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Comment by tokenizerrr | Hacker News Reader

So does this achieve anything other than fuck the people over who (probably unknowingly) wound up buying such a Blackphone? I can just imagine waking up, looking at my phone which has been working perfectly well up until that point, and being told it now has been bricked for some licensing issue.

This seems really scummy and would drive me away from their products forever.

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> I can just imagine waking up, looking at my phone which has been working perfectly well up until that point, and being told it now has been bricked for some licensing issue.

If I were to buy a Blackphone, I would do it because I wanted security, and because I trusted the manufacturer to provide it. The problem with security is that just because my phone appears to be "working perfectly" doesn't mean that somebody isn't eavesdropping on everything I say.

A counterfeit Blackphone, in other words, is completely defective and untrustworthy, no matter how well it appears to work, because my trust in the manufacturer is broken.

But how does that lead to the logic of turning the hardware into a piece of trash, instead of just informing the user?

If you don't turn the counterfeit phones into trash, there is no incentive for people to buy the real thing. This hurts the sales of Blackphones and the revenues and profits of the company which invested cash into developing the product - and harming their ability to provide security for genuine customers.

So, protect the profit first, protect the customers second?

I don't exactly see how it bumps up the profit though. You have a bunch of obviously interested customers, who want your product, and then the company has come out with "Actually, we expect you to buy the phone twice, because of a mistake that may or may not of been your fault"

The customers didn't buy a first blackphone, they bought something vaguely similar, but counterfeit. They literally bought a backdoor.

Remember the hassle WhatsApp got for failing open?

The Blackphone+SilentOS is an actual crypto device for people who believe they need crypto. It needs to fail closed. This may cost some people $100, but save their lives.

This also gives the customers the ability to sue the sellers, or at least push for refunds via the sales platforms.

WhatsApp got that hassle because it failed open and didn't clearly inform the user that it was doing so.

If the user is informed they have a non genuine device that is not safe or secure (e.g. like Windows' nag notification), then they can't expect it to work like a secure device, but more like an ordinary phone.

Then both normal consumers (who will continue to use the phone since they didn't really care too much in the first place about safety) and security conscious consumers (who will re-buy asap) would be more inclined to use the same brand in the future

I can't imagine that anyone worldwide was going to buy their first and only smartphone, but decided to spend more to get a special high-security black phone, and is then without a phone because of this. And even if they were, I'd rate the safety of even one user who'd accidentally click through the warnings and make a call that should have been secure but wasn't, as paramount.

If my smoke/heat/etc detector starts to fails I don't want it silently dropping back to a smoke-only detector. I want it to start beeping loudly and refuse to stop.

> If the user is informed they have a non genuine device that is not safe or secure

Having to flash a new OS onto it is an appropriately sized clickthrough for a warning of that magnitude. Like being woken in the night to change a smoke-detector battery.

It's still no worse than any other China manufactured off-brand phone. Which might be exactly what the owner wants, what they bought, and what just got turned into a brick.

They why would you go to the trouble of getting a counterfeit Blackphone...as opposed to other cheap Chinese devices?

Or something like a Moto G?

Also - they're protecting their own image here - can you image the PR s*itstorm that would unfold if somebody bought a counterfeit Blackphone, got hacked or had their details siphoned off to China, then wrote a blogpost about it? We on HN are often quite quick to judge - so I can certainly see why Silent Circle are taking the careful approach here.

If you bought a car that turned out to be stolen, you might wake up one day to find it's gone because the police recovered it for the owner. It's similar here - buyers looking for a bargain that might be illegal are part of the problem of IP theft. They can seek recourse through the seller they got it from, and if that doesn't work, they shouldn't have trusted a dodgy overseas black market seller with their money.

However, you're talking about an independent third party with authority doing this - the police. About theft of a physical object.

Why should a vendor be able to stop you from using a thing you bought because it looks like one of theirs? No support, sure. Disavow the item, sure. Post warnings on the device as an inbuilt part of the system, sure. But destroy your item? No.

If someone is fraudulently selling cars badged as Fords, Ford itself should not be able to repossess those vehicles. And if Ford thinks that you have stolen their car, they themselves should still not be the ones who repossess it - that's what the police are for. Vigilantism is a bad thing and has all kinds of unexpected failure modes.

Stealing back your car can certainly cause problems if done privately by the owner. But here it's the product itself that already came with a bricking mechanism built in and activated it itself. The buyer trusted the seller not to provide a self-bricking phone, and got ripped off. It's never going to affect an innocent phone. It's also no physical items being taken or damaged. No baby is going to be trapped in it, etc.

