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> generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee I don't want to blame the purchasers of these things - who are some of the victi

> generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee I don't want to blame the purchasers of these things - who are some of the victims - but at the same time, it does seem like a Too Good To Be True situation.

croes 3mo ago
It sounds like scam
havaloc 3mo ago
I have an elderly client who sends me links of stuff to buy all the time. One day it's one of these streaming sticks, the next day it's half-price stamps, and I tell her every time, please don't buy this stuff. And yet she does anyway, as if I was almost being mean and saying no just to say no. So yes, I do want to blame the purchasers of these things, sometimes. To prove her point that her stamps were legitimate, she mailed me a card using one of her half priced (but likely fake) stamps and it made it through!
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  Perhaps they grew up in a time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it", and they're still using that old calibration?
  - mhurron 3mo ago
    My falther-in-law was less that and more, if I can get away with it, it's actually legal. Many know their fake, and do it because they can get away with it. That was his justification for a satellite descrambler, they're sending me the signals, obviously I'm allowed to.
    - mmooss 3mo ago
      I can imagine many on HN having excited discussions about their satellite descramblers. > do it because they can get away with it. Lots of people on HN download and upload copyrighted materials. Is it really different?
      - al_borland 3mo ago
        They aren’t downloading that content from a company with a $2.5T market cap. They presumably aren’t making a living by selling that copyrighted material via a retail that claims to run a legitimate business. I think that makes a big difference. Imagine if Amazon Video, Audible, and Kindle will all just pirate stores, where uploaders of the pirated content made money on the downloads, people paid for those downloads, and Amazon took a cut of everything. How long would that go on before they were in court and that was shutdown?
      - bityard 3mo ago
        Fine, you've nerd-sniped me. I tinkered with Dish Network descrambling 20 years ago. Not because I wanted to just watch a bunch of free TV (I hardly watched any TV anyway, we mostly watched DVDs from the video store and Netflix). More because it felt like an interesting rabbit hole. And it was pretty interesting! I picked a good (newer!) satellite dish and LNB from the trash and had a friend help with the installation and alignment because that was his previous job. Normal people use some kind of tool to find the satellites' geosynchronous orbital station in the sky, but he did it often enough that he could simply look up into the sky and point at them. There were a handful of grey-market satellite receivers you could buy that were technically capable of descrambling a commercial signal. Of course, they did not advertise themselves as such. They were marketed as FTA (free-to-air) DVB-S receivers. These were not illegal as they were fairly popular in regions of the world that actually _had_ a fair amount of FTA (unscrambled) satellite channels. The only satellites visible from North America, however, tended to carry religious, shopping, or Mexican/Central American programming. Oh, and NASA TV. The receiver I bought had DVR functionality if you hooked up a USB drive to it. I think I still have some recorded shows on it. It would have been a great way to harvest and release pirated TV shows to the Internet, if you didn't mind editing out all of the ads and whatever. DVB-S was basically a raw MPEG-2 TS stream that could be optionally encrypted. To use these grey-market receivers as descramblers, you install some custom firmware containing the descrambling modifications and keys. I'm failing to remember the technical details, but the encryption they used was not very good. Dish Network would rotate the keys occasionally, and when they did, you had to update them on your receiver. I can't remember now if the keys were part of the firmware, but I remember it being a pain in the ass. The firmware/keys part of this had a very "colorful" community. You had to sign up to a very specific and somewhat exclusive web bulletin board in order to download the firmware/keys. I don't remember how I gained an account, but I remember it being non-trivial. IIRC, it was like one guy maintaining the firmware/keys and sometimes it took weeks for him to adapt to whatever thing DN did to thwart piracy. The board was moderated by a complete power-tripping asshat who enjoyed banning people for fun and then gloating about it. (I was not banned, that I recall.) I think they started requiring "donations" in order to view certain threads (like firmware releases) after a while. But I could be misremembering that. I just remember the community was very toxic. After a few months of this setup, DN figured out how to rotate their keys too often for the casual pirate to keep up. I disconnected mine around that time and moved onto other things. Partly because the experiment ran its course and partly because migrating to real-time key updates would have meant buying a newer receiver. For a while, I flirted with the idea of getting a DVB-T PCI receiver card and working on breaking the encryption myself, but it was quite a bit above my skill level at the time and there did not seem to be anyone else working on it out in the open, since the DMCA was still pretty new then.
    - brewdad 3mo ago
      There's an old Carlin joke about "If a cop didn't see it, I didn't do it."
  - Pxtl 3mo ago
    Of course, what they're missing is that laws are for poor people. Amazon will be notified they sold something illegal and will take it down and ban the seller who will immediately launch a new store under a new name. The purchaser, on the other hand, will be fully liable for whatever horrible thing they bought.
