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posted by janrinok on Wednesday March 30 2022, @11:45AM   Printer-friendly
from the one-for-the-little-guys dept.

Can't get hold of a shiny new Raspberry Pi? Here's why:

Adafruit, an official reseller of Raspberry Pi computers, has mandated account verification and two-factor authentication in an effort to prevent bots from snapping up limited supply.

In a blog post, Adafruit explained it hopes to give customers the opportunity to purchase Raspberry Pis and other in-demand items at the going market rate, without having to compete with automated bots for stock.

"Please note! We are now requiring a verified account with two-factor authentication enabled in order to purchase certain high-demand products, such as Raspberry Pi computers, due to a large number of bot-purchasers making it difficult for Makers and Engineers to order these products," reads a notice on Adafruit product listings.

"Please make sure you have a verified Adafruit account and enable two-factor authentication. Finally, you will need to sign out and back in to activate the account verification."


Original Submission

Related Stories

An Update to Raspberry Pi OS Bullseye 10 comments

Raspberry Pi OS "Bullseye" is getting some changes to improve its robustness. Gone is the default user 'pi' with the default password of 'raspberry'. On first-boot, a setup wizard walks through setting a normal user with a regular password, though there are still options for headless installation. Among other improvements, it is now also possible to do the setup with a bluetooth mouse/keyboard exclusively. The old way required at least a wired mouse, if not also a wired keyboard, to connect first.

There are also mechanisms to preconfigure an image without using Imager. To set up a user on first boot and bypass the wizard completely, create a file called userconf or userconf.txt in the boot partition of the SD card; this is the part of the SD card which can be seen when it is mounted in a Windows or MacOS computer. This file should contain a single line of text, consisting of username:encrypted- password – so your desired username, followed immediately by a colon, followed immediately by an encrypted representation of the password you want to use.

Since it is a full general-purpose computer, other distros and even other operating systems are available for the Raspberry Pi. Slackware, LInux Mint, and Devuan are all among the distros which run well. FreeBSD, OpenBSD, and NetBSD also support at least some Raspberry Pi models. However, the official guides and tutorials all point to Raspberry Pi OS, which is a Debian derivative.

Previously:
(2022) Long Interview with Eben Upton About Long Term Plans for RPi (journal entry)
(2022) Can't Get Hold of a Shiny New Raspberry Pi? Blame the Bots
(2022) Raspberry Pi 64-bit Armbian Gets New Release
(2021) Raspberry Pi Launches .com Website, Eyes Retail Expansion in Africa
(2021) The Ongoing Raspberry Pi Fiasco


Original Submission

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  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by HammeredGlass on Wednesday March 30 2022, @12:47PM (2 children)

    by HammeredGlass (12241) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @12:47PM (#1233475)

    and the same to all the rest that prefer to exploit people's needs and wants to the levels we've seen.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by FatPhil on Wednesday March 30 2022, @12:55PM

      by FatPhil (863) <pc-soylentNO@SPAMasdf.fi> on Wednesday March 30 2022, @12:55PM (#1233478) Homepage
      You've failed to detect the cobras in the room.

      They've made it harder for you to buy an RasPi from an official channel, therefore encouraging you to buy one from an unofficial channel, thus permitting the unofficial channels to increase their prices, therefore making the unofficial channels more profitable for the people running them.

      I've only seen Pis on sale from dodgy sources at prices higher than the official prices for the last year or so. Their technique of ensuring I get ripped off seems to be working.
      --
      Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
    • (Score: 4, Touché) by captain normal on Wednesday March 30 2022, @04:15PM

      by captain normal (2205) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @04:15PM (#1233550)

      Well what do you suspect? Isn't that the 'merican way...buy low, sell high, It don't matter if you are not going to use the gadget (or oil or food), just get in the middle and make a killing.

      --
      When life isn't going right, go left.
  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @01:04PM (10 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @01:04PM (#1233480)

    ... a free market is supposed to respond to demand by upping supply, price or both. What we have here is rationing. That is because the big AIs don't like humans own hackable computers which don't phone home.

    Where big AIs are corporations, and possibly even states.

