce. Crude oil is $0.015 right now.

Anyway, $60 worth of heroin would be a lot more fun than $60 worth of printer ink, and given the way ink is wasted during use and dries out if unused, the heroin might last longer. And you'd probably regret the heroin less.

Re: You can't be serious!! (shouted John McEnroe style)

Many do contain microchips, that's how a microwave's electronic controls work, even if they aren't "online" and "AI", but they don't care about the date or even know what it might be.

Downvotes are because it's one person applying their poor experience to everyone else on the planet, despite almost everyone else having a good experience. There are plenty of very good third-party, remanufactured and refilled cartridges, which cost FAR less than 2/3 the price of the brand-name cartridges and last as long or longer than the brand-name. Decades ago before all this chip stuff started, I used brands that deliberately refilled beyond an original cartridge because there is a lot of empty space in them to make it look like you're getting more than you are. (Not to mention the kits that let you refill them yourself, but that was too much of a messy hassle.)

There ARE many shitty cartridges out there as well, but that's what happens when you don't pay attention to what you're buying. Anybody that paid 2/3 the price for a lower capacity cartridge was being stupid, and in many cases just going with the OEM brand is a better idea because it avoids any risk.

A single toner cartridge for my previous Xerox printer is $11 third-party, versus $77 from Xerox, and it worked exactly as well and had the same capacity. A full set for my current Canon is $70 third-party, versus $255 Canon-branded. Haven't had to buy any yet. I'm still at 30-40% on the starter cartridges after nearly 5 years. Good luck getting that with an inkjet, even with brand new full-size cartridges that would have been dried out within a month at that rate of printing and and would have ruined the printer (or at least messed it up to the point that the cost to repair it was as much to replace it).

Re: "to make printing a subscription"

Printer manufacturers DO have subscription services for ink and paper already. Inkjet printers are on the verge of free at this point, priced to where they're basically just paying for the shipping it took to get them to the store. They are basically just covering the minimal cost, possibly even selling at a loss, in order to make people FEEL like they're not being locked in and are just buying a product with no strings attached. Then they control what cartridges you can use, and price direct cartridge purchases so high that a subscription actually makes sense for some people. (And companies love subscriptions with predictable income.) Some of them aren't even exactly ink/toner subscriptions, you're actually just paying for the number of pages you print, and you may not even BUY the printer, which is common in the business world but they moved them to the consumer space as well.

HP Instant Ink with Paper Add-on Service

Brother Refresh EZ Print Subscription

Epson ReadyPrint (may be defunct and may have had some value with their EcoTank printers)

Canon PIXMA Print Plan and Auto Replenishment Service

Re: malware to be introduced via print cartridges

Yeah, some sort of buffer overflow COULD be the way it happens, with the shitty programming and security that happens today. In which case HP is complaining about how they keep getting robbed when they leave all the doors and windows on the house open and a big sign on the lawn that says "We're on vacation until xx/xx/xx." But to then actually transfer that data into the computer's OS? Or even to be able to run code that does anything useful (to a hacker) within the printer's own OS, when the thing may have like 2MB of RAM, and who knows what kind of proprietary OS they're running? And man, that is some serious dedication to violating a printer to actually create a custom chip with enough code to infect anything else with malware and create a printer cartridge company to sell them into the world, or even if it just means finding such a small vendor and violating their security and being able to modify their own chip designs to do it. I think HP is both exaggerating the interest anybody would have in all that effort for so little potential return while at the same time pointing out to people just how shoddy their own work is that would even allow it to happen through all those hurdles on a device that should never be doing anything remotely capable of it happening, just to create an artificial barrier to people having a choice in their consumables.

Re: malware to be introduced via print cartridges

As long as it's made very clear right up-front that it will only work with brand-name or properly licensed cartridges, so that people know they will not be able to get anything cheaper, I don't see a need to make it illegal. It's a customer's choice if they want to buy a product that is limited in that way. But I'm talking a large label with high contrast on every side of the package, a clear statement in any text, audio or video marketing (not fast-talking or small print), legal requirements for any online sellers like Amazon that the listing must clearly describe the limitation, so that it's known before purchase, then clear information in the manual, a sticker on the device, a popup message when installing drivers, and no arguments if an opened device is returned unused. But any company that tried that, like selling a car with a clear statement that you can only use Hyundai brand gasoline, would never make a sale. And obviously modifying the product at a later date so that it's not possible should be illegal.