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  - iamben 3mo ago
    I think that's a default for a lot of the older (and some of the younger!) generation, same goes for news and media. They grew up in a time where there was a practical barrier to publishing and (largely) laws behind you doing it. So they trust literally everything they read. I still don't think my folks can fathom you can spin up a very real looking newspaper website with fake articles in about 10 minutes.
    - mmooss 3mo ago
      I find younger people are more likely to trust whatever they read - social media rumors, LLM output, Reddit threads - and older people looking for credible sources.
      - brewdad 3mo ago
        When my kid was young I set up a basic web server and taught him how to make a VERY basic web page. I let him write whatever nonsense he wanted to and then we made it live. It was both a gateway into learning how the web works but also that literally anyone can post anything to the internet and it doesn't make it true. I like to think he's more savvy than many of his peers but we all have our blind spots.
        doctorspazz 3mo ago
        was the url for the website you set up for him www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts
      - CM30 3mo ago
        Honestly, my experience is that it's less age specific and more like 80-90% of the general public. A lot of people just can't recognise the difference between a credible source and a dubious/fake one, and will just share any old random page or social media post they come across online. Heck, the number of people I know that see things like ChatGPT as some magic encyclopedia/sage that knows everything is depressingly high...
  - rrr_oh_man 3mo ago
    > time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it" like cigarettes?
    - magicalhippo 3mo ago
      Or heroin[1]? [1]: https://museum.dea.gov/museum-collection/collection-spotlight/artifact/heroin-bottle https://museum.dea.gov/museum-collection/collection-spotligh...
  - dfxm12 3mo ago
    I doubt there ever was a time/environment. Snake oil has been around consistently for a very long time.
- Scroll_Swe 3mo ago
  Then again I used to torrent everything under the sun and it actually rocks to have every tv show, movie, game ever released for free forever. So is it greed? Yes, but I did it too so now that its more accessible I cannot really blame people.
- floam 3mo ago
  Half priced stamps work though, and nobody is going to prosecute grandma for counterfeiting postage stamps.
  - zeafoamrun 3mo ago
    Yes they do. USPIS does not f around
    - Pxtl 3mo ago
      Oddly they don't ever seem to prosecute the sites that profit from selling them. Funny, that.
      - kube-system 3mo ago
        Makes sense to me, the only place I've ever seen them personally advertised are overseas websites.
      - Terr_ 3mo ago
        It doesn't seem too weird to me: Selling someone fake stamps is a general act of fraud, between buyer and seller, and would be pursued by state/federal attorneys general. The USPS becomes directly involved only later, when someone tries to defraud them by using a fake stamp.
    - floam 3mo ago
      They are unable to do much. Look, their systems cannot distinguish them - not since the crooks figured out the phosphor tags. They aren’t detecting any during the course of business. There are no prosecutions of “duped cobsumers” buying cheap stamps claiming to be real online as far as I can find.
- mmooss 3mo ago
  > half-price stamps Who is selling half-price stamps? #1 How big is your potential market? It's people still mailing things from home, who haven't figured out how to do postage on their computer. #2 Of the population in #1, it's those who find real stamps so expensive that it's worth bothering with discounts. #3 Of the population in #2, it's those who would want to buy something fraudulant (or not know better) and who would want to risk using it. #4 Considering the size of the #3 population, how many stamps do they use in a month? #5 What is your margin on a half-price stamp? You have to pay for advertising, printing (we're talking a profit margin under $1), packaging, and your own time, but at least shipping is free!
  - wildzzz 3mo ago
    Its the grandmas still sending you a $5 check in the mail for your birthday
    - mmooss 3mo ago
      How can those few people - and again narrowed down to the population mailing letters AND needing stamps AND seeking discounts AND willing or ignorant enough to do/risk fraud - with that little revenue per item, make a half-price stamp operation worthwhile?
      - wildzzz 2mo ago
        The Venn diagram of old people with limited mobility (can't just drive to the post office or grocery store) and on a fixed income (they crave those discounts) is nearly a perfect circle of the people that fall for internet scams (fails to understand that literally anyone can make a shopify store and accept card payments).
- rrr_oh_man 3mo ago
  What is your line of work, if I may ask?
- _carbyau_ 3mo ago
  What is the world view (aka context) of this little old lady? Watch the news and see CEO's with golden handshakes after the company is nailed for something. Wall street failures. Companies getting government bailouts. The current US president. It is all about getting away with what you can. The news - being the news - doesn't show process as per normal. People doing the right thing most of the time. In this context, fake stamps for the "little person" doesn't even rate a mention. Who the hell is going to raise a moral panic about an old lady with fake stamps... And so the "little people" will keep buying fake whatevers as long as it stretches their dollar further.
- hakfoo 3mo ago
