eBay removing Raspberry Pi listings as they “encourage infringement”

https://twitter.com/lbhq/status/1323482627681198080

by schappim • 6 years ago

457 305 6 years ago

eBay is the worst for so many reasons. I can’t believe no startup or even big tech company has tried to make a competing platform.

barbs• 6 years ago

I imagine an auction-site like this is only as good as the number of people that are using it.

What issues do you have with it? I find it's not perfect, but it generally works reasonably well.

TheKarateKid5• 6 years ago

Their account interface is so out of date. Parts of it still require you to use an interface from the early 2000’s. It’s a nightmare to navigate.

The fees are high, and they even take a cut of your shipping fee. And yet, they still have 3rd party ads all over.

Their rules and policies are strange and one-sided, just like this one.

Poor customer support.

jen729w2• 6 years ago

Strong disagree. eBay has become a cesspool.

I finally rage-closed my account after carefully listing a thing, monitoring the auction, being happy when it sold, and then having the buyer casually tell me that they didn’t need it after all.

I remember when clicking the ‘make a bid’ button actually meant something. Wasn’t there even a warning along the lines of ‘you are entering in to a contractual obligation’?

nightcracker2• 6 years ago

In the Netherlands people use marktplaats.nl much more than eBay.

duozerk• 6 years ago

In France there's leboncoin.fr, also more active than eBay.

tinus_hn• 6 years ago

However, marktplaats.nl is owned by eBay.

toast0• 6 years ago

Yahoo Auctions tried, but they only won in Japan, and eventually shut down everywhere else. As eBay has shifted to buy it now, marketplace sites (amazon, walmart, newegg, aliexpress) compete to some degree.

TheKarateKid5• 6 years ago

Most of those marketplace sites don’t allow casual selling. Even Amazon’s Seller Central is slowly being restricted to only businesses.

I’ve been using Swappa for phones and consoles, and Bonanza for other things. But they’re still not mainstream.

rasz• 6 years ago

Ebay pretty much doesnt exist in Poland. allegro.pl has local monopoly in similar way to Yahoo Japan. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegro_(website)

They tried expanding to Czechia, Germany, Russia and Ukraine in 2015 but conceded defeat a year later.

MattGaiser• 6 years ago

Probably because dealing with people selling lots of individual items does not scale well and eBay's issues are not easy to solve, even after decades.

toyg• 6 years ago

This. It’s a massive effort to keep ebay somewhat respectable and busy. Small companies will struggle.

mhh__• 6 years ago

In my experience eBay is still the best for p2p auctions, but for anything vaguely commercial it's pretty dire.

You can sometimes find some bargains of people reselling from alibaba or whatever (FPGA boards can be had for cheap on eBay). In the UK at least, the listings are so unprofessional I don't understand why people would shop - usually no contact details, THE DESCRIPTION IS IN CAPSLOCK, and those stereotype word-art and product on white background photos.

fyfy18• 6 years ago

eBay has a lot of different use cases. Although it was originally for selling your second hand junk, now I expect a lot of their sales come from new items.

In my country eBay doesn't exist (i.e. they don't have a localised site, you can sell on other country sites though). The main 'second hand junk' services are:

- a local version of Craisglist

- Facebook Groups (for hyper local listings, mainly for very cheap or free stuff, e.g. "I'm moving tomorrow, come get my half destroyed IKEA furniture")

- Vinted [0] - although it's intended for second hand clothes, a lot of people sell new items they bought in sales from other countries, so it's more like eBay in this retrospect

For new items Etsy (crafts and furniture) is quite popular.

For electronics Tindie (although it's custom / DIY, rather than 'random adapter that only 5 other people worldwide have bought this month'). Most of the time when I want some sort of electronics that I can't find elsewhere I will buy from eBay in another country (using a shipping service) or AliExpress (then wait 2 months).

[0] https://techcrunch.com/2019/11/27/vinted-the-second-hand-clo...

cocoa192• 6 years ago

Amazon and Craigslist are competitors and serve most people's online shopping needs.

Everyone used eBay like 20 years ago. Now, not so much.

BlueTemplar5• 6 years ago

eBay and Adevinta are still (nearly) billion-dollar companies that compete for person-to-person transactions.

