I thought I bought a camera, but no DJI sold me a license to use it [video]
youtube.com
youtube.com
Every TV, phone, camera, tablet, fridge, ... is becoming a spying device like in the worst scifi dystopias. And as soon as the company stops supporting them they become trash to pollute the planet so they can sell you the next one.
Regulations should have come a decade a go. We own nothing, we have no privacy, we are sold products 24/7. I will vote for a goverment that protects me of this total corporate surveillance. It is their duty towards citizens to do so.
And it will happen, like feudalism died this techno-feudalism will die too.
Yeah yeah, survivor bias, rose tinted glasses, conspiracy theories, blah blah. I've heard all the canned refutations. It's true. Appliance manufacturers got better at making things worse.
And even if the device doesn't die early, it will eventually have to be replaced for one reason or another. I got 20 years out of my Honda, which wasn't great but not terrible either, but trying to replace it with something new that had comparable reputation for reliability and also no touch screen computer spyware bullshit was a serious problem. My only choice was Mazda and the although my new car does have the physical buttons and knobs I want, they are easily the worst quality buttons and knobs. All mushy with no satisfying clicks. One company holding out and selling cars or appliances without the new horse shit isn't enough, because without comparable competition they are still free to cut corners and make something worse than could be purchased in the past.
A few years later all microwaves had chiclet keypads with terrible user interfaces. They’ve improved from there over the years but never to the convenience of the original knob layout.
I put whatever leftovers in there. Pasta, chicken and rice, soups, BBQ, doesn't matter. I lightly cover it. Press Reheat. Perfect every time. I don't have to judge how much to turn two knobs.
Same goes for potatoes. Stab it with a fork a few times, butter and salt the outside, toss them in and press "Potato". Perfect baked potato every time.
Same goes for steaming veggies. Frozen or fresh, doesn't matter. Toss them in a bowl, put a bit of water/butter/seasonings in it, lightly cover, press Vegetable, and boom perfectly steamed veggies.
The one-touch sensor modes on my microwave are fantastic. And this is a 20-year-old microwave, so it's not like adding this tech made it less reliable. I'll be sad if I ever need to have a different microwave.
I've only ever left the how high on high, and the time is 3 minutes for chilled, 10 for frozen. so in a way I agree, two buttons saying chilled and frozen would also work for me.
I've used a number of microwaves with these modes which asked for a weight. Those were pretty untrustworthy on their results, because moisture content and starting temp can vary greatly.
I stumbled upon them, but I strongly think the mid-2000's era GE Profile are probably some of the best appliances ever made. They were at least the best dishwasher, oven, and microwave I've ever used.
In many cases this would thoroughly annoy certain authoritarian regimes that are normalised as totalitarian surveillance states. Their exports would be disrupted. What a pity.
TVs are used by multiple people too so how does that even track legally.
My partners will fly through menus agreeing to everything if I'm not there.
I'm using a universal remote that doesn't have a microphone and it complains about that too.
Sometimes during software updates, this pairing is broken, and it never tells me that the pairing has been removed, and never forces me to pair the remote.
My next TV will be a big monitor.
If you want to modify GP’s proposal to exclude things that also have a service, how long until DJI adds a service to their drone? (It might even be a negative duration; I don’t own one, but it would shock me if there wasn’t some kind of service associated already, perhaps to prevent flying a drone in unauthorized areas [or justified as such] or allow access to some online component of camera service.)
You should be able to use your phone and install software on it without signing up for the sellers services, I think there is no reason to not allow that except evil lockin.
See windows for what happens when you don't legally enforce that, its ridiculous windows forces you to sign up to their services.
And that of course is also why this only happens via regulation.
And computers. Sure it's a good idea to have a password, but that's not the same as a user ID registered with a company.
My most recent example: I wanted to calibrate my display using a "calibrite display pro hl" and suddenly got prompted with a software update. After updating, an account is suddenly required. This device is way past its return date. I cannot return it. I'm now stuck with a device that cannot be used with their software without creating an account.
