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.