TheKarateKid5• 6 years ago

Using Craigslist to sell is like the Wild West. There’s no rules or enforcement, and many criminals use it. I’m not going to risk getting robbed trying to sell my iPhone.

Amazon has locked out private selling for most mainstream items unless you’re a business with a PO directly from the manufacturer. Also, their fees get higher the more your item competes with their own sales. Totally anticompetitive.

ratww• 6 years ago

Reverb.com is (was?) eating Ebay's lunch when it comes to musical instruments, but Ebay seems to be fighting back now.

MaxBarraclough2• 6 years ago

Really tough to overcome the network effect problem and build momentum. Who would use an online marketplace with few users?

fyfy18 already mentioned Facebook, but I'm not sure how serious they are with competing against eBay.

userbinator• 6 years ago

The irony of this is that the RPi is far more closed and proprietary than regular PCs and their components, of which you can find plenty of listings for on eBay...

I hope this was just a mistake and done due to other reasons (they thought these were fake RPis?)

londons_explore2• 6 years ago

They probably are scanning to remove all retropies (often sold as a package including tens of thousands of pirated games) and pirate streaming TV boxes.

cocoa192• 6 years ago

Ironic that people buy it for streaming media (pirated or not), but RPi is terrible for video playback.

I have an RPi4, tried kodi (libreelec OS) and vlc on raspbian, both apps stutter with most videos at 1080p. Luckily I repurposed it for IOT so I'm pretty happy with it.

marcan_42• 6 years ago

It's not, really. They both suck. Both regular PCs and the RPi need piles of proprietary code to work, and a regular PC is arguably a lot more complicated and thus has a lot more proprietary parts.

The difference is mostly that PCs have decades of history of having an openly documented abstraction layer below which all the proprietary stuff is piled on, so it looks more open than the RPi which makes all the proprietary stuff more obvious and in your face.

Among ARM SBCs, the RPi used to be one of the least open ones. These days things are slightly better. It's still not great, but it's also hard to find alternatives that are much better. Nvidia Tegra boards are pretty good; you can run those with fully open source firmware these days, at least the X1 (the last bit missing was the DDR4 training code, but that's been reverse engineered now). It's still hard to get all the pieces working with "clean" open code though.

justin663• 6 years ago

The irony of this is that the RPi is far more closed and proprietary than regular PCs and their components

This is such a strangely obvious lie that it's hard to imagine why you would write it.

mPReDiToR• 6 years ago

I love my RasPis, I got one of the first 10k made and have over ten devices myself, plus I've told hundreds of people to buy them.

I'm not a hater AT ALL.

Proprietary bootloader technology that Broadcom maintains is secret stopped the community hacking together USB boot, keeping us tied to bloody MicroSD cards and all the palava which is adherent to that. Proprietary GFX hardware which needs paid for codes to use (see comment earlier about Malaysia).

Everybody should buy one or more, but Broadcom do have control over their chips to a greater degree than I'm personally happy with.

BlueTemplar5• 6 years ago

The main RPi OS isn't Linux, but ThreadX, which is closed source (and is now owned by Microsoft) : https://ownyourbits.com/2019/02/02/whats-wrong-with-the-rasp...

schappim4• 6 years ago

What is worse is the use of "no-reply" email addresses and the total lack of recourse when the algorithm gets it wrong.

We see it every day from folks who get locked out of their Google accounts to the shenanigans carried out by online marketplaces (including both service and product marketplaces).

Something has to give...

yjftsjthsd-h• 6 years ago

On the bright side, eBay isn't a monopoly and this literally costs them money.

sneak• 6 years ago

Where else is there a global, highly liquid market for secondhand goods like this?

I’m not asking to be snarky, I just don’t know of any and would love an alternative to eBay.

Accujack• 6 years ago

They're a de facto monopoly. The only thing they have that could be called "competition" is Amazon, and Amazon isn't quite an identical business.

BlueTemplar5• 6 years ago

Yeah, no-reply emails are unbelievably rude.

