FTC Pushed to Crack Down on Companies That Ruin Hardware via Software Updates
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There's no excuse for an appliance to brick itself or lose functionality just because of the manufacturer's remote action. When I buy a device, I don't want a perpetual, tethered relationship with the manufacturer in order to work the device. I don't want it to ask the manufacturer for permission to run every day. I don't want it to be dependent on the manufacturer to keep it alive. I don't want to create an account. I don't want to log in to the manufacturer's servers. I don't want them to know my IP address or my home address. Leave me alone, I'm just not that into you!
A hardware device should work on day 10,000 just as it worked on day 1. If you as a company can't do that, you should not be able to sell the device (EDIT: OR at least you should be required to prominently mark the devices as "dependent on the manufacturer's servers")
A recent example - you buy a $1600 virtual reality headset (HP G2, specifically). A couple of years later the manufacturer drops support and Microsoft disables WMR capabilities.
This bricks a perfectly functional, expensive, device.
Personally, I feel the "right to repair" should extend to software. Why am I not allowed to revive an old mobile phone with a new OS version? Why am I not allowed to revive an old device by modernizing its hardware driver? Why can I not bring an old video game back to life?
Yes source code is IP - but maybe an expiration system similar to pharmaceuticals should apply where, for instance, a regulator compels a companies to release the sources of their drivers & services when a product or service is no longer officially supported.
This isn't acceptable, especially not for devices in that price range. I recommend to try it once as it is an experience, but otherwise VR is pretty much dead again. But don't buy Facebook or something similar, they simply don't offer support for their hardware.
Smartphones are a tragedy itself. Security theatre destroyed it. I could have a safer phone that is on a current patch level instead of using the OEM OS. But my digitally incompetent bank doesn't allow me to use a good phone to run a banking app, because it doesn't allow rooting devices.
Even without giving you any source, manufacturers could at least provide binaries and a mechanism to flash it to devices. There is no technical reason to not allow this.
So, ol' monkeyfun had a quest 2 controller grip button break. From gentle, ordinary gripping. And on the same day as fixing an unrelated problem in another controller. Tragedy!
Naturally this loser went to fix it. No guides? Oh well, at least she could see 3rd party 3D printed parts online for sale.
Might as well disassemble it to see how broken the part is, to know what to order. Whipped out tools, started disassem-- aaaaaaand it broke.
Not only was there a terribly placed ribbon cable made very difficult to access, not only were tons of parts inconsistently either held in by the lightest friction or intense nearly glued-together forces or strange catches, but the precise intersection of these aspects (and a ribbon cable that was seemingly stuck to the connector on just one pin) meant that when a disassembly step caused the controller to spontaneously fall apart into a few pieces, it was so forceful that it damaged that ribbon cable.
AAAAAAAAAAA!!!! ================
For what it's worth, I anyway discovered that the way the part broke would need me to extract an embedded piece of metal anyway and make some repairs to another piece of plastic, so it was never going to end in success.
But it really made me appreciate just how terribly designed those controllers are for repair. Even the component that broke was... designed to bend a piece of plastic repeatedly from what I could tell, rather than say just having a small metal spring.
So user-hostile.
- 1. use MagiskSU for rooting
- 2. add some modules to bypass SafetyNet/PlayIntegrity (https://github.com/chiteroman/PlayIntegrityFix/releases)
- 3. For especially annoying apps add some modules to hide well-known "root apps" from the applist, so these apps don't know they're installed (https://github.com/LSPosed/LSPosed.github.io/releases + https://github.com/Dr-TSNG/Hide-My-Applist/releases) [I only needed it to get Pokemon-Go to work, banking worked without it]
My local banking apps and even google wallet work mostly fine with these workarounds. Though it breaks every few months, which is then usually quickly fixed with a magisk+module update.
Yep sounds about right. This world is a parody unto itself.
Honestly part of that is the fault of the OS itself. If shouldn't allow apps to tell if the phone is rooted or not. Unless I'm asking the app to do something that requires root, the app shouldn't have any ability to tell that it's on a rooted device.