Re: HP Toner

Laser printers in general are more solidly built and better designed than inkjets as the people buying them generally do expect to be doing a lot more with them and are often businesses. They also just have a lot more moving parts and electronics than an inkjet so they kind of have to be otherwise they'd be falling apart at an even faster rate and couldn't justify the increased up-front cost.

Re: HP Toner

I doubt they were getting any of your money for some time anyway as they stopped manufacturing those types of printers a long time ago and moved the name onto the shittier models. They simply lasted so long that with some maintenance parts made by third-parties, the original ones continued to work and could be re-sold over and over again, even with warranties when they were refurbished. HP may possibly have gotten some few cents out of licensing to be able to make parts but nothing significant, and I'm sure they hated having to allow it since it meant they weren't selling more of their newer printers, and those have been off patent for quite a while now so they haven't made any money at all for nearly a decade.

Re: HP Toner

LJ5 (and LJ4) printers were so amazing and ubiquitous that just about every current printer will work just fine if you use the LaserJet 5 driver to print to them. Just without any special features or specific controls.

Re: HP Toner

HP was still selling reasonably good printer products around that time period, at least laser printers. Ones that weren't deliberately crippled, designed to be discarded after a short period of use, or sold at a loss to make it up on the consumables (though the supplies were still overpriced), and they were never modified to disable third-party supplies. People are still buying and using Laserjet 5 monochrome printers, first introduced in the mid-90s, and there are still replacement parts made for them. And their print quality is exactly as good as new model monochrome printers, just not up to the speed of good new ones.

You are probably due for an imaging drum replacement, though, if you haven't changed that before. :-)

Re: malware to be introduced via print cartridges

Even if the cartridge does have a chip that is used to identify whether it's HP-branded or not, WHY should any of the code in the printer EXECUTE any code from the chip?! Why should it get loaded into memory in any way that is transmitted to the computer?! Why should the printer driver be able to load a VIRUS onto the computer?

Re: Strange words

There are many perfectly reputable brands of third-party ink/toner that have been around for many years, selling quality products that work just as well as manufacturer-branded products at a fraction of the cost. Yes, on a site like Amazon or other marketplaces where anybody can sell anything, you'll find a lot of junk that is even cheaper from companies that were just registered 3 days ago and won't exist 2 days from now, but there are also good third-party brands there as well as brands that have their own sites.

There is virtually no manufacturer-branded ink/toner that is priced to match the quality difference that it may have over third-party ink (10% better quality doesn't even deserve 25% higher price, let alone 300%), at least in the consumer space and for businesses just printing random items that don't need to be perfect or last forever. Obviously niche applications use specialized ink/toner with special requirements which third-party makers might not meet due to the added costs and low volume. The simple fact that liquid ink will dry out if not used regularly, often disabling the printer itself, makes it absolutely stupid to spend extra for manufacturer-branded ink (beyond the poor value of inkjet to start with).

Japan's lunar lander is dying before our eyes after setting down on Moon

I'd say they can't claim to have successfully made a soft landing until they rule out the possibility that the landing disabled the craft's solar panels. If it did, then they didn't have a successful landing, they had a minimally-damaging but ultimately crippling crash. The Donner party didn't make a successful wagon train migration just because half of them eventually reached California. If the scientists can't figure out why they're not working or what caused the problem, then it's kind of a failure because they can't know what to do differently to avoid it happening again.

Microsoft suggests command line fiddling to get faulty Windows 10 update installed

I just freshly set up 2 virtual machines last night, Windows 10 and Windows 10 Pro using the default setup from the latest ISO, no BitLocker and they created default recovery partitions of 522MB. Got them progressively updated until just now, when both of them gave this error message. So stupid.

