Shopping has always been a battle. Companies work hard to convince you that their product is better, while also trying to ensure you pay the highest possible price for your purchase. That’s fair enough, and most of us are accustomed to researching everything we buy to make sure we’re not being ripped off.

But modern technology has changed the game. Companies have been hoovering up information about us for years now, and that means they have a pretty good idea about our shopping habits—including what we’re willing to pay for specific products and services, something called Individualized Consumer Data (ICD). New tools like artificial intelligence are now making it very, very easy for companies to engage in what’s known as surveillance pricing.

What is surveillance pricing?

As its most basic, surveillance pricing is when companies put together a profile of you and your shopping habits, then adjust prices specifically for you. A basic example would be shopping for a television: Two people go to Amazon to look at the same television. One person sees a price of $499, while the other sees $599—for the exact same television, at the exact same moment. The discrepancy is due to their different spending habits and other information that Amazon has gathered about them—their ICD—that tells the company that one person would be willing to spend that extra $100, and the other wouldn’t.

Companies create those profiles by scraping an incredibly large volume of information about you from a wide variety of sources. Internet cookies, your shopping history, your IP address (and the geographic and demographic information it provides), are just the basics—the profiling goes much deeper. Even behaviors like how far you scroll when searching for products or what you leave in your shopping cart and never buy contribute to a detailed picture of who you are as a consumer.

You might be thinking that most of your personal and financial information is protected to some extent by privacy laws and policies, and you would be right. A lot of this stuff is anonymized. But the sheer amount of information that you leak when you go online—not just cookies and IP addresses, but the browser you use, the plugins you have installed, your time zone, screen size, devices, even system fonts on your computer—can be collected to create a detailed “fingerprint” of your online life.

Combined with data gathered from loyalty apps and other sources, this means that an “anonymous” profile of you can be reliably created and identified. In other words, companies may not know that it’s you shopping for that TV, but they know that a unique consumer with specific habits is shopping for one, and thus they can tweak their pricing as needed very effectively.

The signs to look out for

What’s fun about surveillance pricing is how hard it is to tell it’s happening. After all, you surf to a site to buy something, you see a price, you assume that’s just the price that’s been calculated. How can you know that someone else will see a higher or lower price?

It’s not easy. You can look for a few subtle signs and try a few experiments if you suspect you’re running into surveillance pricing:

• Changed prices. If you go back to a specific website regularly and notice that the price changes, it might be because you’re using a different device or because some other aspect of your online fingerprint has changed. Or it might be because your ICD tells the company that you always visit multiple times looking for a lower price.

• Inconsistent pricing. If you know someone who is shopping for the same item on the same platform and they’re getting different pricing, that’s a potential clue.

• Reactive advertising. Even if you haven’t noticed price changes, seeing ads that are narrowly targeted to you can be a sign that ICD is being collected and used on you. For example, if web searches or comments on your social media channels seem to inspire related ads, there’s a good chance that your online fingerprint is specific enough to be used for surveillance pricing.

Defending against surveillance pricing

Surveillance pricing is harmful to consumers because it means you wind up paying more for items simply because of where you live or other extraneous factors—it’s inherently unfair. Defending against it, however, can be challenging—there are basically four strategies you can employ against surveillance pricing, and none of them are magic bullets.

Comparison shop

The simplest way to combat suspected surveillance pricing is to shop around for items at different stores—including physical locations, if possible—to get a clear idea of what the “normal” price should be. This can be time-consuming and not always effective, as different online platforms may all use similar surveillance techniques against you.

Another aspect of this is to engage your friends and family who live in different areas and use different devices (Android phones versus iPhones, for example). A news station recently had several people from around the country check the prices of different products online, and found prices swung by several hundred dollars depending on location and other factors. If you can ask people who live in different areas to check prices, you can at least determine if you’re getting an okay deal, comparatively.

Use a VPN

One of the most common pieces of advice whenever pricing issues come up is to use a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to mask your location—you’ve probably seen this advice in conjunction with finding the lowest airline prices for trips. It seems to make sense: If retailers are charging more for people living in affluent zip codes, changing your reported location should defend against that.

I tried this, using a VPN to change my IP address to locations in Mexico, the Netherlands, Japan, and different areas of the U.S., and actually saw no price changes whatsoever. One reason this might not work is because your IP address and associated location are just one piece of your online fingerprint, and companies can still track you when you mask it (your browser gives away a lot of information—you can see just how much at this site). Another reason this might not work as well as you expect is because companies can pretty easily tell that you’re using a VPN because the IP addresses they assign their users are used over and over again, often by several people at the same time. This creates patterns that allow companies to flag those IP addresses as VPNs.

However, that doesn’t mean that using a VPN is pointless in the fight against surveillance pricing. If you routinely surf the net behind a VPN and combine that with other steps like incognito browsing, regularly clearing cookies from your browser, and deleting your internet history, you deny trackers a wealth of information about you, which can help cloak your identity, making it harder to create that online fingerprint.