If you're willing to buy a new device, then I recommend getting a Pixel on sale and flashing it with GrapheneOS[0]. No rooting required. Read up on it when you have a chance. Also, if you install the sandboxed Google Play Services layer (which doesn't require any Google account logins and has very limited access to the device) you will be able to run your bank app.
- https://www.meta.com/us/en/quest/accessories/quest-2-control...
- https://www.meta.com/us/en/quest/accessories/quest-touch-plu...
On the software side they have been pretty great with support IMO, e.g. by adding 120Hz to the Quest 2 quite some time after release and opening up the Oculus GO, after they discontinued it. Maybe not valve-level but definitely much more than I expected from meta, and their hardware was a third of the price of valve's, despite having an actual APU in them!
You may now want to argue that these devices are older. That is true, you mostly need replacement parts for older devices.
And software support? I do remember where Facebook forced me to make an account or the hardware would be unusable.
For me that was the argument to never buy hardware from Facebook again. Sure, it was Oculus at the time and even if technically the Rift and Rift S were solid products, I would thoroughly recommend to not become a private customer of Facebook for now. Maybe things have improved, because they certainly should.
Same as we need copyright maximums in the range of a generation (20 years). Having something come out of copy right 100 years later removes the cultural impact that putting a copyright into the public domain has. Primarily because everyone who was impacted by the original copyright is no longer alive. A prime example is steamboat Willie, aka Micky mouse og, really doesn't have any interest in doing much with it because it is culturally stale/mummified/dried out.
Not saying that this shouldn't happen, though. Just saying that people suggesting this sort of stuff should realize that the economic consequences for some businesses would be major.
Not so sure in reality. There's a lot to dislike about Apple and I won't go into it, but as an example, I like their support policy. They promise 5y and usually it's 7y. They do disable features on older phones via feature flags where the performance would not be up to it (like on-device AI lately), but this rather long support does not seem to impact their sales negatively. Arguably it works for them b/c people know they can resell their phones after 2y and still get a good price as buyers know they will get support. I am one who switched from Android/Sony precisely because of this.
The same could be true for opening older phones as some Android makers do unlocking the boot loader and leave it to enthusiasts to port newer Android versions. Many phones get recycled to something different this way (controller for home automation) and would never reduce sales.
On one end of the spectrum are people who insist that the reason phones only last as long as they do is a 100% deliberate decision on the part of smartphone manufacturers to hamstring their own hardware, often going all the way into full conspiracy-theory-level thinking, with timed kill switches and the like. Frankly, I find this line of thought to be bullshit.
On the other end are the people who are talking about smartphone manufacturers using components that are chosen for being small, light, and/or cheap, rather than being durable and user-repairable, purely for reasons of design, practicality, and cost savings.
Personally, I know which side of this I come down on; Hanlon's Razor[0] applies here, as well as the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, no actual timed kill switches in hardware or software—nor anything in the same general vein—have ever been proven to exist. And if not even the lowest-grade independent Android phone manufacturers are putting those things in their phones, why on earth would the likes of Samsung, Xiaomi, or Apple feel the need to do so?
Not sure about others, but I am more likely to respect a company that does that and buy future products from them.
It's an unrealistic pipedream, but one can hope.
Hardware is complicated and there are just not enough people with the deep understanding to fix it. I've got lots of old 'open source' devices that lost traction in their developer community. Nobody ever managed to recreate a usable OS for the old Sharp Zaurus PDA until the device itself was completely obsolete.
New OS versions rely on new hardware functions (or just a higher amount of memory or I/O to be usable) so patching to run on old hardware won't deliver something running well.
Video games are a bit of a special case because there's the media copyright as well. But there are lots of reimplementations of game engines so maybe you can't but others certainly do...
In either case, these unsupported iOS versions share a lot of code with newer versions, that are still supported, and also with entirely unrelated products like MacOS, iPadOS, etc. So should Apple only be required to open-source only code that's no longer used in any version of their active products? Should they only open-source the drivers and unlock the bootloader so a third party OS can be made to work on it?
For the US, an expiration system is built into the constituion: "for a limited time"
It's just that that expiration has been stretched to absurdity where "a limited time" now means a whole second lifetime after the death of the author.
