Beware when buying external hard drives or SDRAM chips!
I fell for a con the other day, but fortunately, since I bought through Walmart.com, I was able to quickly get a full refund of my money. What was the scam? Well, Mark wanted a new tablet to read epub books with - a glorified Kindle, basically. We have thousands of e-books on our computers, phones, and tablet, thanks to a kind stranger we met camping.
Anyway, his old tablet died, so I looked around for a new one. You can spend over $1000 on a tablet these days (!) and I guess if you are gaming or something that is a good reason to do so. But our needs are simple, and I found an obsolete "reconditioned" Samsung Galaxy Tab-A SM-T290, which is from the mid 2000's I guess. $69.99 plus tax, free shipping. It arrived and worked OK, but the memory chip (SDRAM) from the old tablet was kind of full - no room for photos and videos. Mark had complained that he hadn't seen old photos anymore, which are backed up on three external hard drives.
So, I figured out the max chip size for these old SM-T290's (I bought one for myself! $69.99!) was 512GB and looked online for a couple. On Walmart.com, a third party seller had two "Lexar" 512 GB chips for $18 each. Such a deal! Too good to be true!
Alas, it was. When the chips arrived, in odd packaging, they could not take any more data than 25GB. Beyond that, the system would generate a "file corrupted" message. I tried two computers, the chromebook, and even the tablets themselves. No data beyond 25GB! It would just bomb out and stop copying.
I figured out I was scammed. I had heard about this with external hard drives - wily sellers putting an USB dongle into the case of an external hard drive and formatting it for 2TB. They put old washers or scrap metal in the case to make it feel like it has the weight of a hard drive inside.
Most people don't immediately dump 2TB of data into a new drive, but fill it slowly. So it isn't until months or years later that they discover that their backup files are simply phantom addresses in non-existent disc sectors on a non-existent disc. Most folks might "test" such a drive by loading some files to it and reading then back - which will work for small files. And even larger files will appear in the directory - but not actually exist. It is a pretty slick scam.
Anyway, I did a return on Walmart.com and they generated a QR code which I printed out. I took the chips to the return desk at my local Walmart and the clerk knew what to do and printed a receipt. My phone buzzed almost right away, confirming the receipt of the return. In a couple of days, my credit card was refunded the $38 for the two chips.
So Walmart to the rescue. On the other hand, shame on Walmart for not vetting vendors properly. Then again, the same thing happens all the time on Amazon or eBay, particularly the latter. At least Walmart is no longer being dinged for offering racist t-shirts from 3rd party sellers!
I got back on Walmart.com and ordered two SANDISK chips, which each cost more than the tablets I bought (!!). But then again, we are in the midst of a memory chip shortage - or a general chip shortage - thanks to AI data centers vacuuming up all fab capacity.
Speaking of AI, my new old phone had been bugging me to update the O/S for some time now and I foolishly caved in to its nagging. The new O/S has a lot of bloatware and a lot of it can't be uninstalled or even disabled - at least not easily. But worst of all, it pushes AI ("Gemini") down your throat. The off button is automatically re-mapped to load Gemini. WTF! They want you to go through menus to shut down the phone! Fortunately, it wasn't too hard to re-map the off button to off.
Speaking of which - and I know this terrifies anyone under the age of 50 - but I shut off my phone all the time, particularly at night. Even worse, sometimes I drive into town without my phone! The horror of it all! Taking such risks! But the phone charges faster when off, and sometimes, the phone gets hot (probably because of all the bloatware running in the background) so I just turn it off and let it cool down and go do something else which doesn't involve screens and doom scrolling.
It is sad how we let our technology get ahead of us. We come up with this tech and it ends up ruling us, instead of vice-versa. I get "SPAM RISK" phone calls all the time these days. I may end up legally changing my name to Mr. Spam Risk, so no one will ever answer my calls. Blissful peace! But seriously, we (our society that is) came up with this phone system and then we just let it go to hell, even though technological solutions to SPAM and FRAUD clearly exist. We just.... let these things happen.
As as kid, we had phone books, where you could look up everyone's number unless they paid extra to be "unlisted." Today, there is no phone book, no directory assistance, just a lot of SPAM sites promising to yield phone numbers and addresses of people, but instead just giving you hokey "Loading" and "Searching" icons, before coming to the point and demanding money for a phone number lookup (and even then, often giving the wrong information).
Oh, right. Privacy. Everyone is so paranoid about their privacy, because humans have devolved into horrific creatures who will "Swat" you if you say something they don't like. The Police show up in riot gear with armored vehicles, because, hey, we let that happen too - the militarization of the Police. And even though this is a common occurrence these days, for some reason the Police have yet to figure this out and, I dunno, maybe call the address in question and figure out what is really going on?
But of course they can't call, because they don't have your phone number or a way to look it up. Moreover, the miscreant who "Swatted" you is using a spoofed caller-ID number because we let that happen too. I mean, how hard is it to fix called-ID so it can't be spoofed? Maybe there is a useful application for Blockchain after all!
Perhaps none of this is by accident. Or if it is, the track record of mankind's ability to control the Genie of technology once liberated from his magic lamp is rather poor. And if so, what does this say about the future of AI? Was The Terminator just mindless entertainment or a prescient documentary of the future? Why is mankind hell-bent on techno-suicide? Maybe we realize, deep down, that the machines will be better than us? Or will AIs spend their days trying to defraud one another or falling victims to AI scams themselves?
I mean, these AI beings must have to have something to do, once we are gone.
Right?