  Discounted stamps do exist. Stamp collectors end up stuck with sheets and sheets of unpopular designs, and since the hobby (like many hobbies) has imploded, the dealers will pay less than face value for it; they in turn will sell it for a smaller discount for people who are willing to futz with wallpapering their envelope in 3-cent stamps and Fat Elvis.
nvme0n1p1 3mo ago
OTOH - TV, radio, and YouTube are all unlimited and free. Why not streaming? There are lots of people alive who grew up during the days of broadcast TV and radio. I get why they might not understand the difference.
- weberer 3mo ago
  There are a ton of legitimately free IPTV streams. You can watch them through most media players like VLC without having to download anything shady. https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv
  - nuxi 3mo ago
    Two things: - How are these "legitimately free"? For example AMC is a commercial TV channel and as far as I know, they don't offer free streaming. Same goes for MGM, FilmBox etc. - Strictly speaking this isn't IPTV, it's just web streams. IPTV is usually delivered via multicast (MPEG-TS/RTP/RTSP streams, over UDP mostly).
    - deleted 3mo ago
      [deleted]
  - nvme0n1p1 3mo ago
    Ok but have fun explaining that to the average person. Buying a dongle is easier than installing software or typing URLs into their TV ("my TV doesn't even have a keyboard"). To most people IPTV is a bunch of gibberish letters, indistinguishable from the gibberish brands on Amazon. Someone's grandma from Colorado doesn't deserve to get scammed because she didn't research the acronyms.
  - kube-system 3mo ago
    That is chock-full of pirated content.
    - crote 3mo ago
fred_is_fred 3mo ago
If you offered most people free streaming for a $37 USB stick but directly told them it would be faking ad clicks when the TV is off, would any of them really care?
- 1970-01-01 3mo ago
  No, and that's is the root of the problem. The buyer is happy and so is the seller. They don't care to understand what they're allowing and everyone is allowing it to happen.
  - GolfPopper 3mo ago
    They're just meeting the standards American society has set.
    - Scroll_Swe 3mo ago
      [flagged]
      - dang 3mo ago
        Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait, and also please stop using HN primarily for political/ideological battle? These things are not what HN is for, and destroy what it is for, so we ban accounts that do them repeatedly. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
  - bayarearefugee 3mo ago
    I wouldn't use a device like this for a lot of reasons, but the fact that what they are doing might be taking advantage of the incredibly predatory digital advertising system is neutral to positive for me, if I'm being fully honest. If they were using the system to rip off random people, I'd be 100% against it, if they are fucking Google and the giant corps that advertise with them, ehh.. not my problem and can't be assed to care. Google is not a positive force in the world. Hasn't been for many years.
flerchin 3mo ago
Well now I want one
- Cider9986 3mo ago
  Stremio+TorBox are the two words. ($3/month)
  - ghostly_s 3mo ago
    That's not what these things are. They come preloaded with apps that stream pirate broadcast streams and on-demand servers operated out of China.
    - Cider9986 3mo ago
      Absolutely correct. My comment intention was if you want to make one yourself and get the experience of all shows +movies.
      - ghostly_s 3mo ago
        Did OP say "I want something vaguely similar that requires a greater investment of my time and money"? Did you in any way indicate that's what you were proposing?
        deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
        deleted 3mo ago
        [deleted]
iugtmkbdfil834 3mo ago
Uhh, I have an extended family member, who not only uses it, but now also tries to get other people to get into it. Since I was familiar with this practice ( and the issues it makes worse ), I noted those to him in an attempt to both politely decline and, hopefully, spare him, and society, some future problems. Without going into any identifying details, he didn't take it well ( and I don't think I got on my high horse ). Anyway, I think some level of blame is warranted.
- chihuahua 3mo ago
  According to the Darknet Diaries podcast episode "Superbox", some of these devices are sold via multi-level marketing schemes, which would explain why there are random individuals selling these, collecting a commission for each device sold. Which is why the person you mentioned is unhappy when someone points out the problems with these devices.
Cider9986 3mo ago
It could be possible, I haven't done the math though. Stremio +Torbox is $3/month and they can probably share 10+ households on one TorBox account so it could work out. The seller could just stop paying the TorBox subscription at whatever point and they have an incentive to do so.
IncreasePosts 3mo ago
Maybe, but if they're a not-very-tech savvy older person buying this, they probably remember shows being free from over the air antennas and may think it is something like that.
- ghostly_s 3mo ago
  > they probably remember shows being free from over the air antennas you are aware broadcast TV never ended?
  - IncreasePosts 3mo ago
    Yes, in fact I have an antenna and a HDHomeRun nestled in my attic to record over the air shows that I occasionally consume. But, I think it's far more common for people to have a TV service today, perhaps since comcast and their ilk push hard the TV/phone/internet bundle, and gone are the years when everyone would fiddle with the antennas on the back of their TV to get the right reception.
  - myself248 3mo ago
    An awful, awful, awful lot of consumers think their old antennas don't work now that everything's gone digital. And they've simply never tried.
    - a96 3mo ago
      Well, analog broadcasts did stop in Finland some 15-20 years ago. DVB-T stopped a few years ago. Only T2 receives anything these days AFAIK. Physical antennas are the same, though. (And C if you have cable.)
- bdangubic 3mo ago