Right next to the prominent label about causing cancer in the state of California, presumably.
I feel a notice wouldn't work here because the average consumer wouldn't understand the implications of depending on the manufacturer's servers or what it even means, plus every smart doorbell or whatever would just include it so it's not like it'd affect any consumer's choice
This product may be revoked at any time.
This product incurs $30 billion in annual fees.
This product sells your usage data.
The features present at time of purchase may be changed, downgraded, or removed at any time.
> you own nothing
> the company owns everything
> you have no rights
> you promise not to try and exercise any right you think you have
> just in case you ever get it in your silly little head that you do have any rights whatsoever, you agree to binding arbitration with the firm we pay
> you cannot do anything the company doesn't like
> the company can do literally anything it wants whether you like it or not
> the company is not responsible for anything ever
> the company makes absolutely no guarantees about anything
> but you agree to indemnify us in all possible circumstances
Just have no need for the hassles.
There's also the grey area of remote kill. It should be required to be disclosed up front and the company should be required to put up a deposit with the FTC for a simple you-can-live server. If the company shuts down the FTC's copy is spun up and anything that hasn't been killed continues to operate.
Why on earth can't I just send the command directly to my garage door opener over my LAN? That should be the simplest mode of operation possible. I only need Internet connectivity if I somehow want to close my garage door from miles away!
Because of NAT. Your door opener isn't connected to the internet, it's connected to your router, which uses network address translation to make all your devices share a single internet connection. So your door opener can send outgoing messages no problem, and the NAT router will route those outside, and then route responses to those messages back to the opener, but there's no (easy) way for a device outside your home network to access your opener. Of course, your phone or PC is on your home network, but only when you're at home. Presumably, you also want to be able to control your door opener when you're not at home, and at those times, you have to get through the NAT. Doing that requires the company's server, or something like Tailscale which sets up a virtual private network (VPN) between your opener and selected devices. But even Tailscale requires some type of server on the internet to work, even though the main traffic goes direct.
Basically, what you're asking for could have been a reality if 1) we had IPv6 (or just not IPv4 with its very limited number of unique addresses), and 2) we didn't have to worry about security so we could feel safe putting random crappy IoT devices directly on the internet and not worrying about hackers opening our garage doors or houses so thieves could enter and take stuff.
I agree it would be ideal to use a local network path if possible, but given that remote access is a requirement, I can understand why they just made it the default.
I'm pretty sure he's had it fail from right outside his house due to mobile network outages more often than he's used it from far away though.
https://www.elkjop.no/product/hjem-rengjoring-og-kjokkenutst...
Unfortunately for electronic items the lifetime and spares information is usually blank because the manufacturer doesn't supply it.
This might be OK for a huge company like Google, but for many others, what good is it? If the product folds, it's probably because the whole company folded, and when that happens, you're not getting a refund, regardless of what any contract says.
Did they promise that anywhere? No. Did they kept on their unwritten and unspoken promise? Yes, for years now. Do you have to be Apple to do this? I don't know, would love it if the answer was no, but looks like everyone else treats this as cost and Apple treats it as value added?
Imagine if there were a product support guarantee corporation which took, say, 4% of the cost of retail electronics sales, in order to guarantee their long term support.
They say "buy" but in reality it's a "licensing agreement" nonsense with a zillion lawyery rules nobody cares about or even reads. Judges should take one look at that and throw the whole thing out but they won't because the intellectual property industry is worth trillions of dollars which means they can buy laws that favor them via lobbyists. It feels like the world is unfixably wrong.
Actually it's "we spy on you and reserve the right to brick your device at any time", which pretty much every EULA already covers ...
Treat it like we do with food allergen labels. A standard location and plain language.
Another option is to require companies go the Minecraft route where the "server" portion is always free to download and run but you need the paid client to actually connect to the servers to play the game.
Suicide bombers like release-to-make switches, so if you shoot them they at least complete part of their mission.
Companies that create self-destructing products are thinking like this. They are binding their survival to that of their customers as human shields and saying "we'll take you with us".
It's very disturbing psychology and having laws that allow companies to do it, even by hiding behind supposed technical ignorance, is a problem.
