I was an Amazon intern in 2011 and there was another intern I met at a party who told me about this fact. We all thought it was hilarious.
His entire intern project was a small piece of the system being built to detect abuse of these SIMs and stop it. Given it's a decade later now, I doubt it still works or works for very long.
I'm pretty sure Amazon agreed to a fixed fee from a number of carriers, and moved on. The few outliars might have costed a few $M over the years, which is a rounding error for Amazon.
I think I remember encountering that project. It got built out a bit more by the time I started full-time in 2012. I could be misremembering the specifics, but I think the most recent country from which a device checked-in was used to decided the data cap, because unlimited 3g cost dramatically less when the devices weren't roaming.
> His entire intern project was a small piece of the system being built to detect abuse of these SIMs and stop it.
I'd rather work for another evil corporation like Mac Donalds than work to remove features from devices people have already bought. When your company is selling surveillance tools to individuals masquerading as e-book readers and you have to struggle to just install a libre Operating System, it's not even close to fair that you get to use the SIM card Amazon planted in your device in whichever way you please.
Having the right to hack your own physical devices is one thing. Getting unlimited access to the cell network just because Amazon sold you a device with credentials for it is totally different and the kind of thing that makes people not take you seriously.
It is a different thing. However they sold you a device with access to the Internet as a feature (not just a SIM slot to put your own). Why would they get to choose what you can do with it?
It's a bit like when Facebook wanted to bring "Internet" into countries where bandwidth is expensive, by branding unlimited access to Facebook as "Internet". Having access to the network should give you full access to the network (net neutrality). Having acquired hardware should give you full access to put your own system (right to repair).
It's only logical that if you paid for a device, and some money of that went into providing you free Internet services, you get to do what you want with both the device and the Internet access and Amazon should have no control over what you do because they CHOSE to sell that to you in an attempt to exploit your attention and control what you can read. That relation was abusive to start with, and that some people find little benefits in it does not bother me from an ethical perspective.
Thanks, definitely not buying one of those. I'm happy to have books that don't require a battery, can't be used to track my habits, and can be lent or given away as i please. If i wanted an ebook reader, i'd go for something 'stupid' (as opposed to smart) that does not provide higher powers the ability to remotely delete my books:
Lol so if you don't have a Kindle, don't want a Kindle, and don't intend to get a Kindle... then why are you here talking about Kindles? What's your skin in the game?
Lol so if you don't do murder, don't want murder, and don't want to do murder... then why are you here talking about murder? What's your skin in the game?
Do you see the absurdity of your argument? It makes perfect sense to criticize something you find profoundly unethical even when you're not directly concerned by the situation.
I don't agree with his/her outlook, but I don't think "don't buy it" is a valid counterargument
Alice: "Don't work for Foo vineyard. Foo vineyard puts poison in the wine that people buy without them knowing it."
Bob: "Just don't buy Foo's wine yourself, then."
(Millions of people are still being poisoned drinking Foo wine and would probably buy a different wine if they were informed about it.)
However, if you morally object to anyone purchasing Amazon's Kindle on the basis of surveillance capitalism, I'm not sure if arguing over limiting data use with their SIM cards is the best use of your energy.
It's not poisoned. It just doesn't have features that you want. The analogy would be that you don't like the style of the wine.
They're arguing 'I bought a product which doesn't offer feature X and I'm mad that it turns out it can't do X'. Use your common sense. Buy a product that explicitly does have X if you want X.
It is also a little more subtle than you are describing.
People ask why do right to repair laws need to exist despite John Deere having thousands of competitors for tractors? Similarly, the market for e-readers and smart phones should allow limitless competition.
How many e-readers companies could negotiate great terms for e-ink displays and world wide 3g coverage? If any of them did, might Amazon automatically get their negotiated best price as part of the clauses Amazon could negotiate given it has most of the volume?
If Amazon and Sony get the best price on e-ink displays, Amazon and b&n on US networks, and Amazon and Kobo on European networks, who is actually competing with Amazon to sell an ereader with world wide coverage?
