8 ms·

Hug of death probably so I cannot read the article. Anyway that's the reason why I don't buy Chinese crap anymore. I'm not saying that I don't buy anything mad

Hug of death probably so I cannot read the article. Anyway that's the reason why I don't buy Chinese crap anymore. I'm not saying that I don't buy anything made in China, almost everything is made in China, but everyone should avoid Chinese crapware. If something doesn't match the description send it back, if you find random executables that you cannot identify send it back, if you are asked to register on some weird Chinese website send it back, if you are asked to download a sketchy application with a Chinese readme send it back, etc... After a while you'll notice you are sending everything back. And it is not only Aliexpress or other Chinese marketplaces or websites, Amazon is full of Chinese crapware just the same. edit: read the article from archive, well it just confirms to me what I wrote earlier.

netmare 5y ago
> After a while you'll notice you are sending everything back. What about shipping costs? When you're buying something the seller is usually paying for that in bulk and including it in the retail price to boast "0-cost shipping". Surely buyers can't possibly afford sending everything back.
- capableweb 5y ago
  > Surely buyers can't possibly afford sending everything back. What country you live in with so poor online protections you can't return things within the return window without incurring extra costs for doing so? Sounds broken.
  - vladvasiliu 5y ago
    In France, for example, it's legal for the customer to be on the hook for return shipping. This is often the case with smaller merchants, but even bigger ones have this policy. Example: Darty [0] So if you have to pay for the crap to be shipped all the way back to China, I can see how that may become expensive. [0] Darty return policy, in French: https://www.darty.com/achat/services/retour-retractation/index.html https://www.darty.com/achat/services/retour-retractation/ind...
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    > What country you live in with so poor online protections you can't return things within the return window without incurring extra costs for doing so? Sounds broken. The sellers are in China and the products are ordered internationally. The sellers don’t care about your local return laws.
    - Dah00n 5y ago
      Then the fix is simple. Buy it locally or from a company from there. They might not care but then the local seller (amazon for example) is on the hook (in any country with a proper customer protection at least).
  - rtkwe 5y ago
    Return shipping is usually up to the customer and shipping back to China is much more expensive than the initial China to the US charges. Sometimes it exceeds the cost of the item itself to try to send it back so it's just cheaper to eat the loss.
    - jimmaswell 5y ago
      > Return shipping is usually up to the customer Not for orders from Amazon or Wal Mart, the two biggest places you'd tend to buy cheap Chinese products from.
      - rtkwe 5y ago
        That's down to store policies though not any legal requirement. And in the case of Walmart you're not shipping back to China anyways you ship back to some distribution hub/return center in the US. Amazon too often the products are staged and returned to the US.
- Clubber 5y ago
  He offers a simple solution in the first paragraph. >everyone should avoid Chinese crapware.
starfallg 5y ago
>I'm not saying that I don't buy anything made in China, almost everything is made in China, but everyone should avoid Chinese crapware. If you spend just a small bit of effort, you can look for items not made in China. They are usually higher quality. Japanese companies (and increasingly large American ones) are moving / have moved their production elsewhere due to an increasingly hostile business environment in China. Sony makes their phones in Thailand, speakers/headsets in Malaysia. Panasonic produces a lot of consumer electronics in Malaysia. Samsung makes some of their phones in Vietnam, and the high-end ones in Korea. Their fridges are also made in Thailand/Korea. Google makes their Nest line of products in Thailand/Vietnam now. Some Netgear Arlo products are made in Indonesia, (some?) Netgear switches are made in Thailand. On the enterprise side, Cisco has moved production of a lot of lines to Thailand for example. This trend is only going to accelerate after the SARS-COV-2 pandemic subsides.
- ianai 5y ago
  Is there a reliable way to research non-Chinese manufactured products? I know to just look for the “made in” somewhere on the page or product, but it’s not as simple as including a search tag in a field, either.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    I've noticed lately that in the Q&A section of the majority of the items I look at on Amazon, someone asks where the item was made. That's helpful. I've always wanted to know where my stuff comes from, from my food to my gadgets. So I encourage other people do ask the same questions on Amazon. It helps other people.
  - throwawayciv651 5y ago
    This might be something to check out: ImportYeti https://www.importyeti.com/ https://www.importyeti.com/
  - rmellow 5y ago
    Sadly Amazon doesn't respect the NOT operator anymore: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20069/is-there-a-way-to-use-the-not-operator-on-amazon https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20069/is-there-a...
reaperducer 5y ago
that's the reason why I don't buy Chinese crap anymore. I'm not saying that I don't buy anything made in China, almost everything is made in China, but everyone should avoid Chinese crapware. This is one of the big reasons that Apple locked down its Lightning/USB ports so hard. There were tons of fake Apple chargers flooding the market that contained exfiltration circuitry, among other problems. It was a huge topic in tech circles, and on HN, at the time. I even have a few "data condoms" leftover from those years. (If you don't remember, they're little dongles you put between your USB cable and the USB charger that only have the power lines connected.) The fact that it also locked out bad cops was a bonus.
