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It is youtuber Linus Sebastian
He's very famous and still nor verified on twitter. What a joke.
I thought that YouTube had suspended their verification program? I.e. nobody can become verified now (who isn’t already).
That doesn't surprise me at all as Google's products seems to be left abandoned.
And Linus torvalds can certainly afford it
Seriously who downvoted this? I left this comment in response to parent, who had no idea this was not the Linus of Linux fame and said he was unable to afford teamviewer as a result of Linux being opensource.
Falsehoods people believe about names: First names are globally unique.
Funnily enough, TeamViewer Support replied with a solution to hide the popup (https://twitter.com/TeamViewer_help/status/14459761128662097...), and later (Original tweet Oct 7, 2021, new tweet Jan 14, 2022) new popups come up anyways: https://twitter.com/linusgsebastian/status/14818556255585894...

Seems the only correct way of using TeamViewer is to uninstall it and never use it again. If you paid "thousands of dollars" for something that doesn't do what it says it'll do when you pay, then you kindly request a refund, otherwise file a complaint with your local commission/bureau/ombudsman.

Linus went over this on the WAN show. Apparently the option to hide pop-ups is only available to subscribers in the new subscriber version and is not an option for those on a perpetual license.
>Apparently the option to hide pop-ups is only available to subscribers in the new subscriber version

Paying for a subscription and yet still receive a debt collection notice doesn't instill a lot of confidence in the business practices of that company if this poster's comments are accurate: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27078542

That previous HN thread and Linus' tweet showing how they abuse their paying customers with nagware are enough to make me avoid them. What's the best paid or free alternative?

I’ve been content with AnyDesk. Personal use. Works well enough, has 2FA.
And, full of folks who've left Teamviewer.
> Seems the only correct way of using TeamViewer is to uninstall it and never use it again.

For anyone seeking alternatives, I found NoMachine[0] to be the closest free remote desktop experience similar to TeamViewer. My criteria was essentially:

- free tier like TeamViewer, but with no nagging

- needed to "feel" fast and responsive like TV, which I wasn't getting with every VNC/RDP flavor

- autoscaling resolution, or the option to have native resolution with "black bars" viewport when window is maximized

- option for shared clipboard (so copy/paste works between machines)

- file drag/drop between machines

The only thing NoMachine doesn't support is automatic tunneling; you need to connect with IP:Port similar to RDP. But I let that slide because all the other TeamViewer-like features were supported.

[0] https://www.nomachine.com/

If your host PC has an NVIDIA GPU, I strongly recommend Moonlight. It's for game streaming, but you can pass it an .exe to enable desktop streaming, and it is much better quality, latency, and bandwidth than any remote desktop experience I have tried. I'm pretty sure you can't use Linux as a host machine though, which really sucks.
Second for moonlight. NVIDIA pulls the data right from the GPU framebuffer and compresses in-hardware. There are solutions that offer better quality (if you're a pro streamer it may not be rightfor you), but at the cost of more CPU and latency.
> I'm pretty sure you can't use Linux as a host machine though, which really sucks.

There is a moonlight host for linux called Sunshine [1]. Works great on Ubuntu and Arch. Just note that it'll use software encoding unless your nvidia driver is patched to enable NvFBC, using nvlax or nvidia-patch [2]. But for non-gaming use, software encoding is more than sufficient with minimal latency compared to vnc.

[1] https://github.com/loki-47-6F-64/sunshine

[2] https://github.com/keylase/nvidia-patch

> The only thing NoMachine doesn't support is automatic tunneling; you need to connect with IP:Port similar to RDP

That's a major drawback, especially when you're trying to help non-tech-savvy people. You have to explain to them how to port forward or set up something like ngrok (just do it for them via TeamViewer - oh wait)

Yeah, I still use TeamViewer portable to help friends and family. For my own work purposes, I've switched to NoMachine.
Dark patterns are just that. They should be opt in, not opt out.

Agreed totally to just uninstall it.

Paying for software?
Even though I had been a (long time, non-family subscription) premium user of Spotify, they started playing ads during podcasts (music was fine). How is that a "premium" service? Canceled the sub.