  I watch TV over an antenna, shows are free still
rng-concern 3mo ago
I know a few people who buy these, and they kind of know what they're doing. They just try and not think about it too hard. It reminds me of the saying: "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It". If these people thought about it for a few minutes, they would understand, but they choose not to, as ignoring it is too advantageous. I admit I was tempted, as the price of all streaming services goes up, and services become more and more fragmented. During the same period where I have not had a raise.
- acdha 3mo ago
  In the 90s, there was a cottage industry selling CDs of bootleg software at swap meets and flea markets. A guy my dad knew was almost condescending to anyone who paid for software despite having been hit by viruses multiple times because it was so much cheaper. Even having to deal with a client(!) who naively called the vendor support only to be informed that they hadn’t actually purchased a license wasn’t enough to get him to resist that savings.
- inigyou 3mo ago
  On what grounds would they choose not to?
  - rng-concern 3mo ago
    I won't argue the ethics of piracy. That was not my point, but if you want to I suppose I could. My point was, their ethics WOULD have prevented them from doing the thing. But they chose not to think about it too hard. Perhaps subconsciously. I'm not above doing this sort of thing either. We all do it for various things. I've added code that is bad for the user (overbearing telemetry for instance) because my salary depended on it. At the time I tried not to think about it too much, as it would cause cognitive dissonance.
deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
paultopia 3mo ago
Yeah, isn’t this a classic kind of scam the would-be scammer situation? If you think there’s some way to buy one cheap device and somehow get around subscribing to streaming services[1], then of course you’re going to be in a market with fraudsters… [1] Can someone explain what the theory of the product is here? It sounds like they’re marketing these things as ways for the customer to commit fraud, for example by connecting to someone else’s login. How else would the customer expect to be able to get free Netflix or whatever?
- chihuahua 3mo ago
  It may be the case that these devices are front-ends for pirated content that's hosted in various places. They're not streaming it from Netflix servers. It's content similar to that offered by Netflix and other streaming services, pirated by someone else, and hosted by someone else for streaming by anyone who can figure out how to find it.
varispeed 3mo ago
I used to know someone doing this. They said they know it is too good to be true, but they hate corporations and it's their little way to stick one in.
pibaker 3mo ago
> it does seem like a Too Good To Be True situation It's difficult to judge the price of media products. We have legal music streaming services that charges you an album's worth of money a month and lets you listen to millions of songs. You can pick up old AAA games for less than ten bucks. I'd say when people say that price tag, they don't think they get scammed into being a part of a botnet. They think the device manufacturer cut a good deal with the media rights holders.
al_borland 3mo ago
Why should anyone assume a product being sold by (or at least on) Amazon, the latest retailer in the country, is an illegal device? It’s not like they’re buying these things out of a car trunk in a dark alley. These retailers need to be held liable for selling these things. If they sell this stuff, why not illicit drugs? If they are unable to maintain control of 3rd party sellers, then they should end the 3rd party seller program. It has done nothing but damage Amazon’s reputation, and it just keeps getting worse.
Tangurena2 3mo ago
The streaming services have fractured and taken so many movies off their service so much that it is too hard for most people to figure out where that show/movie can be found. From a link above to the story on darknetdiaries: > For Pokemon, there is a website that tells you how to watch this. You start off on Netflix, then swap over to the Pokemon streaming service, which is the only place that has Season 2, then swap over to Prime Video for Seasons 3 through 5, swap to Freevee, then Hoopla. Season 13 is only on Amazon, though. Then swap to Tubi, then Hulu, then Roku channel, and then finally back to the Pokemon streaming, and then Netflix. Easy. That's 8 different streaming services to view one series.
- tomaskafka 3mo ago
  And yet they can all be comfortably watched at a single place, with high quality and no ads.
joshmn 3mo ago
I had a streaming piracy site that I went to federal prison for. I can chime in on these people. It's worth separating the two populations: My users had money and had considered legal subscriptions. They paid me because the legal product was worse—in my case, sports blackouts, a bunch of different apps, etc. They knew what they were buying into and they had weighed the risk. I can tell you right now some of my former users have bought into this market. Then there's the unwitting: a person buying one of these devices at a too-good-to-be-true price is treating it as a hardware purchase from Amazon, where the actual monetization isn't inferable from the listing. Calling it too good to be true assumes the buyer can see what shit they're standing in. They can't. There's no visible market here. It's just a product page with reviews. To add to this: the proxy exit is exactly why these cost so little. Demand for residential IPs is booming (check some of the proxy subreddits to see what I mean). The ironic part is that there's a chance the person who bought one of these boxes to watch pirated sports was the exit node I was using to acquire the feeds in the first place.
elzbardico 3mo ago
I don't care about free streaming. But fucking advertisers? Humm... just found a reason to buy one of those boxes.

