Hacker News Reader

Comment by enragedcacti | Hacker News Reader

For those who don't know, just a week or so ago Roku amended the arbitration clause of their terms of service and soft-bricked every Roku in the US until you Agreed to the new terms. This even extended to TVs from other brands with Roku software, making the TV non-functional even as a dumb display since the Roku software controls input selection AND would ignore any HDMI-CEC commands. I guess we know why now.

There is a 30-day window after agreeing where you can mail them a letter opting out of the new arbitration agreement.

https://cordcuttersnews.com/roku-issues-a-mandatory-terms-of...

View on HN

My kids have been watching TV, they must have accepted it on my behalf. They should have required the parental control pin to accept it.

Can anyone who understands legal stuff explain this? As a layman Roku’s popup seemed wildly insufficient verification that the account owners were the ones accepting these TOS.

not legal, but yes theyll probably get sued for this.

Not an expert but have worked on similar stuff and there’s no specific controls that I know of around specifically verifying that the account owner sees these things, just that they’re made available and the account is notified.

The whole point of having a quick, online opt-in and an elaborate "mail us a notarized letter" opt-out is to make it very easy to opt in. Why would they want to make it harder? They're already on dodgy legal ground, and the "enter your PIN" wouldn't make it much firmer.

You're thinking like an engineer given the problem of "get people's consent" instead of like a businessman with the goal of "altering the deal."

Someone else pointed out that they can’t even prove it wasnt a dog who agreed by chewing on the remote. Yet somehow these clicks are still considered to legally bind the owner.

Surely it’s just a happy coincidence that Roku hamfistedly decided to force all customers into arbitration before disclosing a breach…

These lawyers who come up with these schemes never seem to consider capacity planning.

Forced arbitration? Much better than an expensive lawsuit.

Except when hundreds to thousands of people want arbitration and since the company wanted arbitration, we have to foot the bill... Yikes.

Hmmm. Fix the arbitration scaling problem by changing to forced mass arbitration. But the users will have to send in a letter to opt out of the new agreement.

Roku has 80 million+ accounts.

What happens when even one percent of those account opt out? Put on your "grudgingly-pay-the-outrageous-fine-with-pennies" hat and I'm sure you can come up with ways to increase the difficulty level of receiving many letters opting out of this new agreement.

My Roku-enabled TV used to bootloop whenever I blocked it from fetching screensaver ads. Support was happy to help. First step: (re)connect to the internet. Second step: disable any network ad blocking. Hmmmmm.

People rolled their eyes when I suggested that this was intentional, but these recent revelations strongly suggest that Roku is very comfortable exploiting the hell out of dark patterns.

If we don't enact stronger consumer protections, everything will work this way.

For years, it has been the case that, when booting up the Roku, the highlighted item would often be a link that would install an app. My kids have accidentally installed so many things. When I tried to remove YouTube, it suggested it below the installed apps, and the kids re-installed it, without having a clue what they were doing and were confused as to why it now showed ads (logged out), when before it didn't (logged in with Premium).

In the "old days," the junkbuster proxy used to return a 128x32(?) blank gif in lieu of an actual block because the page layout would :fu: if the ad wasn't in place and correctly sized. I could easily imagine that might help your situation, too

Don't misunderstand me: it's 100% atrocious that any device bootloops if some ad network 403s, but on the spectrum of "spit into one hand..." and nginx in the other ...

Haha, yes, that would be something to try, but in the meantime I upgraded monitors and the new one does not have Roku or any of Roku's problems. Yet. If Roku gets away with it this will be everywhere.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com