Always strive to learn something useful. --Sophocles

They started it up in 2011 as an alternative to the Google Play store, frankly I'm surprised that it's still going. This mainly affects their Fire devices.

https://www.amazon.com/gp/mas/appstore/android/faq

https://slashdot.org/story/25/02/20/1245240/amazon-to-shut-down-android-appstore

The merger, announced August 2022, was seen as kind of fraught from the beginning. People didn't like the idea of Amazon having a robot running around inside their house with a camera and precision measuring devices mapping out their houses and reporting back to the Bezos mothership, then potentially reporting back that 'this couch or table would fit perfectly right There'. We know the privacy issues that Alexa has/had, and iRobot would probably have elevated those to a very uncomfortable degree.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240128042393/en/


In the good news area, the Amazon Ring video camera doorbell has improved things a bit. They have recently shut down an app that allowed police to access video footage without a warrant using an app called RFA, Request For Assistance. While this has obvious benefits for hot crimes of the moment, it also has profound potential for abuse for bored officers just wanting to pop around and see what's happening, or perhaps stalk old lovers. Now they'll have to explain things to a judge before they can pour through that footage.

https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/01/amazon-ring-stops-letting-cops-get-doorbell-footage-without-a-warrant/

I posted earlier this year that DPReview was in danger of being shuttered in April as it had become an Amazon property and Amazon had slashed a bunch of less-than-sufficiently-profitable properties. Several people and freelancers were let go.

But the publication of articles throughout April continued at pretty much an unchanged pace. And May. And June. And no announcement as to what had changed.

Yesterday there was an announcement.

DPReview "...and its "current core editorial, tech, and business team[s]" were acquired by Gear Patrol, an independently owned consumer technology site founded by Eric Yang in 2007." Though the core team is intact, no announcement regarding trying to bring those who left back into the fold.

All original content will apparently remain available.

This is great news for photographers! Also a good potentially apocalyptic warning to people who might consider selling enterprises to Amazon.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/06/camera-review-site-dpreview-finds-a-buyer-avoids-shutdown-by-amazon/

Last month, Amazon lost control of 256 IP addresses for three hours due to BGP security flaws. This enabled cybercrooks to take over credentialing authentication and steal $234,000 in cryptocurrency from an exchange called Celer Bridge. 32 accounts were victimized.

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/how-3-hours-of-inaction-from-amazon-cost-cryptocurrency-holders-235000/


In the UK, three men were arrested after a community resident reported suspicious activity. Found in their car was a fake police uniform, an imitation firearm, a real taser and baseball bat. Their intent: "...pay a surprise visit to a 19-year-old hacker known by the handles “Discoli,” “Disco Dog,” and “Chinese.” In December 2020, Discoli took credit for hacking and leaking the user database for OGUsers, a forum overrun with people looking to buy, sell and trade access to compromised social media accounts."

Discoli happened to be not at home, and the thugs were so obvious about not being police that they fled and got the real police notified.

Impersonating police and that fake firearm is really going to ratchet up the sentencing.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/09/botched-crypto-mugging-lands-three-u-k-men-in-jail/


"A Florida teenager who served as a lackey for a cybercriminal group that specializes in cryptocurrency thefts was beaten and kidnapped last week by a rival cybercrime gang. The teen’s captives held guns to his head while forcing him to record a video message pleading with his crew to fork over a $200,000 ransom in exchange for his life. The youth is now reportedly cooperating with U.S. federal investigators, who are responding to an alarming number of reports of physical violence tied to certain online crime communities."

Kidnapped, beaten, and forced to record a video begging for $200,000 with two pistols pressed against his head. Florida.

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2022/09/sim-swapper-abducted-beaten-held-for-200k-ransom/

By now, most everyone knows that Amazon now owns MGM.

And everyone knows there's absolutely no love lost between Donald Trump and Jeff Bezos.

Well, Jeff Bezos now owns all the footage to The Apprentice. Lock, stock, and barrel.

All the outtakes. Anything racist that Trump may or may not have said on camera. All the times that Trump was told in script that Contest A was supposed to be fired, and Trump decided, on a whim, to fire Contestant B, and a mad scramble took place to re-edit the episode(s) to justify firing B. Which apparently happened on a regular basis.

Interesting times.

I don't like mega-mergers, but this one could provide some true entertainment.

RadioShack is not just on Death's door, they're opening it and stepping in briskly. The New York Stock Exchange has delisted them, their stock was trading at 24 CENTS per share the other day, and they can't some up with $50,000,000 to stave off the inevitable.

This makes me very sad. Radio Shack was a major part of my childhood. I bought a lot of stuff from them: even if most of their consumer electronics were crap, they were one of the few places where you could easily buy individual electronic components. In fact, I went to our local store last night to buy a new audio cable for my car (I have to replace it once or twice a year, it shorts out and makes it had to listen to podcasts).