No, it's not exactly like that. It's like selling a bottle of wine (marketed as such), that will purposefully self-destruct if you try to open it in a setting that the manufacturer does not approve of, say an orgy or a popular ball (as opposed to a bourgeois banquet). Technically, it's wine that's intended to be drunk. But the manufacturer enforces that you use it however they please, not you.
So you paid money for the product. The product is technically capable to fulfill your greatest needs and desire as someone who purchased it, yet it has built-in mechanisms to enforce the will of someone else on your life.
Would you find it normal to have screws sold with Ikea furniture that are made so that they can only screw Ikea furniture? Or gasoline sold with a BMW car that only works in BMW cars? Or bread sold with a butter that can only go on that kind of bread? It makes no sense, as interoperability is a fundamental property of most things around us, going against that is an insult and an injury to all of humanity, and to our planet that's ever more polluted because our overlords have decided we should keep on producing and throwing away hardware instead of repairing/re-purposing things as we used to not long ago.
It seems safe to post this too now that it's closing.
It was also possible to SSH from the Kindle, over its 3G connection.
So the SIM card could be kept in the Kindle, to be used as originally intended. But also (in an emergency) to use a few KB of data anywhere in the world for SSH.
I was very careful to use <1 MB of data - as this use case isn't quite what the Kindle was designed for, probably. :-)
From memory, broad steps were:
- Root (jailbreak) the Kindle, and sideload "USB Networking" (to allow tethering - i.e., connect the Kindle to a computer via USB, and the computer would share the Kindle's Internet connection)
- Read the magic key (which the HTTP proxy required) - it was sitting in a plaintext file within /var/local/ so could be easily read after rooting the Kindle
- Run an SSH server on the HTTPS port (TCP/443), then use proxytunnel to connect via the HTTP proxy server - https://github.com/proxytunnel/proxytunnel (proxytunnel has an option to pass an arbitrary HTTP header containing the magic key)
As another nice-while-it-lasted data deal, Verizon used to allow previously-used SIM cards to connect to their LTE network. Once connected, all TCP/IP traffic would be redirected to a captive portal page.
There lies the problem; UDP traffic could still flow freely. Yes, that included OpenVPN (WireGuard hadn't been invented yet). I never really abused this, but someone must've, as when I checked a month later, activation was strictly handled through phone calls; previously-used SIM cards no longer received any type of LTE service.
One of the tricks in the past to get past captive portals that allowed only DNS traffic, but did not redirect DNS traffic to a controlled server, was to tunnel traffic through DNS. I remember I went on a cruise once and that was my plan to get out of having to pay exorbitant fees for data access on wifi. I never ended up doing it though, because I ended up not really using my phone or laptop while on the cruise, which I count as a win.
It was a lot easier to not actually use the internet then though, as it was 10-15 years ago. The last time I was on a cruise, 3-4 years ago I think, I bought the wifi package, and it was so poorly implemented and/or overloaded that it was a pain at best to use. All things considered, not usually an issue when you're relaxing, but when you need it for a moment and it feels like you're using an old 3G connection, that sucks.
That’s a good a find. Back in the mid 90s I was a teenager with a PC but my parents wouldn’t let me go online, so I had to find nefarious ways of accessing the Internet. I had a 50’ phone line cable and had to go online when they weren’t home. One method I found was the Prodigy install CD would have to dial up to the Internet to download the list of servers. I found I could just minimize the installer and go online freely but only for 10 minutes. They ended up fixing this about a year later.
I made a hole in the ceiling and passed a cable that I spliced in the telephone box. I just had to put alligator clips on the cables hidden behind the radiator tubing. That plus some ISP that had a bug in their subscribing system so you got 50 hours for free every time.
> Yeah, must have been those “others” abusing the system while all you were doing was accessing free data in China, Iran and Iraq!
Seriously, what's the problem with that? That model had a basic web browser, so it was basically designed to be used this way. I used it in emergency situations (without taking the card out) for checking email and the like. It was slow and clumsy, but it worked. It would not occur to me that since I'm abroad I'm doing something wrong because the device was actually advertised as having global Internet connectivity, and it was one of the reasons I bought it.
Not much of a problem, just that a global sim with access to unlimited data in those countries must've cost a fortune for Amazon to maintain once those flat-rate providers realized some "Kindles" were using a lot of unexpected data and asked for more money or a data cap.
