Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers' stuff
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
I don't want to create an account for my toaster, nor have my lightbulb send updates to an analytics server, nor have my washing machine cease to function when my wifi goes down.
A ban on products tying hardware features to an internet connection would fix all those problems in addition to giving them theoretically eternal life.
99% of the time (including incident) they are not requiring an account for your toaster, or lightbulbs or your washing machine ceasing to function when your wifi goes off.
The issue is that you have a washing machine that you bought with a feature that you can watch the inside of the machine while it's running over wifi from anywhere in the world. Then the company "kills" their cloud features (like Belkin is doing wiht Wemo cloud features) and you no longer can watch your 4k stream of the washer working. Not even locally, not remotely, nothing. It's a feature you paid for, and 2 or 3 years down the line it's gone.
Some times the whole functionality of a device is a cloud connectivity, like a bridge or something, or a device that has 0 physical controls (for some design or ascetic reason) then yeah. Those devices would "cease to function"
Aside from really really maliciously designed products, most "smart" products I know of function perfectly fine as their dumb counter parts. The vast shocking majority of smart lights, smart switches, smart outlets, smart locks, and smart toasters I have seen all work as regular "dumb" version. But that's not why you paid the extra $40-$200 on it. Like a regular LED lightbulb is $4 and a Lifx wifi one is $30. It works fine as a regular lightbulb, you never need to do anything to it and you'd never know it has wifi in it.
It will display a zillion fancy useless things to me, but my speed and the time are the only things I care about. I installed a speedometer next to it, which costs €10, looks ridiculous, and works.
Done.
So a smart plug might have a list saying:
- Functionality requires 2.4GHz WiFi, Internet access, access to whatever.vendor.com, and a vendor.com account.
- Provisioning requires the above plus BLE and Vendor's app.
A smart washing machine might be more complex:
- Express wash requires nothing special.
- Regular wash requires 2.4GHz WiFi, Internet access, access to whatever.vendor.com, and a vendor.com account.
- Heavy Duty wash requires the above plus a vendor-supplied detergent cartridge.
There was a popular game called "Rocket League" that Psyonix company sold and ran the infrastructure for for many years. But then Epic corporation bought Psyonix for Rocket League's playerbase to bootstrap their proprietary game delivery service. 6 months later everyone who had bought the game for Mac or Linux could no longer play. Epic just stole it from them. No recourse. Not even outrage beyond the effected. It was just accepted as a standard business practice.
> The developer offered full refunds to the game for macOS and Linux owners regardless of how long they had the game.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_League#Free-to-play_tra...
https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rocket-league-ending-mac-an...
They broke something after they sold it
It's like you paying to get lifetime access to a club, the club closing and reimbursing you.
This is a different situation, but if this was the stop killing games initiative, the answer would be that when you shut down the game you release the server software.
> Also, there is no burnt husk.
The burnt husk is the program on your computer that opens to the menu and then falls over unable to play. That's what you're left with if you don't take the refund.
> It's like you paying to get lifetime access to a club, the club closing and reimbursing you.
That makes it sound like they merely shut down a rocket league hosting service and someone else could provide the same service. They arranged it so they're the only possible way to play rocket league, even though the game runs on my computer using my resources.
Basically, they said they were stealing the Mac and Linux Rocket League versions because they wanted to go full directx 10 instead of 9. But the fact that the PS3 is still a first class client running Directx 9 even today shows this is/was a lie. Epic lies quite a bit. In fact when they bought Psyonix they loudly announced there would be no changes, it'd stay rocket league. But of course that lie only lasted 6 months. And now they re-write the wiki pages to pretend it was always the plan.
Anyway, I didn't want a refund. I wanted to keep playing rocket league. And now I cannot play. That's wrong. They bricked my game. And everyone thinks that's A-OK. Just like when they'll brick your modem, or your fridge, or maybe your car. Frankly, having any software in a $thing is a huge risk these days given the status quo.
Like the repo man leaving you a tip.
I think this law needs to move to basic consumer protection and under the protection of a quango and they have a lot of companies to go after now.
My washing machine tells me when it's done, and that's handy, but if it goes away I can still wash clothes. My smart bulbs work with anything that supports Thread/Matter.
They released and sponsored open-source servers for their e-ink display in multiple languages: https://github.com/usetrmnl .
I have never seen a better run, community focused IoT hardware company.
Can't stream to it, can't connect to it at all since they trashed the app, said app is mandatory. It's a doorstop, living on as a reminder that I should have rejected it the moment it refused to run without a phone attached.
There are lots of custom Android running phones that you can truly own.
Except you cannot add stuff to that bridge without registering the device to your account. The resale value of the device drops to zero once their server dies, as you cannot add it to a new account, or add new devices to it.
The 1 redeeming factor is that you can control the devices that you have set up in an offline manner.
But I'm still on the lookout for a fully-functional ZWave to Somfi bridge.
And articles like this actually show that I was right in returning my ceiling fan that was Home-Depot-Data-Collecting only. Now I have a more expensive, but HomeKit capable Hunter (which is absolute hell to set up).