Another example: Philips Hue devices were changed to require an account.
These days I focus on getting commercial variants of devices, since they usually don't have cloud or smart crap in them. For example, there's commercial variants of many TVs. They don't have smart crap in them and are designed for 24/7 usage.
Is the fantasy that some entrepreneurial savior will come along and voluntarily forgo all the massive spying profits in order to cater to the minute proportion of consumers perceptive enough to realize they're getting molested on the daily?
How about smartphones, for example? "Vote with your wallet," says the smirking corporatocrat, "and just buy a mobile operating system that respects your personal privacy." Alright professor, looks like my choices are iOS or Android, so I'm kind of hosed either way? Unless I want to return to a 2004 feature set, or perhaps a GNU/Linux paperweight with a 20-minute battery life that can't use banking apps or place phone calls?
I exaggerate (but in my opinion only slightly), and sincere apologies for tone--but it's quite frustrating to be met again and again with such a smug dismissal of what to many of us feels like an inescapable horror. This depraved race to the bottom, with every MBA-steered ship vying to see who can violate us the hardest, seems to be standard practice these days, and "purchase different products" puts the onus on consumers to fix what isn't their fault in a way that leaves an awful taste in my mouth.
I wanted to buy an etablet but Remarkable has a subscription, so I bought a smaller brand, it's worse, but they got my money.
You want a phone that respects your privacy? There isn't a business model that supports that, so don't support it. Yes you can't have your banking app, but that's the deal, you just dont like it. If no one bought it, there would be a market for alternatives.
Nothing will change these companies apart from market forces.
You tell me that nothing will change the companies apart from market forces, but in response to another commenter you said it well yourself: "this kind of behavior should be illegal." If we had consumer protection laws, and those laws had teeth, maybe a company would have to consider the possible risk to future profits of engaging in the next abusive, ethically bankrupt scheme. It wouldn't be possible to be, as former FTC chair and antitrust warrior Lina Khan put it, "too big to care."
I'm not so naive as to imagine that more economic guardrails are a panacea for consumer suffering, but to me it seems that the globalized economy and its Western democratic hegemons have spent much of the post-WWII era on a deregulatory death march, and we can see with our own eyes how well it's going.
The even worse outcome of failing to protect the consumer at the point of sale is you’ve tacitly swallowed the tenets of an authoritarian surveillance state.
The small claims courts solution of course not everybody has the time or resources to do that, so the company wins that way.
We need new regulations that stops it before it gets to the point where you have to go to small claims court or class action to redress the wrong.
When people are speeding, you don’t need individuals to sue them in small claims court to enforce the speed limit. Having that requirement for consumer goods is bizarre.
I bought an android phone that worked and soon it will reset every 3 days, so Im unreachable unless I enter the PIN. What kills the idea of having a secondary phone just in case.
I think that can be disabled, though. I know of a couple of folks that won’t even enable Face ID. I think that’s insane. The phone has our entire life on it. The thought of having that much information available to any pickpocket is sobering.
I refuse to use custom apps for things like banking and store loyalty, etc. I keep a photo of my store loyalty card’s barcode in my Photos app, because it does get me significant discounts, occasionally, but I won’t install their app.
Most of these custom apps seem to be pretty shoddy quality, in my opinion (I’m a snob, though. Many folks don’t seem to mind). They seem to be written with some kind of hybrid system, and some are little more than webviews.
> Enables a future optional security feature, which will automatically restart your device if locked for 3 consecutive days.
https://support.google.com/product-documentation/answer/1434... (archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20250421103659/https://support.g...)
In few months the option will just disappear?
Disabling the PIN reduces security (what kind of "hacker" gives such bad advice?).
I bet we wont be able to disable that feature in few months.
Pain in the butt with work phone too - take 3 day holidays and it stopps working.
Bad feature created by people who dont think.
We need to make small claims court far more accessible. But outside of the GDPR, there's also just weirdness in terms of what is covered where. I can appreciate that having laws at the county level, the municipal level can be onerous to comply with, so you want things at the national level -- if not international.
