technoethical - no laptop, no refund
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Hello,
I am reluctantly posting here because I've tried to reason with technoethical. I get very occasional communications but no laptop which I've paid for - 760 euros - on October 1, 2021. On October 5 I was told my laptop would ship tomorrow. I tried a number of times to get the tracking number but to no avail. On November 2 I was emailed and informed, with apologies for the absence, that my order had been processed. Then, following some more emails seeking information and complaining to the Free Software Foundation, on November 20 I received an email to tell me my computer had been shipped - tracking number: CO975702979RO - and that I will receive it in 10 days. I'm still waiting for my computer one month after it was supposedly shipped despite a number of emails asking for details of the transport company as I cannot get any information using the tracking number I was given.
It's now 11 weeks since I paid technoethical and I'm still waiting. I have appealed to Tiberiu one more time and will post soon again with good or bad news.
Hello Donagh_20,
I have also not yet received an order from a Wifi Card and a Flash Kit. The order is from the 14th of August. On several emails I received no reply from Tiberiu. I can say from experience that up to this order Tiberiu has always been delivered in good quality, even if it took a very long time! Only the communication is very, very slow. Because I like the little business very much, I hope they are not in trouble!
C.
Hello, Donagh and Vanecek!
This is the reply of Jeanne Rasata of the FSF via RT (info at fsf.org) to my email in reference to your problems with Tehnoetic:
""Thank you for writing. I'm sorry about what is happening. The FSF's Respects Your Freedom program currently only certifies that hardware respects your freedom, privacy, and control, and not its seller's infrastructure or customer-service apparatus. Often times the companies who sell the RYF hardware are small, with limited resources, trying to survive in an industry where most hardware runs proprietary software.
I'm not sure what other way you can reach out to them---e-mail and the phone is all we have, as well; we will, however, reach out to them on your behalf. We hope that this will help resolve the problem more swiftly.
Sorry again for the hassle.
Thank you very much for continuing to support free software.
And best wishes for a happy new year to you, as well.
Sincerely, Jeanne.""
And this is my reply to her:
""Hello, Jeanne!
Thanks for the reply, I specify that I have never had relations with Tiberiu, but it would be good and right for FSF to intervene at Tiberiu in Tehnoetic - you have his email - to urge him to respect the agreements with all the people who have paid, but instead to apparently they have been scammed, because they have not received anything ordered, nor a refund of the money. Beyond the problems that every big or small company may have, honesty, sincerity and availability are the first qualities that every person must have in life and in business relationships with people.""
> I specify that I have never had relations with Tiberiu
Clearly they assumed you had, probably because you wrote to complain, that's why they said they were going to "reach out to them on your behalf". The FSF is not a commercial court, though, so I am not sure how much they can achieve on these matters.
Would you mind posting the first email you sent to the FSF, reporting other users' problems? It would make things clearer.
This is the first mail to FSF:
""In the Trisquel forum I have read this bad news, please read all in order to have a complete awareness of the problem: https://trisquel.info/it/forum/technoethical-no-laptop-no-refund. I hope that the FSF will not support Technoethical in the future!""
In spite of the name of the company, how much ethical and moral have been demonstrated by its owner!
Tiberiu is unreachable and untraceable, see:
"" This is an automatically generated Delivery Status Notification.
Delivery to the following recipients failed permanently:
* tiberiu-constantin at turbureanu.org
Reason: This is the mail system at host smtp-16.iol.local.I am sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to name at domain. The message is attached below.The remote mail system said: Maximum Retry Queue Age Reached"""
I agree with this, he should close shop till he has sorted all problems out.
:/
I have several groups that I know personally who have ordered from Technoethical. One guy ordered (and paid) for a replicant phone a year ago with zero response (despite my warnings to him on how overpriced they are, and how simple it is to install replicant yourself). The others who ordered took months to receive their products, with zero response until they start to complain to others or just get a random email from the guy who runs technoethical. I hate to crap on places that are selling devices with freesoftware, but he needs to put something on the website that says "all orders paused". I am guessing the guy has some type of health/family/mental-issue, it does not seem like he wants to take people's money, but he needs to accept the fact this is not for him, and close shop (or get it together, because it makes the freesoftware market look bad to newcomers who want to just buy a product without proprietary garbage).
That is my two cents.
Complain to the FSF that they endorse people who take money and run.
Technoethical, Purism, the list goes on.
With Thinkpenguin.com I had no problems with my orders!
Hello,
I have ordered a wi-fi USB from ThinkPenguin and posted some questions. I have received a prompt answer as well as my order shipped to Switzerland.
Cheers
Alena
That's bad to hear. I have only ordered a wifi USB stick from Technoethical but received it in good time and no issues. Just as with Piriponzolo I have had zero issues with Think Penguin through several orders as well.