Re: Recurring partition size issues

The instructions are for increasing the partition size by 250MB, not to make it 250MB in total. The recovery partition is supposed to be at the end of the drive with current versions of Windows, so when you shrink the C drive then delete the recovery partition and recreate it, it will be 250MB larger because the instructions use all available unallocated space. The assumption is that no matter what the current size, it's full because of all the cruft that builds up with updates, but another 250MB will fix it. Until the next time it's not big enough because this is a stopgap solution. Disk management won't tell you how much space is being used, as it isn't marked as a "valid" partition type with a filesystem, but diskpart or other disk utilities can tell you. However mine is 82% free (1.6GB) so that is just as likely not the problem as being the problem.

The instructions are for the "standard" situation and don't take into account systems that still have the recovery partition at the beginning of the drive, between the EFI partition and C drive, or if you have your drive partitioned with anything other than a C drive, or if you're trying to leave unallocated space on an SSD for overprovisioning. If anything exists other than the default configuration created by a fresh installation of a current Windows release, you have to figure out how to do it on your own. If your installation is from a Win10 DVD from like 7 years ago, then it created the WinRE partition size which that version of Windows needed, but every major update/version since then has created a larger partition during a fresh install, but they don't increase the size of it when you update one by one, and now the most recent versions can't function with that original recovery partition size. And with buggy updates like this, even sizes beyond what is required don't work properly.

I have a recently-made Win11 VM that created a 625MB recovery partition which is already 538MB filled.

Re: Recurring partition size issues

Ugh. Fixing the partition doesn't fix the issue. My recovery environment was somehow disabled although the partition was there and I was getting this error. I deleted the recovery partition (partition 3 with my C and D volumes AFTER it as well as 300GB of unpartitioned space), which had 600MB used, and recreated the partition using the instructions, which created a 300GB recovery partition at the end of the disk. Brilliant! Exactly what I expected. Creating a partition using interleaved free space with diskpart is a pain so I used AOMEI Partition Assistant to make it unformatted, then used the rest of the instructions to turn it into a recovery partition and format it. But then enabling WinRE failed still because the WinRE.wim file was missing so I had to go into the Windows ISO to find the install.esd file (using 7Zip because Windows doesn't open that format and SOME ISOs use the esd file instead of a wim file) and inside that find the WinRE.wim file. Enabled WinRE and everything says it's working, but still get the error, even after a reboot. And I noticed the recovery partition only showed 11MB used. The WinRE.wim file was deleted since that data is supposed to move to the partition so I dug it out again, disabled and re-enabled WinRE, and now the partition show 333MB used. But I still get the error.

It's really quite amazing that anyone is able to just use a Windows machine and never run across completely unfixable problems.

Re: Not even bare minimum.

Windows installers haven't fit on common optical media for a very long time. Dual-layer DVDs were never really popular due to limited need by the time they were readily-available and much higher cost, and half the speed of single-layer DVDs, much slower than even a cheap USB 2.0 flash drive, so 4.7GB was the max for most people. MS probably tried to keep the installers below 4GB for a long time so that flash drives of that size could be used, but once they reached the point that it wasn't enough, there was no longer a need to try very hard because they just moved to requiring an 8GB stick and had plenty of room to be inefficient AND include a lot more garbage.

Recurring partition size issues

This is something that we run into regularly because of Microsoft's decisions about how these partitions are created. For a long time they were putting this partition at the beginning of a disk with a small size, and then updates would require that volume to be larger so they would fail or have other problems. They eventually started putting it at the end of the desk, but every update still ends up needing to make it larger, so user disk space also slowly gets smaller. They don't just make it a reasonable size one time and leave it, or *gasp* come up with a better solution that eliminates the problem completely. And that causes problems for users who know that an SSD needs to have overprovisioned space for long-term health. It's "640KB should be enough for anyone" over and over again.

Disk Management is not good. It's bare minimum functionality to create partitions and delete them ajncant resize, move, clone while retaining data. Plenty of better and free utilities exist and can resize this partition via GUI.

Crippled Peregrine lunar lander set for fiery return to Earth in matter of days

Re: Burn baby ... oh you've gone out ...