croes 3mo ago

It sounds like scam

havaloc 3mo ago

I have an elderly client who sends me links of stuff to buy all the time. One day it's one of these streaming sticks, the next day it's half-price stamps, and I tell her every time, please don't buy this stuff. And yet she does anyway, as if I was almost being mean and saying no just to say no. So yes, I do want to blame the purchasers of these things, sometimes. To prove her point that her stamps were legitimate, she mailed me a card using one of her half priced (but likely fake) stamps and it made it through!

Terr_ 3mo ago
Perhaps they grew up in a time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it", and they're still using that old calibration?
- mhurron 3mo ago
  My falther-in-law was less that and more, if I can get away with it, it's actually legal. Many know their fake, and do it because they can get away with it. That was his justification for a satellite descrambler, they're sending me the signals, obviously I'm allowed to.
  - mmooss 3mo ago
    I can imagine many on HN having excited discussions about their satellite descramblers. > do it because they can get away with it. Lots of people on HN download and upload copyrighted materials. Is it really different?
    - al_borland 3mo ago
      They aren’t downloading that content from a company with a $2.5T market cap. They presumably aren’t making a living by selling that copyrighted material via a retail that claims to run a legitimate business. I think that makes a big difference. Imagine if Amazon Video, Audible, and Kindle will all just pirate stores, where uploaders of the pirated content made money on the downloads, people paid for those downloads, and Amazon took a cut of everything. How long would that go on before they were in court and that was shutdown?
    - bityard 3mo ago
      Fine, you've nerd-sniped me. I tinkered with Dish Network descrambling 20 years ago. Not because I wanted to just watch a bunch of free TV (I hardly watched any TV anyway, we mostly watched DVDs from the video store and Netflix). More because it felt like an interesting rabbit hole. And it was pretty interesting! I picked a good (newer!) satellite dish and LNB from the trash and had a friend help with the installation and alignment because that was his previous job. Normal people use some kind of tool to find the satellites' geosynchronous orbital station in the sky, but he did it often enough that he could simply look up into the sky and point at them. There were a handful of grey-market satellite receivers you could buy that were technically capable of descrambling a commercial signal. Of course, they did not advertise themselves as such. They were marketed as FTA (free-to-air) DVB-S receivers. These were not illegal as they were fairly popular in regions of the world that actually _had_ a fair amount of FTA (unscrambled) satellite channels. The only satellites visible from North America, however, tended to carry religious, shopping, or Mexican/Central American programming. Oh, and NASA TV. The receiver I bought had DVR functionality if you hooked up a USB drive to it. I think I still have some recorded shows on it. It would have been a great way to harvest and release pirated TV shows to the Internet, if you didn't mind editing out all of the ads and whatever. DVB-S was basically a raw MPEG-2 TS stream that could be optionally encrypted. To use these grey-market receivers as descramblers, you install some custom firmware containing the descrambling modifications and keys. I'm failing to remember the technical details, but the encryption they used was not very good. Dish Network would rotate the keys occasionally, and when they did, you had to update them on your receiver. I can't remember now if the keys were part of the firmware, but I remember it being a pain in the ass. The firmware/keys part of this had a very "colorful" community. You had to sign up to a very specific and somewhat exclusive web bulletin board in order to download the firmware/keys. I don't remember how I gained an account, but I remember it being non-trivial. IIRC, it was like one guy maintaining the firmware/keys and sometimes it took weeks for him to adapt to whatever thing DN did to thwart piracy. The board was moderated by a complete power-tripping asshat who enjoyed banning people for fun and then gloating about it. (I was not banned, that I recall.) I think they started requiring "donations" in order to view certain threads (like firmware releases) after a while. But I could be misremembering that. I just remember the community was very toxic. After a few months of this setup, DN figured out how to rotate their keys too often for the casual pirate to keep up. I disconnected mine around that time and moved onto other things. Partly because the experiment ran its course and partly because migrating to real-time key updates would have meant buying a newer receiver. For a while, I flirted with the idea of getting a DVB-T PCI receiver card and working on breaking the encryption myself, but it was quite a bit above my skill level at the time and there did not seem to be anyone else working on it out in the open, since the DMCA was still pretty new then.
  - brewdad 3mo ago
    There's an old Carlin joke about "If a cop didn't see it, I didn't do it."
- Pxtl 3mo ago
  Of course, what they're missing is that laws are for poor people. Amazon will be notified they sold something illegal and will take it down and ban the seller who will immediately launch a new store under a new name. The purchaser, on the other hand, will be fully liable for whatever horrible thing they bought.
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- iamben 3mo ago