But as soon as you do that, some asshat works to reduce regulation because "regulation bad" without any qualifiers. And then as you say, lack of enforcement, is that alternative to this.
Give them their laws, make them feel as if things have been done, but then don't enforce. You're in the same boat, but people "feel" better.
This is a bit of a tangent, but where I live you have to cook a hamburger to safe temperatures. It is illegal to do otherwise, unless it is freshly ground in house, and we have actual, real inspectors that will ensure safe handling practices.
(This isn't me railing about eating raw meat, I eat my steak med-rare. But that's a steak, if you're going to cook a hamburger that way, you need to wash the outside, grind it up, and cook+eat it within hours. Many restaurants are buying mass produced burger paddies and not even cooking them, which is pure insane.)
Yet when I was in California, it's OK to just present a charred outside, a raw inside, along with loads of parasites. The restaurant is covered if they put up a sign saying something about 'raw meat can make you sick' or whatever.
So every restaurant puts up the sign, then just doesn't care about cooking it to safe temps. Yee-haw, FREEDOM!
Point is, people themselves, everywhere ... whether it's a small business or just their customers, don't even know, understand, or really care.
And this is the true problem. People can't even understand the risks of raw meat, something I was taught in public school when, oh I don't know, freakin' 10 years old!
While it doesn't seem that difficult to people on this forum likely, it surely is for the average person. Clearly.
The foot in the door was theft prevention. Crime rates in the targeted regions of those devices was the original motivation and the enabler. From Chesterton's Fence principle, that has to be solved before the zero consumer ownership problem can be solved.
If I have a thing, that thing should obey me. Be it a crowbar, a PC, a smart lamp or whatever. It's a value in and of itself that I can trust in my things. What about criminals? Sure, it is convenient a car can spy on a criminal and tell the police where they are, but we shouldn't allow that. Just like it would be convenient to force priests and lawyers to tell there secrets, but we as a society decided that there is greater value in confidentiality.
I mean especially for a society like the US which is traditionally individualistic and distrustful towards government etc., it should be a matter of principle that "my stuff" doesn't spy on my and serves me and no one else.
Give it 5 years. The xiaomi or LG above the bed is likely already watching and listening. Interesting how the taboo shifted from "no camera in the apartment" to "no camera in a bathroom". In many short term rentals you have outright always connected IP camera installed inside apartment because of "break ins", "squatters", etc. The owners don't see a problem, don't accept complains.
Those IR sensors are basically cameras; they are wired up for power, they trigger with your image.
So don’t act all surprised when they are hacked and subverted to the visible spectrum and recording capabilities.
So it matters not whether it's one pixel or 50 megapixels doing the work there, what matters is that everyone who attends a baseball game or eats at a restaurant is accustomed to a conscious machine that can "see" their buttcheeks well enough to know exactly when to activate the flusher without any pesky hu-man touching it.
And that there is electrical power and, probably, networking available in the restrooms so that the conscious machines can stay alive and discuss buttcheek sightings with one another and their mothership.
Yeah, everybody here agrees. The main problem is to get this implemented and this will not happen by just venting here. So I'm still waiting for someone with good ideas.
The fact nearly zero legislation has been introduced to punish companies for violating the protection of our data with the bazillions of data leaks is telling of which master they serve.
Most companies care more about it being a rental device than a spying device
I'm sure a bunch of elderly magistrates would feel that this kind of requirement is obscene and would readily side with the claimant.
Collectively this would cost the company a lot.
Think of renters stuck in a place with units like that! They too should have the right to require un-tracked appliances and be free from being forced to agree to additional contract overheads that aren't obvious in the price / what should be reasonable terms.
https://craphound.com/unauthorized-bread/
Discussion here (2020, 123 comments):
Though, it's usually the store who's responsible for that refund, not the manufacturer . Still, stores are motivated to reduce return rates and will put pressure on manufactures to not do stupid things.
