The corporate enshittification of once decent products and services continues unabated. Amazons decision to charge for UPS store returns even if the products they delivered were defective was almost enough for me to cancel Prime, but this seals the deal. When Amazon Prime commercials begin my Prime membership and most of my Amazon purchases end.
I had to return a DOA item last week and they imposed the charge for the first time. It depends on your specific situation though. In my case a Staples is physically closer than a UPS store, but I’m never near the Staples while I’m in the UPS store parking lot twice a week.
It wouldn’t bother me if I were returning items because I changed my mind, but when I’m already inconvenienced because of crappy product quality I don’t expect to be further inconvenienced so Amazon can save a buck.
I think it depends on the cost/reason of return, and where you’re returning it. Sometimes I have to pay a $1 fee to take to a UPS store but taking it to Kohl’s drop off is free.
Got prime when Grand Tour came out. Now that we get two episodes a year if lucky not worth it anymore. Get better service with Instacart for delivery anyway.
We should have canceled when Prime got rid of UPS pick up for free. Only reason I used it. Now there is zero benefit to Prime with this new stupid ad tier. You don’t even get free grocery delivery.
“To continue offering you high quality original programming like X and Y, we have to raise our price for Amazon Prime. But don’t worry, we’re now adding a lower cost ad-based alternative called Amazon Subprime.”
So, as usual, most people will be fine with it and put the plastic bag back over their head.
I’ve been paying Amazon for more than 25 years just for the free deliveries. I don’t watch anything on Prime, it’s so hard to navigate between the free and rent videos. Been torrenting since the 90s, yeah I’m old, so my advice stands -get a good VPN, and sail the seven seas-
BitTorrents initial release was in July of 2001. You were not torrenting since the 90s. In the 90s we were still on Napster, soulseek, Usenet, and IRC. Limewire, DirectConnect, and The Pirate Bay wouldn’t come around until into the 2000s. I used BitTorrent mostly to get actual Linux ISOs at first because it was better than downloading for several days only to discover at the end that your md5sum checked bad. The pirating came later once the trackers got a better selection than the competing protocols.
The Kademlia network (eMule, Kazaalite, etc), did indeed use a global P2P Distributed Hash Table, to resolve which IPs hosted which content, which the torrent protocol also does … some of:
Unlike the mainline torrent protocol, Kademlia’s DHT (like the modern-day Tribler DHT), also resolved filenames to content, allowing in-app search.
With torrents, one needs to consult a DHT crawler, or an index site (which sucks; centrally operated sites are fragile, compared to DHTs), whereas eMule & more contemporarily Tribler, have two layers of DHT, enabling decentralized search without relyiance on someone having created a listing at some particular site & that site being online to search its index.
eMule was introduced in 2002, which is again NOT THE 90s. Napster also uses a very different protocol, without any of the distributed file sharing. With P2P like Napster, soulseek, and DirectConnect you downloaded a complete file from one person only. Once you had it and could share it, someone could get it from you. But downloading bits of the same file from multiple peers at once was not a thing until after BitTorrent’s release in 2001.
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