  I think that's a default for a lot of the older (and some of the younger!) generation, same goes for news and media. They grew up in a time where there was a practical barrier to publishing and (largely) laws behind you doing it. So they trust literally everything they read. I still don't think my folks can fathom you can spin up a very real looking newspaper website with fake articles in about 10 minutes.
  - mmooss 3mo ago
    I find younger people are more likely to trust whatever they read - social media rumors, LLM output, Reddit threads - and older people looking for credible sources.
    - brewdad 3mo ago
      When my kid was young I set up a basic web server and taught him how to make a VERY basic web page. I let him write whatever nonsense he wanted to and then we made it live. It was both a gateway into learning how the web works but also that literally anyone can post anything to the internet and it doesn't make it true. I like to think he's more savvy than many of his peers but we all have our blind spots.
      - doctorspazz 3mo ago
        was the url for the website you set up for him www.creedthoughts.gov.www\creedthoughts
    - CM30 3mo ago
      Honestly, my experience is that it's less age specific and more like 80-90% of the general public. A lot of people just can't recognise the difference between a credible source and a dubious/fake one, and will just share any old random page or social media post they come across online. Heck, the number of people I know that see things like ChatGPT as some magic encyclopedia/sage that knows everything is depressingly high...
- rrr_oh_man 3mo ago
  > time/environment where "if it was that bad they wouldn't be allowed to advertise it" like cigarettes?
  - magicalhippo 3mo ago
    Or heroin[1]? [1]: https://museum.dea.gov/museum-collection/collection-spotlight/artifact/heroin-bottle https://museum.dea.gov/museum-collection/collection-spotligh...
- dfxm12 3mo ago
  I doubt there ever was a time/environment. Snake oil has been around consistently for a very long time.
Scroll_Swe 3mo ago
Then again I used to torrent everything under the sun and it actually rocks to have every tv show, movie, game ever released for free forever. So is it greed? Yes, but I did it too so now that its more accessible I cannot really blame people.
floam 3mo ago
Half priced stamps work though, and nobody is going to prosecute grandma for counterfeiting postage stamps.
- zeafoamrun 3mo ago
  Yes they do. USPIS does not f around
  - Pxtl 3mo ago
    Oddly they don't ever seem to prosecute the sites that profit from selling them. Funny, that.
    - kube-system 3mo ago
      Makes sense to me, the only place I've ever seen them personally advertised are overseas websites.
    - Terr_ 3mo ago
      It doesn't seem too weird to me: Selling someone fake stamps is a general act of fraud, between buyer and seller, and would be pursued by state/federal attorneys general. The USPS becomes directly involved only later, when someone tries to defraud them by using a fake stamp.
  - floam 3mo ago
    They are unable to do much. Look, their systems cannot distinguish them - not since the crooks figured out the phosphor tags. They aren’t detecting any during the course of business. There are no prosecutions of “duped cobsumers” buying cheap stamps claiming to be real online as far as I can find.
mmooss 3mo ago
> half-price stamps Who is selling half-price stamps? #1 How big is your potential market? It's people still mailing things from home, who haven't figured out how to do postage on their computer. #2 Of the population in #1, it's those who find real stamps so expensive that it's worth bothering with discounts. #3 Of the population in #2, it's those who would want to buy something fraudulant (or not know better) and who would want to risk using it. #4 Considering the size of the #3 population, how many stamps do they use in a month? #5 What is your margin on a half-price stamp? You have to pay for advertising, printing (we're talking a profit margin under $1), packaging, and your own time, but at least shipping is free!
- wildzzz 3mo ago
  Its the grandmas still sending you a $5 check in the mail for your birthday
  - mmooss 3mo ago
    How can those few people - and again narrowed down to the population mailing letters AND needing stamps AND seeking discounts AND willing or ignorant enough to do/risk fraud - with that little revenue per item, make a half-price stamp operation worthwhile?
    - wildzzz 2mo ago
      The Venn diagram of old people with limited mobility (can't just drive to the post office or grocery store) and on a fixed income (they crave those discounts) is nearly a perfect circle of the people that fall for internet scams (fails to understand that literally anyone can make a shopify store and accept card payments).
rrr_oh_man 3mo ago
What is your line of work, if I may ask?
_carbyau_ 3mo ago
What is the world view (aka context) of this little old lady? Watch the news and see CEO's with golden handshakes after the company is nailed for something. Wall street failures. Companies getting government bailouts. The current US president. It is all about getting away with what you can. The news - being the news - doesn't show process as per normal. People doing the right thing most of the time. In this context, fake stamps for the "little person" doesn't even rate a mention. Who the hell is going to raise a moral panic about an old lady with fake stamps... And so the "little people" will keep buying fake whatevers as long as it stretches their dollar further.
hakfoo 3mo ago
Discounted stamps do exist. Stamp collectors end up stuck with sheets and sheets of unpopular designs, and since the hobby (like many hobbies) has imploded, the dealers will pay less than face value for it; they in turn will sell it for a smaller discount for people who are willing to futz with wallpapering their envelope in 3-cent stamps and Fat Elvis.

