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Comment by wffurr | Hacker News Reader

Smart home cloud services disappearing and bricking devices seems analogous to pre-Internet devices losing their circuit boards (due to heat, tin whiskers, etc.) which are no longer made by their manufacturers. Or a small plastic part breaking which is similarly no longer available.

It's just another step in the long sordid history of intentional or not planned obsolescence.

Maybe it seems more egregious because of the rate it happens at and that the company has to turn off a service by unplugging the servers.

Ultimately, regardless of cloud features or not, you want to buy things that are durable and repairable, whether that's self hosting a new cloud service or fabricating a new metal part.

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> Smart home cloud services disappearing and bricking devices seems analogous to pre-Internet devices losing their circuit boards

There used to be an electronic repair shop in every neighborhood. These were small businesses that would be able to diagnose and repair faults in random electronic devices.

I wonder if at one point this problem of cloud services disappearing will become widespread enough that we'll start to see businesses that will take your bricked device, flash their own firmware to it and provide their own, generalized cloud service as a replacement.

Obviously reverse engineering each device and making a custom firmware would be a large initial investment, but maybe at a point where just about every trivial thing will depend on a network service it would be economically feasible.

This will not work if the bootloader on your device does not allow upgrading unsigned firmware and would take some laws prohibiting this behaviour to be in place.

One of the greatest faults of Linux was sticking to the GPLv2, GPLv3 actively sought to deny "tivoization" as they called it, as Tivo used Linux and provided the code, but required signed software to boot, rendering the access to the code effectively pointless

Considering you think Linux has several great faults I think it has done incredibly well.

This might come across as a bit snarky but have you considered that vendors has other options besides Linux?

The alternative to

- having the source code but not being able to install a modified version on your device

might very well be

- not having the source code at all (since it is written with a proprietary os)

Now at least we have the source code in case someone wants to create a similar system.

I wonder if the fixed cost of reverse engineering would ever overcome the sheer number of devices you’d have to do this with through scaling geographically.

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