They mentioned the leak has slowed. Kinda seems obvious that less fuel leaks out when most of it has already leaked out. Whatever failed is probably freezing cold and with lower pressure in the tank it may not be able to force open whatever gap there was as wide as before so at some point it will stop leaking entirely. I had a car tire recently with a very small puncture that would lose air after I filled it up, but after a certain point it would stop for that reason.

C'mon, we need to mount an Armageddon-style mission to rescue, repair and refuel the craft so that it can swing around Earth and make another try for the Moon. Too bad Bruce Willis and Michael Clark Duncan couldn't make it this time; it would be great if we got the entire same team together, 26 years older.

I say we still using an oil-drilling crew for it, too.

Tesla owners in deep freeze discover the cold, hard truth about EVs

These people are waiting until they're at ZERO battery before plugging them in?

Other than that, it's a hilarious situation that you have to use 10% of your car's total range just to warm it up to the point that you can plug it in. And then the charging costs more because it's taking longer than normal (sounds like a design goal for Tesla), and you're blocking the charging space from other people for even longer.

Maybe a thin wrapper of uranium on every battery would do the trick.

Or maybe a pedal device you could attach to generate power for a heater.

FCC's Affordable Connectivity Program dangles by a financial thread

Re: If only they'd pay to install the infrastructure...

One reason I like my city is that I have 2 cable options plus AT&T fiber at somewhat reasonable prices, and the cable has always been reliable from both providers. (I've never actually had bad cable service anywhere I've lived. Rarely ever had anything more than an occasional brief outage during maintenance hours. Never anything less than the rated speeds.) I don't even consider DSL service options. And in a small part of the city, Comcast is even available as they were planning to expand into the city but stopped the buildout quickly for some reason and were allowed to just service whoever they could reach at that point.

Spectrum's prices are about as expected for a big bad ISP that has a little competition. Download speeds can be high but until recently they have always simply refused to provide anything but 10Mbps upload speeds at any tier, even on business packages. The other provider is WOW! which bought out a city-owned cable ISP years ago, and their prices are a bit lower but they provide up to 50Mbps upload speeds (although they charge a $14 gateway/modem rental fee). And AT&T is surprisingly cheap. For a little bit more than the price of Spectrum's un-discounted non-promotional 500/10 cable service I can get symmetrical 1Gb fiber. And AT&T might suck but I just don't want to give Spectrum equal money for such horrible speed plans. (OOOOH, gigabit download with 50Mbps upload!)

Unfortunately everything else about living in this city or surrounding cities is on the high end of cost. At some point in the next several months I'm going to have to move and I expect that when I find a place with affordable rent I'll also find that I have limited ISP options at higher prices.

Re: Beware the Hook Beneath the Bait

Is that a pre-paid or post-paid plan at that point? Considering those free ones are not their standard plans, what plan do they put you on automatically? I'd assume their very lowest to be a close match to the free one, so it would at least be a small amount you might have to pay for one month and then cancel (if you can stand to lose that phone number at that point now that our lives are tied to them), although "small" is relative.

Just in time for me to (hopefully) get approved for Social Security Disability so that I would have possibly qualified for the ACP, after almost 2 years, 2 denials and a final hearing with a judge last week.

But I'm sure all those ISPs will simply offer an equivalent discount to formerly-eligible customers and take the hit to their revenues because it's the right thing to do.

Not even poor Notepad is safe from Microsoft's AI obsession

4 kilobytes?

Re: What I need

There are "copy as plain text" extensions, but I usually have a Notepad window open already anyway and don't copy from browsers to other apps that support formatting so I don't use them now, but I did for some years. Of course those extensions require using the context menu to copy instead of just Ctrl-C.