Krisjohn• 6 years ago

Didn't take me long to find that they have a "RetroPie" listing. I think this is going to be a lot more grey than first glance.

schappim4• 6 years ago

Good guess, but that wasn't what eBay delisted. They did however feel the need to delist "8GB MicroSD Card with NOOBS 2.0".

varenc• 6 years ago

Do you have a list of everything they delisted? Super odd that they'd remove that listing, but leave your listings for 16GB/32GB cards with NOOBS. Thinking optimistically, this is looks like accident of some sort and if you can ever actually get a response from eBay they'll realize it.

k_sze2• 6 years ago

I feel that this is the perfect opportunity to create a new auction site called “The Arrrr PIrate Bay”.

eru2• 6 years ago

You can try that, but as soon as you interact with the real world and especially with payment processors in the real world, regulation ensues.

feanaro• 6 years ago

Which actual, real world regulation do you think legitimately leads to this removal of the RPi listings?

sasaf5• 6 years ago

Tip: when a couple starts fighting around you in a coffee shop, turn off your laptop before watching them.

k_sze2• 6 years ago

This comment just completely flew over my head. Please explain?

wegs• 6 years ago

It's called Aliexpress.

I've been gradually moving from Amazon to eBay to Aliexpress. Ironically, this happened because I got scammed on Amazon a few times. I figured if I was gonna get scammed, I might as well save a bit with eBay, and it seemed a bit more reliable. Then Aliexpress came out even cheaper, although shipping times are sometimes insane.

Aliexpress also has real human beings. I got scammed there once too, and the result was human, efficient, and chaotic (partial refund, on a product worth $0). All-in-all, it was a lot better than talking to Amazon's recently-useless reps, or eBay computers.

What's odd is Amazon had amazing customer service just a couple years back.

And if I need quality/genuine, I order direct from the vendor most of the time.

mewse7• 6 years ago

I bought my first two RPis from Little Bird, the company whose tweet is linked (albeit through one of their web stores, not via ebay). Those were an original RPi model B, now sadly retired (it still works, just is very slow even for running basic services), and a 3B+, now faithfully serving as a PiHole and HomeBridge machine.

I have a surprising number of RPis around the apartment now; a PiZero with the HQ camera module is serving as a webcam for my desktop machine, and another one is acting as an “on air” indicator to let folks know when a microphone is hot in the room (typically working-from-home zoom meetings). And another zero is controlling a set of “presence” indicator lights, watching bluetooth to determine who is in the apartment at any given time. That makes it so that if one of us is leaving the apartment, we can easily tell whether we need to lock the door on our way out, without needing to go searching through the apartment to check whether another flatmate is home or not. (I found that for us, testing bluetooth was far faster and more reliable than testing arp, wifi, bonjour, geofencing, or etc)

... and I’ve just ordered a moderately large e-paper display which is destined to be mounted with a zero inside a picture frame and hung from the wall like a photo. Haven’t decided exactly what to show on it yet; probably will show a weather forecast and how long until the next tram will arrive at the stop outside our building. That kind of thing.

Plus, of course, the pi 4 that I just use as a generic linux box for my own amusement. These little projects have been such fun little creative outlets; I’ve very much enjoyed coming up with and implementing them over the past few years!

formercoder• 6 years ago

Cool stuff, check out the ESP32 if you want to get smaller.

mewse7• 6 years ago

ESP32 is one of the Arduino-compatible boards, right?

I keep bouncing off Arduino stuff just because I find their IDE to be astonishingly awful (at least on Linux, running inside a dwm window manager)

I’d be 100% on board if I could write the code in vim and ideally compile/upload from the command line. Maybe a nice makefile. And I did set that up for a few arduino devices in the past, but it was just too much jumping through hoops for me to really bother with longterm. Much easier to just grab a RPi Zero and install a compiler or python on it and then just code directly on the device, over ssh.

If there’s a better approach to handle the coding side of things than the standard Arduino IDE, I’d be super interested to learn about it!

dirkc• 6 years ago

PiZero with the HQ camera module is serving as a webcam for my desktop machine

How did you set that up? I wanted to do that for some time now

walrus01• 6 years ago

http://www.davidhunt.ie/raspberry-pi-zero-with-pi-camera-as-...

https://ubuntu.com/blog/how-to-stream-video-with-raspberry-p...

mewse7• 6 years ago

walrus01 pointed out the original DIY methods, but there’s a pre-built especially nice implementation over here:

https://github.com/showmewebcam/showmewebcam

It boots up much faster and mounts the filesystem read-only so you don’t have to worry about unplugging the pi and accidentally corrupting the file system or anything like that. I’m currently using this one.

the_angry_angel• 6 years ago

and I’ve just ordered a moderately large e-paper display which is destined to be mounted with a zero inside a picture frame and hung from the wall like a photo

Which display, if you don’t mind me asking? I’ve had a similar idea for a while, but haven’t seen a display that felt reasonably sized or priced for a hobby project

mewse7• 6 years ago

I ordered this one:

https://www.waveshare.com/product/raspberry-pi/displays/e-pa...

