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Comment by like_any_other | Hacker News Reader

Are we to understand that it is legal to sabotage [1] products if you buy their bankrupt manufacturer? Do I have to care about the corporate health of the maker of every item in my house now?

And does the bankruptcy even matter, legally? The company had a business/contractual relationship with its customers. Selling that contract/relationship to someone else, even through bankruptcy, does not let them unilaterally alter it. E.g. if they had made promises, contractual or even just in marketing, a change of owner is immaterial to the other side of that contract/promise.

[1] This is not hyperbole, but an accurate description of destroying functionality that did not require company servers.

[2] False advertising is a crime, after all.

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I mean, I think the answer to 1 is "yes". They wouldn't have bought the asset if they couldn't extort their customers. Now you at least have the option to pay to continue access, versus having no maintenance at all.

Is it ethical? I wouldn't say so, but I do think that is the economic argument.

> Now you at least have the option to pay to continue access, versus having no maintenance at all.

They locked the owners out of their devices, hence the bounty from Rossmann to "hack" them. They gave one option, but took one away.

> I think the answer to 1 is "yes". They wouldn't have bought the asset if they couldn't extort their customers.

It's definitely how the law is currently being applied, and they probably won't have legal trouble from it, but I argue this is a corruption of ownership law, and any kind of update that is against the device owner's wishes (that they are deliberately prevented from reverting) is equivalent to criminal hacking. I can't emphasize this enough - the devices in question do not belong to them. They sold them, these are privately-owned computers they are interfering with.

Especially in the case of bankruptcy - the device owners have no more of a business relationship with this new owner, than they do with a random hacker making printers emit goatse.

Sadly this is probably all clearly spelled out in the original fine print. And the only way to guarantee you can avoid these kind of shenanigans is to go full Stallman and run everything yourself.

If you have an sort of a services subscription with a company and they are dissolved during liquidation -- the most frequent outcome is that the service is no longer available for any price. The business is gone.

If you had a landscaper mowing your lawn and they die, nobody expects the person who buys the lawnmower at the estate sale to continue mowing everyone's lawn.

This isn't any different just because it is a different type of service. Cloud platforms are services and like any other business, they disappear... a lot.

It’s more like if they sold you a lawnmower, but kept the key to start it, and now they’re dead, and someone bought their key cabinet.

In my analogy, the lawnmower is the cloud server, and your sod is your smart hub.

But forget the analogy.

Cloud services are services. If you buy a device that requires continued services to operate, and the service goes away, it doesn’t operate.

People might be mad about this, but I’m sure everyone on this forum is smart enough to realize that servers don’t run themselves

They didnt buy a device that requires connected services. It could work locally. That functionality has been removed in an 'upgrade'.

They destroyed the lawnmower and now want you to rent one.

That sounds awfully like a dependency on services to me. If the device is designed for somebody else to be managing and pushing out offer updates to it on your behalf, that’s a service. I wouldn't buy a lawnmower where normal operation of the device let somebody else change it whenever they feel like it.

The point is that the dependency is artificial. The user you responded to said it wasn't sold as a service, as it had local functionality that was removed post-sale.

The customer didn't buy access to a service with a physical product to serve as support for that service, they purchased functionality, and that functionality is (potentially illegally) being taken away from them.

I understand why people are mad. I just don’t understand why anyone here is surprised.

Nor is there really anything unique about artificial proprietary lock-in when it comes to services. As a business practice it’s not uncommon.

> I just don’t understand why anyone here is surprised.

Are they? To me it looks like legitimate complaints and only that.

> Nor is there really anything unique about artificial proprietary lock-in when it comes to services. As a business practice it’s not uncommon.

It's unique in its illegallity. They're lucky these aren't very expensive products, or people would actually go to court and maybe force the manufacturer's hand for once.

I don't know about the home jurisdiction of this company, but I don't see any reason why this would be illegal in the US. Typically most cloud products outline in their terms that services and their features may change at any point.

The illegality lies on the fact that the product was advertised as having certain functionality on its own.

> Typically most cloud products outline in their terms that services and their features may change it at any point.

The user bought the device before ever agreeing to any terms. At that point they're inherently entitled to the advertised functionality, merely by having their money change hands. Any post-sale agreement is separate from the purchase of the product that was informed by the advertisements.