I don't even like tabs in browsers or any other applications, and use them very sparingly now that it's become completely impossible to disable them and everything defaults to opening in tabs. I have a taskbar for that already, didn't need every app to have its own taskbar, and I don't need to keep 72 websites open at all times, I have bookmarks to handle quick access to them later, and I hate grouped apps on the taskbar. I'm fine with the taskbar filling up and making an additional row with a scroll arrow. I guess always-on-top could be useful, something that many utilities type apps ought to have, but I have two screens if I want to watch one thing while typing in another app, and even when I don't I'm very proficient with alt-tab (which Microsoft co-opted in Edge to work the way ctrl-tab works for tabs in other apps). I won't even tile windows. Huge file capability becomes important when you're trying to read system logs, and the current Notepad considers 5MB to be "too big to open quickly with an SSD and a 4GHz 12-core CPU" but the log files might be 50MB or more which Notepad just hangs on.

I wouldn't even mind if a replacement program WAS a couple of MB in size due to use of current coding methods or whatever, rather than being written in assembler so it actually results in negative disk space used, if it was just a standalone program, maybe even a standalone executable, that could be dropped in any folder and have a shortcut point to it, with no requirement for any DLLs or anything else in another folder, and the only thing it put in the Windows registry was its own application folder that held the simplest information like maybe recently used files, default save location, display font settings, default printer options, that sort of thing. A quick option to associate common text file types to it would be nice, but not required as it's pretty simple to associate file types by browsing to the executable from the properties of one file. (I think the program has to register itself somehow as an installed application to be listed as an option when you change associations that way, too, or in the Default Programs list.) But most importantly is that is opens quickly.

Re: Notepad2

They look okay but still way beyond requirements to just replace a paper pad and pencil.

Interesting, and I might do it, but they could easily break the ability to do that, and even make it so just copying executables didn't work. (Really weird that they still include the old version as an Optional Feature, but it doesn't actually work if you install it. I guess they just crippled it enough and then didn't want to put in the effort to really remove it, since that would be invisible and make no profit.) If I coded my own I could make it do exactly what I wanted without having to work around MS's breakages, which is why I wanted to try to learn to code decades ago just to make things for myself and throw them to the wind for anybody else that found them useful. But coding was confusing.

Find and replace works just fine in Notepad. But they won't be able to make it open 100MB+ files. All that memory will already be used up running the executable and associated code for the AI features.

It's almost enough to make me keep a paper pad on my desk to write notes, but it's hard to copy and paste a URL that way. Maybe shit like this will be the thing that finally makes me attempt learning to code again 25+ years after the first time, just so I can write a 250KB shareware notes app that doesn't connect to the Microsoft Store and doesn't send my notes anywhere outside my computer.

Did you mean to type "911" [or 999 in the UK] instead of 555-1212? Would you like to dial 911 now? BUTTONS: (Yes / Continue)

We noticed you typed 555-1212. Cowriter Copilot OpenAI Bing Search has located 555-1212 associated with 73 accounts on Instagram, Twitter, Truth Social, TikTok, Facebook, Snapchat and Zoophilia.org and followed them on your accounts on these sites. Your searches will help us provide more relevant advertising and search results in the future you goatfucker.

Re: WHY?!

Please, don't. I already hate that every application now uses the Windows display settings for things like color and dark/light mode so that you can't have one app look different from others, and they're all starting to use the built-in Windows spell-checker so you can't disable it in only one app if it's an annoyance and can't customize for a single app. I don't want every app to pop up AI suggestions when I'm typing even when it's completely useless and unnecessary (not that I'd leave the global setting turned on, but they may take that option away). The operating system should not contain application features that every application uses so that there's no differentiation.

Notepad++ is always touted as an alternative to Notepad, but N++ is even more overkill and less simple than all the changes to Notepad (which at least are just out of the way). Anything that isn't just a blank window where text can be entered with a menu to save the file, plus basic text manipulation like searching and copy/paste, is more than I need. Formatting is mostly just to make it easier for me to physically see, or when I need to use large text to make a sign and just want it to look cute. The Notepad executable is 197KB on my system; I bet it could still be ported to run on an 8086 computer. Even having been open for over a day it's using less than 2MB of RAM, so make it a 286 CPU. The Notepad++ executable is 7MB, not counting all the other stuff in the portable package that makes it 20.6MB (I don't know what libraries and stuff Notepad really requires in total). Just Notepad++'s executable probably wouldn't run on a 486, and it hit 15.4MB of RAM as soon as it opened so it wouldn't even have run on my second and very expensive PC (without paging to disk).