However, it must be admitted that the prices of Thinkpenguin.com and others are really exaggerated (=too much expensive) and immoral, given that we are on the subject of free (as in freedom) software. See https://www.thinkpenguin.com/catalog/notebook-computers-gnu-linux. Free (as in freedom) hardware will never make a serious competition and will never supplant on the market the proprietary products from HP, ASUS etc etc, as long as the prices are so stratospheric. In my opinion, a strong and decisive stance is needed in this area not only by the FSF, but also by all free (as in freedom) software developers!
I am a member!
Sorry to hear about that.
But a word of caution to anyone reading this who is planning to support libre-friendly shops:
Poor service from Technoethical does not mean that you should buy from Vikings instead.
I see their "D8" desktop computer is on the FSF's ethical giving guide, but I've had a somewhat disappointing experience with buying that same "D8" from Vikings.
It certainly wasn't 100% bad, but bad enough to make me not want to buy there again and even made me want to caution others about Vikings. (I don't feel good saying this without backing it up, so I'd like to write about it in detail later, but it's a long story, and at the moment I can't even access the internet at home with my combination of Trisquel + Vikings D8, unlike with three earlier computers.)
Perhaps Thinkpenguin is indeed better? And how about Libiquity? I hesitated to buy from either because they are not in the European Economic Area where I am, so I thought there was a risk that if any problem arose, it might be more difficult and expensive to resolve.
I am a translator!
After switching to Debian on my D8 from Vikings (and using the Mate desktop environment, as I was used to with Trisquel) I have no problem anymore.
I plan to try redo a clean installation of Trisquel in case that solves the problem, but when I tried once Trisquel installer on USB, it wasn't working on my D8.
What has been bad about it?
Have you contacted us?
I am a member!
Libiquity doesn’t respond to email inquiries. That’s a shame as I’d love to support a local free business.
So, I ordered an X200 from minifree, which I should have in a few weeks. Leah has been very responsive to questions, which I appreciate.
FYI
Libiquity is too much expensive! MiniFree is a little better, 527$!
Given this bad situation for Donagh and Vanecek, I want to increase the dose: the one who takes advantage of the good faith of a buyer after receiving the money and then fails to fulfill his obligations is simply a criminal!!
I've never bought an X200 and I don't know the best place to buy those from. But for routers, I recommend buying a Netgear WNDR3800 and installing LibreCMC on it yourself (a pretty simple process). I purchased one from Ebay for about $30 and it works very well. It has gigabit ethernet ports, unlike some of the RYF routers.
Thanks for recommending alternatives. I was thinking in buying a Mini router from Thinkpenguin but I don't know which is better.
I am a translator!
That routeur seems to only exist in US. At least, I can't find any from Europe. On eBay, I can see some for 30$ but with 40$ shipping and I wonder whether it will actually work in Europe.
I do not see any reason why it wouldn't work in Europe. You can change the region in the OpenWrt/LibreCMC settings: https://openwrt.org/docs/guide-user/network/wifi/wifi_countrycode
To my knowledge this has been sold in North America only. It works very well anywhere in the world and it's our main router in the office, though you might need a power adapter and in the cases where it hasn't been sold with a wide-range power supply with another power supply (if you get it on the 2nd hand market, e.g. ebay).
What's more this router has been available in the Vikings store since approx three years, with either LibreCMC, openWRT or Freifunk as its distro.
It should be FSF RYF certifieable with LibreCMC (openWRT and Freifunk comes with some (for this device unnecessary) blobs). Actually we started the RYF process in 2019 but had to prioritize in favor of other work. IIRC there was the issue that uboot didn't build for that target at the time for some reason. We sold a larger number anyway and now we only have 50 or so devices left in stock and they have become hard to find. So looking into RYF at this point wouldn't make much sense financially for the remaining devices.
When will your site be back up Viking? This router would be a perfect birthday gift for myself. Any idea what the cost will be, since there's no web page, or is there a way to buy over the phone right now?
No need, the store will be back up in a couple of days :-)
The price is somewhere below EUR 40 for the remaining routers.
It also can be debricked even if hard bricked via nmrpflash, this aka:
https://github.com/jclehner/nmrpflash
I once accidently bricked my wndr3800 router so friggin badly, that I couldn't unbrick it any other way.
So yeah, I would say its your best option.
I had my beefs, with tehnoetic, albeit, it was not that they were bad company back then, this was somewhat past september 2016,
But oddly enough, he was never a problem for me back then, it was more that Tiberiu got really vicious to his competitors, this was both around the time when Libreboot was in jeopardy... I mention this, because he felt angered by being removed from the list of sellers on the libreboot site, which was understandable but... I was saddened to see he began to lose any signs of life within him, aka his good judgement. He used to be reasonable to customers, but I think that ship might have sailed.
My point being, I don't know what he is thinking, but he must be having some issues...
Also, I wonder if he is going under soon, because his certificate is bad and it seems if he isn't responding to anyones refunds, something must be up, I have no idea what, but I really hope he comes out of his mess and takes care of all these problems he seems to be ignoring at this time and either refunds everyone, or actually sends the stuff everyone payed for, etc...
