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Are we to understand that it is legal to sabotage [1] products if you buy their bankrupt manufacturer? Do I have to care about the corporate health of the maker

Are we to understand that it is legal to sabotage [1] products if you buy their bankrupt manufacturer? Do I have to care about the corporate health of the maker of every item in my house now? And does the bankruptcy even matter, legally? The company had a business/contractual relationship with its customers. Selling that contract/relationship to someone else, even through bankruptcy, does not let them unilaterally alter it. E.g. if they had made promises, contractual or even just in marketing, a change of owner is immaterial to the other side of that contract/promise. [1] This is not hyperbole, but an accurate description of destroying functionality that did not require company servers. [2] False advertising is a crime, after all.

Pet_Ant 1y ago
I mean, I think the answer to 1 is "yes". They wouldn't have bought the asset if they couldn't extort their customers. Now you at least have the option to pay to continue access, versus having no maintenance at all. Is it ethical? I wouldn't say so, but I do think that is the economic argument.
- like_any_other 1y ago
  > Now you at least have the option to pay to continue access, versus having no maintenance at all. They locked the owners out of their devices, hence the bounty from Rossmann to "hack" them. They gave one option, but took one away. > I think the answer to 1 is "yes". They wouldn't have bought the asset if they couldn't extort their customers. It's definitely how the law is currently being applied, and they probably won't have legal trouble from it, but I argue this is a corruption of ownership law, and any kind of update that is against the device owner's wishes (that they are deliberately prevented from reverting) is equivalent to criminal hacking. I can't emphasize this enough - the devices in question do not belong to them. They sold them, these are privately-owned computers they are interfering with. Especially in the case of bankruptcy - the device owners have no more of a business relationship with this new owner, than they do with a random hacker making printers emit goatse.
  - foobarian 1y ago
    Sadly this is probably all clearly spelled out in the original fine print. And the only way to guarantee you can avoid these kind of shenanigans is to go full Stallman and run everything yourself.
kube-system 1y ago
If you have an sort of a services subscription with a company and they are dissolved during liquidation -- the most frequent outcome is that the service is no longer available for any price. The business is gone. If you had a landscaper mowing your lawn and they die, nobody expects the person who buys the lawnmower at the estate sale to continue mowing everyone's lawn. This isn't any different just because it is a different type of service. Cloud platforms are services and like any other business, they disappear... a lot.
- tobr 1y ago
  It’s more like if they sold you a lawnmower, but kept the key to start it, and now they’re dead, and someone bought their key cabinet.
  - kube-system 1y ago
    In my analogy, the lawnmower is the cloud server, and your sod is your smart hub. But forget the analogy. Cloud services are services. If you buy a device that requires continued services to operate, and the service goes away, it doesn’t operate. People might be mad about this, but I’m sure everyone on this forum is smart enough to realize that servers don’t run themselves
    - Xss3 1y ago
      They didnt buy a device that requires connected services. It could work locally. That functionality has been removed in an 'upgrade'. They destroyed the lawnmower and now want you to rent one.
      - kube-system 1y ago
        That sounds awfully like a dependency on services to me. If the device is designed for somebody else to be managing and pushing out offer updates to it on your behalf, that’s a service. I wouldn't buy a lawnmower where normal operation of the device let somebody else change it whenever they feel like it.

Pet_Ant 1y ago

I mean, I think the answer to 1 is "yes". They wouldn't have bought the asset if they couldn't extort their customers. Now you at least have the option to pay to continue access, versus having no maintenance at all. Is it ethical? I wouldn't say so, but I do think that is the economic argument.

like_any_other 1y ago
> Now you at least have the option to pay to continue access, versus having no maintenance at all. They locked the owners out of their devices, hence the bounty from Rossmann to "hack" them. They gave one option, but took one away. > I think the answer to 1 is "yes". They wouldn't have bought the asset if they couldn't extort their customers. It's definitely how the law is currently being applied, and they probably won't have legal trouble from it, but I argue this is a corruption of ownership law, and any kind of update that is against the device owner's wishes (that they are deliberately prevented from reverting) is equivalent to criminal hacking. I can't emphasize this enough - the devices in question do not belong to them. They sold them, these are privately-owned computers they are interfering with. Especially in the case of bankruptcy - the device owners have no more of a business relationship with this new owner, than they do with a random hacker making printers emit goatse.
- foobarian 1y ago
  Sadly this is probably all clearly spelled out in the original fine print. And the only way to guarantee you can avoid these kind of shenanigans is to go full Stallman and run everything yourself.

kube-system 1y ago

If you have an sort of a services subscription with a company and they are dissolved during liquidation -- the most frequent outcome is that the service is no longer available for any price. The business is gone. If you had a landscaper mowing your lawn and they die, nobody expects the person who buys the lawnmower at the estate sale to continue mowing everyone's lawn. This isn't any different just because it is a different type of service. Cloud platforms are services and like any other business, they disappear... a lot.

tobr 1y ago
It’s more like if they sold you a lawnmower, but kept the key to start it, and now they’re dead, and someone bought their key cabinet.
- kube-system 1y ago
  In my analogy, the lawnmower is the cloud server, and your sod is your smart hub. But forget the analogy. Cloud services are services. If you buy a device that requires continued services to operate, and the service goes away, it doesn’t operate. People might be mad about this, but I’m sure everyone on this forum is smart enough to realize that servers don’t run themselves
  - Xss3 1y ago
    They didnt buy a device that requires connected services. It could work locally. That functionality has been removed in an 'upgrade'. They destroyed the lawnmower and now want you to rent one.
    - kube-system 1y ago
      That sounds awfully like a dependency on services to me. If the device is designed for somebody else to be managing and pushing out offer updates to it on your behalf, that’s a service. I wouldn't buy a lawnmower where normal operation of the device let somebody else change it whenever they feel like it.