It's not abuse if the use is within the terms of use. At most you can just call it a bad deal for Amazon or simply an "advertisement cost" of the phrase "Global access."
If anything it's to be applauded that "global" really meant global, not just "yeah global as long as you're in USA, CA, UK, EU, AU, NZ." So many times my "global" MasterCard did not work in some whole country.
> a global sim with access to unlimited data in those countries must've cost a fortune
Nearly every country in the world has at least one mobile network that has a roaming agreement with Deutsche Telekom. They have negotiated rates at high volumes in the cents/GB regardless of local pricing shenanigans.
DT is often the local cell providers gateway for international calling, so they have quite a bit of leverage.
If you have to extract a key to do what you're doing, then you should stop and think if you were intended to do this and if you think it's therefore a honest thing to do.
I postulate there are two categories of people: those who assume that if the activity was minimum, the service would continue, and others that assume the service will end, so will pump as much as possible.
I'd found it to be invaluable solving the after-landing-before-you-have-a-local-SIM conundrum.
It wasn't a Kindle, but another country's prepaid SIM that I continued using while in Japan. Phone companies in Japan don't do prepaid: only phone rentals by the day, or 2 year subscriptions. Neither of those were suitable for the 2 months I lived there.
Some international SIM cards would run out of balance and send an SMS as a warning. But others would redirect me to a topup page. Let's just say that wasn't the only page that was available, and the "send this page to a friend" email function is very convenient when Japanese phones have incoming email addresses for sending email-to-SMS.
Google calendar used to be a great way to get free email-to-RSS-to-SMS notifications, but that shut down a couple of years ago unfortunately.
> Phone companies in Japan don't do prepaid: only phone rentals by the day, or 2 year subscriptions.
Prepaid data (sans voice/SMS) have been easily accessible at reasonable prices for at least 6 years; they are now ubiquitous and can be bought at electronics stores, airports, and the occasional convenience store.
These days the 2y term requirement only applies when you get a plan with a subsidized smartphone or pocket wifi. Though you still need (IIRC) 6 month min on your stay for any subscription, so prepaid or rental is the only way if you stay for shorter. High-speed LTE data is cheap and available but SMS/voice is nigh impossible for non-long-term-residents (which is extra problematic given how practically everything/everyone in Japan assume you can provide a Japanese voice number they can call, and LINE does age verification through your mobile provider).
Prepaid where the credit expires after 21 days sounds more like a subscription that lasts 3 weeks and cancels safely.
With my current prepaid SIM, I typically top up $5 every 3 months. Between iMessage, WhatsApp/WeChat/KakaoTalk/Skype/Facebook, free incoming calls, and the occasional emergency SMS, I usually don't need a phone. People don't like it when I don't have a local number though.
I think they're just adding the minimum amount to prevent the minutes expiring and the phone subsequently being cancelled, which I assume happens after 3 months. They would still have to typical rates pay per minute or MB for any usage.
I add the minimum. In many countries (Switzerland, UK, New Zealand) the minutes don't expire, and the number is mine to keep unless it doesn't connect to a network at all for a year or more.
Yes, I pay per minute for outgoing calls, or MB of usage - and those costs are high. That's why I try to use WiFi whenever possible, and use offline maps, offline Wikipedia, etc.
Yep, I pretty much bought a Kindle back in the day for this exact purpose. Unlimited free 3G that worked anywhere? Yes please. Also the Kindle itself had an experimental web browser, so my Kindle basically became an emergency internet connection for overseas travel.
Fi has data roaming for 10$/GB, free after 6GB (speed reduced after 15GB, unless you opt-in to pay extra). This is actually the normal Fi plan- there are just no roaming charges. This is single #1 reason why I am on Fi, no more messing around with local SIMs.
FWIW, T-Mobile US had free throttled global data roaming in most countries since a few years before Fi was launched. It was typically more expensive than Fi for a single line, although usually cheaper for family plans.
Frustrating how individual plans in the US tend to be priced horribly compared to family plans (which are already awfully priced, generally). It's not like I'm going to get a spouse and kids just to save money on my monthly plan, and it also doesn't cost them anything extra, so why is it like this?
