Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jeroenhd | Hacker News Reader

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That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network.

Honestly, people buying these products should be smarter. They bought an expensive chalkboard that they knew depends on someone else's computers (unless they didn't even bother to look into how the products work), without any guaranteed server support period anywhere to be found.

Anyone who cares about their purchases suddenly no longer working will simply avoid this hardware. The people who do purchase this stuff don't really care. They may act outraged in hopes of getting enough people worked up to start a class action lawsuit they can benefit from, but they failed to even consider "what if the servers shut down" before spending five grand on a glorified touchscreen and hooking themselves up to a $600 per year subscription. To make things worse, they bought this stuff from Google.

Screw Google and their e-waste factories, but banning all online products seems like an unnecessary hampering for innovation to be honest.

I suggest an alternative solution: for up to x years after a product is sold by retail stores, the servers must be up or the consumer must be able to get all of their money back from the sellers. This adds risk to the businesses launching and shutting down IoT stuff willy-nilly and helps consumers. Products sold in third party stores will have to be pretty reliable for stores to take the risk stocking this crap.

In a perfect world, I'd like the law to mandate that online-only products like these must put their server source under escrow (to be opened when the service shuts down) and must provide the user with an option to pick an alternative server address. Sadly, I don't think that idea is going to survive even a single day of IT lobbying.

With Availability as a critical part of the cybersecurity CIA acronym, I think it may just be possible that the EU's Cyber Resilience Act will include something to solve this problem.

> That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network.

I get your point but making calls is no longer the principal reason to own a smartphone. I have made no calls in the last two months and have received just one. But I have spent hours on Skype via WiFi, recorded tens of hours of video and taken hundreds of photographs, as well as read lots of books, sent and received money for goods that I have used the phone to list for sale online. Not to mention email and dozens of other applications.

Almost none of my use needed the cellular network.

Skype needs servers, as does sending and receiving money, email, and dozens of other applications.

The fact phones are barely used for calling these days only makes legislation for devices using online servers more difficult.

It really doesn't feel that hard to write legislation that exempts uses that are definitionally network tied. But, to continue the phone analogy, if it somehow loses network access, I expet to be able to turn it on, take photos, run local software (that isn't network dependent), etc. Losing network access should not turn the device into a brick including non-network related functions.

I agree, but "brick" is subjective. If Google turns off the jamboard servers and turns them into normal whiteboards, are they bricks? They were bought specifically with video calling in mind.

Turning them into power hungry competitors for a slab of treated plastic sounds pretty bricky to me, like pushing firmware to a phone that turns it into a fancy front camera mirror. Even if Google just disables the software entirely and turns these smart panels into a big, rectangular light panel, they still serve some function.

Ideally you'd write some sort of legislation that will ensure that products like these become open so that third parties like Zoom can integrate with them so that they remain functional.

I can't think of a good way to describe that concept in legal terms, though, at least not without making it very hard to sell any connected device at all.

> That would basically ban normal cell phones. You can't do calls without access to the network.

Cell phones use globally standardized, government regulated network protocols with many providers. Not a private, locked down, super-duper encrypted, single provider SAAS.

I think the legislation should be that if you shut down a device's backend you must open up the protocol so someone else can implement it.

The point is that the phone needs to be navigable without a check with a server. It can fail at taking calls as much as you want, just give me the calculator.

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