Net Work
Alan Winstanley
This month, in an extended issue of Net Work, we look at the vitally important issue of trust in
online purchases and reviews.
O
ne of the core principles of
successful sales and marketing
is the need to answer a certain
question that buyers unconsciously
ask themselves before they commit:
‘Why should I trust you?’. That nagging
uncertainty and lack of confidence is
a barrier to buying, and smart sellers
know that they must break down that
barrier before achieving a successful
sale. Hence the flag-waving claims of
‘Established 50 years’ or ‘Thousands of
customers served every day’, perhaps
displaying a trade body logo, showing
off some illustrated case studies or
glowing testimonials. If those claims are
true then the product or service must
be alright, mustn’t it? Done properly,
marketing measures like these dispel
doubt and give potential customers
the rosy feeling that they are making
the right choice.
There has of course been a seismic shift in the last 20 years towards
the two-dimensional world of online
shopping, where it’s second nature to
source products and local services. In
the UK, the home improvement sector
is valued at some £4bn a year, and
online trade directories such as RatedPeople.com, CheckaTrade.com and
MyBuilder.com have sprung up to steer
consumers towards local firms whom
they claim are monitored and vetted
for quality. Potential buyers pore over
details, feedback and reviews, and they
check star ratings before engaging a
trader. The directories vet their members themselves, though RatedPeople
also highlights the government-backed
TrustMark quality-assurance scheme
(www.trustmark.org.uk) that may apply
to some of their traders. Some, more
progressive traders, may hold more
rigorous SafeContractor accreditation
instead. One question worth asking,
though, is ‘Who checks the checkers?’
Following consultations and investigations by the UK’s Competitions and
Markets Authority (CMA) five years
ago, to counter the possibility of fake
reviews or the deliberate withholding
of negative ones, both CheckaTrade and
rival TrustATrader agreed to tighten
up their internal review procedures.
As far as buying physical goods is
concerned, if things don’t work out
then EU consumer law (enshrined in
the UK’s Consumer Contract Regulations) provides for a 14-day return
period, so you could always send stuff
back for a refund (including the original basic postage charges), if you don’t
mind the hassle of returning them at
your expense (unless they are faulty).
Remember also that UK PayPal transactions don’t have the same consumer
protection that buying directly using
one’s own credit card would, especially for items costing over £100.
For many online sellers, the problem
of cementing ‘trust’ is dealt with by
offering star ratings and reviews. We
have become conditioned into relying
on them before taking the plunge, but
how trustworthy are the reviews themselves? Some very underhand tactics
can be used to try to garner positive
reviews and distort the picture in a
seller’s favour.
The seeds of doubt
Seeds labelled as ‘rings’ and ‘bracelet’
mailed from China to the US as part of
a brushing scam. They have not so far
proved hazardous. [Image: Washington
State Department of Agriculture/Facebook]
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Earlier this year, people around the
world started receiving mysterious little
packets of seeds that they knew nothing about. The bags from China were
often labelled as ‘beads’ or ‘jewellery’
but contained small bags of seeds instead, causing not a little consternation
and alarm to their recipients. As you
would expect, rumours soon swirled
around on the web: were the seeds a
genetically modified biohazard or an
act of ‘agro-terrorism’? Did they contain dangerous pathogens? What would
happen to the nation’s food chain if
they germinated?
In Britain, there was even speculation
that the seeds might be Japanese knotweed, a destructive bamboo-like plant
notorious for undermining foundations
and wrecking property! According to
the US Dept. of Agriculture (USDA),
people from every US state received
them, and by the end of August worried
citizens had sent some 8,500 packets to
the USDA for analysis. So far, though,
more than 320 seed varieties have been
identified but no biohazard has been
found, says the USDA. The puzzling
packages have not been limited to
seeds, either. Other cheap, unsolicited
goods turned up, including flashlights,
handwarmers, ping-pong balls and a
small keyboard vacuum cleaner that
all turned up unannounced, according
to America’s Better Business Bureau.
What was going on?
The packages were deemed part of
an ongoing scam that we first saw in
Britain two years ago, in which unscrupulous traders (usually third-party
Amazon sellers) hijack the IDs of individuals and set up bogus customer
accounts using them. The rogue sellers
then anonymously mail out low-value goods to the individual’s address,
which allows the seller to chalk up the
delivery of a ‘successful’ (but bogus)
transaction. The scam, called ‘brushing’, then enables phony sellers to post
fake positive reviews about themselves,
important because as we all know, good
reviews create an impression of trustworthiness. Vendors selling through
Amazon have been heavily implicated, but other online retailers have been
affected too.