- I go to the store and make the purchase.
- A delivery crew brings the washing machine to my house.
- They unhook my old washing machine and take it away.
- They attach my new washing machine in its place.
Even with the strongest reasonable protection laws I can imagine, the most the store would be obligated to do if the new machine is unsatisfactory would be to detach the new machine and take it away. And I've probably had to pay for one or two visits from the installers at that point. Regardless of whether the extra visit from the installers carries any extra cost for me, there's enough hassle associated with this that I can easily imagine keeping a machine where I'm not happy with some app requirement because it'd be too much trouble to make the change.
"The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it."
Looking forward to argumentative washing machines.
Thanks to all upthread for the reminder.
Last week I was sorta forced to install the app for the laundry room at the place I am renting.
They previously used another big service provider, and had troubles with plumbing and there was undoubtedly finger-pointing between the laundry service and the landlady, and eventually, landlady switched to a new laundry service provider, which has a very generic-sounding app.
So you can pay two ways (no coins and no currency): obtain a stored-value card from the little kiosk in the laundry room (it will cost you, like $10 just for the card with $0 on it.) or you can install the mobile app, and load money into your account. (The account is not shared with any stored-value card, so they'll be separate.)
So last time, I opted for a card, and I immediately punched a hole in it, so I could string it to a lanyard. That disabled the card! It is some sort of RFID/NFC thing which has little spiderweb tendrils, rather than a single chip in one place that can be avoided.
So this time around, I installed the Android app. I loaded money on the card (of course you can't specify the exact amount, but you select a dropdown, and the $10 or $15 or $25 or $40 is never an exact multiple of the cost of a load.)
And the mobile app demands a lot of permissions. It wants camera access, and Nearby Devices, and Location, and probably Precise Location too. And then you need to enable Bluetooth, and you also need to be standing right inside the laundry room in order for the app to go anywhere (yes, you can't even check your account profile, or balance, or add money, unless you're inside the laundry room, so fuck me if I wanted to set this up in the comfort of "my" home before going down there in public.)
And the app relies on a shitty QR code scan anyway. I mean, you can tap the NFC stored-value card, but your phone won't tap-to-pay the fuckin' washing machines. And they don't take credit cards, or coins or bills. And the soda machines here don't take credit cards, or bills either, only coins. LOL!
And the app has a fucked-up self-image. It lists 16 washing machines. There are 6 in the room. So there are 10 "phantom machines". I informed the Support dudes like in Marh 2024, when they first installed everything. I told them the app was a dumbass and listed too many machines. I showed them how I was standing in the correct room and the other two rooms had likewise fucked "phantom machines" too, but I didn't care about them. We went around in circles with Support asking for "more information" and I cc:ed the landlady, and she was rather bemused, but more-or-less a bystander on the whole issue.
I was sort of indignant on behalf of the other residents who may be confused. I wasn't personally too confused, but imagine if Grandma installed her iPhone app or something and tried to start Machine #13.
And it's been 13 months and they still haven't rectified the list of machines.
The old service provider, they used to provide a public website; you could see each machine and whether it was active or not, in a little widget, it was very Web 1.0 but with animation. It didn't use Flash or anything fancy. There was no authentication to see these laundry machines running. I suppose that was too vulnerable, and so they locked it up in the app. And of course the app requires you to be in the fucking location rather than checking from the comfort of your home.
So I used to be able to see availability before I took everything down and went into the laundry room and bugged the other resident ladies. But now I can't see availability until I barge into the fucking room itself. Fuck you app makers. I have a login. Let me see whether I can start my wash or if I can wait in the comfort of my home. Now I need to make a special trip just to check on things, or to add funds or even just to check my balance.
The RFID card will have a chip too. The 'tendrils' are the aerial which is a thick loop (of many wires) round the outside. So punching a hole in one corner is a non-starter, but there's a good chance you could punch one in the middle if you work out where the chip is
Of course, the simpler option is just to get a lanyard with card holder.