It’s the same size as the screen on most Kindle devices; 12cm by 9cm.

So it’s not large except in comparison to most e-paper displays out there, which seem to most often come in at 6cm by 3cm or smaller. And it’s not exactly cheap by any stretch of the imagination, but for me it was at the ‘sweet spot’ between size and cost, as stuff bigger than this gets expensive fast.

Note that I haven’t actually received the display yet and can’t vouch for its quality or usability. But for what it’s worth, that’s the one I ordered.

imagine99• 6 years ago

one is acting as an “on air” indicator to let folks know when a microphone is hot in the room (typically working-from-home zoom meetings).

How did you achieve this? I'd be very interested in setting something like this up for myself... Thanks.

mewse7• 6 years ago

This was a little bit of a cheat.

It just so happens that the computer being used for the Zoom calls is a Mac, so I just wrote a program that runs in the background on the Mac and asks the OS about whether any microphone devices are in use by any programs, and then sends a message to the Pi, which really is only turning a hat of LEDs on/off based on UDP packets it receives. It could be turning the indicator on/off for anything that somebody else told it to do it for.

(Originally, I was using an Arduino Nano and a USB serial interface for communication, but my flatmate rewrote it to go over UDP to a Pi Zero W, as he wanted to use a particular RPi hat as the indicator lights)

Detecting the microphone on/off status on OS X was shamelessly ripped off from the answer to this StackExchange question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/37470201/how-can-i-tell-.... I don’t know if there’s a similar approach that would work for Windows or other OSes.

raman325• 6 years ago

Not OP but if you are willing to run HomeAssistant, I built a zoom integration [0] that uses web hook events from Zoom to tell HA when you are “busy”. This triggers anytime my calendar shows I’m supposed to be in a meeting, whether I am or not. But the HA Mac app also provides sensors for your mic and video so you could combine the three sources however it made sense to achieve this

[0] https://github.com/raman325/ha-zoom-automation

madaxe_again3• 6 years ago

I bought my first RPi six months ago, and now I have four (two 4s, two zeros), and six arduinos.

My uses are all brutally utilitarian.

One pi 4 is openhab, grafana, mqtt broker etc., and the other is doing all the network gumph - vpns, qos, Wi-Fi ap, Bluetooth presence, LoRa. One zero is a controller in a micro hydro system I’m building, the other runs a couple of remote cameras.

The arduinos are being used in a lora sensor network, using dinky batteries and solar panels - they’re so low power it’s ridiculous - most of them using ultrasonic rangefinders to measure depth in tanks (water, gasoline) and monitor river levels here and upstream - we live in a mill, so being able to see the delta-h will hopefully save us from a surprise flood this winter. The government operated river gauges were all destroyed in the floods last year, and haven’t yet been replaced. I’m managing to build serviceable river gauges for under €100 a pop - I might have to see if they’re interested, as I think their issue is money - they use these big mechanical gauges that I can’t see being cheap.

Another arduino is a weather station, and the last one for now is controlling a valve way, way uphill that I got bored of walking to.

Over the winter I intend to build out a heap of arduino/lora irrigation control valves, and am toying with sapping a tiny amount of energy from the water with an impeller to power the things - my ultimate aim here is to automate everything that reasonably can be, so we have more time to do the things that can’t be.

Also, damn, it’s fun to be tinkering again - 15 years of working in tech kinda killed my passion for playing with tech, but it turns out it’s still there.

prox2• 6 years ago

That’s pretty amazing, how you can build solutions “on the spot” (instead of buying something off the shelves) how did get started with tinkering?

zaroth• 6 years ago

I have a problem which requires automated valve control — too many times a sprinkler failure has led to days of leaks before being noticed, so

1) I don’t want the water feed to the irrigation on when the sprinklers are not supposed to be running, and

2) I want a daily report on how many gallons went out that pipe to detect if something has changed.

