[HN Gopher] Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with...
___________________________________________________________________
Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking
customers' stuff
Author : speckx
Score : 61 points
Date : 2025-07-11 19:18 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (arstechnica.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (arstechnica.com)
| tocs3 wrote:
| Do not buy stuff you do not own.
| barbazoo wrote:
| It is as "easy" as that. My assumption is these are mostly
| optional things we think we "need" so a little friction finding
| something that doesn't suck isn't the worst thing. Reigns in
| our consumerism a little bit too.
| sam_lowry_ wrote:
| Google or Apple phones also?
| barbazoo wrote:
| For any smartphone I guess, can any one provider cut you
| off from using it? For Apple and Google Pixel phones that
| might be true, but not for all smartphones out there.
|
| There are lots of custom Android running phones that you
| can truly own.
| alnwlsn wrote:
| In parallel, learn to modify stuff you don't own so that you do
| own it.
| supportengineer wrote:
| Rules out any vehicle for sale in the US today with a built-in
| cellular connection.
| quantified wrote:
| I haven't bought for a long time, are these required to run
| the car? Or is it just prohibitively obscure to disable it
| (smash the antenna or connect it to ground, for example).
| greatgib wrote:
| I'm not against manufacturer stopping support for their Internet
| Of Shits devices, but there should be a law making it mandatory
| for them to release source code, protocol specs and whatever is
| needed so that a man of the craft could be able to do what is
| necessary to continue using the product that he bought.
| thomassmith65 wrote:
| I'd rather a law mandating that all devices include an
| 'offline' option for any hardware features that could
| conceivably support one.
|
| 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.
| Angostura wrote:
| I love this idea. But " features that could conceivably
| support one." is going to be the tricky bit to regulate
| Rygian wrote:
| "Must be fully operational as described in the brochure
| without an internet connection. Any features that require
| an internet connection must be priced and sold as optional
| enhancements."
|
| Done.
| Mister_Snuggles wrote:
| Rather than regulating features, I'd start with a
| dependency list.
|
| 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.
| eddythompson80 wrote:
| I think the problem with this argument is that this is rarely
| the case.
|
| 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.
| orev wrote:
| There are definitely many products that need no account or
| cloud functionality at all, but still make you sign up for
| an account. Philips Hue did this recently for their app,
| when the bulbs only need local WiFi or ZigBee, but then
| decided to force you into an account "for your convenience"
| to sync minor things that don't matter. The bulbs still
| work without the app, but you can't control or update the
| firmware without an account (or some other system like Home
| Assistant)
| Gigachad wrote:
| The last projector I bought would not function until I
| signed in to a Google account.
| altairprime wrote:
| In lieu of a law, a class action against Bellingham that
| publicly states "we will settle for $1 in exchange for you
| publishing all protocol docs, device firmware source code, and
| any private keys used to authenticate firmware installed for
| these devices, so that competitors can pick up where Belkin
| left off" would absolutely hold their feet to the fire on this.
| superkuh wrote:
| This all started with software and because we didn't stop it
| there it'll keep happening to software that runs hardware.
|
| 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.
| sigwinch28 wrote:
| Via Wikipedia:
|
| > 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...
| kmerfeld wrote:
| Its less bad that they offered refunds, but why would it that
| make it ok? If you buy a car, and the company lights it on
| fire and then offers you a refund is that ok? You'll still
| have the burnt husk if you choose not to take the refund
|
| They broke something after they sold it
| sofixa wrote:
| It's hard to take this comparison seriously because Rocket
| League is a (mostly) online game for which an active
| connection to active servers (and thus a cost to the
| developer). Also, there is no burnt husk.
|
| It's like you paying to get lifetime access to a club, the
| club closing and reimbursing you.
| Neikius wrote:
| Since when are companies required to run servers for
| multiplayer? There is always other ways to play
| multiplayer. At least there used to be but not any more.
| It is just a thinly veiled excuse to be able to shut it
| off.
| bobmcnamara wrote:
| Brutal.
|
| Like the repo man leaving you a tip.
| superkuh wrote:
| I have tried to keep the Psyonix wikipedia article true to
| reality if you look at the change history but there are
| people working for Epic heavily whitewashing it and I didn't
| want to force (wiki) arbitration or cause a disturbance after
| the first couple edit/revert battles. The Rocket League one
| is even harder to keep true.
|
| 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.
| PaulKeeble wrote:
| The Sony playstation 3 was another example where it let you run
| Linux and then people found a way to use the hardware to its
| fullest (the coprocessors were locked in Linux) and Sony pulled
| support. Took some court cases but customers got partial
| refunds then too. HP also lost a lawsuit on blocking ink jet
| cartridges too.
|
| 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.
| surgical_fire wrote:
| It's almost like that in the absence of proper government
| regulations corporations are free to screw up consumers. And of
| course they do, why wouldn't they?
| benoau wrote:
| Really just an extension of the "Stop Killing Games" initiative,
| "Stop Killing Everything Else", even the Belkin devices that will
| survive through HomeKit are tied to an iOS device with a limited
| support period! Buy a new everything every 5 - 10 years or your
| stuff might get bricked or left to fend for itself without
| security patches. The whole tech industry needs to change.
| AndrewDucker wrote:
| This is why I'm buying "smart" things only if they either work
| fine without the internet or if they are part of a standard.
|
| 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.
| apparent wrote:
| HN discussion from yesterday's announcement:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524063#44527939
| OptionOfT wrote:
| I have a couple of shades with Somfi motors, and got one of those
| Bond bridges with it, to connect it to Home-Assistant.
|
| 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).
| schappim wrote:
| I want to shout out to https://usetrmnl.com for showing folks how
| to actually handle the situation of ensuring that your IoT device
| will never be bricked.
|
| 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.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| I've got Sonos' least smart speaker. No microphone.
|
| 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.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2025-07-11 23:01 UTC)