nvme0n1p1 3mo ago

OTOH - TV, radio, and YouTube are all unlimited and free. Why not streaming? There are lots of people alive who grew up during the days of broadcast TV and radio. I get why they might not understand the difference.

weberer 3mo ago
There are a ton of legitimately free IPTV streams. You can watch them through most media players like VLC without having to download anything shady. https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv https://github.com/iptv-org/iptv
- nuxi 3mo ago
  Two things: - How are these "legitimately free"? For example AMC is a commercial TV channel and as far as I know, they don't offer free streaming. Same goes for MGM, FilmBox etc. - Strictly speaking this isn't IPTV, it's just web streams. IPTV is usually delivered via multicast (MPEG-TS/RTP/RTSP streams, over UDP mostly).
  - deleted 3mo ago
    [deleted]
- nvme0n1p1 3mo ago
  Ok but have fun explaining that to the average person. Buying a dongle is easier than installing software or typing URLs into their TV ("my TV doesn't even have a keyboard"). To most people IPTV is a bunch of gibberish letters, indistinguishable from the gibberish brands on Amazon. Someone's grandma from Colorado doesn't deserve to get scammed because she didn't research the acronyms.
- kube-system 3mo ago
  That is chock-full of pirated content.
  - crote 3mo ago

fred_is_fred 3mo ago

If you offered most people free streaming for a $37 USB stick but directly told them it would be faking ad clicks when the TV is off, would any of them really care?

1970-01-01 3mo ago
No, and that's is the root of the problem. The buyer is happy and so is the seller. They don't care to understand what they're allowing and everyone is allowing it to happen.
- GolfPopper 3mo ago
  They're just meeting the standards American society has set.
  - Scroll_Swe 3mo ago
    [flagged]
    - dang 3mo ago
      Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait, and also please stop using HN primarily for political/ideological battle? These things are not what HN is for, and destroy what it is for, so we ban accounts that do them repeatedly. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
- bayarearefugee 3mo ago
  I wouldn't use a device like this for a lot of reasons, but the fact that what they are doing might be taking advantage of the incredibly predatory digital advertising system is neutral to positive for me, if I'm being fully honest. If they were using the system to rip off random people, I'd be 100% against it, if they are fucking Google and the giant corps that advertise with them, ehh.. not my problem and can't be assed to care. Google is not a positive force in the world. Hasn't been for many years.

flerchin 3mo ago

Well now I want one

Cider9986 3mo ago
Stremio+TorBox are the two words. ($3/month)
- ghostly_s 3mo ago
  That's not what these things are. They come preloaded with apps that stream pirate broadcast streams and on-demand servers operated out of China.
  - Cider9986 3mo ago
    Absolutely correct. My comment intention was if you want to make one yourself and get the experience of all shows +movies.
    - ghostly_s 3mo ago
      Did OP say "I want something vaguely similar that requires a greater investment of my time and money"? Did you in any way indicate that's what you were proposing?
      - deleted 3mo ago
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      - deleted 3mo ago
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iugtmkbdfil834 3mo ago

Uhh, I have an extended family member, who not only uses it, but now also tries to get other people to get into it. Since I was familiar with this practice ( and the issues it makes worse ), I noted those to him in an attempt to both politely decline and, hopefully, spare him, and society, some future problems. Without going into any identifying details, he didn't take it well ( and I don't think I got on my high horse ). Anyway, I think some level of blame is warranted.

chihuahua 3mo ago
According to the Darknet Diaries podcast episode "Superbox", some of these devices are sold via multi-level marketing schemes, which would explain why there are random individuals selling these, collecting a commission for each device sold. Which is why the person you mentioned is unhappy when someone points out the problems with these devices.

Cider9986 3mo ago

It could be possible, I haven't done the math though. Stremio +Torbox is $3/month and they can probably share 10+ households on one TorBox account so it could work out. The seller could just stop paying the TorBox subscription at whatever point and they have an incentive to do so.

IncreasePosts 3mo ago

Maybe, but if they're a not-very-tech savvy older person buying this, they probably remember shows being free from over the air antennas and may think it is something like that.

ghostly_s 3mo ago
> they probably remember shows being free from over the air antennas you are aware broadcast TV never ended?
- IncreasePosts 3mo ago
  Yes, in fact I have an antenna and a HDHomeRun nestled in my attic to record over the air shows that I occasionally consume. But, I think it's far more common for people to have a TV service today, perhaps since comcast and their ilk push hard the TV/phone/internet bundle, and gone are the years when everyone would fiddle with the antennas on the back of their TV to get the right reception.
- myself248 3mo ago
  An awful, awful, awful lot of consumers think their old antennas don't work now that everything's gone digital. And they've simply never tried.
  - a96 3mo ago
    Well, analog broadcasts did stop in Finland some 15-20 years ago. DVB-T stopped a few years ago. Only T2 receives anything these days AFAIK. Physical antennas are the same, though. (And C if you have cable.)
bdangubic 3mo ago
I watch TV over an antenna, shows are free still

rng-concern 3mo ago

I know a few people who buy these, and they kind of know what they're doing. They just try and not think about it too hard. It reminds me of the saying: "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It". If these people thought about it for a few minutes, they would understand, but they choose not to, as ignoring it is too advantageous. I admit I was tempted, as the price of all streaming services goes up, and services become more and more fragmented. During the same period where I have not had a raise.