Beware geeks bearing gifts
It is easy enough for Chinese vendors to
sell to the West via eBay and Amazon
or through portals like AliExpress
and Banggood. The level of trade circulating in China is truly enormous: I
wrote in 2019 how, on China’s ‘Singles
Day’ alone, the volume of trade was
Practical Electronics | November | 2020
CH¥ 213.5bn (£24bn, US$30bn), and
that’s just on Alibaba. To get an idea
of the scale of industry, some YouTube
videos offer insights into some Shenzhen-based blocks that are described as
the world’s greatest electronics markets.
They’re crammed with myriad sales
booths, retail counters and more besides, all dedicated to selling gadgetry
and electronics technology (see https://
youtu.be/kaKVSANVMRI)
Eager to build up credibility and sell
their wares to the West, Chinese vendors have taken to offering reviewers
free or discounted goods in return for
customers submitting a favourable
Amazon review. The offer may come
in the form of a WhatsApp message
or a discrete voucher tucked in with
the goods, maybe offering the chance
to join a ‘VIP Program’ and tantalising buyers with the offer of more free
goods. A whole trade sector has also
sprung up that specialises in furnishing
their clients with rosy product reviews.
Millions of reviews are checked and
posted online every week and disreputable sellers may also try to remove
poor ones. At the start of the year I
sourced a wildlife camera from an
Amazon seller in China. It exceeded
expectations, but I then received a request to give them a five-star review,
along with the offer of a full refund
on another model (ie, a free product)
subject to a favourable five-star review
appearing on Amazon. One Amazon
UK reviewer left a scathing two-star
review of a China-sourced appliance
and then wrote: ‘I [then] received a [personal] email from someone asking me
to remove this review or change it to
five stars in exchange for a £40 refund
in an attempt to raise the rating of their
product... I refused the offer and lowered my review from five stars to one
star and reported it to Amazon.’
Fake reviews are not a new problem: four years ago the Competitions
and Markets Authority shut down an
A Google Chromecast dongle that allows media to be cast to the TV through its HDMI
port. It also needs a power source. [Photo: author]
Internet marketing firm that posted
fake reviews to boost their client’s
online profile. In an effort to combat
dodgy reviews, Amazon UK recently
took down no less than 20,000 of them,
written mostly by a handful of Amazon’s ‘top reviewers’. One contributor
submitted a five-Star Amazon review
of various Chinese products every four
hours on average. The Financial Times
newspaper then revealed that he had
resold many of the goods on eBay.
The reviewer denied any wrong-doing and claimed they were duplicate,
unopened goods. Amazon states it has
8,000 staff processing reviews and rigorously takes steps to prevent feedback
from being manipulated.
Not so starstruck
Most traders are honest though, and
some vendors on Amazon now face
an even bigger problem: fake one-star
reviews that are posted onto their product pages by dishonest rivals in order
to derail their business. It doesn’t take
much to scare off an unsure buyer and
a handful of one-star reviews can sink
a legitimate business almost overnight.
‘Business fell off a cliff’, said one such
maligned seller who gave it all up as
a bad job. eBay sellers have similar
issues when chasing down malicious
Detailed Seller Ratings (DSRs) intended to harm their sales.
Over time, one learns to take reviews
and feedback with a pinch of salt. One
excitable reviewer on Amazon left nothing but five stars for every purchase,
possibly to convince herself about her
decision to buy them in the first place.
Recently, several Amazon customers
had problems with facemasks not arriving from a European seller: after
complaining directly to the seller, they
posted five-star reviews just because
the vendor promised (hurrah!) to send
some more. We’ll never know if they
arrived because the seller’s account got
shut down by Amazon. Five stars too
for some photo paper: ‘I haven’t used
it yet but since Epson quality is reliable I imagine it will be just as good as
it was last time. No complaints at all.’
A four-star review for spraypaint said
‘Seems good, but I have not used it yet,’
while another one marked down an
electric fan to one star, stating ‘Fan no
good because it only blows air around,
it does not cool it down.’ A helpful
five-star review too for a Christmas
gift: ‘Cannot review as not used yet,
bought as stocking filler for Xmas.’
The comedy goes on.
Before buying, probably the best
tactic is to check the most recent seller
feedback and look for suspicious patterns such as a flurry of five-star (or
one-star) reviews all dated roughly
the same time. With experience, and
maybe after suffering the odd setback,
online buyers are learning to become
much more sophisticated and discerning when shopping online.