It's a failure of both management, and the developers carrying out management's tasteless design/vision which leads to this sort of shit. Not the kind of world I want to live in, and I wish these organizations would get punished somehow for the shit they put out into the world.
If you don't have enough money to do that, immediately start looking for a new job. If you are feeling lucky you can try weaponised incompetence to try to prevent this from being shipped.
I imagine this is what that "AI" feature is doing.
Why run a sophisticated surveillance and information retrieval system when a you can just ask big-tech for the data for free, or buy from the market at a fraction of the running cost of a dedicated system?
Personally I think the best way to combat this is for concerned people to build businesses with privacy as a feature. Dumb TVs, dumb washing machines etc.
Dji and Insta360 are very good at giving away free stuff to influencers, and to tech reviewers with strings attached (like forbidding side-by-side comparisons). Sock-puppets constantly recommending these brands, etc.
As a consumer it's very hard to make an informed decision on what to buy. Can't trust anything you read about the models.
But registration is a huge pain, yes. Two solutions: 1/ Buy used; the previous owner probably didn't do a factory reset -- if they did, return it and try again. 2/ Use a disposable email. On the Action pro, once "registered", nothing happens and the device never asks for anything.
Drones are different, they sometimes need to be attached to a proper account; when that happens, create yet another disposable email and "register" again.
did you test them all or are you basing it on the reviewers the other commenter just pointed out are useless?
* Best Motorcycle Camera Review - Insta360 X4 vs X5 (FortNine)
* I Tested the Next-Gen 360 Camera (Mrwhosetheboss)
* The IMPOSSIBLE Camera (CaseyNeistat)
And if even Casey Neistat graces us with a new video, you just know there was a good reason for him.
Gotta wait for non-sponsored reviews to arrive.
US companies are A-OK with censoring movies and games to gain access to the Chinese market, for example remember when Blizzard banned a US player in an US tournament to please Chinese censors? But in the other direction, it seems Chinese companies aren't willing to "return the favor" and modify their products to account for American sensibilities when they export to the US. Perpetual surveillance and only little property rights protection is how everyday life in China works, so Chinese consumers won't be bothered by this. It only bothers US consumers, who are used to more privacy and solid property rights.
Which US are you talking about? The one I know is a capitalist free-for-all, where the word "regulation" is anathema. The vast majority of Us-based products and services spy on the consumer to make an extra penny, and nobody cares.
It really baffles me to hear someone say that the US isn't under perpetual surveillance, when the NSA literally piped all phonecalls to their servers twenty years ago, before they realized they can just make companies give them all the data.
I resisted for a long time, but in the long run it became very exhausting (for example, people sending me MMS messages I couldn’t open, or having to reply using that clunky keypad on the phone).
In the end, I chose convenience. I believe we’re all to blame.
I do not have a phone app.
The idea that this stuff is a meaningful choice is laughable. Society requires use of a smartphone now. We're 20 years down this road, there is no going back
Sure, someone will make a video “this coffee machine killed my wife and burned down my house with my children in it”, and you would say it’s the market working as intended…
There are standards the stuff sold need to meet, even if ultimately you are always “free to not buy it”.
We have a good system, and this video shows it functions well.
Companies, unchecked, will kill as many people as they can to make more profit. History proves this, it’s not a hypothetical. Laws are the only lever we have to keep profit incentive aligned with the common good.
They are good at some things (allocating resources, adapting to changing supply and demand, revealing preferences and discovering prices, incentivising innovation and socially useful risk taking, …)
and bad at others (ensuring new entrants don’t repeatedly make the same safety mistakes, preventing exploitation of customers, protecting IP, solving for long term social needs, maintaining national resilience against threats, preventing waste…)
Fetishisation of markets is the issue.
Though markets and generally free trade are incredibly important and have brought (and hopefully will continue to bring) great benefits to humanity, they also have downsides, and other tools (regulation, taxation, industrial strategy, …) are needed to balance these.
This is one such case. The market is creating downsides that society should not tolerate.