- gruez 5y ago
  >There were tons of fake Apple chargers flooding the market that contained exfiltration circuitry, among other problems. It was a huge topic in tech circles, and on HN, at the time. source? I've heard of fake charges being planted with exfiltration circuitry as part of a targeted attack (eg. by red teams or actual bad guys), but I haven't heard of aliexpress vendors shipping them out en-masse.
  - sbate1987 5y ago
- warning26 5y ago
  Given the vast financial incentive apple has for keeping its chargers proprietary, I find it difficult to believe Apple is doing this for the primary reason of benefitting their users.
  - reaperducer 5y ago
    I don't think phone chargers register even a blip in the financials of a trillion-dollar company. But the bad press and bad customer experience from people having problems with "Apple" chargers probably does. It's called protecting the brand.
- 5y ago
chias 5y ago
I bought a bluetooth dongle on Amazon recently. didn't work out of the box, and the instruction booklet told me I had to download and install an unsigned device driver that I should download from a specific dropbox link. I tried to write a measured review on Amazon explaining the problem, but Amazon rejected the review. I threw it away and composed an angsty tweet [1], but I really should have returned it. [1] https://twitter.com/ojensen5115/status/1351598563751559169 https://twitter.com/ojensen5115/status/1351598563751559169
- Datenstrom 5y ago
  I very rarely write negative reviews, but every time I have was for something of this magnitude and not once has any ever been left up on any platform.
  - AlwaysRock 5y ago
    I tend to write something like, "Didnt work. 1 star" At least that stays up most of the time.
  - tempnow987 5y ago
    Same. What I don't get is that on Amazon I've purchased 10's to 100's of thousands in product (was an early user, business account admin etc). Of all the reviews that SHOULD have credibility, someone who doesn't review a lot and buys a TON of product - you think would be slightly credible? Instead, for those (few) times I've posted a clearly negative review - gone for whatever reason. If you buy enough from Amazon, especially in last 5 years or so, you got some total absolute trash in there. "Genuine" Apple products absolutely totally 100% fake trash. How amazon's supply chain thinks these are legit is mind boggling. I've had such bad luck with "genuine" and "oem" battery replacements I've given up - most of these things are just crap scam stuff. I'm actually curious how this even happens sometimes, some of the used crap was BADLY used, think of a bunch of electric pencil sharpeners for an office, all "new" that are filled with old pencil shavings, scratches etc etc. Product reviews that when you go back to understand how the piece of trash product got 5 stars you realize the reviews DO NOT EVEN RELATE TO THE PRODUCT you purchased. I mean, how does this even happen? So you get out the review - hey, this things was garbage, and many of the 5 star reviews were for a knife set it looks like instead of a powerbank. Review rejected :)
paul7986 5y ago
- geysersam 5y ago
  You cannot possibly blame the Chinese government or the people for the Corona virus. That's just insane. Granted, the official response wasn't good. But a virus pandemic was ever only a question of time. It's unlikely it could have been prevented wherever it had started.
  - iamstupidsimple 5y ago
    Is there a credible reason why SARS and COVID both came from the same country? The right official response would've been to not start a cover up (and the rest of the world could've hopefully prepared better). Even the WHO was carrying water for China in Feb 2020.
    - geysersam 5y ago
      Yes, the reason is that a fifth of the world population lives there.
      - paul7986 5y ago
        officialjunk 5y ago
        you need to travel internationally more.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        Not just now, though.
    - reincarnate0x14 5y ago
rafale 5y ago
Buying from China, as a westerner, is akin to buying the rope that will hang you. Regardless of the quality or price of their products. We should have never allowed them to become this powerful. Their ideology is toxic and incompatible with ours.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  > We should have never allowed them What does this mean?
  - rafale 5y ago
    Trade ban and sanctions in the early 2000s when it should have become clear their ambition and dirty tactics would put us on a collision course. Instead, we were blinded by the cheap cost and outsourced everything there. To a country that doesn't respect IP, or even basic human rights, and, on top of that, is now ready and able to export their world vision and order. Now it's a bit too late to stop them. NATO/West id too preoccupied by Russia when, imo, China is the bigger threat, by far.
    - tiahura 5y ago
      Early 2000’s? Here’s Joe Biden in 2011 fawning over King Xi and calling for a rising China. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaBdlu4rL4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaBdlu4rL4
      - aaronblohowiak 5y ago
        Nixon, really
    - jacquesm 5y ago
      Sorry, but we did this to ourselves. We moved our manufacturing capability to China in a hundred thousand tiny transactions and a couple of smaller ones for better quarterly earnings, the kind of stuff that Wall Street drools over.
  - 5y ago
ClumsyPilot 5y ago
"If you find random executables that you cannot identify send it back, if you are asked to download a sketchy application" That means I should send back laptops made by Sony and Dell too though?
- aendruk 5y ago
  Ideally. But life is short, so choose your battles.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]

netmare 5y ago

> After a while you'll notice you are sending everything back. What about shipping costs? When you're buying something the seller is usually paying for that in bulk and including it in the retail price to boast "0-cost shipping". Surely buyers can't possibly afford sending everything back.

