Amazon’s crackdown on pay-to-play reviews (where companies basically bribe customers to leave positive reviews) seems to be continuing. The latest company caught up is Choetech, maker of a range of devices including charging accessories and USB hubs.
The company’s Amazon storefront is still accessible, but there are no products available for purchase.
Meanwhile, smartphone maker OnePlus has been caught cheating in a different way – the company has admitted it’s using software to throttle performance of its OnePlus 9 series smartphones when running many popular apps… but not when running benchmarks. That means the phones notch high scores in benchmarks, but real-world performance may be lower.
This isn’t a new problem. But apparently it’s not an old one either – it rears its head from time to time.
Here’s a roundup of recent tech news from around the web.
- Examining OnePlus’ Performance Behaviour: Optimization or Misrepresentation? [AnandTech]
After OnePlus was caught throttling performance in the OnePlus 9 and OnePlus 9 Pro for certain apps, the company acknowledged the move, which it says is designed to prolong battery life (but gives a false impression since benchmarks are *not* throttled). - Hardware accelerated video playback now possible on the PinePhone [LinuxSmartphones]
Now it’s possible to get hardware-accelerated video playback on a PinePhone using a GUI app, no need to use the command line every time you want to watch. - Amazon shifts Lumberyard to open source 3D game engine supported by 20 companies [VentureBeat]
Amazon is open sourcing its Lumberyard 3D game engine. It’ll be known as the Open 3D Engine moving forward, and the project will be overseen by the Linux Foundation. - Choetech seems to be the latest tech brand delisted on Amazon [xda-developers]
It looks like Amazon’s crackdown on vendors soliciting fake/paid reviews continues. The latest mobile & PC accessory maker to have its products de-listed is Choetech. This follows crackdowns on Aukey, Mpow, RAVPower, Taotronics, and Vava. - Raspberry Pi CM4 hacked to feature 128GB of eMMC storage [@Merocle]
The Raspberry Pi Compute Module 4 is a tiny computer-on-a-module that’s normally available with up to 8GB of RAM and up to 32GB of eMMC onboard storage. But that wasn’t enough for @Merocle so he desoldered the eMMC and replaced it with a 128GB chip. - Here comes Microsoft’s Cloud PC virtualization service [ZDNet]
Microsoft may announce its long-anticipated “Cloud PC” service next week. It’s expected to be a “virtualized desktop-as-a-service” that will let you basically log onto a Windows PC in the cloud from anywhere using a thin client device with minimal specs. - Nothing ear(1) [Nothing]
Nothing ear (1) wireless earbuds will have active noise cancellation, a design that incorporates transparent materials, and a $99 price tag. The full unveiling is scheduled for July 27. - As it moves to Wear OS, Samsung wants owners of its first Android watch to switch to Tizen [SamMobile]
Samsung’s next smartwatches will run a version of Google’s Wear OS rather than the Tizen software Samsung has used for years. But the company’s first smartwatch, released in 2013 shipped with Android Wear. Users who never updated to Tizen may have to soon. - Volla Phone X rugged phone is available for pre-order with Ubuntu or Android
The second phone from Volla has specs similar to the first, but a new rugged design. It’s also one of the few phones available for purchase with a choice of operating systems including the Android-based Volla OS or the Linux-based Ubuntu Touch.
Keep up on the latest headlines by following Liliputing on Twitter and Facebook.
You can also find the latest news about open source phones by following our sister site LinuxSmartphones on Facebook and Twitter.
A bunch of people remote desktop-ing into VMs at a datacenter isn’t really a huge deal, but only if it’s an unaffiliated service.
When it’s Microsoft doing it however, it invites a whole host of problems. Windows cloud is in direct conflict with desktop Windows and by controlling both Microsoft gets to rig the game and pick the winner. And I would expect it to be the cloud. Here’s why.
1. Computers are expensive. They’re getting more expensive. Everything is getting more expensive. But even if you live paycheck to paycheck, you can afford 10 bucks a month, right? It’d take 8 years before you could save up to afford a decent Thinkpad. Even longer for something with an actual graphics card. VMs that float around between servers however are cheap.
2. Microsoft gets a real time video stream of everything you do and say and has the infrastructure to process all of it for marketing purposes, and for putting you on secret illegal industry blacklists if you get too out of line (in ways that don’t violate TOS). Encryption on one of these things is useless. If they say they don’t, assume they do and are lying. How are you going to prove it?
3. Since they own the VM, they own any files on it too. Even if they don’t look at them, once you fall into this trap, they can keep you paying because if you don’t, you’ll lose access to the files. Now I remember being able to download files I’d saved on a remote PC via remote desktop, but if they don’t use the remote desktop client and make you download the “windows cloud app” instead they could remove that option.
4. The TOS and other limits on what you can do can be shaped to their established advertising/social engineering customers desires. Shadow has no such customers AFAIK. If Microsoft decides that advocacy for the talking points of some political party in your country is “otherwise objectionable” they can lock you out of your computer, so you won’t even try to type a blog post for that. They could do that on desktop Windows too but at least you could recover your files from an unencrypted NTFS drive, and the customers would need to get ChromeOS and MacOS to do the same thing simultaneously or people would switch.
I’d say try to avoid it, but eventually our budgets might not leave people any choice.