    • (Score: 2) by ikanreed on Wednesday March 30 2022, @02:12PM (1 child)

      by ikanreed (3164) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 30 2022, @02:12PM (#1233495) Journal

      And what exactly would say the source of the demand is?

      Responding to demand by raising prices typically requires some understanding of the extent of the demand so you can fund your expansion/choose an appropriate price point. Because transient demand or distribution-complexity centered demand can be very hard to model.

      And competition is part of the magic of supply and demand, because a competitor could come eat your market. As far as I know, no one is successfully competing with the reputation of pi, partially because of the Pi's extremely low price point.

      • (Score: 5, Interesting) by DECbot on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:45PM

        by DECbot (832) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:45PM (#1233531) Journal

        RPi makes hobbyist computing affordable. Instead of buying a power hungry x86 for their projects, a just-good-enough Arm device is available at a quarter the price (or less) and using just a fraction of the power consumption. Personally I think Pine64's RockPro64 is more compelling spec wise with more cores and a PCI Express slot at a similar price point to the CM4 4GB with all the extras to make it usable, but what Pine64 doesn't have is the community that makes their product truly an x86 replacement. From what I can tell, Debian is the closest with a prebuilt image for, SID it think it is. SUSE has a freaking installer for the Raspberry Pi 4 and all the other distros at least build images for the Pi. That's why there's demand for the Pi board over other Arm hobbyist boards. The hardware is good enough and mature enough for production in light load scenarios--like self hosting for your family's use--and it has a broad and healthy community providing new life and support for the devices.
         
        I have a 10+ year old 32-bit x86 devices that's due for a replacement that's providing webmail and newsreader services. I have a RockPro64 that is supposed to take on that role, but I'm hesitant to put it in production because if the hardware fails it will be a pain to get it back up. I have another box that is doing fileserver, jellyfin, minecraft server, and other dockerized services, but I'm thinking about replacing both with either a CM4 powered Kuberneties cluster or an embedded Epyc device. As absurd as it sounds, the cluster will be about half the cost of the Epyc device and a lot easier to get spare hardware. I guest the other solution is to wait for Asahi Linux to get stable and buy a Mac Mini. I've thought about used servers or building a low cost x86 box--but I am also looking for low TDP and 16+ cores. There's just not a lot of that under $500 except the Pis.

        --
        cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
    • (Score: 2) by DeathMonkey on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:33PM

      by DeathMonkey (1380) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:33PM (#1233525) Journal

      .. a free market is supposed to respond to demand by upping supply, price or both.

      And when the market CAN'T increase supply because of an ongoing chip shortage and a global supply chain traffic jam cased by a pandemic there can be shortages, increased demand, and people taking advantage beyond what we find acceptable as a society.

    • (Score: 5, Insightful) by theluggage on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:50PM (6 children)

      by theluggage (1797) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:50PM (#1233534)

      ... a free market is supposed to respond to demand by upping supply, price or both.

      A free market is supposed to involve customers who want the product buying from people who make the product, maybe with a retailer/distributor providing a service for a reasonable markup (which is limited because there is a choice of competing retailers both for the consumer and the maker).

      Scalpers using automated tools to buy up all available stock from retailers in order to create artificial scarcity and collect money for nothing are an attack on the free market. Also, the seller can't raise prices indefinitely without killing the product, whereas scalpers don't give a flying fuck about that (...and have probably arranged things so that they are buying the stock with someone else's cash anyway - how many of the people running these bots are suckers who have responded to a 'make $$$ in your spare time" ads?)

      A prime example why an "anything goes" free market won't stay free unless the invisible hand gets the occasional slap on the invisible wrist.

      • (Score: 2) by krishnoid on Wednesday March 30 2022, @05:05PM (5 children)

        by krishnoid (1156) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @05:05PM (#1233562)

        I think the free market would say the item is underpriced. Which is kind of the point, because while it's popular, it's more intended as a hobbyist/development platform [raspberrypi.org]. There, society benefits from people with more specialized skills than money being able to get ahold of those, and then vastly improve their value to people without those specialized skills. In the past (and depending on the platform), companies employing these people would pay well for these platforms, but that's sort of less the case here.