Avoid loyalty apps

Loyalty apps that offer coupons and discounts to regular shoppers are, of course, data vacuums that make it very easy to create a profile about you and your shopping habits. For a few measly discounts, you’re basically giving companies everything they could possibly need to track and profile you—and they can (and do) sell that information to other retailers. If you want to make it harder for them to use surveillance pricing against you, giving up those little perks is probably necessary.

Use different devices

The final piece of advice for defeating surveillance pricing is the one thing that did actually make a difference when I tested it. I randomly searched Amazon for a 65-inch TV made by TCL. On my desktop browser, it was listed at $469.95. When I switched to my phone, it was suddenly $479.00. Less than $10 isn’t a huge difference, but changing devices was the only strategy that yielded any results at all for me, and indicates that checking prices on different devices is an effective strategy for ensuring you’re getting the best possible price despite what your profile might say about your shopping habits.

Of course, all of this checking and device-swapping takes time and effort, so you have to consider whether the money you might save by getting around surveillance pricing is worth the time you put into it. Using a VPN with an incognito browser regularly is probably the best passive strategy you can employ to frustrate attempts to profile you without making it into a second job.

Last year the Federal Trade Commission opened an investigation into surveillance pricing, which could lead to new rules and enforcement to end the practice, and several states have some kind of legislation to regulate or ban the practice in the works. But until those become reality, keep your eyes open.

Valve is releasing version 3.7 of SteamOS to the general public, and among the routine updates and changes is a big one: This is the SteamOS release that finally adds official support for some kinds of PC hardware other than Valve’s own Steam Deck.

Valve mentions certain specific handhelds as having either “official” or “improved support,” including the Asus ROG Ally, the Lenovo Legion Go, and the Lenovo Legion Go S. It also includes directions for configuring the original Legion Go and ROG Ally for SteamOS installation. But Valve says that only the Steam Deck and Legion Go S have fully baked SteamOS support.

The release claims to run on “other AMD powered handhelds” more broadly, implying that most third-party handheld PCs with Ryzen Z1 or Z2-series processors ought to support at least some basic functionality. Other all-AMD desktops and laptops have a decent shot at being supported, too.

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Nike is heading back to Amazon. The sneaker company will soon begin selling products directly through the platform, according to reporting by The Information. This hasn’t happened since 2019, when Nike left Amazon to move toward a “more direct, personal” retail experience.

That’s not the only reason Nike abandoned the online retail giant after just two years on the platform. The shoe manufacturer partly blamed the decision on Amazon’s inability to curb counterfeit goods and unlicensed sellers.

Nike’s direct-to-consumer pivot was working well, for a while. Sales spiked during the pandemic, as did all online shopping, but has gone downhill in the years since. CEO Elliott Hill, who started in October, has prioritized building back Nike’s wholesale business.

Nike products have been available on Amazon throughout these past six years, but in a roundabout way. Third-party sellers were allowed to hawk its wares, though Amazon is putting the kibosh on that. The Information reports that these merchants have been told that they have until July 19 to stop selling certain Nike items.

So Nike shoes will soon be easier to buy online. That’s the good news. The bad news is that they are likely to be more expensive. CNBC has reported that the company plans on raising prices on all of its products, which goes into effect on June 1.

This is likely in response to the on-again, off-again, on-again, off-again (on-again) tariffs mandated by President Trump via his poison pen. The price of adult clothing and shoes will rise by $2 to $10 per item. Some items won’t be impacted, like cheaper goods and children’s products.

This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/big-tech/nike-comes-back-to-amazon-following-a-six-year-absence-152621298.html?src=rss

An interesting piece on Construction Physics that examines how Japan transformed discarded American wartime shipbuilding techniques into a revolutionary manufacturing system that captured nearly half the global market by 1970. The story reveals the essential ingredients for industrial dominance: government backing, organizational alignment, relentless will to improve, and the systematic coordination needed to turn existing technologies into something entirely new. A few excerpts: During WWII, the US constructed an unprecedented shipbuilding machine. By assembling ships from welded, prefabricated blocks, the US built a huge number of cargo ships incredibly quickly, overwhelming Germany’s u-boats and helping to win the war. But when the war was over, this shipbuilding machine was dismantled. Industrialists like Henry Kaiser and Stephen Bechtel, who operated some of the US’s most efficient wartime shipyards, left the shipbuilding business. Prior to the war, the US had been an uncompetitive commercial shipbuilder producing a small fraction of commercial oceangoing ships, and that’s what it became again. At the height of the war the US was producing nearly 90% of the world’s ships. By the 1950s, it produced just over 2%.

But the lessons from the US’s shipbuilding machine weren’t forgotten. After the war, practitioners brought them to Japan, where they would continue to evolve, eventually allowing Japan to build ships faster and cheaper than almost anyone else in the world.

[…] The third strategy that formed the core of modern shipbuilding methods was statistical process control. The basic idea behind process control is that it’s impossible to make an industrial process perfectly reliable. There will always be some variation in what it produces: differences in part dimensions, material strength, chemical composition, and so on. But while some variation is inherent to the process (and must be accepted), much of the variation is from specific causes that can be hunted down and eliminated. By analyzing the variation in a process, undesirable sources of variation can be removed. This makes a process work more reliably and predictably, reducing waste and rework from parts that are outside acceptable tolerances.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Expert advisors for the Food and Drug Administration met Thursday to discuss which virus strain this year’s updated COVID-19 vaccines should target. The advisors have been meeting around this time each year for such a strain selection, a routine decision in the process of updating the life-saving vaccines.