Except there are two different companies here. The company that initially advertised and launched these products doesn't exist.

The second company bought servers that are connected to devices where users have all clicked through a EULA which likely says that they can change it whenever the heck they want.

> The second company bought servers that are connected to devices where users have all clicked through a EULA which likely says that they can change it whenever the heck they want.

And that EULA is potentially unconscionable, both procedurally and substantively, both due to the prior purchase that was concluded before any EULA came into the picture and the overall balance of power in the terms, the reason being that users have an inherent legal right to use software that comes with a device they purchased regardless of any later agreement.

I do agree that the users have a good case for the right to run the version of the software that the device came with. I don't know if they have a good case to demand specific performance from a different company in order to do that for them. I also think that a EULA, whether enforceable or not in its terms, serves as pretty decent notice that continued software updates are a thing that it does, and those updates may change features, then that the current owners didn't violate anyone's rights by pushing out a software update. But if I were a user trying to revert my device back to the original software, I wouldn't be worried about any legal threats from the current owner.

> I don't know if they have a good case to demand specific performance from a different company in order to do that for them.

I mean, this new company pushed the lockout update and imposed the new terms. If we already assume that the users have the right to the advertised functionality, and that the new company has ties to the consumers by inheriting its contractual relationship with them through the previous company's EULA, it would make the most sense for a court to order them to right their wrong.

Liability for false advertising generally does not transfer in an asset purchase. And the original company didn't really make any false statements. They were just unable to continue to uphold them because they cease to exist. But promises by some other company don't really transfer over unless you have a contract that specifically says that they do. If you're saying that the EULA is that contract, well, that same contract almost certainly gives the service provider the option to change it however they see fit. And I don't know the details here, but usually when something like this happens, any acquiring service provider will usually pop up a click through EULA that's updated for the new service provider, before they push out any further updates, to further strengthen any agreements that might be contained within it before they make any changes. But again, it looks like this company is not in the US so who knows how this may work in some other place.

Is false advertising a crime? If so, there are people who are liable no matter which legal entities they used to pull the scam off. Someone authorized it and someone implemented it. There should be fines and entries put in records.

It is, but this doesn’t qualify. The claims by the original company are of a company that does not exist. And when you buy the assets of a company you are not obligated to continue business the same way nor fulfill any of their promises aside from the acquisition of specific contracts detailing otherwise. Whether they have any of the same employees is irrelevant. Besides being two different businesses, piercing the corporate veil is only done in very certain circumstances.

People are just mad that services which aren't essential to operation are being used to force people into subscriptions, or to enable features which could've been implemented without the server (and thus without the additional cost to the company).

Like with Nest going EOL. There's no reason that it needed a wifi connection to operate. The server doesn't hold any useful information and just proxies instructions to your nest device when you use the app.

It would have been nice if rather than wifi being used to communicate with googles' servers, wifi was just used to communicate with your app on your device via the local network. Or bluetooth was available as a fallback.

Yeah, it’s buyers remorse. Buy devices that rely on cloud services, and you are at the mercy of that continued service. I just find it absolutely wild that some seem to be surprised by this in a technical forum of all places.

I’m a nest early adopter affected by the nest EOL. I presume you mean: there’s no reason it needs a cloud service? Because it definitely needs network access for you to connect to it remotely.

But if you are familiar at all with the history of IOT devices, the reason why cloud connected devices took off in popularity, is because they do NAT traversal for you. Most people struggled to set these devices up before the advent of cloud IOT.

Let's not conflate the cloud service, with locking the devices from their users and preventing even non-cloud-functionality.

It's like if the landscaper tried charging me for using my own lawnmower, myself.

If you can use the box without the service, just do it.

I think the actual answer is that you can't. Just because the technology is there in such a way that it theoretically could, doesn't mean that is actually what you bought.

> If you can use the box without the service, just do it.

They prevented that by locking the boxes, and threatened prosecution to someone trying to undo those locks: Futurehome CEO threatens police action after I offer $5,000 bounty to free his ransomed customers - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RwSkwh3nWv8

If you buy a device that remotely executes code as a matter of normal operation, there isn’t anything local about it.

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