In fact, I bought my first computer from RadioShack in the early '80s: a TRS-80 Model 100. It was one of the first portable computers ever made, it was powered by 4xAA batteries that would power it for ages, had an 8 line by 40 character display, and 24k of non-volatile memory. You could hook up two different kinds of disk drives (both 3.5" and 5.25"), an external monitor, optical bar code reader, cassette tape recorder if you didn't have the disk drive, etc. Built-in BASIC programming language, built-in text editor, etc. Amazingly capable computer: not only do I still have it, but it still works. I power it on occasionally for amusement. It also had a fantastic keyboard.

Even though this computer is 30+ years old, it's very popular among marine researchers: you can put it in a 2 lb Ziploc and take it out on a boat.

Here's a lamentation from Wired:
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/dear-radioshack-adored-love-wired/

And here's the Wired article saying that Amazon might buy them:
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/amazon-radioshack/

This would be a good move for Amazon. They'd get A LOT of stores for very cheap, they're spread around major cities and have presences in many smaller ones, like here. It lets them show off their own line of Kindle electronics and would provide space for drop-shipping items. I would certainly use a drop-ship and drive two miles from work to the nearest RS/Amazon store if it saved money and got my stuff to me quicker.

But apparently the Amazon/RS talks are for a limited number of stores, not the whole chain. Sprint is also in talks to acquire the stores, so I expect they'll end up busting up the chain and selling it off piece by piece.

I first came across this a couple of days ago while browsing my Twitter feed, a rare event. Fred Hicks of Evil Hat Games was writing a lot about it. Nasty stuff, makes me glad that we buy from Barnes & Noble and another chain when we can.

"Amazon, under fire in much of the literary community for energetically discouraging customers from buying books from the publisher Hachette, has abruptly escalated the battle. The retailer began refusing orders late Thursday for coming Hachette books, including J.K. Rowling's new novel. The paperback edition of Brad Stone's The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon — a book Amazon disliked so much it denounced it — is suddenly listed as 'unavailable.' In some cases, even the pages promoting the books have disappeared. Anne Rivers Siddons's new novel, The Girls of August, coming in July, no longer has a page for the physical book or even the Kindle edition. Only the audio edition is still being sold (for more than $60). Otherwise it is as if it did not exist. Amazon is also flexing its muscles in Germany, delaying deliveries of books issued by Bonnier, a major publisher."

I'll be honest: I'm of very mixed feeling re: Amazon. My main objection has been the genocide of mom & pop book stores, but they have many business practices that I'm not exactly sanguine about. The genocide wasn't Amazon's fault, it began when B. Dalton and Waldenbooks started growing and became Barnes & Noble and Borders. Then along comes Bezos and Amazon destroys Borders and is close to doing in B&N. Some small chains have found places where they survive, we have one such here called Hastings. And while we do drop a fair amount of coin there, they are an endless source of frustration for my wife and I. A couple of years ago Bujold had a new book coming out on my wife's birthday, the release date was confirmed through Bujold's web site, Amazon, and B&N. Hastings told us to our face that they wouldn't be getting it for two months. So it was ordered from Amazon. And don't get me started on gripes about Kindles.

We buy a lot of non-entertainment from Amazon, right now I'm wearing a pair of sweat pants that I couldn't find locally. Sweat pants. What a ridiculously trivial item, yet I shopped in three different cities for them and couldn't find what I needed. I love the used book marketplace that Amazon provides, I recently got a training manual for a slightly older piece of software from some used bookstore that otherwise would have been hard to track down, and it was a drop kick finding it on Amazon. I've ordered lots of used books on Amazon, but only after I scour my regular supply of used bookstores and come up empty.

I guess it boils down to this: I could live without Amazon, but I don't want to. But if they continue their rectal haberdashery ways, I may put it to the test.

http://news.slashdot.org/story/14/05/23/1743225/amazon-escalates-its-battle-against-publishers

About bloody time. I hope Barnes & Noble follows suite. I prefer, for a variety of reasons, B&N ebooks and their Nook over Amazon's format and the Kindles. My problem is that I have an old Nook tablet, theoretically I can root it and it will run a version of Android, but I don't know if it'll be a late enough version to access Google's Play store and the Kindle app. B&N is going to be announcing two new Nooks soon, so I may need to buy a new tablet in the not distant future.

http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/383932/amazon-kindle-matchbook-bundles-ebooks-with-print-purchases

Amazon requires that your phone be set to allow apps from untrusted sources, which can open your phone to exploits. Google's app store does more inspecting, but is still not invulnerable. Amazon won't consciously allow compromised apps through, but you never know. And Amazon doesn't have a remote kill switch to remove installed apps that are found to be compromised like Google does.

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/03/amazon-app-store-security/