Tangent: Now that I occasionally play music on Spotify I get ads in the form "We know you were a premium user before, how is life with the free service now?". I find that somewhat creepy and disturbing.

> Even though I had been a (long time, non-family subscription) premium user of Spotify, they started playing ads during podcasts (music was fine). How is that a "premium" service? Canceled the sub.

This is interesting to me because besides ads that are hardcoded into the podcast by creators, I have never heard an ad in Spotify premium, not a single time for years I've been using it. Not sure if country of origin has something to do with it, but I'm from Poland.

Yes, it will be the hardcoded ads in the podcast, but I think the point still remains.

Edit: Apparently Spotify also does dynamic ads too! Greedy...

At that point, why not just use another service instead of Spotify for podcasts? E.g. Pocket Casts. If you pay for the Spotify subscription I'd expect _all_ ads to be removed.

>> why not just use another service instead of Spotify for podcasts?

So... Spotify have been buying popular podcasts outrights and signing exclusivity deals. Those are only on spotify now.

You misunderstand. My point is "I empathise and am not surprised that people choose to unsubscribe and go elsewhere if people are being given adverts in podcasts"

Assume the best, not the worst in peoples arguments, please. Cheers.

Maybe I don't understand still.

I wasn't disagreeing with your point. I was adding to it. I agree that if spotify annoy listeners with ads, they'll go elsewhere. Podcasts, unlike music, are (were?) a mostly free media... as in both beer and liberty.

Hence... Spotify has been pursuing exclusives ans a solution to the "why should people listen to our ads" problem.

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I haven't listened to Rogan since his RSS feed died. I'm a fan, and I don't mind that he "got the bag", but I'm not going to take part in this attempt to kill podcasting.
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There is also a similar issue with YouTube at two levels:

1) Sometimes the Premium mode of YouTube doesn't work, and you still get the ads (this looks like a cache bug or something like that where the Premium setting is not activated).

YouTube doesn't believe it's real, though I managed to screenshot it.

2) You pay for YouTube premium, but you still get in-video embedded ads that creators encode in the stream, like LinusTechTips. In a way this is not fair, as the promise to stop seeing ads is not kept.

YouTube could enforce their policy to force the content creators to mark their sponsored videos segment and automatically skip them if you have Premium.

You can use SponsorBlock[1] to automatically skip sponsors.

As for the ads: you could install uBlock Origin and not have to deal with ads in any case.

[1] https://sponsor.ajay.app/

YouTube doesn't believe it's real, though I managed to screenshot it.

I seem to recall reading that advertisers can outbid premium in the ad auction, in which case you will still see ads. Can anyone confirm?

Just another reason to not use YouTube Premium. The whole thing just makes the problem worse by still allowing ads and requiring you to log in using an account that is also tied to your real world identity (for payment processing).

You just end up giving more data points to Google to track and don't get rid of all ads.

>I'd expect _all_ ads to be removed

spotify can't do that unless they own the rights to the podcast, otherwise they might run afowl of copyright laws. I believe their intent is to have one place for podcasts (both their own premium ones and freely accessible public ones).

That's ridiculous. I'd expect all ads added by Spotify to be gone. They can't control the underlying content. I pay for YouTube premium, but the ads the creators put in their videos are still there.

When I watch a streamer on Twitch, they'll advertise. Then, the streamer will upload the video to YouTube. Who is responsible for getting rid of the ad?

> They can't control the underlying content.

This is the only place where I would like to see more control from platforms. And I believe they can. Youtube already requires to label video containing paid promotion. They can require to label exact time interval so that it can be auto-skipped (without sponsorblock).

Instead they release one shitty "feature" after another.

How is it ridiculous? The selling point of paying for a subscription service like Spotify is to remove ads, the free service Spotify offer is otherwise almost identical.

I would expect the creator of the content to remove ads and the ToS to say "Do not upload content that contains advertisements".

I find it fascinating that you're OK to pay for a product and then watch ads on top.