The issue I’m running into is all the motorized ball valves or solenoids for 3/4” water pipes seam to be total junk.

Any suggestion for sourcing a decent motorized valve?

shadowpho• 6 years ago

Can you link to the3 large e-paper display please?

dheera2• 6 years ago

And they didn't do a damn thing about price gouging on N95 masks, hand sanitizer, and disinfectants during a pandemic.

I reported dozens of listings and they didn't do anything about them.

RedShift1• 6 years ago

I feel like the market will automatically correct? Nobody buys this overpriced stuff?

dheera2• 6 years ago

Not really, because people still need masks, and at that time, everything else was sold out, even the local shops.

Lots of people overpaid, and it went into the hands of some eBay armchair hoarders.

pmiller23• 6 years ago

This is not a thing the "free market" can do. We need to get PPE into the hands of hospitals and healthcare workers above all. The "free market" is literally designed to make that not happen, if someone else with more money is out there and willing to pay more money than the hospitals.

donmcronald• 6 years ago

I don't think so. As stupid as it sounds, this is something I learned playing WoW many years ago with the expansion that added glyphs. Everyone _needed_ glyphs in the sense that your character wasn't hitting it's full potential and you'd get mocked if you didn't have them.

Back then I wrote my own auction house addon that would scan for glyphs below a certain price threshold, buy them, and re-list them in bulk for higher prices. It also scanned for raw materials and bought them too to help strangle the supply as much as possible. It was so easy that hitting the technical gold limit (something just over 200k IIRC) was a realistic problem to deal with.

The supply was limited enough that 2-3 people could monopolize an entire server. I recognized the other 1 or 2 people doing it on my server and it's something I would describe as tacit collusion. We never talked to each other, but we didn't compete with each other either.

The whole time _everyone_ complained about the price of glyphs, but there wasn't much they could do about it. If someone came in and tried to compete by undercutting you, you'd just buy out their supply and re-list it at your inflated prices.

It wasn't complex. You just needed to be willing to be a bit of a scumbag. The only thing that was moderately difficult was getting enough gold to start monopolizing that part of the market. IIRC it costed 5k gold to get a flying mount and most players had to save up for that, so being able to drop 5k at the auction house gave a lot of buying power.

Having a limited supply product that people _need_ means your profits are only limited by your ethics. Capitalism works really well for luxury products IMO, but less so for necessities.

shock• 6 years ago

Wait until it's overpriced for you too, and you need it...

wil421• 6 years ago

It doesn't matter if it's doctors or nurses in hospitals or not-so-smart people buying second hand because of a panic, people shouldn't be price gouging or hoarding PPE. There was a hoarder arrested in NYC earlier this year.

https://nypost.com/2020/03/30/brooklyn-man-arrested-for-hoar...

bemhave• 6 years ago

When there is huge demand for a product prices go up. Then the people who really need it will still be able to buy it. This is a good feature of markets.

mienski• 6 years ago

TIL price gouging of medical supplies during pandemics is a good feature of markets..

mullingitover• 6 years ago

Not when it's a price shock, supply isn't able to respond to price signals in a timely fashion, and the increased prices are purely lining the pockets of middle men.

skipnup• 6 years ago

With face masks, the people who need them and the people who have lots of money are not the same group of people

rendall4• 6 years ago

I heard it explained this way: in a war zone or disaster area it's risky to even have a market, so prices will rise very high. This is good. If prices were kept artificially low, by price-gouging laws for example, then there would be no market at all, as the risk would not be worth it

High prices during the pandemic slows hoarding, and is a signal to producers that there is high demand. When production ramps up to meet demand, prices will lower. This is the situation now.

Price-gouging laws encourage hoarding: the first person in line gets to buy everything at artificially low prices. Now they have to make other laws to limit purchases. Now people who need to buy for a large family or community can't buy enough. Now the needs to be another law allowing exceptions....

mdoms• 6 years ago

Religious fanatic.

Erlich_Bachman3• 6 years ago

What exactly is wrong with selling the stuff at a price that will easily find buyers?