Hopefully MS won't bother with injecting this into the Windows 10 Notepad, as a rare benefit to trying to make Win11 seem more advanced and desirable, but since Win10 and Win11 are essentially the same code they may do it just so they don't have to maintain two applications on the Store.

Re: Missing the point....again

This is due to the way capitalism and the economy work at this point. Nobody can live on being innovators from the ground up, and the companies that will pay you aren't interested in risking anything on true innovation. Even one bad quarter due to taking a risk and it not working can tank a company (unless they brutally axe enough people to satisfy the shareholders and market and promise they won't try that nonsense again), and simply maintaining isn't enough, either. So things have to be ZOOM WOW without actually being risky, and are just slight modifications or renaming of something that existed already. Or as in this case, a big but meaningless change to something that is completely irrelevant; nobody is going to ditch Windows because Notepad turns to crap, and it doesn't hurt MS if people just find some other simple text editor.

Silicon Valley weirdo's quest to dodge death – yours for $333 a month

Re: consuming no more than 1,977 calories a day

You'd only need to gain 7 pounds to be considered "overweight" by the American medical system that uses BMI as a Holy Unit of Measurement. If you broke a leg and were laid up while it healed, you'd probably gain that and struggle to lose it for the rest of your life. But he doesn't necessarily have to do a lot of exercising to keep his cardiovascular system healthy. There are very obese people that have healthy hearts and clean arteries and livers because they hit the genetic lottery jackpot, meaning if they had cut their calories down severely early on, they wouldn't have gotten fat and wouldn't have needed to exercise which may be the way he is. He was probably destined to be a healthy weight, with good physical health, no matter what he did. His diet is probably 80% unrelated to his health and biological age, other than just not eating more than he was burning.

Re: About that very specific 1,977 calories...

You get to write your own prescriptions? I have a business proposition for you.

Which probably means nothing would have killed her early no matter what she did because she happened to have a really good set of genes, and she wouldn't have lived any longer if she'd done all the healthy stuff either but she sure would have enjoyed it less.

It's possible to live a very long time without being physically healthy, and to die quite young despite great physical health. And an obsession like this is by definition a sign of poor mental health. There are things you can do to ensure you don't die "early" due to health, but past that it's essentially random genetics that you can't predict or control in any way, and nobody's "secret to long life" will work for everyone and there's no way to know if it will work for you in particular. Just enjoy your life and be a good person so that the years you do get will be worth living.

Official: Hewlett Packard Enterprise wants to swallow Juniper Networks in $14B deal

Re: does juniper do much in the "AI" space?

> Looking at Juniper's stock price since the dot com era, I was quite surprised how little it has appeared to move in the past 20 years.

Some very few companies are happy having stable, small amounts of growth and profit with a steady return for shareholders that is sustainable for years and decades without trying to make every quarter record-breaking, and get themselves in the news regardless of whether it's for good or bad reasons, while risking sudden plummets that could make the company at risk of falling apart and being bought out for cheap.

I don't even understand how "AI" can have anything to do with getting packets from point A to point B. It's just algorithms, all it's doing is looking at the traffic to determine if there might be better routes or where there is a problem. It's nothing special. It's not anything new. It's just sticking the latest marketing words on stuff that's been in use for years, like Cloud.

expand our total addressable market = reduce the amount of competition

Amazon on the hook for predictably revolting use of concealed clothes hook spy cam

Re: Another frivolous case

The description doesn't suggest using it as a towel hook in a bathroom. The image doesn't suggest using it as a towel hook in a bathroom. The image suggests using it as a hook to hold something that looks possibly like a towel, in an undefinable location with absolutely nothing that looks like a bathroom item other than a towel that can exist in any room.