If the ads are being added by the content creator and you don't like that, the solution is to not watch that content creator, not blame a random streaming platform for supplying unadulterated content.
Spotify could require that content creators upload ad-free versions of their podcasts for premium users. This would probably require a significantly higher subscription fee to support much larger payments to the podcast creators.
Podcasts are generally accessed as a syndication service. Except for ones actually contracted by Spotify, like Joe Rogan, they are just importing them from RSS like everyone else.
Yes, this would have to be a new thing which they did.
How would you feel if they published a remastered song with an ad right in the middle?
If an advert is hardcoded by the author into the file they upload, how do you suppose Spotify should remove that? They don't have rights to do that but even if they could, they would need to programmatically detect when the ad starts, ends and cut it out from the file? Soft Skills Engineering does this for example, they record their own audio for the ad and play it like it's a part of the podcast, I don't mind that as it helps authors, but that has nothing to do with Spotify.

I've heard about some dynamic adds Spotify supposedly adds, that are usually not related to the podcast itself, but I've never encountered a single one like that.

I've heard about some dynamic adds Spotify supposedly adds, that are usually not related to the podcast itself, but I've never encountered a single one like that.

You probably have heard them. Old episodes of a podcast with anachronistic ads for new products are one clue.

I stopped listening to podcasts on Spotify because of the ads remaining with premium.

I've had spotify premium for years and almost solely listen to podcasts. The only ads I have ever heard are sponsored ads spots within the podcast itself (that you can fast forward through), never spotify ads. Is that what you're talking about? Because if so, it sounds like you need to be subscribing straight to your favorite podcasts if they offer a membership for an ad-free podcast feed. Expecting spotify to remove sponsor spots is kinda ridiculous.
The only ads I have ever heard are sponsored ads spots within the podcast itself (that you can fast forward through), never spotify ads. Is that what you're talking about?

They try hard to make it sound like a sponsor spot. If the voice changes, that's another clue, but sometimes the advertiser will pay the host to read a new ad.

First search result:

https://variety.com/2020/digital/news/spotify-podcast-dynami...

The dynamic ad insertion comes from the service backing the URL for the podcast in the RSS feed. If all you receive is a stream of bits which decode to audio, how do you tell that it’s an ad that’s been spliced into the audio?

If Spotify are actually hosting the content themselves, it’s a different story, and I’d expect them to be able to not insert ads for premium users. If they’re just reading the feed and sending the request to origin, it’s a bit more difficult.

I wish Spotify removed podcasts, at least the public ones. They do not add anything: you can already listen to them for free with a different app devoted to that. I have been using Overcast since forever and I'm happy with it, but Spotify is trying to shove podcasts down my throat because that's what they do, even if I'm paying for their service. Is it that difficult to have an app for music and another one for podcasts? What's next? Will Spotify also have movies, books? I just want to listen to music. Spotify: if you're around, please have a switch to hide all podcasts.
Or platform can require that the creator labels paid promotion and penalise them if they don't. I hope Youtube will do that some day.
Ads are a legal risk as the degree of separation required between content and advertisement is surely dependent on the jurisdiction.

For example some youtube influencers lost a court case in Germany because they didn't make that clear enough (or didn't try to at all).

So I'm very surprised Spotify didn't just forbid uploading ads to their platform.

All uploads should be checked by someone working at Spotify for compliance with their ToS, which should include not allowing ads.
There are millions of podcasts adding thousands of hours of content every day, how is this even remotely feasible? Why would Spotify want to do this anyway? If you don't like it when a podcast includes ads then don't listen to that podcast, this has nothing to do with Spotify.
Hire more people to skim through them? They could afford to spend 100m on an exclusivity contract.
> Why not just use another service instead of Spotify for podcasts?.

User Convenience. You just have one app for your music and your podcasts. From a podcast creators point of view Spotify has a large userbase for your listeners to fid you on. Looking at the stats for a couple of podcats I help in the backend of, we tend to get more people listening on Spotify then we do on any of the other platforms.

> If you pay for the Spotify subscription I'd expect _all_ ads to be removed.

Spotify doesn't share the subscription with most podcasts (Obv exception being Joe Rogan, but thats an exclusivity deal, I'm not sure if it even went "Ad Free" after the Spotify deal as I've not listened to it in years). The vast majority of podcasts on Spotify are from podcast creators submitting their RSS feed to Spotify because it has a decent userbase. This is the same for Apple Podcasts/Google Podcasts/Tunein/Stitcher/Etc.