A king’s ransom
Floor to ceiling electronics: a look inside ShenZhen Huaqiangbei Electronics Market
(Image: Nikolay Tanev / YouTube)
Practical Electronics | November | 2020
Last month, I highlighted how ransomware had hit Blackbaud, a popular
services provider that hosts web services on behalf of many institutions
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NVidia’s Shield TV is a powerful Androidbased digital media player for demanding
users and gamers. It has Wi-Fi and
Ethernet, and works with Alexa and
Google Assistant.
around the world. Blackbaud joins an
increasing number of victims that decided to pay the ransom. For their 2020
report, The State of Ransomware, security specialist Sophos commissioned an
independent survey of 5,000 IT managers in 26 countries and the results were
quite surprising. They found that 51%
of respondents had been hit by ransomware in the last year, but increasingly
the main targets of the ‘smart’ criminals were now server-based systems
rather than small operators.
Of those affected by ransomware
since 2019, over 70% of respondents
had at least some data encrypted but
94% managed to get their data restored.
Big business has insurance covering
such losses but, interestingly, Sophos
found that it was ultimately twice as
expensive to pay a ransom instead of
restoring systems from backups and
dealing with the fall-out. In Spain,
just 4% paid the ransom and 72% restored from backups, but in India 84%
of respondents had been hit and 66%
of them paid the ransom. Overall, just
1% who paid a ransom did not get their
data back – maybe a sign of ‘honourable thieves’ finding that they can rake
it in by offering a ‘professional’ service.
(Download the 2020 report from Sophos
at: http://bit.ly/pe-nov20-sophos)
Tune into Android TV
The way we access TV entertainment
is changing, thanks to Internet access,
smart apps, streaming services and
Freeview ‘Play’ TV. Home network
users who enjoy the likes of Netflix,
YouTube, Amazon Prime or catch-up
14
TV will know that an ordinary ‘dumb’
HDMI TV can access streaming content by adding a powered HDMI Wi-Fi
dongle. Amazon offers a remote-control Alexa-powered Fire TV Stick 4K
UHD (£50), and smartphone apps and
voice controls make it easy to queue up
content for casting onto the TV. Google
offers their Google Chromecast dongle
(£30) or 4K Chromecast Ultra (£69) and
Android apps are great for queuing up
and casting YouTube content from a
phone or tablet onto the big screen.
These HDMI dongles can give older
TVs another lease of life. Whether to
buy into Google Nest or Amazon’s
Fire depends on how deeply you are
wedded to either eco-system. I have
three Google Home Minis (the second
generation is called Nest Mini) dotted
around because I frequently google for
answers, definitions, reminders, the
time or the news. A Google Nest Hub
on my desk handles voice search and
displays ‘written results’ on its LCD
screen: it’s a great desktop tool for a
busy internet worker. I have just one
Amazon Echo Dot to ask ‘where’s my
stuff?’, though ‘skills’ can be added
to interface with many IoT devices or
automate other tasks (the same being
true of Google Nest apps). Of the two
systems, Amazon’s offer is probably
more family friendly all round and I
sense that it slightly has the edge. Frequent googlers (or those who use, for
example, Google Calendar) will prefer
to use Nest, which is configured by the
Google Home app.
Add-on HDMI dongles like Chromecast also give you a fighting chance of
‘outsmarting’ troublesome smart TV
apps by using smartphone apps instead.
For example, the author discovered
his ageing Samsung smart TV simply
refused to run the My5 ‘catch up’ TV
app anymore: the TV just locked up.
The My5 app for Android ran perfectly on a smartphone and enabled
Channel 5 programmes to be cast to
the Chromecast dongle instead. There
was no reply from Channel 5 when I
pointed this out.
Google is releasing a new HDMI
dongle probably called Google Chromecast with Google TV. The fully-fledged
Android TV device has a remote control
and incorporates the usual streaming apps along with a D-pad, buttons
for YouTube, Netflix and support for
Google Assistant and Google Play apps
and games. It’s expected that ‘unlisted’
Android apps can also be sideloaded
onto the dongle. Release dates, prices
and technical specs are sketchy, but
it’s worth watching out for as a way of
adding extra Android functionality to
an HDMI TV.