capableweb 5y ago
> Surely buyers can't possibly afford sending everything back. What country you live in with so poor online protections you can't return things within the return window without incurring extra costs for doing so? Sounds broken.
- vladvasiliu 5y ago
  In France, for example, it's legal for the customer to be on the hook for return shipping. This is often the case with smaller merchants, but even bigger ones have this policy. Example: Darty [0] So if you have to pay for the crap to be shipped all the way back to China, I can see how that may become expensive. [0] Darty return policy, in French: https://www.darty.com/achat/services/retour-retractation/index.html https://www.darty.com/achat/services/retour-retractation/ind...
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  > What country you live in with so poor online protections you can't return things within the return window without incurring extra costs for doing so? Sounds broken. The sellers are in China and the products are ordered internationally. The sellers don’t care about your local return laws.
  - Dah00n 5y ago
    Then the fix is simple. Buy it locally or from a company from there. They might not care but then the local seller (amazon for example) is on the hook (in any country with a proper customer protection at least).
- rtkwe 5y ago
  Return shipping is usually up to the customer and shipping back to China is much more expensive than the initial China to the US charges. Sometimes it exceeds the cost of the item itself to try to send it back so it's just cheaper to eat the loss.
  - jimmaswell 5y ago
    > Return shipping is usually up to the customer Not for orders from Amazon or Wal Mart, the two biggest places you'd tend to buy cheap Chinese products from.
    - rtkwe 5y ago
      That's down to store policies though not any legal requirement. And in the case of Walmart you're not shipping back to China anyways you ship back to some distribution hub/return center in the US. Amazon too often the products are staged and returned to the US.
Clubber 5y ago
He offers a simple solution in the first paragraph. >everyone should avoid Chinese crapware.

starfallg 5y ago

>I'm not saying that I don't buy anything made in China, almost everything is made in China, but everyone should avoid Chinese crapware. If you spend just a small bit of effort, you can look for items not made in China. They are usually higher quality. Japanese companies (and increasingly large American ones) are moving / have moved their production elsewhere due to an increasingly hostile business environment in China. Sony makes their phones in Thailand, speakers/headsets in Malaysia. Panasonic produces a lot of consumer electronics in Malaysia. Samsung makes some of their phones in Vietnam, and the high-end ones in Korea. Their fridges are also made in Thailand/Korea. Google makes their Nest line of products in Thailand/Vietnam now. Some Netgear Arlo products are made in Indonesia, (some?) Netgear switches are made in Thailand. On the enterprise side, Cisco has moved production of a lot of lines to Thailand for example. This trend is only going to accelerate after the SARS-COV-2 pandemic subsides.

ianai 5y ago
Is there a reliable way to research non-Chinese manufactured products? I know to just look for the “made in” somewhere on the page or product, but it’s not as simple as including a search tag in a field, either.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I've noticed lately that in the Q&A section of the majority of the items I look at on Amazon, someone asks where the item was made. That's helpful. I've always wanted to know where my stuff comes from, from my food to my gadgets. So I encourage other people do ask the same questions on Amazon. It helps other people.
- throwawayciv651 5y ago
  This might be something to check out: ImportYeti https://www.importyeti.com/ https://www.importyeti.com/
- rmellow 5y ago
  Sadly Amazon doesn't respect the NOT operator anymore: https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20069/is-there-a-way-to-use-the-not-operator-on-amazon https://webapps.stackexchange.com/questions/20069/is-there-a...

reaperducer 5y ago

that's the reason why I don't buy Chinese crap anymore. I'm not saying that I don't buy anything made in China, almost everything is made in China, but everyone should avoid Chinese crapware. This is one of the big reasons that Apple locked down its Lightning/USB ports so hard. There were tons of fake Apple chargers flooding the market that contained exfiltration circuitry, among other problems. It was a huge topic in tech circles, and on HN, at the time. I even have a few "data condoms" leftover from those years. (If you don't remember, they're little dongles you put between your USB cable and the USB charger that only have the power lines connected.) The fact that it also locked out bad cops was a bonus.