Yes, but all the manufacturers want you in that relationship with them, and the technology of "internet" has finally given them that ability.
It's just a reminder that capitalism doesn't produce the best goods for consumers, it only produces the ones that are just not shitty enough that people keep buying them.
No matter how good a product is, the market will inevitably enshittify it to optimally conform to market incentives.
And I believe (not totally sure though) that IP is always part of the bankruptcy assets so probably insolvent companies are not even allowed to just open-source their stuff and allow configuration of the backend so users could set up community-servers and keep things running.
Completely different are cases where companies continue to live but lock features behind new paywalls like Happiest Baby with their Snoo bassinet, invent fees to hinder re-sale like Peloton or cripple working hardware like Sonos did.
Those make me unreasonably mad, not just because I already have too many subscriptions for things that improve my QoL but add up, but also because I do care about my CO2 and environmental footprint. I do not want to trash working devices just because they are now 2 years old. Companies should untether them if they think further cloud support is no longer viable and at the very least should support them for 7-10y.
Then don't buy that device. I know this will be unpopular but there is an entitlement here. I want X, X comes with insane restrictions, instead of sticking to my principles I will buy X then complain about the restrictions. I agree it shouldn't happen, but I also don't buy anything that allows that to happen to me.
There are some necessary conditions to fully consent to an agreement. If someone has a gun to your head and tells you to do something you don't want to do, it is not entitlement to comply but complain instead of "sticking to your principles".
Except when the device doesn't appear to be, but can be updated in a way that makes it obvious it does. Absolute statements like "all devices should be able to be jailbroken" or "I want things supported forever" or "just dont do x" are misguided. The world is more complicated, even on this issue. Any implemented solution will have holes and the world will be all the better for it. Progress requires things to die off.
It's clear just from this thread that different people care about different things. And I'd rather see a certification that never gets used, than a whole kind of product removed from the market because the FTC got it wrong, and now it doesn't make sense to produce it.
Granted this doesn’t always work but since many state and local governments have similar rules for EnergyStar it does drive a lot of compliance with a completely optional certification in many industries.
My VCR still plays cassettes 30 years after it was made, but my 1st Gen iPad stopped playing YouTube videos 5 years after it was made.
The only way to solve this problem is to regulate markets that become unfree where observed to be necessary to do so.
You don't need regulation to fix this, you need startups to go compete with the entrenched firms that are bricking their customers' devices.
Any industry that involves leveraging copyrights and patents to keep the incumbents in power, for example.
Consumers are stupid. To most, computers are still Magic Box.
Free market dynamics like you, and others, describe only work IF the consumers are able to have the knowledge easily, cheaply, and instantly. You'll find in modern society, with complex products and supply chain, this is becoming harder to satisfy.
Look at the FDA. Why don't consumers just desire lower calorie products and go towards those, why does the FDA need to force serving size suggestions? Because Comsumers can't spent 10,000 dollar and hundreds of hours burning every single piece of food they buy to deduce the calories.
Europe has the CE marker [2] which indicates that the product meet EU safety, health or environmental requirements.
However, China created the "CE" marker (China Export) which looks very identical to the Europe CE marker [1]. ChinaExport does not imply any regulations.
So if you buy a power supply from China you might think it is safe due to the "fake" CE marker.
1: https://www.kimuagroup.com/news/differences-between-ce-and-c...
> In 2008, a logo very similar to CE marking was alleged to exist and to stand for China Export because some Chinese manufacturers apply it to their products. However, the European Commission says that this is a misconception. The matter was raised at the European Parliament in 2008. The Commission responded that it was unaware of the existence of any "Chinese Export" mark and that, in its view, the misunderstanding had arisen because a producer had failed to respect the precise dimensions and proportions of the mark as prescribed in the legislation.
Those labels don't mean much because companies have really worked around and lobbied to make it all a very murky label.
"Organic" labels, for instance, don't mean they haven't used pesticides or other harmful things – just a certain list of them.
https://www.fda.gov/food/nutrition-education-resources-mater...
Ok. What if instead of the FTC getting it wrong, they only put out rules and regulations on very obvious situations, where it isn't really possible to get it wrong?
