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Comment by mindcrash | Hacker News Reader

Seemingly remote kill command, very likely punishment due to not receiving telemetry because that particular address was blocked through firewall:

"2024/02/29, 14:06:55.852622 [LogKimbo][CAppSystemState] Handle message! cmd_id 501 RS_CTRL_REMOTE_EVENT, len 8 serialno 0"

Note something being named RS_CTRL_REMOTE_EVENT

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Yes, but automatic or manual? If automatic, what exactly was the trigger?

I'd have been tempted to explore this further - does sending fake or repeated telemetry satisfy it?

OT, but anything automatic was manually and intentionally implemented at some point

But is it malicious or innocuous? I could see just the assumption being made that if it hasn’t phoned home it must be malfunctioning and ask risk mitigation then force it to brick. It’s not super unreasonable considering very few people will ever block the comms.

I think OP said it claimed to be able to work offline.

How is that reasonable? What about loss of network access makes vacuuming less safe?

it's not loss of network access, it's partial network access. There still got to be _some_ connection to get this 501 command.

I wouldn’t argue it’s reasonable, but these kinds of decisions get made without much thought all the time whether we like it or not. It’s possible they just didn’t give it much thought. Or, it was just a directive from Legal and so nobody asks questions. Possibly the marketing team doesn’t even know this got made and still touts it as “works offline”.

I’m not really defending it but pointing out this is still on a different plane than outright maliciousness.

Punishment due to not receiving telemetry? Please, that's fantasy land stuff.

It might be a malfunction caused by his blocking, but the idea that someone in HQ was like "guys, we've got someone blocking telemetry!" "disable his vacuum, the bastard".

Or in some design meeting they were like "what do we do if a handful of privacy nerds block our telemetry?" "well.. I guess we should automatically disable their vacuums in a weird way so they repeatedly send them in for repair and it costs us loads of money".

Come on, at least try to live in the real world.

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