Those items were not controlled by the government, there were no quotas in place or anything like that, so what exactly did you report those listings for? What crime, or even what ethical problem do you see with it? Just don't buy it if you think it's too expensive. It would be one thing if it was a big company that was ordered by the government to give masks to hospitals, but the listings you talk about were likely from individuals who had small stocks that were free to do with those stocks as they pleased.

It sounds like you didn't want to pay the price that the seller wanted, but instead of simply refusing to buy you tried to go around and try to abuse the reporting system to force them to sell cheaper in a new listing.

pulse73• 6 years ago

It is wrong to substantially rise the price of the health-related product if you suddenly see there is a big need for it. It is non-ethical and totally wrong!

pmachinery• 6 years ago

It sounds like you didn't want to pay the price that the seller wanted, but instead of simply refusing to buy you tried to go around and try to abuse the reporting system

Or perhaps they simply know Ebay's policy on the matter.

"We encourage our community to report any listings they suspect of price gouging to us."

https://www.ebay.com/help/policies/prohibited-restricted-ite...

DigitalSea• 6 years ago

Same thing happened with the Nvidia 30xx series cards. Some of the scalped cards were being listed upwards of $3000 for a 3080. Many had fake bids, I watched as eBay did nothing. People were even trying to mislead users by selling cardboard images of the Nvidia cards, but in a way it looked like you were buying a card (even if the description did say cardboard).

dawnerd• 6 years ago

They even sent multiple emails to all of us sellers telling us they’re banned across the board with a few exceptions for companies that already have a history of selling. Clearly they were all talk.

But reporting items in general is a waste of time. I’ve reported obvious scams directly to their support people and they let them slide.

Paul-ish• 6 years ago

This reminds me of a tangential matter. The Rasberry Pi has a built in hardware decoder for MPEG-2. You can pay a licensing fee and enable the decoder. This is despite the fact that the relevant patents on MPEG-2 have expired in the US and much of the world[1]. The issue is that there are still active patents in Malaysia[2].

[1] https://github.com/raspberrypi/firmware/issues/939

[2] https://bryanquigley.com/pages/mpeg2-patent-tracker.html

Namidairo• 6 years ago

The Rasberry Pi has a built in hardware decoder for MPEG-2.

Well the older models did, yes. I don't believe the Raspberry Pi 4 has one anymore. (And the CPU can probably handle it just fine as well)

cheese655362• 6 years ago

I regularly use software decoding on the 3B+ for (legally) recorded over-the-air (ATSC) MPEG2 content and it handles 1080i@30 and 720p@60 just fine. For some shows I watch at 150% speed and it still handles it.

dane-pgp• 6 years ago

That second link is interesting and perhaps needs to be updated given that it says:

Please be aware to renew your patent before this date is reached, or else your patent will become expired. 14 Sep 2020

(and earlier dates for the other 2 patents). Following the link to the MPEG LA site, though, indicates that they believe the Malaysian patents are still valid as of October 2020.

https://www.mpegla.com/programs/mpeg-2/patent-list/

jimbob45• 6 years ago

What’s up with the RIAA and MPAA this year? Feels like their lobbying has gotten out of hand.

bencollier49• 6 years ago

Perhaps they finally feel that if one of their cases ends up in the US Supreme Court, they'll have a sympathetic audience.

cheese655362• 6 years ago

Shouldn't the more conservative court be against Hollywood liberals? /s

Yes, I know you probably mean the court will be more corporatist.

salawat• 6 years ago

Two words. Captive audience.

flyinghamster• 6 years ago

Looks to me like they see a perfect opportunity in the tech backlash to try to get their own licks in.

Nasrudith• 6 years ago

The movie theaters dying and streaming as king making them panic?

cmdkskdhl• 6 years ago

Encourage infringement of what? Methinks ebay just can't deal with conflict in any reasonable way, which is perfectly in line with their reputation of being a marketplace without any sane method of conflict resolution.

Netcob• 6 years ago

I checked, and they are still selling knives. Sure, you can use a knife to cut food or walk through the woods pretending to be a "survivalist" (judging from my search for "knives"), but it can also be used to murder people.

But also checked "TVs", and they are absolutely still selling those. TVs are like the number one item used for infringement. I am VERY confused.

And don't get me started about food. Without food, it's basically impossible to infringe, yet ebay allows all sorts of food listings.

simongr3dal• 6 years ago

They also sell HDMI capture cards and HDMI splitters that can remove HDCP. As if those aren't encouraging infringement.