acdha 3mo ago
In the 90s, there was a cottage industry selling CDs of bootleg software at swap meets and flea markets. A guy my dad knew was almost condescending to anyone who paid for software despite having been hit by viruses multiple times because it was so much cheaper. Even having to deal with a client(!) who naively called the vendor support only to be informed that they hadn’t actually purchased a license wasn’t enough to get him to resist that savings.
inigyou 3mo ago
On what grounds would they choose not to?
- rng-concern 3mo ago
  I won't argue the ethics of piracy. That was not my point, but if you want to I suppose I could. My point was, their ethics WOULD have prevented them from doing the thing. But they chose not to think about it too hard. Perhaps subconsciously. I'm not above doing this sort of thing either. We all do it for various things. I've added code that is bad for the user (overbearing telemetry for instance) because my salary depended on it. At the time I tried not to think about it too much, as it would cause cognitive dissonance.

deleted 3mo ago

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paultopia 3mo ago

Yeah, isn’t this a classic kind of scam the would-be scammer situation? If you think there’s some way to buy one cheap device and somehow get around subscribing to streaming services[1], then of course you’re going to be in a market with fraudsters… [1] Can someone explain what the theory of the product is here? It sounds like they’re marketing these things as ways for the customer to commit fraud, for example by connecting to someone else’s login. How else would the customer expect to be able to get free Netflix or whatever?

chihuahua 3mo ago
It may be the case that these devices are front-ends for pirated content that's hosted in various places. They're not streaming it from Netflix servers. It's content similar to that offered by Netflix and other streaming services, pirated by someone else, and hosted by someone else for streaming by anyone who can figure out how to find it.

varispeed 3mo ago

I used to know someone doing this. They said they know it is too good to be true, but they hate corporations and it's their little way to stick one in.

pibaker 3mo ago

> it does seem like a Too Good To Be True situation It's difficult to judge the price of media products. We have legal music streaming services that charges you an album's worth of money a month and lets you listen to millions of songs. You can pick up old AAA games for less than ten bucks. I'd say when people say that price tag, they don't think they get scammed into being a part of a botnet. They think the device manufacturer cut a good deal with the media rights holders.

al_borland 3mo ago

Why should anyone assume a product being sold by (or at least on) Amazon, the latest retailer in the country, is an illegal device? It’s not like they’re buying these things out of a car trunk in a dark alley. These retailers need to be held liable for selling these things. If they sell this stuff, why not illicit drugs? If they are unable to maintain control of 3rd party sellers, then they should end the 3rd party seller program. It has done nothing but damage Amazon’s reputation, and it just keeps getting worse.

Tangurena2 3mo ago

The streaming services have fractured and taken so many movies off their service so much that it is too hard for most people to figure out where that show/movie can be found. From a link above to the story on darknetdiaries: > For Pokemon, there is a website that tells you how to watch this. You start off on Netflix, then swap over to the Pokemon streaming service, which is the only place that has Season 2, then swap over to Prime Video for Seasons 3 through 5, swap to Freevee, then Hoopla. Season 13 is only on Amazon, though. Then swap to Tubi, then Hulu, then Roku channel, and then finally back to the Pokemon streaming, and then Netflix. Easy. That's 8 different streaming services to view one series.

tomaskafka 3mo ago
And yet they can all be comfortably watched at a single place, with high quality and no ads.

joshmn 3mo ago

I had a streaming piracy site that I went to federal prison for. I can chime in on these people. It's worth separating the two populations: My users had money and had considered legal subscriptions. They paid me because the legal product was worse—in my case, sports blackouts, a bunch of different apps, etc. They knew what they were buying into and they had weighed the risk. I can tell you right now some of my former users have bought into this market. Then there's the unwitting: a person buying one of these devices at a too-good-to-be-true price is treating it as a hardware purchase from Amazon, where the actual monetization isn't inferable from the listing. Calling it too good to be true assumes the buyer can see what shit they're standing in. They can't. There's no visible market here. It's just a product page with reviews. To add to this: the proxy exit is exactly why these cost so little. Demand for residential IPs is booming (check some of the proxy subreddits to see what I mean). The ironic part is that there's a chance the person who bought one of these boxes to watch pirated sports was the exit node I was using to acquire the feeds in the first place.

elzbardico 3mo ago

I don't care about free streaming. But fucking advertisers? Humm... just found a reason to buy one of those boxes.