        • (Score: 3, Insightful) by dalek on Thursday March 31 2022, @12:47AM (3 children)

          by dalek (15489) on Thursday March 31 2022, @12:47AM (#1233648)

          There's a difference between the Raspberry Pi Foundation raising prices versus a scalper buying up supply and reselling at a higher price. The former is a producer who is adding value by creating a useful product and raising prices to reflect the increased value of their product. The latter is essentially engaging in rent seeking behavior, contributing nothing of value, and exploiting market inefficiency for profit.

          When scalpers buy up the entire supply, the inability to purchase goods from normal channels creates the appearance of scarcity. The perception that it's going to be difficult to acquire particular goods may cause people who wouldn't otherwise buy those goods right away to do so because of the fear they won't be able to purchase it later. Scalpers contribute to the perception that those goods are scarce, probably exacerbating customers making a run on them. In other words, scalpers not only not contributing any value, but they may also be driving people to attempt to purchase goods when they otherwise wouldn't, making it even harder and more expensive for people to purchase those goods. In that sense, I would argue that scalpers profit by contributing negative value.

          --
          THIS ACCOUNT IS PERMANENTLY CLOSED
          • (Score: 2, Interesting) by khallow on Thursday March 31 2022, @12:26PM (2 children)

            by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 31 2022, @12:26PM (#1233711) Journal
            When you have much larger demand than supply at a given price point, then who should have those goods? The scalper regulates the disparity between supply and demand when the producer can't or refuses to.

            Scalpers contribute to the perception that those goods are scarce, probably exacerbating customers making a run on them.

            Scalping only works because the good is scarce - that's how it contributes to that perception (something like how us not floating into space contributes to the perception that there's this force called "gravity"). If those manufacturers of Raspberry Pi computers just made more computers in response to scalping, then scalping would fail and stop.

            • (Score: 4, Informative) by theluggage on Thursday March 31 2022, @06:06PM (1 child)

              by theluggage (1797) on Thursday March 31 2022, @06:06PM (#1233787)

              When you have much larger demand than supply at a given price point, then who should have those goods? The scalper regulates the disparity between supply and demand when the producer can't or refuses to.

              Except the scalpers play a large part in creating that disparity.

              If those manufacturers of Raspberry Pi computers just made more computers in response to scalping, then scalping would fail and stop.

              Except that's not possible right now because of component shortages and distribution problems. Even in better times you can't just magick up extra supplies overnight to meet an unexpected spike in demand. The scalpers are exploiting and exacerbating that situation, turning a minor shortage into a major famine. By the time the manufacturer can ramp up production, the scalpers have made their money and moved on to the next target (...and I bet you an internet that the ringleaders have ensured that any unsold stock they're stuck with has been paid for by some other mug).

              • (Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday March 31 2022, @07:42PM

                by khallow (3766) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 31 2022, @07:42PM (#1233802) Journal

                Except that's not possible right now because of component shortages and distribution problems.

                Recall I wrote "Scalping only works because the good is scarce"?

                (...and I bet you an internet that the ringleaders have ensured that any unsold stock they're stuck with has been paid for by some other mug).

                Good scalpers are market savvy.

                The problem here is just that there's a market inefficiency - the sell price is much lower than it should be. Scalpers wouldn't be around, if the price of the Raspberry Pi were higher so that demand matched supply.

        • (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2022, @10:57AM

          by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 31 2022, @10:57AM (#1233705)

          I think the free market would say the item is underpriced.

          I think you don't know what this "free market" actually means. "Free market" requires some heavy regulation in forms of anti-trust laws and anti-dumping laws and similar so unscrupulous people don't screw it up for the little guy. The so called "free market" only exists because of government intervention in it. We just need to make scalping illegal everywhere and we can have nice things again.

          https://www.reddit.com/r/PS5/comments/jtjibi/make_scalping_illegal/ [reddit.com]

          If you want the "free market" as per your definition (or your beliefs), you need to look at the black market. For one, if you think this market is bestest of them all, then don't forget the price of entry into this market can be high, including your life on the line. In the regulated market, no one "offs you" because you became unwelcomed competition for them ;)

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Revek on Wednesday March 30 2022, @01:19PM (2 children)

    by Revek (5022) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @01:19PM (#1233481)

    If adafruit would implement a queue system for ordering them and let us queue up that would be okay for me. I just need one but I would probably buy two so I don't have to wait the next time I want to build something.