Well said.
It should also be pointed out, that the regulatory laws are what _defines_ the market. They are even more fundamental to a market's existence than the companies producing goods and services, or the consumers buying them.
Without regulatory law, the "market" devolves to a relapse into the warring states era. Why shouldn't amazone hire a mercenary force to blow the vault doors off of Ft. Knox and carry all the gold home to Bozo?
Because there are laws against it! And that would render the action unprofitable. Bozo sure as sh1t doesn't care about stealing from anyone, or even someone getting killed, if it means he gets a bunch more shekels.
The regulatory law is more than just inherent, it's a mandatory component of anything that's going to have more resemblance to a "market" than to Mad Max...
So, the profiting companies actually _require_ a regulatory structure, to prevent the most wealthy and powerful from just taking whatever they have.
The question is in also making these regulations benefit the consumer as well as the supply side.
In the US this part is currently in rather complete failure...
Nice camera, shame about the app - it's pretty bad in and of itself (you need it for remote shutter), but it has a horrific data collection/sharing T&C.
Fortunately, in Android, you can block network access for an app.
If I couldn't do that, I'd need to root e/os/ to install firewall to prevent, or, not use the app - which would mean no remote shutter on the camera.
AFAIK, there is no way to discover the T&C until you have installed the app.
Not in stock Android. If you have that option it's an added extra.
Did not cross my mind would already exist!!
Thank you very much.
Appalling Ricoh T&C now in the bin.
A company can't force you to use a physical product in a certain way; a "license" won't hold up in court.
Does that even matter? because at 4:50 on the video you can clearly read:
"You agree to give up your right to go to court to assert or defend your rights under these Terms"
They instruct technicians to disable features for hardware if you haven’t paid the licensing fee for that hardware. Swapped the 10 head tool changer for a 14 head from a downed machine? Sucks to be you buddy it won’t work because you haven’t licensed the feature to have 14 tools! Oh you bought the machine used? And they swapped it for you? Sucks to be you pay up or it’s scrap metal to you.
I've sent stuff back for that sort of thing. Often, I'll look at a EULA and decide I don't want it. Mandatory arbitration with anybody other than the American Arbitration Association is a killer.
2. If you do read it, it is a long document in difficult and intentionally misleading legalese, where you can easily miss something.
3. If you don't agree to the terms, and return it, does the company pay for the shipping? Even if they do, you have now wasted a fair amount of time on this product you won't actually use.
4. Depending on the product there may not be anything on the market that has an acceptable EULA. In part due to the fact that few enough people read the EULA that companies can afford to lose business from the people who do.
[1] https://consumer.gov.au/sites/consumer/files/2016/05/0553FT_...
Having said that I'm not sure how this would work if an Australian bought the camera online from a business based outside of Australia, I'm guessing the answer is "not at all".
I used to have one and it was not like that, but now you need to pay a monthly plan to have the last day of events available "in the cloud". It might be ok for me if it was just in the case that you store things in the cloud, but it looks like that if you don't take the subscription, even if you store things on a local sdcard, when there is an intruder alert, you will just receive the alert but you will not be able to see remotely the 10s video of the event like what is done when you use their subscription.
Also you have nag screen for the subscription everywhere. And obviously, there is no way to store things in the cloud anywhere else than using their own service. And especially not using common standard protocols.
What pisses me off is that Chinese brands, like Xiaomi, used to be "you just buy a device", no frill, good value and no need to rely on Chinese services and co.
Now, DJI, Xiaomi, they are following the trend of American and European crappy products selling you licence to products that you don't really own but that requires an all time one connection and subscription to Chinese services.
I saw the change coming hard when used to buy Xiaomi phones regularly, before you got the phone with a very light OS, crap free, it was a big relief coming from Samsung phones.
Now it is probably worse than Samsung, you have hundreds of mandatory apps by default for useless games and utils like bubble war, candy crush, facebook things, and dozens of nag screen to share your data or take subscriptions...
Why would a camera need a phone camera access if not for surveillance?