People do this very weird thing where they bring up the downsides of government regulation, but they don't recognize that some problems are easier to solve than others.
Not everything is a matter of "well, its just trade offs! What if customers prefer to have their hardware purposefully sabotaged and they bought the hardware because they want to be screwed over".
A much better explanation, is that sometimes consumers don't expect to be completely screwed over, they don't know what they magic seals or pages of fine print mean, so they buy the thing anyway, without knowing the consequences.
Once again, this argument can perfectly reasonably be applied only to the extremely obvious situations, where we don't have to go all in on the libertarian, perfectly rational actor arguments.
And in the end users who had used that feature and lost it got... $10.07
The executive in charge of the business unit probably got an extra $4M bonus for managing to make the costs so low.
$3.75m is tiny to Sony but probably quite large for the group responsible for the loss. I know I've seen serious trouble at Fortune 10 companies over $3m issues, when the 6-person group's annual budget is $500k.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayStation_3_cluster
https://www.theverge.com/2019/12/3/20984028/playstation-supe...
At least in Germany's nerd circles Sony's behaviour rather lead to "so nie" jokes (explanation of "so nie": when you pronouce "Sony" with the first syllable like you would pronounce a German word, stress the second syllable, and put a little break between the syllables, it sounds like "so nie" [German for "never this way"]), and lots of people used this "little different" prounciation of "Sony" to express their disgust for Sony's behaviour. This "guerilla pronounciation" of "Sony" helped to spread quite some reputational damage of Sony among hackers and tech enthusiasts in Germany.
I did not get my $10.07.
Afterwards several researchers investigated how to execute third-party code on the device and succeeded. [1] In response Sony did attempt to prosecute several people under DMCA and similar claims [2] and were more successful with certain defendants in some countries versus others.
[1] https://media.ccc.de/v/27c3-4087-en-console_hacking_2010 [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Computer_Entertainment_Am...
[1] https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1994-02-24-fi-26671-...
Just not worth the hassle.
I pretty much avoid newer cars for similar reasons. The ones I drive have no annoying screen. It is easy to setup a Bluetooth phone connection to either the factory radio, or an easily installed one. And I can do most repairs, need never talk to a dealer, they go for 100, often 200k miles after I buy them, get great fuel economy, and it goes on and on. I would be crazy to buy a new car.
The rest of what one might need?
Got a phone for that. In a pinch, an older car phone powered by a current phone hot spot works great too.
Music?
Got all the tunes I need on a storage device. Or pop a CD in. I like CD media, and this year it outpaced digital downloads.
Good. I like vinyl too.
I see people struggle with a lot of this stuff. No thanks. My life is nowhere near as enriched relative to the costs and risks.
Years ago I gave them a separate guest network / vlan to use, with only 5mbit of bandwidth.
The only thing I have left is some ip cameras and my roborock vacuum.
We seriously need a local first law that enables all these devices to work 100% on local wifi.
There really is no reason why a phone couldn't, for example, have a home management app on it that manages all the IOT devices over bluetooth or other protocols directly rather than needing an internet connection.
I made a conscious decision to build out absolutely everything HA-related that I could using Zigbee and Z-Wave devices. I intentionally avoided anything based on wifi and proprietary apps. It's basically what you're describing. I switched from SmartThings to Home Assistant about a year ago, and everything flipped over without any real drama.
As others have said, Matter is another step in this direction with the end goal of making setup a little bit easier; it's still incredibly immature at the moment, though. But Z-Wave and Zigbee are both here now and work fine.
Be that as it may, the issue is also that you can't take your phone and hook up directly to these devices which is the bigger issue for wider adoption, IMO. It's fine for someone like me that has a home server laying around where I can plop in HA. But what about the average consumer who's only device is probably their phone and maybe a smart speaker?
That's more the problem I was talking about that needs addressing.
(And that's kind of the entire point.)
It can operate over WiFi/Ethernet, as well as thread and Bluetooth.
Edit: the implementation is also open source, and you can roll your own
>> This exists, it’s “Matter”
Sadly, I am not sure Matter will solve the problem. Not because it cannot solve it, but because what I see in the industry manufacturers will not solve it.
