Hacker News Reader

Damage caused by the customer isn't covered by any warranty anyway, and realistically, how many people would tinker with root access as long as the device worked as intended?

I'd be really surprised if the number was more than 1 in 100. And if 1 in 20 brick the device in the process, that's 1 in 2000.

According to [1] the average warranty claims rate for consumer electronics is 1 in 100. I doubt the difference in support load would even register on the scale.

[1] https://www.warrantyweek.com/archive/ww20240711.html

> Damage caused by the customer isn't covered by any warranty anyway

Exactly. We charged the guy for what he did. We gave him 'sa' access to the database and he tried to burn us.

I think you may be assuming people act rationally? They do not. Most will but you will always get 'that guy' especially at scale. People will lie about what they have done. Or not even realize what they did goofed things up. In my example the guy was asking us to pay them back for defective software (millions of dollars). Right up until we proved he had broke it on purpose. I later found out he did it on purpose (confirmed by former coworkers of his 'he likes to mess with vendors'). He was not even alone. At least 3 other people tried that trick on us at different companies.

Most service requests are 'easy'. Small tweak/reship and off you go. But someone who has really broken something can be as easy as 'ship them a new one' to weeks of trying to figure out why a device has suddenly started acting out of spec. That means at least 1-2 people working on something for a period of time. That costs money.

> I'd be really surprised if the number was more than 1 in 100.

It is the time you have to put into looking into why did you end up with a defect that is not a defect. The margin on some of these IoT devices is in the couple of bucks range or smaller. You have to dedicate 2 guys for 3 months to figure out what went sideways can eat the entire profit margin of the whole run.

I was just saying I can see why a company would withhold the info. I did not say I agree with it. Especially for things that are out of warrantee. I think companies are using it to basically have no support and basically leave what would be a decent customer hanging and hoping they can covert to another sale. There is no 'one reason' there is a list.

That seem extremely frustrating.

It does seem like there ought to be a reasonable split between personal software and business stuff. I mean you guys had a big contract, it is some negotiated thing between two peers, it could be reasonable to negotiate root in some subsystems, not in others. In the end you can’t really trust anything a system tells you if somebody has full root of it. It seems like you guys keeping control of the logging would be a reasonable give for them, if they expect support. (But why would you guys have planned around a downright adversarial customer? That guy is weird).

Also, doesn’t this seem like… basically some kind of fraud? I wonder if your annoying user expected to be able to add the savings whatever he got back from the support contract to his “value to the company” somehow.

For personal customers who are just buying smartphones, we don’t really have giant support contracts to screw around with.

It was frustrating. As it was me who got to speed weeks figuring out what this guy did. My group figured out the root cause though was the software was not doing what he wanted. So we made up a new group to sell that custom service to others. Everyone eventually came out ahead there. Because someone in his management chain realized that we had a good breach of contract case. Weird is nice for what he was doing. He was being a jerk because the stuff was forced on him. It broke his small empire of spreadsheets he was holding the company hostage with. Our 'mistake' was assuming our customers were rational. Many are. But you always have a handful that seem to just be in a bad place in life and they like to take it out on others.

For IoT devices/cell/etc it could be 'bad' to give out the root password from a company PoV. As there are so many out there with the exact same password on several thousand devices (poor security but you can image a thousand devices in a few hours). So once given out it is written down into some wiki and everyone has it now (welcome to the botnet). So if you get one change whatever you were given and assume everyone else has it. Or maybe the 'secret sauce app' is under some random user account. But give out root and that special secret account is bypassed. Then it is off to china somewhere to be ripped apart and resold under a new brand name and half the cost.

Then on top of that lets say you are a nice company giving the thing out. That means you will need some sort of training for your support guys. Documentation on how to do it. And so on. Those things cost money for a EoL product you no longer make anything on.

Like I said there is a list of things as to why not to do it. There is also an interesting list of why to do it. But the upside is low for the company to allow it. I wish more companies would do it. But it is rare.

If people want companies to do this, the company has to be incentivized to want to spend any time/money on it. If people can make this an upside to companies doing this and not 'shame' and 'you broke the law' the companies will help.

It's an old anecdote, but years ago Samsung refused a warranty claim for a _failed USB port_ that would no longer charge the phone _because I had rooted it_ and the fuses were burnt. I think this was unreasonable of them, but it's not like I had any recourse. If vendors were really worried about this aspect, they would/could implement such draconian policies.

That only explains why a company wouldn't want to provide free software support for software they didn't write. There are at least two alternatives to that. First, sell hardware the user can replace the software on, or that doesn't even come with software, and then don't provide software support at all. Second, provide software support and bill by the hour, in which case the customer messing up their stuff and calling your support is the opposite of a problem.

You can even combine them if you want. Free support for the software that comes with it but if you replace the boot loader then support calls are billed hourly. There is no excuse for not allowing it -- it's leaving money on the table.

Unless the reason is that locking the user out of the device has the purpose of monopolizing ancillary markets, which should be an antitrust violation.