With pervasive automation, we are accelerating towards a future where money is meaningless, but not in a nice humanistic star-trek kind of way… more in a dystopian, no need to pay wages to anyone because automation, so we just need land, natural resources, and energy kind of way.
It’s grey goo, on a macro scale so you have to get into space to see it for what it is.
The current pushes us towards a time, soon, when power is the only currency that matters, and justice is reduced to the will of the stronger.
If we want to have something better than trying to compete for resources as squishy humans alongside technofacist enclaves where humans are sparse and wield unprecedented power through massive robotic capabilities, we need to start making changes now.
We are entering a new chapter, where money will cease to be relevant at all. Only land and energy will be relevant. The elite will not need people at all anymore, people and society in general will become annoyances, at best. Everything is better when you have less people to share it with, so “depopulation” will likely be in vogue.
Technofacist enclaves will have the monopoly of coercive force, and will probably fight amongst themselves for resources, but the population of people outside those entities will be a lot like ants.
Enshitification is a decay of online platforms.
I get it, it's fun to throw such words around, but just like a nazi, it has a specific meaning.
DJI can just add some mandatory firmware upgrade process that offloads your footage to the mothership, and 99.9999% will agree to everything without reading.
Remember how, in the 1970s and 80s, they used to have little booths surrounded by parking-lot, and you could drive up to the Fotomat booth and drop off your 110 or 35mm film, and they would go develop it and bring back your negatives and prints, and you could drive your Dodge Charger or your Ford Fairlane to come pick them up?
And then, the pharmacies got in on this, because pharmacies are where the chemicals are at anyway. And at a pharmacy, you could have film developed, and you could also get prints, and reprints, and larger-sized prints, and framed photos and albums and greeting cards and all sorts of things.
And this pharmaceutical extension tradition carries on into the present-day. Now you can waltz into CVS or Walgreens or Wal-Mart, you can bring your USB or your microSD card, or just your phone with a cable, and you can plug in your USB or thunk down a disc, and load it into their kiosk computer, and some even have scanners. And then you can order instant photo prints! And they still can sell you albums, and framed photos, and large-format prints, and posters and whatnot.
Here's the trouble, though: phone cameras don't generate the right-sized images.
I was at a Walgreens and they were selling, like, 8x10 and 5x7 and other standard photo-sized frames and prints. And I upload a photo, and the kiosk complains. Kiosk says it's low-resolution. Kiosk shows me a sample preview, and the edges are cut off.
So I chat with the clerk there, and she tells me to just take a screenshot of the image and it'll work. LOL a screenshot, when the resolution is too low already?
And so eventually I figured out that, even if I took a 50 megapixel photograph with the phone's sophisticated camera, it would not print correctly. I told the clerk: this phone takes photos like a TV set. It's in 16:9 or 4:3 aspect ratios. Those are not the same as 8x10 photos!
So the pharmacies have all this tooling for conventional cameras. I suppose a DSLR could still turn out 8x10 photos. I suppose I could "crop" a photo down in my smartphone on Android. But what I really wanted was to download a PD photo from Commons.wikimedia.org and print that out in an 11x17 or larger. And that was not working out so well.
Phone cameras today are producing really impeccable photos of really impossible aspect ratios. There's a ton of tooling that is specifically made for photographs that were based on the size of negatives and the size of photo paper in the last 70 decades or so. Kodak and Fujifilm and their ilk are still haunting us.
Thankfully there are more online services. Everything I put now into Google Photos. Google Photos will happily generate a photobook and they'll even drop-ship them to my family. I have sent them cool photobooks in the past. I never got to peek at them. No complaints. Google Photos doesn't mind when your photos are a weird aspect-ratio. Google Photos will adapt. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be shown your memories.
> ...I have sent them cool photobooks [printed and shipped by Google Photos] in the past. I never got to peek at them.
So you have no idea if the photos are stretched or cut off. (Given how many folks fail to complain about [0] godawfully misconfigured televisions that stretch, squash, or otherwise mangle what they're displaying, I wouldn't take the absence of complaints as evidence of correctly printed images.)