I have tried several (e.g., Aqara, Google, GE) Matter products that supposed to "just work", but they did not. Every one of the devices I tried failed or made it extremely onerous to function with non-native hubs.
At 3.5% profit margin for the hardware, there is little incentive to truly interoperate. The money is in subscriptions, locking the user into an ecosystem that makes them dependent for the life of the product.
(Caveat emptor - I am an old crotchety, jaded grouch.)
I've got a few cheap Matter light bulbs that I've picked up mostly just to play with, starting a few months ago.
This fleet has several random and forgettable names on the packaging and exactly two (also unmemorable) manufacturers so far.
Pairing is a little weird: It seems to broadly involve a pocket supercomputer with Alexa or Google Home or Home Assistant or whatever, and scanning a QR code.
This QR apparently begins Bluetooth handshake between the light bulb and the pocket computer, wherein things like WiFi information seem to be exchanged.
After that, Matter devices (in my application at least) just live on WiFi.
This all happens without needing weird(er) apps, overseas clown accounts, or manufacturer-specific hardware. It is local. (Well, Home Assistant is local. The others...are whatever hybrids they are.)
And multiple local control systems (like the three I've already mentioned) can each monitor and control each Matter devices directly. There's probably a limit, but it's nice to have these things non-interactively interacting. ;)
And they seem to be working fine. Boring, even. Right now I just have all of my IoT stuff on the same VLAN/SSID as everything else because it is easy, but I have 100% confidence that these Matter devices would continue to boringly Just Work if I were to isolate them to their own VLAN with zero WAN access.
(Maybe that's something I will work on when setting everything up again after the next move.)
Yay?
The problem is that end users suuuuuuuck.
Oh, by the way iOS and Android do everything in the universe to make using Bluetooth absolutely miserable. Which Android or iOS version are you running? Which buggy Bluetooth stack did Samsung saddle you with? Oh, we retired that version of the app 18 months ago, please, for the love of God, update it. And, oh, you're using a shitty cracked Chinese version of the app <facepalm>.
If I make the users connect to the "cloud", I can control the device, the backend talking to the device, and the front end talking to the user. I now know exactly what the versions are, and the Chinese can't pirate the app. The customer support is orders of magnitude easier.
From the perspective of the device developer, the "cloud" is simply a no-brainer on every single front.
You, as a local-only user, simply won't pay anywhere near enough money to make supporting you worthwhile.
My only gripe is the wall switches do not have any ability to accommodate retrofitting a 3/4-way setup which is quite common for stairwell and hallway lighting.
Edit: here's the dimmer API for reference https://shelly-api-docs.shelly.cloud/gen2/Devices/Gen2/Shell...
Those use opensource software, integrate nicely into home assistant, and well.. are "local first".
Devices with local API, be it binary or http, are one part of the equation. There are systems like esphome that are best in class.
The other part is getting a decent router and Wi-Fi infrastructure to support them. Most consumer routers crap their pants after 30 or so devices
I used to be vehemently against Wi-Fi. Internet of things stuff, but when I got my new house, my current house I've been building it out in a hybrid approach. Approach. Lighting loads are controlled via lutron, and then non-lighting loads are a mixture of Z-Wave, zigbee, and Wi-Fi devices running ESPhome. My Network infrastructure is a unifi system. It's been more or less bulletproof
I depend on nothing in the cloud and I only have encrypted backups in the cloud secondary to local back ups. I even download my email in Thunderbird.
Apple is criminal when it comes to cloud dependence. An iPhone is mostly useless without an iCloud account. With GrapheneOS and Android there is no dependence on the cloud. I am just pissed that the android phone makers keep getting rid of SD card expansion.
I will never own an IoT device though. I never saw the convenience of them over the hassle and cost.
EFuses enable awful anti-consumer "features" like preventing firmware downgrades, blacklisting compromised cryptographic keys, and bricking devices remotely.
Do you mean before or after manufacturing? Afterwards, I agree. Before, no way: that's how most modern CPUs work. They put a bunch of crap on the chip and make them all the same way, but due to defects, different chips have different parts that don't work, so they blow efuses inside the chip to disable the broken parts, and then sell the chip as the variant that doesn't include that function.