If Spotify removed the ads from podcasts to serve ad free versions to their paying subs without the permission of the content creators that would most likely be copyright infringement.

If Spotify asked permission to remove such ads to avoid copyright issues, creators would want to be compensated for the drop in Ad Rev. Creators would have to report lower listener numbers to advertisers because paid Spotify listeners wouldn't get the ads being sold. If Spotify did this it would be easier for Spotify to just ask creators for an Ad-Free RSS feed for paying subs (which a lot of podcasters have to give to their own paying listeners).

Edit: Spotify does have a "Spotify Podcast Ads" system, but thats just for content that is "Spotify Original and Exclusive titles" and not (atleast yet) open to podcasters who also distribute their content on other platforms.

No, there's non-hardcoded ads in the premium tier of Spotify, I've gotten them.
Nowadays the content is an or embed product placement itself so even if you don't see/hear an ad you are exposed to advertising content when watching/reading/listening to anything.
Wish someone would create a machine learning thing that deletes brands from video footage. Just filter all that noise right out.
Even as a premium user with all notifications in the settings switched off, I still get popups for albums that I'm assuming artists have paid Spotify extra to push towards me.
> Even though I had been a (long time, non-family subscription) premium user of Spotify, they started playing ads during podcasts (music was fine). How is that a "premium" service? Canceled the sub.

In the beginning of time (well, maybe not that far back), there was TV. Soon, TV had ads in them, but fear not, because you can pay extra each month and get access to premium channels that don't show ads, because you are paying extra. Soon after, they started showing ads as well. But then came the streaming services, promising Ad-free lands if you just subscribed to their service. And people did, but soon thereafter, found that the streaming services also added ads when you decided what you wanted to watch. Amazon Prime is a prime example of this.

Ted Turner started cable without ads, which is why you paid for it. That lasted about 5 minutes. I suspect the whole "no ads" thing was a bug bandied as a feature, because Turner couldn't GET advertisers on the new platform when it started.
In the beginning of time (well, maybe not that far back), there was TV, TV had ads in them. Then there was bittorrent, and life was good.
Ignoring the fact that those two events were like 60 years apart :) But sometimes it takes a while before life gets good I guess.
Where you have to navigate forums or websites pestered with ads, scam ads and plain malicious ads. Yeah, uBlock Origin I know but still...
Radarr, Lidarr, Sonarr and LazyLibrarian got you covered. Get on a few private sites for torrents or usenet and never visit them again.
But then you are almost centralizing again on a few, literally closed platform/communities where you also are at risk of data leakage if breached.
Funny you mention this! I noticed about a month ago and will also not renew later this year because of this. I don't want podcasts on my MUSIC player to begin with, never mind them playing a single ad on a premium subscription. On principle it is wrong, so shame on them. I will not renew because of this, simple as that.
Reminds me of using Hulu's free service with commercials, then buying a Roku to get Hulu's 'premium service' which confusingly had fewer shows available. Returned the Roku and haven't used Hulu in years.
Interestingly, I paid for premium pretty much since it started until about a year ago but it seems that with a pihole and or Ad block, there are no adverts anyway … so yea I can still listen and no adverts
They will always add advertising to paid services. Not doing so is leaving money on the table. Eventually some executive is gonna realize that and do it. Actually paying for stuff just makes us even more valuable to them.
They also serve you ads by promoting music that they get paid to promote - or where the artists agree to even less royalties in order to be promoted more. Which, for a service I paid for specifically for the great music discovery just destroyed the reason for using it. I'm on apple music now despite not owning a single apple device.
(Just to clarify a question raised in the child comments)

Those were Spotify ads promoting other podcasts, not sponsors promoted in the podcast itself.