It is annoying, but the various MVNO options recently have largely mitigated this problem as far as I can tell. A single line can be had for $20/month with most everything included, or cheaper on promotions (down to around $8-15/month depending on GB of data). That seems comparable with the western European countries in which I've gotten a SIM card, at least.
It's not just 10 minutes. It's every time you go to a new country, having to figure out what the local pay as go is called, finding somewhere to buy a sim, picking a plan, figuring out how to reload. Likely none of this is in your native language. If you are going to several countries consecutively it gets old. And you still can't use your own phone number. Yes, you might save ~50$ a month while travelling, but I will happily 50$ not to deal with local sims anymore. I will only do it if you need a local number for interactions with local businesses.
If you need a lot of data it probably makes sense to get a local sim but if you are travelling through a few countries and really just need it for getting directions every now and then it makes much more sense.
Can you cite examples of prepay SIMs that charge only $1/GB without any strings attached? I've travelled overseas and have looked into local SIMs and can't really recall any that cheap with reasonable restrictions (e.g. valid for a good period of time). For example I recall one local SIMs marketed at the airport to foreign travellers I looked at that offered 40GB valid only for a few days making it more worthwhile to choose a different (marketed to locals) plan with lower data caps that lasted for a month as I was there for a week.
Iliad[1] in Italy has 120GB/10€: That is 0.08€/GB if you use them all. Ah, also unlimited calls and text.
Just a regular prepaid SIM card, no strings attached. If you use it for just 1 month, no problem, just don't top it up. The SIM itself costs 10€.
This is far from the norm though, this company basically undercut everyone else and they had to lower their prices. The fun part is that they're actually better than most because they don't try to charge you random fees every few months.
They sell you a hotspot that works in 80+ countries with an eSIM. When you land you top up 500 MB of that countries data for a few dollars, which is usually enough to get me to the hotel and then out to a shop where locals buy SIMs. Depending on the device they have 1-2 extra SIM slots and you an hot swap between them.
There is an upfront cost and it doesn't quite meet your price point - but it gives you the flexibility to do a bit more shopping past airport rates.
In Finland I can buy a prepaid and unlimited 200 Mbps for 25€ a month or 7.90€ a week. In Thailand I get $2.10 for 10GB / 5 days or $1 for unlimited 24 hour 8Mbps. In Cambodia basically any data package is around $1 / GB with month validity, but usually with all the promotions and extra data they throw in it ends up being much cheaper. Vietnam is so cheap it's basically free, first package I checked was $1.30, 7GB for 7 days.
When I travel I use airalo to get local e-sims for data and pay probably something like $10 on average for 5GB for 30 days. (Another option for people who's phones support e-sims)
I had no idea there was a company doing this already! I just downloaded their app, and will have to give it a try when my next travel destination opens its borders again.
- Set up the sim before you leave. It's the worst trying to do it once you land. (Ask me how I know)
- You will get some interesting networks, but I've never had problems with them.
- I think they just fixed it on iOS, but be prepared to type in the details manually (not hard, just not seamless) because they expect you to scan a QR code???
Even with those quirks, it's been great, simple, no problems, and I've used in US/UK/Australia.
Before my provider offered worldwide roaming on my monthly plan for an additional fee of the equivalent of USD 6 (that you pay whether you use it or not), I've used Flexiroam for data when traveling abroad. Good prices if staying for less than a month.
Reminds me of a gps tracker placed on birds that got found in a 3rd world country and the SIM card was used to take up 1000s of dollars worth of calls on the scientists bill.
I have one of these whispernet and I did use the kindle + experimental browser + gmail as form of communication while abroad, and it was great that it had the built in proxy. But many years ago it stopped working in China.
this was one of the main reasons I acquired the kindle keyboard :)
worked excellent as an emergency device when you _needed_ to rebook travel things with nothing else around.
Everything passed via an http proxy, with a key that could be easily extracted from the Kindle via SSH.
The SIM worked globally - I'd used it in China, Iran, Iraq, etc - all sorts of places that normally are not covered by providers.
At some point others must have abused the system, because the unlimited data got capped to 150MB a month, but in a pinch, it was an incredible tool.
Ditto with first generation Lime scooters that had unlocked global twillio SIMs ...