(No, that's not a thing.
But I'm not sure what qualitative differences might exist, and which would actually survive debate, betwixt a fully-built silicon chip with parts disabled forever and a fully-built engine assembly with parts disabled forever.)
After the sale-- that's why I qualified who the device belongs to in my post. Before the sale it belongs to the manufacturer and they can do whatever they want to it.
A company introducing a product that requires a connection to their service MUST maintain utility and features at the same or better for at least 7 years after the hardware product is last sold at a retail establishment (equal or expanded features and lower cost).
At whatever time they reduce features or increase cost beyond a faster level of inflation, they are required to release all related current source code, comments, documentation, test suites, etc. required to make usable all product features, into the public domain.
At that point, all parties are also fully permitted to use any measures to reverse engineer or otherwise hack the source code and firmware.
Simple: You maintain it, it's yours as long as you want. You stop maintaining it, everyone else can do it for you.
Let the bean counters trying to cut this month's bottom line costs fight with the IP lawyers trying to hide everything forever.
[edit: typos]
I could also imagine a common situation where there was some complex integration with various third party like OpenAI where it wouldn’t be that easy for users to handle themselves.
1) resolve them in favor of the customers/users. If it is required to use it, release it, and anyone is free to hack. If it integrates with some 3rdPty service, they'll pretty quickly update their TOS to prevent such risks to their codebase, so it won't be an option.
2) it'll encourage corporations selling products to use modular and local-first design. If the product works by itself, local-first, and using a software package delivered with the product, and they sell an ADD-ON cloud-based service, they'll have zero problems. They can discontinue the ADD-ON cloud service at will, and people can still use the original product as sold.
Why should people be able to hold their products hostage if they aren't even selling or maintaining them anymore? Customers win and the company doesn't really lose anything. They aren't selling or maintaining it anymore!
But hey I got paid $10 for my trouble in a class action lawsuit.
It's unethical but I am just tired of paying $$$ for products that break right after warranty ends.
Fucking ridiculous. I ordered a second if for no other reason than to get back to work, and that one arrived broken! But, fortunately, the power supply was in-tact so I took them both apart, constructed a working one, kept it and returned the broken parts. If whoever's fulfillment can't even be fucked to check the ones they're shipping out to see if they're shattered, I figured it was long odds anyone would even care if I did it. And I never heard a thing about it.
And an interesting side note, I received refunds for both purchases. I have no idea why, but clearly some folks working at either Amazon or ASUS aren't too on the ball.
And the monitor I built still works too, so.
Did I ever tell you, I "love" software engineers and their mentality of "ship first, fix bugs later"?
/s
Appealing to common sense, or morality/ethics, or a sense of professional responsibility or pride in the work, won’t help. Saying that crap work will tank the company won’t even help, because if attribution is missing, there’s no fear of punishment and a good chance of failing upwards. IOW, just assume that most adults will act like horrible selfish children most of the time and you’ll rarely be disappointed.
Cloud(read IoT fever) at least can be mitigated by somehow mocking the thing the device is looking for, the unpredictable AI mocking is …
This does not have to be a release. But at a trigger point. EOL announcement, or on an update that removes previously available features, or after 2 years after the first sale of the device.
There should be zero exceptions. If a hardware provider can’t do this they should be forced a full refund of the device and any software components bought tied to said device.
I notice even with my 12 mini there's been a big increase in websites with horizontal scroll bars
You can go to Apple directly to get the battery replaced. They'll help you with Macbooks going back to 2015.
Is this like some obscure government rule where the FTC can't do something until they receive a letter in the mail? What is this world we live in? Are they not aware of what is happening in the world? Do all government agencies enforce their mandates by mail order?
Regarding annoying paywalls, it's ironic that the page says "Checking your browser before accessing this site.", "Please allow up to 5 seconds..." and then keeps showing the wait sign indefinitely.
I guess Techdirt site could be a subject to FTC push?
I agree that regulation should be used sparingly, but I could see a justification for some regulation here.
Or tbh perhaps this could be solved by deregulation: remove DMCA protection for drivers and firmware.