Other streaming media players include the Xiaomi Mi TV Stick (£35,
scan.co.uk) which runs Android 9.0 and
its basic remote control has buttons for
Google Assistant, Netflix and Amazon
Prime; devices from Roku start at £30
and rumours circulate of a forthcoming Nokia-branded Android TV dongle
as well. For network-hungry users or
gamers, there’s the NVidia Shield, a powerful Android TV media streaming and
gaming device that works with Alexa
and Google Assistant and has Chromecast 4K built in, along with 2.4/5GHz
Wi-Fi and gigabit Ethernet. It offers HDto-4K upscaling using AI. Prices start at
a penny under £150.00. Full specs and
details of the pricier Pro version are at:
www.nvidia.com/en-gb/shield/
Other news
The speech recognition and context-awareness skills of Alexa and Google
Assistant are extraordinary, but did you
know that all your speech queries and
clips are memorised in their systems?
To review your Alexa voice commands,
open the Amazon Alexa app on your
smartphone and go More/Settings/Alexa
Privacy. There you can review Voice
History and delete any recordings from
memory. You can also enable ‘Deletion
by voice’ and Alexa will erase recordings on command. Instructions to delete
Google Assistant recordings are at: http://
bit.ly/pe-nov20-google
Chinese video clip giant TikTok,
which like Huawei has come under
fire from the US Government, has announced its first European data centre
will be built in Ireland at a cost of about
€ 420 million. TikTok is also rumoured
to be considering building its HQ in
London, but perhaps the outcome of
stormy UK/EU Brexit negotiations,
due to conclude in mid October, may
cause a re-think. TikTok was threatened with an outright ban in the US
due to fears of personal data being
exfiltrated to mainland China. In September, the US approved an effective
takeover of Tik Tok’s US operation by
Oracle and Walmart.
The status of current Huawei smartphones is now becoming less clear,
despite earlier assurances that existing Huawei devices would continue to
receive Google updates. The author’s
Huawei continues to update, but extended US licences that permitted Google
to keep apps refreshed expired in early
August. The US has also choked off supplies of semiconductors to Huawei and
is considering sanctioning other foundries too. Huawei is far from finished; it
has developed its own OS called Harmony and is rapidly building up its
own library of apps including signing
Practical Electronics | November | 2020
up TomTom. Meantime, the US faces
a bill of some $1.8bn to rip out and replace telecoms equipment that ‘poses a
national security threat’ – mainly, hardware made by China’s ZTE and Huawei.
Ironically, America, in turn, has had
its own data protection standard (Privacy Shield, formerly Safe Harbor)
invalidated by the EU. This follows
a legal case dubbed ‘Schrems II’ (see
Net Work, August 2018 for background)
which ruled that America’s own privacy controls still failed to adequately
safeguard EU data subjects from US
surveillance. As a result, many readers
will have seen emails from Facebook,
Google and others concerning the use
of so-called SCCs instead – Standard
Contractual Clauses cover the transfers of personal data out of the Europe
Economic Area, Switzerland and the
UK. The use of SCCs has been allowed by the EU for the time being,
but further negotiations will have to
be hammered out with neither side
showing signs of giving way.
Disappointment for those awaiting
the launch of the new Intellivision
Amico TV games console (Net Work,
August 2020). Disruption caused by
Covid-19 has resulted in the postponement of the launch until April 2021.
Proposals made four
years ago by Facebook
and Google to build a
new undersea cable between the US and Hong
Kong have been banned
by US authorities, due
to ongoing security concerns. Revised plans
for a cable connecting
the Philippines and
Taiwan instead have
been re-submitted.
...and in space
In early September,
SpaceX successfully
launched its twelfth
Starlink mission, lobbing another 60 Starlink America’s Privacy Shield data standard (formerly Safe
satellites into LEO (low Harbor) has been invalidated by the EU over privacy and
earth orbit), making surveillance concerns. Standard Contractual Clauses
roughly 650 to date. (SCCs) are being implemented in its place.
The mission’s first stage landed for a low-cost connectivity for IoT devices
second time on the SpaceX drone ship, in agriculture, marine and more. You
Of Course I still Love You.
can track the SpaceBEE coverage at:
Swarm Technologies successful- https://swarm.space/leo-labs-globe/.
ly launched their first 12 SpaceBEE
That’s all for this month’s roundup –
microsatellites on 2 September (Net see you next month for more Net Work!
Work, Oct 2020). A total of 150 of the
The author can be reached at:
400 gram saucer-sized SpaceBEEs are
alan<at>epemag.net
destined to circle the earth and offer
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