    --
    This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
    • (Score: 3, Informative) by EvilSS on Wednesday March 30 2022, @02:59PM (1 child)

      by EvilSS (1456) Subscriber Badge on Wednesday March 30 2022, @02:59PM (#1233512)
      Canakit is doing this. I ordered a few boards that should ship, well, one day. April or May probably. Looks like they are only taking pre-orders on kits at the moment though. Boards all show sold out.
      • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:56PM

        by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:56PM (#1233540)

        I ordered my Pi 4 from them back in January, and I got it in March. But, they didn't charge until it was set you ship. So far, I'm happy with the purchase.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @02:15PM (5 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @02:15PM (#1233497)

    Didn't see it in TFA, what method(s) of 2FA do they support?

    • (Score: 2) by Revek on Wednesday March 30 2022, @02:24PM (4 children)

      by Revek (5022) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @02:24PM (#1233500)

      I just set it up. I installed google authenticator but they had a link to something called authy app if installing another evil empires product bothers you.

      --
      This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
      • (Score: 2) by SomeGuy on Thursday March 31 2022, @12:43AM (3 children)

        by SomeGuy (5632) on Thursday March 31 2022, @12:43AM (#1233646)

        So, in other words it requires a stupid smart phone. Fuck that shit.

        • (Score: 2) by jasassin on Thursday March 31 2022, @05:47AM (1 child)

          by jasassin (3566) <jasassin@gmail.com> on Thursday March 31 2022, @05:47AM (#1233684) Homepage Journal

          So, in other words it requires a stupid smart phone. Fuck that shit.

          Serial port, smart-phone app… still a PITA. Besides, do they make computers with serial ports anymore?

          --
          jasassin@gmail.com GPG Key ID: 0xE6462C68A9A3DB5A
          • (Score: 2) by Revek on Thursday March 31 2022, @10:54AM

            by Revek (5022) on Thursday March 31 2022, @10:54AM (#1233704)

            Yeah, they are called servers.

            --
            This page was generated by a Swarm of Roaming Elephants
        • (Score: 1) by ncc74656 on Wednesday April 13 2022, @02:32PM

          by ncc74656 (4917) on Wednesday April 13 2022, @02:32PM (#1236604) Homepage

          So, in other words it requires a stupid smart phone. Fuck that shit.

          TOTP (the authentication implemented in things like Google Authenticator and FreeOTP) is also available as a plugin for KeePass. You can have your TOTP secrets backed up there, and request codes from there instead of from your phone. I rarely look up codes in FreeOTP anymore; when I do, I'm usually already on my phone and an app is asking for a code.

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by richtopia on Wednesday March 30 2022, @02:48PM (1 child)

    by richtopia (3160) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @02:48PM (#1233507) Homepage Journal

    I'm sure others have a similar situation to myself: over the years I've collected single board computers, and almost all of them are collecting dust. 3rd gen RPIs are selling well over their original purchase price, even first generation RPIs are selling at reasonable prices.

    I'm not even that concerned with making a profit, I mostly would like to get them to someone who will use them. Since we are talking about tens of dollars, I'm definitely not getting rich.

    Interestingly, I also looked up the ODROID-C2 and it is not getting sold on eBay regularly for significant money. I have a few; they used to be my preferred platform and I can move my RPI hosted projects over to the C2. The only real gap is the graphics drivers haven't kept up with new distributions; if you need a display I would stick with x86 or RPI.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @04:33PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @04:33PM (#1233557)

      My Pi 1 is currently running pihole and apart from some annoyance with Google devices refusing to use it without TLS, it's been working well. My Pi3b+ is happily working as a emulator. My Pi 4 seems happy enough for a zfs based media streamer and nas.

      They've definitely got their uses, but the lack of options for vendors can be an issue if you're wanting to base a system on it.

  • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:38PM (3 children)

    by pTamok (3042) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:38PM (#1233528)

    I would like an RPi 4 with a hat, or RPi CM4 on an appropriate board to give me a router with two GigE interfaces, in a fanless case. It is, as far as I can make out, a great platform for routing (and firewalling), and running SQM at GigE, at low power draw. There doesn't seem to be much competition.

    Problem is, RPi 4s and RPi CM 4s are scarce because of supply shortages affecting their manufacture. And the extra GigE interfaces, while available, don't have nice fanless cases. I have no objection to USB GigE interfaces, other than it's not a very neat solution. I was hoping for an all-in-one fanless box that can be powered by PoE, and so far, such a solution doesn't seem to exist.

    I could use an x86 box, but it costs more, is bigger, and uses more power, which for something on 24x7 is a consideration. Some of the industrial fanless mini-PCs look nice, but they have rather 'nice' prices too.

    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by DECbot on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:57PM (2 children)

      by DECbot (832) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @03:57PM (#1233542) Journal

      I got this one from DF Robot [dfrobot.com] for Christmas with a CM4, 4GB before the availability crunch and it works great for my house. I don't think it does PoE, but that is nice is the components chosen to connect the nics directly to the PCIe bus. Both ports are gigabit. Jeff Geerling did a review of DF Robot's and Seeed's boards [jeffgeerling.com] and found that Seeed's board uses a USB3 controller to host the two nics, thus throughput is lower and more heat is generated. He has a video out there too if that's your preferred medium.

      --
      cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base
      • (Score: 1) by pTamok on Wednesday March 30 2022, @05:42PM (1 child)

        by pTamok (3042) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @05:42PM (#1233565)

        Thanks.

        When I last looked, there was no case available for it.

        Of course, now, Compute Module 4's are hard to find, especially where I am. International shipping costs are more than the hardware.

        • (Score: 2, Informative) by ncc74656 on Wednesday April 13 2022, @02:44PM

          by ncc74656 (4917) on Wednesday April 13 2022, @02:44PM (#1236612) Homepage

          When I last looked, there was no case available for it.

          There should've been a laser-cut acrylic case listed with it. STLs for that case are also available, though my attempt at 3D-printing a case didn't work out so well. I ended up placing a second order to buy their case.

          Of course, now, Compute Module 4's are hard to find, especially where I am. International shipping costs are more than the hardware.

          Keep an eye on rpilocator [rpilocator.com]; as I write this, 2- and 4-GB RPi 4s popped up as available in Europe. I don't know if either vendor ships to the US, but within the last month, I managed to snag a RPi Zero 2 W at The Pi Hut, and shipping was reasonable enough (think it was about £12 for the board and maybe £6-7 for shipping).

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @05:32PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @05:32PM (#1233564)

    "Two factor authentication" is here a funny name for tracing the product to the purchaser. There is no problem in getting user's data from their phone number. There is no problem in applying unique features in the Pi microcomputer. And there is no problem to join two tables.

  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @06:50PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @06:50PM (#1233573)

    Somewhere there has got to be a rental storage bin filled to the gills with RasPis and PlayStation 5's. Break into that and you'll become an ebay millionaire!

  • (Score: 3, Informative) by corey on Wednesday March 30 2022, @09:53PM

    by corey (2202) on Wednesday March 30 2022, @09:53PM (#1233616)

    I didn’t know what the bots were or who they were run by so I RTFA. It’s scalpers.

    “However, the problem has been aggravated for regular consumers by scalpers, who are using bots to scoop up any supply that does hit the shelves, with a view to flipping it for a large profit on secondary markets.”

  • (Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @11:04PM (3 children)

    by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @11:04PM (#1233629)

    As an already computer-literate over-18, I'm not supposed to be the market for an Raspberry Pi anyway.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @11:24PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @11:24PM (#1233630)

      Some of their biggest customers are industrial.

    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @11:38PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 30 2022, @11:38PM (#1233633)

      You're just salty because it doesn't come with a touch screen so that you can play your candy game.

    • (Score: 3, Funny) by kazzie on Thursday March 31 2022, @07:30AM

      by kazzie (5309) Subscriber Badge on Thursday March 31 2022, @07:30AM (#1233695)

      If we didn't have an Ad for Adafruit it'd just be 'afruit'.

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