Other examples are: Wahoo, who locked the control of their products behind an account and login requirement for devices which had been working perfectly fine for years prior.
Roche, who killed their blood glucose app at the start of 2023 and forced all their users to move to a third party app, developed by one of their subsidiaries, which requires you to accept a data exfiltration clause, if they wish to continue the automagic on-device logging.
A couple months later Logitech shitcanned the entire product line (which I had already returned after discovering their scam), and screwed all the apologists. I wonder what they think today... if they even do.
Don't underestimate the cognitive dissonance (and resulting apologism and shilling) that you'll face when you call out defects and scams in someone's pet product or belief system. And yes, it happens right here on HN too often as well.
Then Miku sold to another company (they either filed or were planning on filing for bankruptcy), and the first thing the new company did was send a letter demanding $10 a month to keep using most of the monitor’s features.
You also can't get a software update without installing their terrible mobile app (and logging in), so I take it to the dealer and make them do it.
Back then, we thought legal questions about discrimination silly - if the baker won't bake cakes for lesbians, who cares, there are dozens of bakers in town who are not silly, why fight with the one who is, especially since the only recourse you will get is a birthday cake.
But now with the app monopolies it's different. If Lyft bans you over a justified chargeback and Uber bans you over another justified chargeback you are going to have a problem.
Then what?
Amazon did lock the guys account for the report from their driver. That did lock him out of his other IoT devices.
People can and SHOULD return this garbage to the retail store the minute they get home and realized it's encumbered in this way.
There are other doorbell choices, like Eufy by Anker. The one this man used.
A notable flow on effect is both of these products had helped with the management and improvement of my health, and these changes have had a measurable negative impact since I’ve been unable to use them.
The lesson that it drives home to me is that if a company can force updates to your device, it doesn’t matter what the terms of service are or how much you trust the company.
They can go bankrupt, sell off the assets, and some new vampire company can come along and remove your ability to use your product.
Won't they charge you through the nose for this? We recently went to a Lexus dealer for something random but specific on an old Lexus, and they did basic service like an oil change. When we stepped inside, it was like a 5 star hotel lobby with ordurves and fancy hosts a bunch of weird junk.
We got the bill, and never even considered going back.
In reality, on each new iOS device, Apple forces you to use the current version of the app in the App Store now, and your old version apps are not included in backups or able to be transferred to new devices.
You are eventually forced to use the latest version of the app by Apple.
The latest version of the app will require the latest firmware or will modal lock you out until you upgrade the device.
Blame Apple for not letting you preserve your old versions of working apps between backups and devices, and blame Apple for allowing time bomb expiring apps like Signal and Chase Mobile into the App Store.
Further blame Apple for not having an iOS "internet access" permission per app that would prevent these apps from learning that there are new, unwanted firmware updates available when all you want to do is local operations.
Finally, any product that requires that you "sign up/log in" on the first screen and can't be used otherwise without PII should go straight back into the box to be returned.
Sometimes people get into niche communities and get really obsessive in a ridiculous way, like spending inordinate amounts of time defending a junky Logitech software suite.
I know, because it has happened to me. I see it happen with particular frequency in Discord.
I am not a psychologist, but it seems like a trap humans are predisposed to fall into.
Worse, if your device requires remote services then they can control access to those. Stallman was right.
As far as I'm concerned these companies should get hit with deceptive advertising charges. Yes, I realize that buried somewhere two or three hundred paragraphs deep in the TOS I "agreed" to let them do this. Then again maybe I didn't, because I also likely "agreed" to have the TOS changed at any time for any reason without warning. That is key here.
IMO These companies get away with this because they can toss out one of the basics of contract law. It is unconscionable that one party can _unilaterally_ change the terms of the contact (the "terms of service") without prior warning or input from the other party (me, as the purchaser of said device/service).
Basic contract law should apply here. What _tangible_ benefits are there to me
If every experience with Tesla was like the initial buying experience I’d recommend it to anyone, however, let me assure anyone interested the honeymoon phase definitely ends.
Some off-the-cuff ideas of how:
1. Make our own purchases "on principle", and hope that enough other techies do that, that economic pressure is applied to brands.