Till this happens, I think its a good idea, for the FSF/GNU REALLY need to warn against buying from tehnoetic till this mess is cleared up.
Although, this will require them to be made aware of this problem, I hope someone is doing this, I will try to do this, when I get a chance...
The libre community shouldn't get weaker just because of one seller, who is not using good judgment, to say the least...
Yeah I felt the same way. He was really argumentative on this forum a few years ago, attacking his competitors.
Hello together and a Happy GNU Year to all of you,
I wish Tiberiu from the bottom of my heart all the best for 2022, whatever happened to him.
He always built me good laptops that last for years now.
I see my order now as a donation for a free software company in trouble, because i'm able to do that.
That doesn't mean that i don't understand other customers that have not received their delivery yet, don't get me wrong.
But i hope Tiberiu will solve his problems and come back with Technoethcial!
C.
I agree, but I would like him to at least, say something on the subject of whats going on...
I just don't want people to avoid coreboot based hardware because of this.
I haven't ordered in a while, but yeah, its kind of saddening to see him degrade even further by not responding for so long...
:(
Glad you are so merciful to him, he might need that right now, maybe he will snap out of it?
I very much hope so... soon.
Also, I recall him saying he will continue to sell Replicant devices, even if they keep getting returned, because he wanted to get more libre phones on the market.
I hope that's not what caused this situation...
:(
<<< I just don't want people to avoid coreboot based hardware because of this. >>>
SkedarKing,
I wanted, but I will not buy a Replicant phone from Technoethical, I have lost the trust.
Why not just buy a Galaxy S3 and flash Replicant yourself? You would save a lot of money. If you don't know how to do it, there are plenty of people on this forum who could help you.
I am a translator!
Be careful to get exactly the right model, make sure it shows "Samsung Galaxy SIII" and exactly "GTI-9300" on the boot screen.
Also, make sure the 4 physical buttons are functional (volume up, volume down, power and home).
Flashing Replicant is quite simple indeed, I can certainly help if needed.
EDIT: I use Replicant without non-free wifi and bluetooth. I sometimes connect an external wifi USB adapter that works without non-free firmware, mostly when I want to download a somehow large amount of data (like more than 100 MB). Keeping an external wifi USB adapter permanently connected is not practical as it drains too much battery.
I understand, I just meant, avoid sellers like Technoethical, that's all.
Legimet, Avron
Thanks for the suggestion, I will try to search in Ebay.
I am a member!
Think Penguin is awesome with great products, excellent communication and quick shipping within the U.S. Highly recommended.
A U.S. eBay seller, fastradingco, sells libreboot(ed) T400 laptops in a variety of configurations (search for 'libreboot'). I'm very pleased with the T400 that I purchased a few months ago. Shipping was very fast and they shipped a replacement for a broken plastic hard drive bay cover almost immediately upon notification. Communication is outstanding. I've suggested that they apply for RYF certification (FWIW). Highly recommended if you are in the U.S. I will be placing another order with them soon.
How much was that T400 on ebay?
This one currently sells for $199.00 (no HDD) or $259.00 (250GB HDD included). By fastshiptradingco.
You think "fastshiptradingco" might be related to "fastradingco"? Maybe they are step-brothers. They had the same father, "fastco", but one's mom was "trading" and the other's mom was "shiptrading".
Or is "fastshiptradingco" committing identity theft and trademark violations against "fastradingco"?
The plot thickens....
Not sure...
But fastshiptradingco says: "Only one left!"
Could this be construed as a threat?
...or you could find the T400 with a 680 nits outdoor display if you want proper exclusivity *and* use it in direct sunlight.
https://thinkwiki.de/Datei:T400_680nits_vs_200nits.JPG
I believe there are no comparable Thinkpads today, most are around 400 nits. Let alone usable with coreboot.
Truly, sunlight is overrated.
Living in a cave must have its advantages, I guess.
I am a member!
Yep, fastshiptradingco.
He'll do custom configurations as well.
My T400 is roughly equivalent to the $259 model listed now. I paid $279 at the time plus shipping by priority mail. I use it for hours daily with no complaints. Not affiliated, just a pleased customer.
Running nicely on Trisquel 10.
I am a member!
I just purchased an X200 with osboot from minifree. The computer is in very nice shape and runs great with Trisquel 10. Thanks Leah!
A shout out from Alaska to Libiquity. I've been using their X200 for two years now and it has been rock solid. Now that Trisquel 10 is out, I'm looking forward to upgrading this awesome machine tomorrow.
I finally received my T500 from Technoethical on January 24 with apologies from Tiberiu explaining that he had been unwell. My battery wasn't up to par and he sent me a replacement without much delay so all good now.
I also ordered a T400 from minifree and received it within a couple of weeks and that was after the Christmas rush. Very efficient, communicative and a pleasure to deal with.
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