gruez 5y ago
>There were tons of fake Apple chargers flooding the market that contained exfiltration circuitry, among other problems. It was a huge topic in tech circles, and on HN, at the time. source? I've heard of fake charges being planted with exfiltration circuitry as part of a targeted attack (eg. by red teams or actual bad guys), but I haven't heard of aliexpress vendors shipping them out en-masse.
- sbate1987 5y ago
warning26 5y ago
Given the vast financial incentive apple has for keeping its chargers proprietary, I find it difficult to believe Apple is doing this for the primary reason of benefitting their users.
- reaperducer 5y ago
  I don't think phone chargers register even a blip in the financials of a trillion-dollar company. But the bad press and bad customer experience from people having problems with "Apple" chargers probably does. It's called protecting the brand.
5y ago

chias 5y ago

I bought a bluetooth dongle on Amazon recently. didn't work out of the box, and the instruction booklet told me I had to download and install an unsigned device driver that I should download from a specific dropbox link. I tried to write a measured review on Amazon explaining the problem, but Amazon rejected the review. I threw it away and composed an angsty tweet [1], but I really should have returned it. [1] https://twitter.com/ojensen5115/status/1351598563751559169 https://twitter.com/ojensen5115/status/1351598563751559169

Datenstrom 5y ago
I very rarely write negative reviews, but every time I have was for something of this magnitude and not once has any ever been left up on any platform.
- AlwaysRock 5y ago
  I tend to write something like, "Didnt work. 1 star" At least that stays up most of the time.
- tempnow987 5y ago
  Same. What I don't get is that on Amazon I've purchased 10's to 100's of thousands in product (was an early user, business account admin etc). Of all the reviews that SHOULD have credibility, someone who doesn't review a lot and buys a TON of product - you think would be slightly credible? Instead, for those (few) times I've posted a clearly negative review - gone for whatever reason. If you buy enough from Amazon, especially in last 5 years or so, you got some total absolute trash in there. "Genuine" Apple products absolutely totally 100% fake trash. How amazon's supply chain thinks these are legit is mind boggling. I've had such bad luck with "genuine" and "oem" battery replacements I've given up - most of these things are just crap scam stuff. I'm actually curious how this even happens sometimes, some of the used crap was BADLY used, think of a bunch of electric pencil sharpeners for an office, all "new" that are filled with old pencil shavings, scratches etc etc. Product reviews that when you go back to understand how the piece of trash product got 5 stars you realize the reviews DO NOT EVEN RELATE TO THE PRODUCT you purchased. I mean, how does this even happen? So you get out the review - hey, this things was garbage, and many of the 5 star reviews were for a knife set it looks like instead of a powerbank. Review rejected :)

paul7986 5y ago

geysersam 5y ago
You cannot possibly blame the Chinese government or the people for the Corona virus. That's just insane. Granted, the official response wasn't good. But a virus pandemic was ever only a question of time. It's unlikely it could have been prevented wherever it had started.
- iamstupidsimple 5y ago
  Is there a credible reason why SARS and COVID both came from the same country? The right official response would've been to not start a cover up (and the rest of the world could've hopefully prepared better). Even the WHO was carrying water for China in Feb 2020.
  - geysersam 5y ago
    Yes, the reason is that a fifth of the world population lives there.
    - paul7986 5y ago
      - officialjunk 5y ago
        you need to travel internationally more.
        wizzwizz4 5y ago
        Not just now, though.
  - reincarnate0x14 5y ago

rafale 5y ago

Buying from China, as a westerner, is akin to buying the rope that will hang you. Regardless of the quality or price of their products. We should have never allowed them to become this powerful. Their ideology is toxic and incompatible with ours.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
> We should have never allowed them What does this mean?
- rafale 5y ago
  Trade ban and sanctions in the early 2000s when it should have become clear their ambition and dirty tactics would put us on a collision course. Instead, we were blinded by the cheap cost and outsourced everything there. To a country that doesn't respect IP, or even basic human rights, and, on top of that, is now ready and able to export their world vision and order. Now it's a bit too late to stop them. NATO/West id too preoccupied by Russia when, imo, China is the bigger threat, by far.
  - tiahura 5y ago
    Early 2000’s? Here’s Joe Biden in 2011 fawning over King Xi and calling for a rising China. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaBdlu4rL4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=CQaBdlu4rL4
    - aaronblohowiak 5y ago
      Nixon, really
  - jacquesm 5y ago
    Sorry, but we did this to ourselves. We moved our manufacturing capability to China in a hundred thousand tiny transactions and a couple of smaller ones for better quarterly earnings, the kind of stuff that Wall Street drools over.
- 5y ago

ClumsyPilot 5y ago

"If you find random executables that you cannot identify send it back, if you are asked to download a sketchy application" That means I should send back laptops made by Sony and Dell too though?

aendruk 5y ago
Ideally. But life is short, so choose your battles.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

deleted 5y ago
[deleted]