Simon_says• 6 years ago

Which ones? So I know to avoid them.

willis936• 6 years ago

Daily reminder that HDCP is a crime against physical layer conventions. It’s an Orwellian theft of data. Those bits on the line are my bits.

Sunspark• 6 years ago

Not every splitter can remove HDCP. Only some. It's a real problem because right now I am trying to get a PS3 going again. I've established that the HDMI port isn't burnt out because I am able to get it to show an initial screen but not past that point. I have a new splitter on the way, hope this one works before I test other things out. I'm pretty sure the issue is the HDCP is malfunctioning or is corrupted because I hot-plugged the HDMI cable while the unit was turned on. I also notice an interesting symptom, on my monitor when I attempt to get the PS3 going and then switch over to the computer, if I play something that requires HDCP the monitor will flash a brightly coloured static snow pattern before continuing to play. This doesn't happen if the PC and monitor have been powered down. So whatever is wrong with the PS3's HDCP is definitely leaking out into the monitor temporarily.

HDCP is awful. Thanks Intel.

sfoley• 6 years ago

“Can be used for infringement” is not the same thing as “encourages infringement” why does everyone make these bad faith comparisons.

jjeaff• 6 years ago

How does a raspberry pi encourage infringement more than a regular desktop pc?

classics2• 6 years ago

Ooooh I see it’s new trust and safety employee week at eBay.

Wait until PayPal bans them for life for the same thing using the exact same language. Fun times.

sundvor• 6 years ago

All these moves to block make me want to discontinue some paid services and return to torrents. Just saying.

_0ffh• 6 years ago

Have the first tendrils of the coming war on general computation reached into the present?

rektide• 6 years ago

The war never ended, but it sure does look like scary strong Authoritarian deeply vested special interests like RIAA are gearing up for a major offensive against the right of humans to compute & think as they may/might.

yodelshady3• 6 years ago

Sympathies to Little Bird, who don't seem to be retroPie resellers (I assume, what the source was). Raspberry pi's do seem to be listed on ebay.com.au...

Side note: wow are they expensive down under.

globular-toast• 6 years ago

Copyright continues to be a scourge on society. This was recognised decades ago by many people and yet here we still are.

jcmontx• 6 years ago

This is the most stupid thing I’ve ever read

jijji2• 6 years ago

ebay has so much red tape to be able to post anything on there im surprised people still use it. Not to mention the fact that they take 15 percent of whatever you make, so any potential profit you thought you might make on selling something is diminished...

MaxBarraclough2• 6 years ago

I saw this post pointing out that eBay still takes no action against obviously counterfeit Nintendo products. [0] Nintendo are known for being litigious, but this has been going on for years. Does anyone know what's going on here?

[0] https://twitter.com/Kavawuvi/status/1323587131974045696

motohagiography• 6 years ago

Prediction: the "infringement," definition will expand to cover anything that enables people to limit the surveillance capabilities of their devices, or to organize themselves socially outside official tech platforms.

People thought the DMCA was just about entertainment, but it's about regulating culture and how it impacts politics. Literally the "means of production," for culture.

I had included a list in this comment of what I was betting were next on the list of "infringing" technologies, but why give them a map? If there is a legal precedent that can be leveraged and abused to an authoritarian end, expect it to be so in the near term.

rusk• 6 years ago

If there is a legal precedent that can be leveraged and abused to an authoritarian end, expect it to be so in the near term.

Sounds like a corollary to Stallman's Law! [0]

[0] https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/stallmans-law.html

swiley• 6 years ago

I heard eBay has been taking down PinePhone listings as well. Their reason was that PinePhones might be used for hacking.

bovermyer2• 6 years ago

So what are you, dear HN, going to do about it?

DoofusOfDeath• 6 years ago

Is that a reference to a scene from Blues Brothers?

bovermyer2• 6 years ago

No. It's a request for someone to do something about it rather than just talk about it.

totalZero2• 6 years ago

Although eBay's motivations are probably not benevolent, and the implementation of this policy harms a reputable distributor, I do think this is a good thing overall. There are several different authorized distributors of RPi; listing RPi on eBay simply offers another vector by which counterfeit/damaged/problematic devices can be sold, and the existence of a secondary market (eBay used buyers and sellers) for RPi also reduces the demand (revenue) for new devices. I buy mine directly from one of the authorized distributors provided by the project's website.

deelowe• 6 years ago

In your opinion, it's a good thing overall for ebay to ban a legitimate business over completely baseless copyright infringement claims because there might be a knock on effect causing some counterfeit manufacturers to get banned as well? What?