[0] Or even notice.
Wouldn't be surprised if some will tout a "better and safer experience" if you use their cloud services...
Canon's high-end DSLRs used to have a module to sign the RAW files as they came off the sensor, for use in law enforcement and other sectors. This was back as far as 2011.
How would that work? I would imagine that any system to implement this would necessarily be something that AI tools could replicate, wouldn’t it?
Then you can check the signature using the company’s public keys.
If you make edits to it, the editing app will package the new metadata, edited photo data, the original signature, and sign it again.
Now you have a chain of “changes” and can inspect and validate its history. It works for video and audio too.
As long as the private keys aren’t leaked, there’ll be no way to fabricate the signatures.
It seems to me that any "paper trail" scheme of the sort you describe would have to solve the problems of DRM to work: making the elements that report on the real world (in this case, the CCD) tamper-proof, making the encryption key impossible to extract, designing robust watermarks to avoid analog holes, etc.
I don’t think C2PA’s goal is to completely prevent this type of thing, but to make it hard enough to stop low-effort attempts.
This, like DRM, will probably be an arms race, and future solutions will look nothing like what I described.
But then again, the spec has been out for more than a year, and I haven’t seen anyone big bothering to implement it. Maybe it’s a flop already.
Frankly, I find the justification you provide preposterous and dangerous.
The sad reality is that apparently many customers will find it believable (in the .0001% of cases when they actually read what they are agreeing to).
I avoid DJI when and where I can now.
The only DJI product I have purchased since experiencing this same shit is the Osmo Pocket 3. I know of no comparable product.
I used to avoid spyware apps. My antivirus would flag them so I could remove them. Until all of them became spyware. Widely used apps by well known corporations do more intrusive and more constant tracking that the apps that my antivirus used to flag.
Avoiding these brands is one step, but it will not last long. Only the law can deal with total corporation surveillance.
DJI happens to be a Chinese company but Samsung isn't, and they have been tracking what people watch on their TV (even if you're using HDMI and your own input) for years.
Big European, Asian and American brands are doing the same, washing machines requiring an account to access basic capabilities, cars phoning home, computers phoning home, phones phoning home, they all want it, they all do it.
Blaming China for this is deflecting the true culprit: the rampant notion that everything that could be sold has to be sold. Privacy doesn't matter, just put a red ribbon over it and force user to create an account and share their data in exchange for the priviledge of accessing what they thought they bought.
China didn't invent that, they sure love it, but they are not responsible for it alone.
How? If you didn't give it an internet connection, how is it sending any tracking data back to the mothership? It can't guess your wifi password or anything.
Really, the only answer is privacy regulation. Any other solution (just let the free market handle it, don’t give it internet access, etc) is not workable in the long term.
For starters, where do you think your router was manufactured? Can you trust it to only allow connections with your WiFi credentials?
Beyond that, there’s a broad range of products and manufacturers in an average house. Assuming none have struck a deal to do a credential-less connection with the router itself, they may be talking to each other, basically asking “do you know the WiFi?” To every device in your home. Then, they share the info with each other even though you haven’t granted it.
One of the comments in my past discussion on this topic noted that he didn’t even have his Wi-Fi setup, had just moved in to a new apartment, yet apparently his TV was knowledgeable about something similar. I don’t remember how he knew/found out but he suggested that it discovered his neighbors TV which was the same manufacturer and his neighbor did have it connected to their WiFi so the commentor’s TV leveraged the neighbors WiFi without being provided the credentials by a human.
My xiaomi TV is making thousands of request per day to their domains. I block them all using adguard/adblock, but imagine the amount of information they can get from a connected TV.
Samsung and LG and many others do this. Look for Automatic Content Recognition (ACR) in Samsung's privacy
This interesting study from last year: A First Look at Automatic Content Recognition Tracking in Smart TVs - https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.06203
Subscriptions all the way