I have the same issue with podcasts. Spotify bakes in ads that are in my native language, not english like the podcast I am listening to.
Though much cheaper, Sublime Text 4 is similar. If you click on the upgrade button from ST3, which is perpetually brought to the foreground, it upgrades to ST4 and requires a new license.
IIRC there's a setting to disable that
Sure. So why is it default on? Dark patterns are just that, even if they can be toggled.
You can disable update checks using the setting `"update_check": false` if you do not wish to transition to ST4. Note that only licenses older than 3 years require an upgrade (3 years relative to the release of any future ST update). Additionally any previously purchased license will still prevent the nag popup even if it's not valid for that version.
I had to use TV professionally for a 1-day gig and they cancelled my connection because of commercial use. Sure, I thought I earn money with it it’s only fair if I paid. The cheapest plan available was for a year long license. I called the support asking if they offer a monthly subscription, which they didn’t. I ended up using RDP instead. If anyone asks me to use TV in the future, I will explain them how to setup an RDP connection instead.
Yep. The practice of spying on user behavior and phoning home is far past my line for acceptable software behavior. It doesn't matter if TV cost $0 or $10,000, it should not be used by anyone who respects their self.
How is TV better than RDP?
You don't have to open up ports or use a VPN.

TV also connects to the local session. So you can screen share basically.

It’s much easier to use for laypeople, works without special network settings and is cross platform. But since I work in tech this is usually not a problem (although there are exceptions).
I've ditched TV with Tailscale + RDP
> they cancelled my connection because of commercial use

How did they even know?

They cancelled mine because I connected to the same remote computer 3 times in one month. No, really. Cancelled for commercial use for repeatedly connecting to the same computer. Well, duh, what else would I want this software for?

Thereafter, any time I re-installed Team Viewer, it would only work one time before telling me I was banned for commercial use.

Growth hackers are eating a good software
Gave up on Teamviewer subscriptions years ago because of crap like this. I paid for a full license for a software rev that did everything I needed (basic remote desktop). They upped the version number and of course do not have version cross-compatibility for pre-existing features.

I just found that Teamviewer was not worth any price when the future cost and experience were entirely unpredictable.

I usually try to unsubscribe form emails about two/three times. If that doesn’t work I’ll start making them as spam.

I’m aware that a company’s email address falling on the spam list can be an absolute nightmare for the company, but I have no other option to let them know that I no longer need their emails :(

If I receive an email I didn’t sign up for I’ll contact the email service provider directly. They act quickly because it’s their servers reputations that are at stake, and many times they’ll drop their customer over it.
This sounds like a good idea. Do you usually have to look through the email headers to find the email service provider?
This never happens because they send through services like Sendgrid with thousands of source IPs which never get onto the block lists because they also send some mails which are not spam.

Quote from their website:

> If you are on one of our shared IP plans and you notice a block message from Spamhaus based on one of our IP addresses, please know that we are already working with Spamhaus directly to address the issue.

Antispam isn't just IP based.
I encourage you to start marking them as spam on the first strike. When I give a company my email, I only do it because it’s necessary for creating an account, making a purchase, or something like that. I’ve never clicked a checkbox inviting a company to send me emails that are not directly related to me using their product, like tracking updates or password resets. If there was an obvious box to uncheck, I would have unchecked it. I would never, ever consent to receiving company newsletters, product updates, marketing, or anything else. Ergo, it’s spam, and I do my little part to harm their deliverability.
I changed my internet provider once, after I was pissed off by their constant stream of calls about their new offers I might miss. It was a good provider for some time, but after his merger with an other calls begun. I told them every time to not call me, because I'm not interested and if I was I'd contact them. They didn't listen. I tried to shout at them, it didn't work either, so I quit. But it was not the end. They kept contacting me for year and half, trying to convince me that they are the best provider here and I should choose them. I was angry beyond sanity, I'm still angry at them.

I just do not dig it, how people stand this.

We can only conclude that this must be profitable; i.e. enough customers actually pay money to try and make these bothersome people go away ­– enough customers that is pays to emply special customer-botherers to do this.
Maybe. If you'd spent much time working for a large company, you'd know just how insulated from reality a manager's decision-making can be.
True; an important distinction!
We can only conclude that some decision-maker believes it's profitable.
We spent 20 years seeding the web and our phones with popups, and now we are surprised when we have popup people?
I still get over 100 paper letters a year from Spectrum (previously Time Warner) about various deals even when I already had their service. I've had Google Fiber for awhile now, but they keep coming. I've been storing them all in a box to eventually mail them all back to their HQ. It's quite a hefty box a this point.
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We have the "don't call me register" - https://www.dncm.be/nl/

If businesses call you and you're on it. You can file a complaint.

