[HN Gopher] Dear Websites, Stop Asking for Ransom Sign-Ups
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Dear Websites, Stop Asking for Ransom Sign-Ups
Author : vishnuharidas
Score : 42 points
Date : 2023-08-01 20:41 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (iamvishnu.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (iamvishnu.com)
| nickthegreek wrote:
| My biggest current peeve is not allowing me to see shipping costs
| until I've given basically all my information to a company before
| I've checked out.
| TheAngryCanuck wrote:
| This actually worked out to my advantage! I did this on a site,
| found out that they didn't ship to Canada so I abandoned the
| cart. I got all the oh no emails so I emailed them back telling
| them I CAN'T buy their stuff because you WON'T ship to me.
|
| Couple of days later the company CEO emails me back. First he
| apologises (bonus points to a Canadian), promises to fix the
| cart abandon logic, and offers to ship me 2 of the things I was
| going to buy for free.
|
| They will hopefully arrive this week
| WirelessGigabit wrote:
| Including your email address.
|
| And then you abandon the cart, because it doesn't make sense
| for you to pay $50 for shipping.
|
| But then you get those emails 'you forgot something'. No I
| didn't.
| badwolf wrote:
| And you're forever on their "mailing list" because they don't
| process unsubscribes, since they probably just manually
| upload a .csv of everyone every time they want to send
| something to you, whether you ever opted in, or not.
| ianlevesque wrote:
| This is why Amazon is still winning. The competition needs to
| compete better.
| rlpb wrote:
| I wish there were a way for users to share the websites that do
| this and other dark patterns so that I can avoid them.
| Effectively a reputation system. Search engines used to do this,
| but apparently not any more. We need a replacement.
| tsuujin wrote:
| https://www.deceptive.design/hall-of-shame
| datavirtue wrote:
| I agree, we need a replacement. At the protocol level I would
| like life insurance policy returns and banking service as a
| place to store my money that allows me to pay any portion of
| currency I want at any time. So Facebook can be paid for the
| time I'm on the site, for instance. The returns from the
| insurance contract might even make it all free to me (it would,
| easily). Everyone is happy except those who rely on reaching
| you via forced advertisements. Oh, and the people who rely on
| enslaving others.
|
| Any such protocol would be labeled as evil, filthy socialism.
| gnicholas wrote:
| I also dislike websites that get you down a path before requiring
| an email signup or cell phone verification.
|
| But I much prefer the former to the latter; pretty much everyone
| has a spam-only email address, right? Whereas I won't give out my
| phone number under pretty much any circumstance (and don't have a
| spam-only number).
| JohnFen wrote:
| > pretty much everyone has a spam-only email address, right?
|
| I used to, but I've since taken to just not signing up to
| things instead.
| 63 wrote:
| When I have no choice, I use a free throwaway email service.
| Unfortunately it's much harder to get a throwaway phone
| number so it greatly annoys me when services (Twitter,
| specifically) require one
| datavirtue wrote:
| All of big tech is checking phone numbers against
| sophisticated databases to determine if it is possible for
| an individual to have that number associated with their
| cell phone device. If it isn't a real mobile number you are
| not getting in.
| flangola7 wrote:
| Where do these databases even get their data? IIRC the
| phone network is very opaque compared to IP addresses and
| internet routing.
| anonym29 wrote:
| smspool, smspva, etc. not free but not expensive.
| DamonHD wrote:
| Indeed a dark dishonest practice.
|
| I won't touch services that do such things.
| Gordonjcp wrote:
| [dead]
| scohesc wrote:
| Adobe's web-based JPG to PNG converter is exactly like this.
| Upload a JPG, hit convert - it uploads the file, processes it on
| their end, and then refuses to give you the result until you
| "sign up for a free adobe account that we conveniently didn't
| tell you about until now!"
|
| Similar enough - some shopping websites will grab your email
| address when you start doing a guest checkout but eventually
| decide not to purchase from them. They'll then start spamming you
| without your consent a day later.
|
| Ransom sign-ups belong in the same tier of horrible.
|
| Modern downloadable software does this too. You download a "free"
| partition manager or "free" PDF converter, or whatever "free" -
| you install it, get through their wizard/main workflow to do what
| you want, but then it says "oops, sorry, you have to pay for
| this!"
|
| Anti-consumer stuff it all is. What a shame software and websites
| like this are allowed to exist.
| veave wrote:
| If you use a web service to convert from jpg to png you've
| already lost.
| 63 wrote:
| This is a little tangential, but your post reminded me that
| I've struggled with converting images at work because our vpn
| blocks a lot of those file conversation sites (presumably for
| good reason, but I'm not privy). Converting common file formats
| seems like such a common use case that I really feel like there
| should be a tool built into modern operating systems for it. It
| seems like an obvious add to me, but then again the Windows
| search functionality barely works so I'm not sure they're
| incentived to actually help their users right now.
| JoshTriplett wrote:
| Grab a copy of netpbm or GraphicsMagick that's compiled for
| Windows.
|
| Or, grab a free image editor (https://www.getpaint.net/ is
| popular for Windows), open in one format, save in the other.
| JohnFen wrote:
| This. I honestly don't understand why people use online
| image converters when there are high-quality OSS programs
| that will do the job locally. I'll bet that the majority of
| the online converters are using these programs to do the
| actual conversion anyway.
| asynchronous wrote:
| Especially since almost all conversions can be done in the
| browser with JavaScript libraries now.
| ryandrake wrote:
| A browser + JavaScript seems like a pretty heavy lift to do
| something as trivial as converting an image from one format
| to another. ImageMagick is simple, fast, and available for
| just about every system imaginable.
| malikNF wrote:
| Just saying, some of these sites don't have captcha or any kind
| of spam prevention implemented. Something something simple shell
| script feed them garbage data something.
| veave wrote:
| It's unlikely that they are actually storing anything until you
| sign up. And even if they did it would take a lot of effort to
| feed them garbage from tons of different ip addresses.
| s-xyz wrote:
| How would this work?
| malikNF wrote:
| curl is a very powerful tool.
| s-xyz wrote:
| I understand the point; ideally you want to have some free
| content before you actually need to sign up. However, when
| integrating a paid solution like OpenAI for example, the tricky
| part is to limit the number of free requests to prevent going
| bankrupt by one user. I can imagine that this would be a
| potential reason to ask for a sign up.
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(page generated 2023-08-01 23:00 UTC)