People regret buying Amazon smart displays after being bombarded with ads

"I'm about to just toss the whole thing..."

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[Mental Gear Reduction]

I bought one of the FireTV Cubes when they were new, and goddamn, that thing is absolutely festooned with ads. And it constantly sends weird packets my firewall doesn't like, even when it's supposedly 'off', so I've ended up keeping it unplugged most of the time, just plugging it in when I want to use it.

I mean, I thought the NVidia Shields were kind of bad, with all the forced ad nonsense from Google. But the Cube is a heck of a lot worse.

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

Does Amazon encrypt everything, or is it just that folks with the right stuff are...busy elsewhere?

There are no Amazon thingies in my home so this is an honest question.

Are you talking about network traffic? I don't actually know what the traffic looks like, I haven't bothered snooping, as I have the device on a dedicated, isolated network. I just saw that, when supposedly in 'off' mode, it was sending some kind of weird TCP packets with incorrect flags set, which my firewall was complaining about.

Since IMO it shouldn't be sending packets at all when off, weird or otherwise, I started unplugging it.

But the actual traffic to Amazon? Dunno. And as far as local lockdown goes, I was able to at least sideload a custom Kodi with Dolby Vision support onto it, which was enough for me. (that may not be necessary now, DV was experimental in Kodi at the time, so I needed a custom package.)

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

Might I ask, what's wrong with the Nvidia Shields?

It was my mother's, so I didn't mess around with changing anything. The default setup is pretty ad-infested, although it's my understanding that this was forced by Google, and wasn't a thing NVidia wanted.

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

I mean, it could be that there's not a single person of average intelligence, most people are geniuses, but there's this ONE massive idiot of such ineptitude it drags the average down.

Hey! I already know I'm not the sharpest tool in the shed, no need to rub it in.

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

An ESP32 and a cheap touchscreen allowed me to ditch my Google/Amazon device.

That's going to be way past most people's tech ability. Even with the Ars crowd, that kind of thing is officially A Project.

Talking about what you actually did and the problems you had would help point folks in the right direction.

 

[Mental Gear Reduction]

Meanwhile you could just not buy adware devices from the likes of Amazon.

The problem is that it's hard to find a non-spy/adware phone or tablet from anyone but Apple. Even Google's Pixel phones are terrible.