Martin SeegerOct 28

This is a valuable lesson for any manufacturer: never awaken the nerd sleeping inside your customer, because his wrath shall be terrible.

In this case the warning was quite literal.

The company annoyed a buyer enough to push him into full blown nerd mode. He tore the product apart, reverse engineered every part, and then published a step by step guide showing exactly how to disable "kill switch" that prevented the use of the product without the vendor spying on the user.

What started as a minor grievance became a public, technical exposé that left the maker exposed and embarrassed.

Moral of the story: underestimate your users at your own peril.

The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me

Update: This post seems to have struck a nerve and went very wide. As I will not be able to answer every comment, I want to add a few points:

  • The linked article was not written by me. It came to me on a different channel (Discord). I only wrote the post on Mastodon.
  • The top image in the article looks AI generated. It is no a good image, but in my view less irritating than an advertisement (which is far more common).
  • Some people suggest the article itself is AI generated. I don't think this is the case. I wouldn't rule out he author wrote the text in a different language and used AI for translation assistance.
  • The claims in the article are not fully backed by the linked repo, but the general statement is correct and IMHO important.
The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me

Would you allow a stranger to drive a camera-equipped computer around your living room? You might have already done so without even realizing it. The Beginning: A Curious Experiment It all started innocently enough. I had recently bought an iLife A11 smart vacuum—a sleek, affordable, and technologically advanced robot

Small World
Show threadKeenan Tims

@masek It seems somehow unlikely to me that the manufacturer would intentionally trigger a kill switch in this scenario. Maybe if it triggered something user-visible demanding to re-enable network connectivity, but shadowbanning the device does nothing for them but inflate customer support costs. What justification would they have?

It seems more likely that a queue of 'work' to send to the mothership got full and that stalled further 'work', or something along those lines.

Not that depending on connectivity to the mothership is a good thing, especially in an asynchronous way, but I am not sure it makes sense to ascribe malice here.

Oct 28 at 8:31pmWeb
Show threadTobyBartelsOct 29

@ktims @masek

It does seem like a very poor business decision. A normie customer won't hack the device but will just throw it away and buy a new one, but they'll almost certainly want to buy a different brand next time, so the company gets nothing but bad reviews and maybe repair costs during the warranty period.

Of course it's bad that they have the power to do this even accidentally, but it does seem likely to be unintentional.