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Hard disk fraud: long runtimes on new Seagate hard disks
- OptionOfT 2y agohttps://archive.ph/2025.02.09-074637/https://www.heise.de/en/news/Hard-disk-fraud-Increasing-evidence-of-origin-in-China-10269059.html https://archive.ph/2025.02.09-074637/https://www.heise.de/en... As you cannot deny cookies without paying.
- anilakar 2y agoAnd this BS comes from a German company. Oof. Stop pushing EU-wide laws you cannot yourself adhere to.
- rcthompson 2y agoAre they breaking the law? I don't love that they're requiring either payment or allowing cookies, but at least they're fully disclosing that and giving you the choice. I'm pretty sure that's what the GDPR requires.
- flotzam 2y ago"The tactic has been criticised by privacy advocates and non-governmental organisations such as NOYB and Wikimedia Europe, which claim that it is illegal under the GDPR. On 17 April 2024, the European Data Protection Board released a non-binding opinion stating that in most cases, consent-or-pay models do not constitute valid consent within the meaning of the GDPR." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_or_pay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consent_or_pay
- joblessjunkie 2y agoGDPR states that consent must be freely given. If there are financial incentives, the consent may be invalid.
- tyfon 2y agoThis is under consideration now due to the meta case. The GDPR states that consent should be freely given and one can argue that forcing you to choose between payment our tracking is not a free choice but cohersed. I personally think that interpretation is correct. Since a large part of German media in also doing the same, they are lobbying for this to only apply to "large online providers". Here is a good writeup on the situation: https://iapp.org/news/a/pay-ok-or-a-third-way-context-analysis-from-the-edpb-s-opinion https://iapp.org/news/a/pay-ok-or-a-third-way-context-analys...
- alistairSH 2y agoYou forgot the 3rd option… don’t consume their content. Pay, allow cookies, or surf elsewhere. GDPR doesn’t require them to give away content for free. Edit - ok, being downvoted - how should content be monetized if both targeted ads and subscriptions are off the table? Are we saying GDPR requires a site to operate off generic, non-targeted ads?
- Tarq0n 2y agoTargeted ads aren't the only kind of ads. Disregarding for a moment that you can do some amount of targetting without collecting PII too.
- IshKebab 2y agoSome sites can do that. E.g. Hacker News would easily be able to do targeted advertising without collecting any data because it's a self-selected audience. Even someone like The Verge could probably do a decent job (just advertise games and tech stuff). But what the hell would The New York Times advertise? They're back at TV-style cars and perfume advertising which isn't profitable enough to sustain most businesses. I think Google's flock was the only serious attempt to solve this, but obviously it got heavily criticised by HN fundamentalists who think that the web should be entirely free and ad-free with zero tracking. To be fair it does have a rather big practical issue in that only Google has any incentive to actually implement it (I don't see why Microsoft or Mozilla or Apple would ever bother). We're probably stuck with tracking unless the EU gets some sense and mandates a do-not-track style preference system, and actually enforces it with fines.
- nomius10 2y agoAlternatively the "reader view" feature in Firefox can be used as the entire article is loaded in memory (as opposed to other websites where they'd load a preview till you agree to cookies / pay for a subscription)
- nickthegreek 2y agoPreviously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42864788 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42864788
- metalman 2y agoloads for me, have cookies,java script, dom storage, off by default..add blockers on, I get just the text which is just fine still dont understand how a major disk maker got caught up in something as skeezy as this though
- b112 2y agoIt sounds like Seagate has nothing to do with this. It sounds like someone is scamming retailers and distributors. None of the drives in this article were shipped by Seagate, only some by authorized resellers. EG, Amazon, newegg are authorized resellers.
- ldoughty 2y agoIndeed. Force the seller to be the retailer itself and see if you still have this problem... Any other seller is (at a glance) indistinguishable as a legitimate business or a scalper/scammer.. and there's plenty of legitimate businesses operating in the grey area in-between too.
