This was posted on the consumerist website on Monday, October 30:
This is our last post on Consumerist.com. We're deeply proud of all the work we've done on behalf of consumers, from exposing shady practices by secretive cable companies to pushing for action against dodgy payday lenders.
We've had a tremendous run as a standalone site. Now you'll be able to get the same great coverage of consumer issues as part of Consumer Reports, our parent organization.
Since they've defeated those secretive cable companies and payday lenders, I guess they had nothing left to do...
Additional coverage at the New York Post entitled "Consumerist site shuts down after alleged mismanagement".
Related: What happened to Consumerist's Worst Company in America contest?
Consumer Reports Proposes Open Source Security Standard
Consumer Reports Pulls Recommendation of Microsoft Surface Hardware Due to Poor Reliability
Related Stories
Starting in 2006, every March The Consumerist has held a Worst Company in America contest modeled on the March Madness college basketball tournaments. The 2014 champion was Comcast. But this year, there was almost total silence. No contest. No news on why the contest was not being held. No discussion at all. It's like almost every post about a 2015 WCIA contest is being deleted. That includes all of the Internet outside The Consumerist website. Very few articles or blog posts exist trumpeting the contest for 2015.
Has interest in the contest declined that precipitously? The contest certainly had problems, with the worst being that it was an unpopularity contest focused on bad service rather than a merit based contest that considered more factors about why a company might be bad, with many companies worse than EA not even being seeded, and entire industries being ignored. For instance, not one member of the mining industry has ever been seeded, despite their horrible records on safety and environmental damage, such as the 2010 Upper Big Branch Mine disaster that killed 29 miners, and the 2014 Elk River chemical spill that poisoned the water supply of 300,000 people. A difficulty is that mining companies are more ephemeral, routinely transferring most assets to the owners, then going bankrupt to evade having to pay for clean-ups. The same lack of seeding goes for the prison-industrial complex, the photo enforcement industry, and the still active military-industrial complex that President Eisenhower warned about in 1961.
Or is it that The Consumerist website is slipping, being taken over by corporate interests or perhaps just incompetents, given that they killed off their user base when they wiped user accounts and disabled posting for months? Is this a demonstration of the growing power of the corporate propaganda machine, which would surely like to censor all negative publicity?
This is also a demonstration of the fragility of websites, when they become a single point of failure for the user community they build.
TechDirt reports
Thanks to a laundry list of lazy companies, everything from your Barbie doll to your tea kettle is now hackable. Worse, these devices are now being quickly incorporated into some of the largest botnets ever built, resulting in some of the most devastating DDoS attacks the internet has ever seen. In short: thanks to "internet of things" companies that prioritized profits over consumer privacy and the safety of the internet, we're now facing a security and privacy dumpster fire that many experts believe will, sooner or later, result in mass human fatalities.
Hoping to, you know, help prevent that, the folks at Consumer Reports this week unveiled a new open source digital consumer-protection standard that safeguards consumers' security and privacy in the internet-of-broken things era. According to the non-profit's explanation of the new standard, it's working with privacy software firm Disconnect, non-profit privacy research firm Ranking Digital Rights (RDR), and nonprofit software security-testing organization Cyber Independent Testing Lab (CITL) on the new effort, which it acknowledges is early and requires public and expert assistance.
As it stands, most of the proposals are common sense and take aim at most of the common issues in the IoT space. For example, encouraging companies to spend a few minutes engaged in "penetration testing" of their products before shipping (a novel idea!). The standard also hopes to ensure companies notify consumers of what's being collected and who it's being shared with, and that devices aren't using default login credentials. But Consumer Reports also notes that it hopes to develop these standards with an eye on more broadly incorporating them into product reviews.
"The standard should be easy enough for consumers without a technical background to understand, yet sophisticated enough to guide testing organizations such as Consumer Reports as we develop precise testing protocols. We want to rate products on measures such as security, in much the same the way we currently assess products for physical safety and performance."
Consumer Reports has revoked its recommendation of Microsoft Surface laptops and tablets due to poor reliability compared to other brands, as reported by its subscribers:
Consumer Reports is removing its "recommended" designation from four Microsoft laptops and cannot recommend any other Microsoft laptops or tablets because of poor predicted reliability in comparison with most other brands.
To judge reliability, Consumer Reports surveys its subscribers about the products they own and use. New studies conducted by the Consumer Reports National Research Center estimate that 25 percent of Microsoft laptops and tablets will present their owners with problems by the end of the second year of ownership.
Microsoft objects:
"Microsoft's real-world return and support rates for past models differ significantly from Consumer Reports' breakage predictability," Microsoft said in an emailed statement. "We don't believe these findings accurately reflect Surface owners' true experiences or capture the performance and reliability improvements made with every Surface generation."
Also at CNN, CNBC, and Reuters.
Update: Microsoft blog post.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @06:22PM (3 children)
Corruption is taking a very firm foothold, talk about the warning signs of a downfall. I bet it is approaching Mafia levels of violence and corruption, "shut down that site or the puppy gets it!"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @06:24PM (2 children)
or you have no evidence and "Consumerist site shuts down after alleged mismanagement"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @06:43PM (1 child)
Right cause "stop reporting on us or else" is really how someone would quietly shut down a site. I have zero evidence aside from the ever increasing trajectory of corruption in the US, paired with the interesting timing with the Net Neutrality Neutering Project.