Nice, I like it.
Yeah. I mention it when they call to change the option in their system to not call me, ask their name and ask for a person where i can verify it tomorrow.

I don't need to call the day after too and never got called back. I think the amount of irrelevant calls i received is 1 per 2 months.

Normally from an older supplier if i changed something years ago.

The annoying thing is if you ever need to contact these sort of companies then you will find they will go out of their way to avoid talking to you.
Before software is going to eat the world, it's going to annoy you to death. Or it does that at the same time, I don't know.
LogMeIn did this. I paid £17.99 for LogMeIn Ignition on the iPad. A few years later they retired the product & forced subscriptions on everyone. Great way to make people hate your product & brand.
It's a circle of life in remote admin apps.

First there was Citrix. Good, but ridiculously expensive.

LogMeIn appeared, offered free tier and inexpensive subscriptions, got some users.

LogMeIn matured, dropped free tier, jacked up subscription fees.

People left for TeamViewer because of - you guessed it - a free tier and inexpensive subscriptions.

TeamViewer matured, clamped things down, jacked up the fees.

People will now leave for the next thing that - if properly managed - will follow in LMI and TV footsteps.

The reason behind this is that the $$$ are in large enterprise subscriptions. But you can't get them without having a name and a reputation. So you first build yourself up using smaller users, picking up larger ones along the way and then shed the small fish by raising prices. The end result - a handful of large clients, lower operational and support costs, higher margins. The end.

It's Cluster B behavior (you know, narcissists and psychopaths and stuff) on a grand scale. The 'gray rock' method is not going to help you, going 'no contact' is your only option.
Maybe I didn’t pay attention before, but I really hate how thirsty brands are allowed to be with unsolicited survey emails, constant pestering to rate them in the App Store, and invasive popovers.

Your need to make money is not my problem. If you made something halfway decent you wouldn’t need to nag customers constantly.

If they keep pestering you for a review then give them what they want, except just one star.
It would horrify a lot of people to discover that clothing and personal care businesses that market specifically to women send 10-100x as many emails per month to their customers as other businesses.

I don’t exaggerate; in my testing with fresh email addresses, registering as a woman at fashion-linked retailers would generate up to 4 emails per day from certain well-known retailers, while registering as a man simply would not (or maybe one a week, or month).

It’s bad enough that brands are so thirsty for our wallets, but they had to find a way to be even more greedy and cruel about it.

Modern email clients don’t comprehend the concept “I want one thread in my email listing for all Nordstrom emails”, so retailers just bombard us all to death with emails to flood our inbox. There’s a simple fix, of course: threading by ‘sender’, where you just mark a given email as sent-by Nordstrom or whatever, and all future emails go into that thread, and it shows newest-first and defaults to “mark all older messages read”. This would utterly destroy the relevance of email bombardment and crater open rates, especially if the client doesn’t show the unread count for the thread, since older unread content from that sender doesn’t matter.

This doesn’t make it right for TeamViewer, but at least it would be one step closer towards neutering greedy marketing.

Switch to meshcentral.
This sounds kind of like a modern update to those old stories where someone uses a magic monkey paw or a genie to grant a wish and learns to their regret that monkey paws and genies like to grant wishes in a way that is literally exactly what you asked for but is as far from what you actually wanted as ancient mystical artifacts or beings can make it.

He wished for a never ending relationship with TeamViewer. He got one that included all aspects of the relationship of a typical TeamViewer customer with the company--including a perpetual relationship with their marketing department.

All that's missing at this point is narration by Rod Serling.

Ugh this is so annoying. Same with Dropbox, I'm already paying 140 bucks or so a year for storage and they have the audacity to ask me to upgrade all the time. Banners everywhere.

I can't wait to ditch them but I just haven't had the time to separate the files into long term cold storage and files I use all the time to reduce the amount of space I need for data that needs syncing across machines.

Use FOSS such as RustDesk, VNC or any other suitable solution.