Actually, there's a very analogous thing for cars - LoJack. Is that wrong too?

It happens with copy protection on software. I've heard of games that become impossible to win if they detect they're pirated. Others that just fail entirely. Is that not OK either?

>It happens with copy protection on software. I've heard of games that become impossible to win if they detect they're pirated. Others that just fail entirely. Is that not OK either?

It wouldn't be OK if the developers intentionally affected copies that most users would explicitly believe were not counterfeit (for example, if all Steam copies did this because the game developer had an exclusive agreement with EA/Origin).

The users of the counterfeit phones had no way of knowing they were counterfeit. They were advertised as brand new and came in a shrinkwrapped box.

The users of the counterfeit phones had no way of knowing the phone was fake and probably contained physical and software backdoors.

Crypto devices should brick themselves if they discover they've been tampered with.

It's a clear case of seller fraud and if you use a good marketplace (ie not the one starting with E) you can get a refund through the platform. And maybe get information to use in suing the seller.

> It's also no physical items being taken or damaged

So if I scramble the firmware on your phone and brick it, you don't consider that damaged?

> LoJack

... works in tandem with police, hardly 'very analagous'.

> It happens with copy protection on software.

The user should have been warned that applying the update would brick the detected non-original phone. It shouldn't have just silently fucked the user over. It's bad ethics and also bad PR. Fucking over a user acting in good faith is poor form ethically.

The analogy would work if IP "theft" was anything like actual theft, ie, if the company actually lost anything that could be recovered by "repossessing" the software.

A closer analogy - and still not exactly, since the owner would still have actually lost the car - would be if the police came and burned it down just so that you couldn't use it.

They company surely did lose something. Customers who wanted to buy their product ended up buying an illegal competitor's product instead. There might even be some customers who go back and buy a genuine phone now that they can't use their fake one.

They're enforcing their copyright. Why not? The police can also confiscate computers with pirated software on them. They even do that sometimes. It doesn't return the money to the IP owners but it's still a way to deter theft.

It sounds like a good idea to me. Even if it doesn't recover their lost sales, it should prevent future black market copies since customers will know to avoid unofficial sellers.

You can't assume that someone who bought a $200 phone would buy the exact same phone for $300 if the $200 option was unavailable (I don't know the exact prices but the Ars article said that there were price differences of up to $100).

Going even further, the analogy is still a little bit flawed, because the people buying the phones have reason to believe the phone was NOT stolen (it came brand new, sealed in a box).

It'd be like if you bought a brand new car from a dealership, then two weeks later the police came to your house, told you it was stolen and burnt it down.

A highly consumer-oriented company would at least offer a discount in trade for a real one, with a grace period.

Plus extra points for following through by not actually ever remotely bricking the phones before the anticipated useful lifetime of the real thing. Nagging may or may not be very bearable depending on consumer goodwill.

Why would they care about driving away the one set of people who have already demonstrated they aren't interested in buying the phone from them?

Most of these people probably just bought the phone from a store somewhere thinking it was legit.

So you expect them in the future to seek out the higher priced legitimate product?

I expect they will avoid the brand that turned their hardware into a brick.

I'm saying it doesn't matter if they avoid a brand if the alternative is that they will buy a knock-off. Neither option represents any value to the actual manufacturer- avoiding negative PR from people with knock-offs might actually be preferable.

Well, I've never owned a Blackphone and after reading this article, I certainly never will.

This isn't a gameboy. If you want toy security I can sell you a phone painted black. But if you want to stay alive when the Syrian police are hunting your people you might want to rethink that.

I know people click through warnings. If that warning could keep them alive, as a dev I'd better do something that'll get their attention.

Also, if they only softly bricked these phones the counterfeiters would just click-through the warnings and sell the phones that way. They have to essentially burn them, for the safety of people who need to be their customers.

No, I'd just want an unbricked, functional, phone. The point is if you buy a $100 phone from wherever and it works, then it suddenly gets bricked due to some company pushing an update, that company is being a dick.

Not if they're saving you from being shot. One of the features of a secure-phone is failing secure.

If you want a regular phone running whatsapp, use that.

It literally is a regular phone with some goodies. Disable the goodies, maybe.

No, critically it comes with an off switch for when you find it's been compromised.

If you didn't want that, there were cheaper phones - even counterfeit.

Because most of the users did not realize that they were buying the phone from them, they just bought the cheapest one they could find (from what seemed like an authorized retailer). Had the user known the phone was counterfeit, they may have bought the legitimate one.

I suppose it stops people from buying these dirt cheap phones and consider buying the original (if they want the SilentOS benefits).

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