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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

This kind of intentional remote bricking should be super illegal. I would really like to see a law that would allow the customer a full refund of the original purchasing price if the manufacturer remotely disables advertised functionality of a device for whatever reason. Because this kind of deceptive behaviour needs to be slapped down hard.

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Oh, your XOURR smart vacuum got remotely disabled? Unfortunately the XOURR company has ceased operations so no refund is possible, but luckily there's a sale on IWEEET robot vacuums now, and I hear they're very reliable!

Yes BUT "I paid it back, so nothing bad ever happened" is not sufficient.

Someone (or a company) does something bad - yes, pay it back, but there needs to be some punishment for doing evil. Pay back X 100. Or pay purchaser + pay fine.

Just paying back the cost (or fraud) is saying "it's fine if you don't get caught, and if you do get caught, there's no real cost to you."

Most "smart" devices simply don't function without connectivity back to the manufacturer's cloud, and this is basically just the same thing with extra steps.

It clearly doesn't need the cloud, it intentionally bricks itself if it can't exfiltrate it's logs. It's not like it's sending data necessary for its immediate operation.

Sure it does need the cloud - you might have notice that the kill command was delivered _over cloud connection_. And author carefully blocked not entire connectivity, but only the part that they considered "logs". They wanted to keep cloud control, just not the whole thing.

Given the complete lack of relevant technical details, it could be something as simple as "internal log storage full, refusing to start up until logs uploaded". We'd never know.

I think the extra step should be enough to technically constitute hacking and destruction of property.

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