2. Make our own non-purchase technology adoptions "on principle".
3. Inform other techies, both on specifics of individual devices/architectures/vendors/etc., and to bring everyone up to speed on the basics (e.g., reasons for open standards, user-oriented products/services, avoiding lock-in, privacy-respecting, responsible security, etc.).
4. Inform non-techies, such as by pointing them at solutions in their interest, and in the interest of society.
5. Advise lawmakers, to complement whatever they're hearing from lobbyists.
6. Contribute code and other effort to open platforms, and actually use them.
7. Be careful about helping to prop up society-hostile platforms, such as by using them to the exclusion of something else, making them more palatable to the exclusion of something better, implicitly endorsing them, etc.
8. Keep principles a factor in who we go to work for, how we work while there, and whether we stay there.
Completely useless comment.
My Samsung Galaxy S8+ had those sensors and I used them often for many years. The results were interesting and useful, and graphed with history in the Samsung app which shipped on the device.
Then one day they changed the terms so you had to create and sign into a Samsung account, and upload your health data, to continue using the sensors.
I didn't accept those terms so I wasn't able to use those health monitoring functions on my expensive device any more.
Interestingly, most articles I saw about the change portrayed it as a good thing, that you could now have consistent healrh sensor records across your devices and other good cloud features, even portraying it as an oddity that Samsung Health didn't require Samsung cloud integration all along and that they had finally caught up to the times. But it already had those features before the change! The only visible change was to to remove the choice to opt out of uploading your personal data.
An example that comes to mind is how if you get banned from Steam, you typically still retain the ability to access your past purchases, you just lose multiplayer, purchasing new content etc.
Similarly, companies should not be able to unilaterally discard the responsibilities they take on when they sell people things that require continuous service to operate.
This should be especially relevant in cases like with Philips Hue, now that they've chosen to bear the burden of even previous Hue owners' smart homes, they should not be able to willy nilly shed that in a way that renders the system non-functional. Any bans they make should just leave the hardware usable in the way that it already was.
Our Miku's use a Novelda (fka Xethru) UWB sensor SoC, specifically designed for human presence monitoring and, drumroll, breathing and heartbeat. Specifically they use an X4: https://novelda.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/03/x4_datasheet_...
I likely won't have time, what with the kids and all, but I'm going to give it the old college try to tear into this thing and craft some firmware so we can actually keep things from being a paperweight. It blows my mind this isn't just table stakes with IoT crap these days, but here we are.
In general it’s getting harder and harder to avoid devices where this is possible. The obvious answer is regulation.
Citation needed
I know I'm part of a dwindling customer base that still uses separate A/V gear and not just built-in streaming apps and a soundbar, but it seems like there would have still been a market for competent universal remotes that you could customize.
I hated how almost every generation of their remotes got harder to use and program compared to pre-Logitech Harmony. The Touch remotes were practically unusable because you had frequently used buttons in poor locations and a touch screen that you had to scroll through to find the correct soft touch button for that wasn't especially responsive, the old models with all hard buttons were vastly more usable.
But screw it. On the rare occasion I watch something that's not on my Shield (whose remote can control my receiver's volume with CEC), I just adjust the volume manually.
But let's not even get started on the pathetic state of the A/V receiver market, where you can't even get a receiver with A/B/C sets of speakers... despite advertising three zones.
Step 0A- Realize that most mature industries are incestuous. They share the same consultants, they swap employees, they compete for the same market with the same group-think mindset, etc. They all have the same incentives and paradigm for success and thus often act in murmuration'ing way. That is, they're too big and too risk-adverse to consider innovation so they feign being competitive and milk the market the best they can.
Step 0B - Realize that for the most part the gov - via Cronie Capitalism - will not protect consumers, and will put the thumb on the scale for the largest players. Your rights and privacy - in the context of Surveillance Capitalism (which the gov benefits from) - are more myth than they are real.
Step 0C - Realize that all the steps follow are rarely successful. Sure, you can try but the odds are not in your favor. You end up paying the subscription and/or having your usage data sold in some black box cyber back room.
What you claimed was a lot more specific than that. Do you have any actual examples of the specific sequence of events you claimed?