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> A big question is why there's no way for Charter customers to keep using these devices, given that they rely on the Zigbee specification that allows multi-ven
by daniel-thompson 7y ago
> A big question is why there's no way for Charter customers to keep using these devices, given that they rely on the Zigbee specification that allows multi-vendor interoperability for smart-home products. Why can't Charter customers connect their security devices to a Zigbee-enabled smart-home hub or use them with another alarm-monitoring service that supports Zigbee? One user on DSLReports pointed out that years ago, Spectrum devices "were firmware coded to prevent them from being seen and usable within the normal universe of Zigbee devices."
I imagine this was a pretty short conversation between the engineers and PM:
- Engineers "Why do we have to lock them down? There's no technical reason to do this to our customers."
- PM "Because fuck em, that's why."
- VLM 7y agoMore realistically how it works in giant mega-corporations is a contractual arrangement with another company works until it doesn't, and after the contract is no longer in force... well... its all over. There's a subgenre of the above where mega-corporations set up and later dissolve an entire department. So any employee who could unlock those devices was probably downsized months or even years ago when the project was internally cancelled and the shutdown was planned. First, fire the engineers because we're cancelling so no possibility of R+D, whoopsie that means no possibility of unlocking, oh well.