- metalman 2y agook, then. A hardware solution. These drives are not mechanicaly serviceable, at least by meer mortals. So pot everything, with all of the fasteners and ports, injection molded with simple breakaway covers, that get removed by snapping them off, little holograms torn, it is now evidentialy used. It wont be worth the effort refurbish in such a way as to look new. got to be worth the trivial extra effort by an oem, just to return serv. Alternative would be a tiny window, with a tiny fuse, attached across the input power, blows the first time it powers up gota be a hundred easy ways to fox em, just keep switching up
- snvzz 2y agoThere's a little serial port in the header of every Seagate drive. I have connected to it. Documentation is easy to find online. There's commands giving access to a lot of functionality. Modifying SMART values is trivially done. Thus, they likely wrote a script that gets the job done in seconds. Attach device to hdd and remove when LED turns red. Done, next. Seagate could make this a little harder, but hasn't. This is likely the case only because nobody has abused this at a scale before.
- daneel_w 2y agoThe same scheme is very common on the market for "new" laptop batteries sold by Chinese retailers on for example eBay. The batteries will come with a reprogrammed charge cycle count of 0, an unlikely serial number of all-zeroes/ones/nines or 123456789 etc., and with about 50% of its marketed capacity. As soon as you bring up a refund/warranty errand with the retailer they will offer a 50% discount for the battery in return for you not giving them a 1-star rating. Now you've still paid them for a bad battery, and you've helped keeping the systemic economic crime alive by not warning other customers.
- cjbgkagh 2y agoThis stuff is trivial to detect by the platform. At best the platform could say they don’t search for it, but the only reason not to would be because they don’t want to find it. In essence they’re knowingly outsourcing fraud to sellers.
- greggsy 2y agoHandling the seller appeals would quickly become expensive
- cjbgkagh 2y agoI concur, fraud is much cheaper and more profitable
- thayne 2y agoAll they would have to do to prevent it is make it so if you give a 1 star review, you can't change it to something else later.
- gruez 2y agoWhat happens if a customer made a hasty negative review but the vendor reached out and genuinely resolved/fixed the issue?
- curiousObject 2y agoFrustratingly bad article about an interesting story. Has no one moved on the obvious step of checking the drives for deleted data to track down where they’ve come from?
- gist 2y agoAlso what happens to a user whose hard drive is seized (and forensic tools are used) to find deleted files? Hard to believe (and why would they) take time to properly sanitize the drives.
- waltercool 2y agoAre you new at technology? China is well known to produce counterfeit products. Most of the time, they just resell products from factories who didn't pass the quality tests.
- Havoc 2y agoWow. Heise takes #1 prize in most anal advertising consent form. Literally a individual reject button for every one of their billion individual ad partners and consent to advertising as a whole has only an Accept button. At that point you may as well just cover the entire screen with a "Agree to anything" button
- ahoka 2y agoIt’s unlawful. Feel free to report them.
- maep 2y agoThat must be the bigest scandal since Watergate-gate.
- AzzyHN 2y agoMy uBlock Origin has blocked 64% of the page so far, and I've read two paragraphs.
- Pushy 2y agoI suspected eastdigital drives were dodgy. Lucky I resisted the cheap prices
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- pajko 2y agoCannot read this article (requires subscription without allowing cookies), but have seen a couple of german stores mentioned in another one. Those are most likely small shops (just online or garage) which get the cheapest stuff they can and sell with some margin. So I've had to idea to look at Alibaba, and voila: https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Seagate-Exos-ST16000NM001G-16TB-SATA-III_1601018895574.html https://www.alibaba.com/product-detail/Seagate-Exos-ST16000N... That seems to be too cheap to be true.
- ahoka 2y agoWhat’s with the GDPR violating cookie popup?
- merillecuz56 2y ago[dead]
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- merillecuz56 2y ago[dead]