To be clear I am NOT saying this is 100% what is happening, as I said no evidence, but it is something to keep in mind. If you don't think shit like this is happening pretty frequently then I have a slightly used but superbly engineered bridge you might be interested in.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @07:00PM
Will the bridge employ people in my district? If so, I'll have the money guy contact you. Don't worry about the cost, we've got it covered.
- Anonymous Congressman
(Score: 5, Informative) by jmorris on Wednesday November 01 2017, @08:58PM (3 children)
Consumer Reports isn't shutting down, just a .com spinoff they thought could sustain itself independently through donations. It couldn't. CR seems to be able to operate on a subscription model and has done so for quite some time, the Internet ain't the same thing. And they were giving away the content with zero ads so they needed a lot of people to hit the tip jar, which people on the Internet really aren't accustomed to doing yet.
And it is probably time to end all non-profit tax exemptions. Look at this thing's legal chain of custody. Consumerist.com is owned by Consumer Media LLC, which is a subsidiary of Consumer Reports, which is a non-profit tax exempt operation. How many levels of corporation should a "charity" be organized into? How much money runs through it, how many Proggies making serious bank, all 100% tax exempt. End it all, churches too. Everybody pays.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @02:06AM
Sure, make churches pay taxes. Sounds great to me (a post-theological AC), but has a snowballs chance in hell of going anywhere. Sheesh, talk about impractical dreams, that about takes the cake.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @02:24PM (1 child)
but why mention consumer reports is not shutting down if no one actually claimed it did; at least not in the summary. the summary even quotes the consumerist as stating the same info will be made available at the consumer reports website.
The summary clearly states the consumerist is being closed by consumer reports. why make a point to refute a claim no one made, and is without question not something requiring clarification by your statement that CR isn't shutting down?
i don't understand why you say that. the rest is good and so thank you for that info, but i can't rate you at -1 irrelevant and +1 informative at the same time
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:05PM
Not the GP, but I can see two reasons. One is that the similar name and combined ownership might make one thing that it is both. The second is that Consumer Reports is having widely publicized problems itself, so the idea of Consumer Reports going out of business wouldn't surprise me.
However, the real reason I see for Consumerist closing is because they are trying to drive traffic to their website so they can push a CRO subscription. They need more of those to stay alive, as their magazine subscriptions are going down). Well, I'm not paying $3 per month for reviews on your website, especially since the last few I looked at appear to be just shitty comparisons of 5 models or have dates from years ago. And I don't even know how much a magazine subscription is, as the website doesn't tell you but the magazine is just full of the same stories from the CR website, but a month or two later and with the same shitty reviews from CRO, but barely searchable and without access to the reviews online.
(Score: 5, Informative) by donkeyhotay on Wednesday November 01 2017, @09:01PM (5 children)
There's no need to dream up conspiracy theories. Consumer Reports has been losing readership, subscriptions and therefore money for a while now. I even canceled my subscription. There were several reasons: The first was that I hardly used the service. Their reviews were too few and far between. Since retailers custom name the models they sell, and since they change the model numbers frequently, it was hard to figure out which review went to which product. CR's reviews were unreliable. Too often I would purchase a "best buy" item, only to have it break after a short period of time. Finally, CR sends out EVERY email message with the subject line "An Important Message from Consumer Reports", and nearly every email was a plea for donations. I was already a subscriber. Why do they keep hitting me up for money? It just got to be too tiresome.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday November 01 2017, @09:59PM
An Important Message from Consumer Reports
Ah the same method sirus radio uses. Out of the thousands they have sent me only 1 was worth reading.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @01:04AM
Ah yes, because vital aspects of human civilization are obviously easily monetized. I mean if no one wants to subscribe to a regular dose then it isn't worth doing right?
(Score: 3, Interesting) by optotronic on Thursday November 02 2017, @02:30AM (1 child)
I am a Consumer Reports fan. I have subscribed to the print magazine for decades, and to the online service for many years.
There have been some problems in the last couple years, such as: the use of slang and poor grammar in the print magazine, manufacturers figuring out how to make a product test well and last just long enough for the review to be printed, removing the date from the cover of the magazine (recently restored, fortunately), and too much print space used for pointless pictures.
However, they buy all the products they review and are therefore not beholden to anyone for the product rating. They provide the best rating and reliability information on automobiles. They provide the only useful reviews I've seen on interior and exterior house paint. They provide the most comprehensive product reviews I've seen for any products they review, with the possible exception of the computer and printer reviews in PC Magazine in their heyday. They also review home, auto, and health insurance, with less frequency and less breadth.
I wish they could do more with reliability information for most products. Autos are well covered. I recognize that most products these days have a short shelf life and if they waited to see how long they lasted the information might be useless by the time it was published. Still, there is probably room for improvement in large appliances and some other products. For shorter lived products, perhaps they could follow up on recently reviewed products more frequently.
I still find significant value in Consumer Reports and expect to subscribe for many more years.
(Score: 2, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @04:20AM
> They provide the best rating and reliability information on automobiles.
Personally, I'm a fan (and early member) of this relative newcomer, https://www.truedelta.com/ [truedelta.com] for reliability data.
The webmaster is pretty sharp with statistics and always publishes the sample sizes, along with a lot of supporting data and comments.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @06:14AM
Why didn't you unsubscribe from the e-mails?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday November 02 2017, @02:31AM
They say [archiveteam.org] "Archive Team can always be reached by e-mail at archiveteam@archiveteam.org or by IRC at the #archiveteam channel on EFnet."