No, this is a terrible precedent. Ebay needs to explain what's going on here.

totalZero2• 6 years ago

If I translate that from Snark to English, I get "In your opinion, is it a good thing overall for eBay to prevent a legitimate business from selling a particular hardware product, and claiming that it is due to a violation of one of their stated policies, because there could be positive implications for the community that uses that hardware product?"

My answer would be "yes." BTW it's the product that was removed, not the business itself.

One of the nice things about RPi is that it is cheap and commoditized. WYSIWYG. One of the bad things about knockoffs is that their faults and authenticity are not discoverable at first glance.

Also, I don't see what eBay needs to explain. They are preventing a product from being sold on their for-profit platform. You're talking about it like it's a Supreme Court decision and nobody wrote a majority opinion.

dwild• 6 years ago

Everyone here argue about how this is incoherent with them allowing to sell others things... while the real question is why they did this.

Someone else mentions they take 15%, I though it was higher, but let's go with that. Why wouldn't they want to make bank over theses Pi, even the ones actually in a grey area.

Let's be honest, this is coherent with Ebay, they want to make cash, like any other business, and something would cause them to make less of it if they were to sell Raspberry Pi.

Someone else mentioned RIAA/MPAA, which would make sense with the copyright stuff, but why wouldn't RIAA/MPAA fight all the other ones too?

So here I am, asking myself, who would want to stop Raspberry Pi from being sold, or for Little Bird Company to stop selling stuff.

ajmarcic3• 6 years ago

Pure speculation, but it's more difficult to fingerprint device users when buying used. Linux is obviously more protective of privacy, as is the entropy of having many near-identical setups.

treis2• 6 years ago

Everyone here argue about how this is incoherent with them allowing to sell others things... while the real question is why they did this.

Actually, the real question is "did they do this". And the answer is, no, they didn't. Raspberry Pi returns 50,000 items and all sorts of new and used kits. Whatever listing got removed was either by mistake or because they were selling something more than just a Raspberry Pi.

ajmarcic3• 6 years ago

The answer is, yes, a small third-party used listing was removed by eBay. The fact that large retailers are recirculating used Pis has no bearing on what makes this intriguing (see my reply).

The open question is whether this is part of broader efforts by parties such as eBay or the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

jvanderbot• 6 years ago

It might encourage an uptick in fraudulent PIs? It's a hot, easily-imitated item.

mariuolo• 6 years ago

Infringement of what? Could they ever be more vague than that?

Fwirt• 6 years ago

For everybody bashing on eBay here... I'm just legitimately curious, can you recommend a service of similar visibility and quality in the US where you can sell used junk (old game consoles, appliances, collectibles) without being a business? I still use eBay because as far as I know they're still the best service in that segment of the market, but I'm open to other suggestions.

I have tried Craigslist, OfferUp, Facebook Marketplace (yuck) etc., but honestly the selling experience has been even worse than eBay. EBay skims 10% off the purchase price, but even listing at 20% below eBay selling price on other services leads to people lowballing you and then not showing up to get their stuff after you waited for them for an hour. At least with eBay if somebody flakes out I can just relist the item in a couple minutes and wait for it to end again.

thirdsun• 6 years ago

Indeed. It's rarely mentioned but eBay still offers the most streamlined selling experience and the most attractive selling prices, despite the 10% fee. To me it seems as if buyers on eBay are just as tired of time-wasting, long-shot negotiations as sellers - which is a good thing for both sides.

decibe1• 6 years ago

I've only seen Pi's used for hobby projects. Can someone help me understand what 'infringement' app/project they are accused of being used for?

redwall_hp• 6 years ago

My guess is Kodi and MAME boxes. They're big for retro gaming or media centers.

White_Wolf• 6 years ago

I wonder when they'll ban laptops and PC's.

The ammount of infringement going on on those is off the charts.

eBay removing Raspberry Pi listings as they “encourage infringement”

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