Re: Another frivolous case

>> "Amazon failed to properly inspect John Doe’s camera three times—including an inspection by Amazon’s Product Safety team tasked with preventing the type of harm alleged here. ... (looking to the

defendant’s conduct in light of its own policies in duty analysis). Despite these inspections, Amazon approved the camera"

"These allegations raise a reasonable inference Amazon sold a camera knowing it would be used to record a third party in a bathroom without their consent."

"Despite these inspections, Amazon approved the camera. ... Amazon then exercised control over the camera’s product description—including over the photographs encouraging using the camera in

a private bathroom as a towel hook.<<

There is no indication that it "failed to properly inspect" the listing. You and the victim and lawyer are still basing all of this on the assumption that the image is of a bathroom towel hook. You're deciding with absolute certainty that the image is a bathroom towel hook. There is nothing in that image that implies that it's in a bathroom. So it comes down to whether a judge will think that it's reasonable that someone looking at the listing might have thought it was a bathroom towel hook AND therefore was advocating use of it in a bathroom. The victim and her lawyers are biased in their evaluation of the image, as is everyone reading about this case who knows that it was in fact used in a bathroom. A hook that is capable of being used in a bathroom is not automatically a bathroom hook, and a camera that is capable of being hidden in an illegal location is not automatically an illegal camera, just as a knife that is capable of stabbing someone is not automatically a murder weapon.

Hidden camera recording without consent is not, in itself, a felony anywhere in the US. (Yet for some reason, audio recording without consent CAN be illegal, depending on the state.) It only becomes illegal if the recording is being done in a location where the recorded person has a reasonable expectation of personal privacy for certain activities, such as changing rooms, a bathroom, a breastfeeding room. At no point in the marketing is usage in such private places mentioned explicitly, all the uses described are legal, and the image used in the claim which they say indicates that it is meant to be used in a bathroom is questionable. All it shows is some towel-like things on the hooks, and a shelf. There are no bathroom-specific items shown. So the plaintiffs will absolutely first have to get a judge or jury to decide that the image could be understood by a "reasonable person" as being a picture of a bathroom and therefore a suggestion that the camera be used in an illegal manner. IF they decide that is the case, then they have to show that Amazon willfully or negligently ignored the "obvious" marketing of illegal usage during their normal review process. The fact that "bathroom spy camera" searches bring these devices up can support the claim that Amazon doesn't do enough to block it, but it doesn't necessarily support a claim that Amazon facilitates illegal uses, since Amazon's search functionality is WILDLY variable in its ability to return relevant results and often will return results that only match a single word, or no words at all. And just not preventing people from finding items that could be used illegally probably isn't an actionable thing, legally. (There doesn't seem to be any indication that anyone actually REPORTED the item as being marketed for illegal uses and it was ignored. The plaintiff is only claiming that Amazon's normal review processes didn't catch it.)

But none of this will ever actually come up, because it will be settled before going to trial, like so many things that desperately need legal precedent to be set but never do.

Lapsus$ teen sentenced to indefinite detention in hospital for Nvidia, GTA cyberattacks

Re: Given that it appears….

Perhaps it should just provide better mental healthcare and education so that parents don't have to struggle to get help for their neurodivergent children. Make it so that it's just a regular thing, no harder than any other part of being a parent, rather than something that can take a significantly larger portion of the parents' time and energy than caring for a neurotypical child, and often becoming simply impossible. There would still be those who don't avail themselves of the resources, because people are dumb, but far fewer.

SEC charges ex-medtech CEO with fraud for selling plastic fake implants

How did it even work if they weren't implanting a functioning receiver? Did they just gaslight the doctors and patients for as long as possible when they complained it wasn't doing anything? Could they not have just made it shorter and still have a copper core, with a provision that it might not have the same power level as the full-size one maybe? Even more profit for the doctors since the implantation would still be billed at the same amount, and no reason the company would need to charge less for the smaller unit either. Small, medium or large, you're getting a device that does a thing and that's what you pay for. (The company would have to do some testing and apply for approval, so that would cost a small amount.)

Google pencils in limited third-party cookie purge for January

If they hadn't already shifted to Chrome/Chromium-based due to third-party cookie blocking...why would they do it now that Chrome is going to block third-party cookies as well?