But this year’s meeting was awkward and even a little tense. Earlier this week, new FDA leaders under health secretary and anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced a sweeping new framework that would restrict access to the shots, making them available only to people 65 and older and those with medical conditions that put them at risk of severe illness. For updated COVID-19 vaccines to be approved for healthy children and adults, vaccine makers would need to repeat large, randomized, placebo-controlled trials, which are expensive, ethically debatable at this point, and could easily take too much time to complete before the shots would need to be ready for fall vaccinations. The advisors weren’t consulting on the new framework, and there is much uncertainty about its implementation.

Just thirty minutes into yesterday’s nearly seven-hour meeting, one committee member broached one of the largest looming questions, saying, “If a different strain was selected for this season, would that require additional clinical trials, etc.?”

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If you want to begin coding—either for a career shift, a hobby, or just to better understand your favorite apps—this bundle is worth a look. You can get Microsoft Visual Studio Professional 2022 bundled with the Learn to Code Certification course pack currently on sale for $55.97—a steep markdown from its original $1,999 price tag. The standout here is that you’re not just getting a license for Visual Studio, which is already a powerhouse development environment, but also lifetime access to more than 60 hours of beginner-to-advanced coding instruction.

Visual Studio Pro 2022 itself is widely used in professional environments. It’s built for serious dev work—think C#, Python, .NET, and more. You get tools like IntelliCode for AI-assisted coding suggestions, built-in Git support, debugging, and advanced testing features useful whether you’re building a small app or working on enterprise-level projects. Normally, licenses for just the IDE can get expensive, so getting it bundled with a full curriculum covering JavaScript, React, Python, CSS, and more is the kind of package that feels designed for someone starting out with ambition or a side hustle in mind.

That said, this is a very Microsoft-centric deal. If you’re aiming to become a Mac-based developer or work heavily with Xcode and iOS projects, this probably won’t be your best fit. The same goes if you’re already deep into development and just looking for a few advanced certifications—some of the coursework may feel too foundational. But if you’ve been stuck in tutorial limbo, this bundle provides structure, software, and real-world tools at a reasonable price. For under $60, it’s hard to beat the value, especially for learners who want both a development platform and a guided roadmap in one place.

Donald Trump woke up Friday morning and threatened Apple with a 25 percent tariff on any iPhones sold in the US that are not manufactured in America.

In a Truth Social post, Trump claimed that he had “long ago” told Apple CEO Tim Cook that Apple’s plan to manufacture iPhones for the US market in India was unacceptable. Only US-made iPhones should be sold here, he said.

“If that is not the case, a tariff of at least 25 percent must be paid by Apple to the US,” Trump said.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Vietnam’s technology ministry has instructed telecommunication service providers to block the messaging app Telegram for not cooperating in combating alleged crimes committed by its users, according to a government document reviewed by Reuters.

The document, dated May 21 and signed by the deputy head of the telecom department at the technology ministry, ordered telecommunication companies to take measures to block Telegram and report on them to the ministry by June 2.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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If you want to level up your home security, the Arlo Essential 2K Outdoor Camera is now 50% off. For $49.99, this indoor and outdoor camera features high-definition footage, thanks to its 2K video resolution, allowing you to get a clear view of license plates, faces, and more. It also provides peace of mind with nighttime surveillance, featuring an integrated spotlight for color night vision that operates in low-light conditions.

Arlo Essential 2K Outdoor Camera

$49.99
at Amazon

$99.99
Save $50.00

$49.99
at Amazon

$99.99
Save $50.00

A motion detection feature works in real-time and sends notifications to your connected device, keeping you up to date on any alerts. The motion detection feature is rated highly, as is the video quality, which reviewers describe as sharp and crisp. 

A two-way mic and speaker allow you to listen and speak to visitors through the camera using the Arlo app, where you can also switch between modes such as “Home” or “Away.” It works seamlessly with most smart home systems, including Alexa, Apple,  Google Assistant, IFTTT, and SmartThings. While it’s advertised for outdoor usage, it can also be used indoors. But unlike the Arlo indoor camera, its IP65 water-resistant design makes it durable and allows it to withstand various weather conditions, including rain or extreme temperatures. That said, it may experience issues or lag in extremely cold conditions, but this is a common issue with most outdoor cameras. 

Amazon reviewers appreciate the ease of installation, which is completely wireless and comes with all installation tools included. The camera uses a rechargeable battery, offering flexibility in placement. Still, there are a few drawbacks. Some features are locked behind a monthly membership, and there are mixed reviews regarding the battery life, with some individuals stating that it drains quickly. Based on the location where you install it, it may be inconvenient to take it down for frequent recharging. 

At full price, having features locked behind a monthly membership might not be worth the cost. Still, given the 50% discount, the camera’s performance and reliability make it a smart choice for those seeking a versatile outdoor security solution.