A Brazilian woman expressed her shock after discovering ants had built a nest inside her Amazon Kindle and had even begun “purchasing” books.
A video showing ants crawling all over a Kindle that looked to be coming from the tablet’s charging connector was posted online by journalist Mariana Lopes Vieira.
Hundreds of insects can be seen darting in and out of the hole at the base of the infected Kindle and all over its front and rear in the video.
In order to read a paper book, Vieira claimed she had put her kindle away for a few weeks. She intended to return her virtual reading once she was done.
However, when she went to grab her Kindle, she discovered that ants had broken in.
In a blog post describing the event, she claimed that the ants had formed a nest inside the gadget through the charging hole, rendering it useless.
“I needed help bad! I own a number of digital books, many of which are out-of-print volumes that I had assumed were lost, according to the journalist.
According to Vieira, the ants even underwent a color change from their normal darker shade to a “albino” hue, indicating that the ants emerging from the hole were juvenile ants from the nest.
In a horrifying image, little red ants began to spread out of the apparatus. After some time, the dots begin to shift in size and color, and even tiny albino creatures begin to collide. She penned, “Puppies.”
Some ant species, like the South American-born Nylanderia fulva (Raspberry Crazy Ants), prefer to hide in cramped spaces that are warm. As a result, such bugs may find electronic equipment to be attractive breeding grounds.
She claimed that receiving email notices that two books had been bought on her account made her even more astonished.
She said that the ants, who had gained access to the Kindle’s casing and were manipulating it to send commands as though it were being used by a person, had made the transactions.
According to Vieira, she can buy books with only one tap because the “one-click purchase” option is active. She said that by doing this, the insects would have had an easier time activating the gadget and making transactions.
She instantly used her computer to turn off the one-click buy feature on her Amazon account after seeing that the ants had “purchased” two books: “Robots and the Empire” and “The Ring of Gyges: An Ethical Fantasy.”
The infection, however, caused many of the tablet’s other features to stop operating or to engage in undesirable behaviors, such as eBook pages flipping on their own.
Fabiane Guimares, a writer and her friend, posted her video on social media. Her tweet received more than 66,000 likes, which propelled Amazon’s e-book reader to the top of Twitter’s Brazil trending list.
Rafael Rech di Muzio described how the ants were generating the undesirable behaviors in an interview with the Brazilian technology news website TecMundo.
‘Kindle uses a capacitive touch, which detects capacitance changes on the display so it knows where the touch was made,’ the Mechatronics Engineering graduate said. He explained the ant’s movements were registered by the devices as touches.
‘The ants, in large numbers, can change the capacitance of the tracks and the equipment understands that there was a touch or some gesture on the screen.’
Another Amazon Kindle owner who posted a separate video of their ant-infested gadget on TikTok went popular for the same problem.
Renata Alves Frederi went one step further, though, and demonstrated how to get rid of the ant infestation on the Kindle by first hitting it on a surface to get rid of as many ants as possible, then opening its shell while spraying an ant-killing cloth sheet.
After that, she set the Kindle on the sheet and waited for the ants to begin slowly crawling away from the spray in an effort to avoid it, after which they would finally perish from the fumes.
Ms. Vieira, meanwhile, said that in order to freeze the ants, she put her equipment in the freezer.
Experts have stated that neither technique will be failsafe and that either one might harm the gadget. Amazon advised consumers to avoid using their devices near sinks or other moist areas if their model is not waterproof and to keep them away from severe heat and cold.
A jornalista Mariana Lopes Vieira teve seu Kindle INVADIDO POR FORMIGAS 🐜
E o pior: os insetos ainda compraram livros usando a conta dela no leitor digital da @amazonBR😱 pic.twitter.com/QsoEfmbEmw
— TecMundo (@Tec_Mundo) July 28, 2022