I can't bring myself to be bothered by this - and wouldn't be even if I were using these devices.<p>For crying out loud, equipment with unique recorded serial numbers was stolen, so the company is blocking the <i>specific</i> stolen devices. That makes perfect sense to me. Objecting to how they do it (bulking up software with a list of serials, requiring software to phone home, whatever) is fine and their customers have a legit basis to be unhappy if it's impacting their use, but people with the stolen devices? <i>Those aren't SDRPlay's customers because SDRPlay hasn't been paid for those devices.</i><p>Quoting from the article: <i>In a PR disaster the manufacturer gives "Because we can" as an explanation to make end user devices worthless.</i><p>I'll note that this complaint very carefully leaves out a key word: STOLEN. I'm not seeing the PR disaster except that it's going to seriously hurt their image in the community of people who steal stuff from warehouses. <i>tiny violin plays sad music</i><p>If you've purchased one of these, as I said above you're not a customer of SDRPlay or one of its distributors because payment is part of a vendor-customer relationship. You're someone who bought "Bose" speakers out of the back of a white van in a parking lot. Get your money back from the seller - you may even be able to get the police report from SDRPlay if you need it for a chargeback - and tell SDRPlay where you bought it so they can try to track down the thieves.<p>Edit: reading the original SDRPlay forum posts, they ID the specific ebay sellers, note that this is the <i>third</i> time they've had things stolen like this and sold by the same accounts, and note that "We will NOT penalise innocent people so that assumption that this is our intent is frankly WRONG!!" Basically they're likely looking for anything like saved packaging, shipping return addresses, etc. to be turned over to the police. Also, this whole thing is about (in this case at least) a total of 39 devices. We're not talking about thousands of people affected.<p>SDRPlay: <a href="https://www.sdrplay.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3225" rel="nofollow">https://www.sdrplay.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3225</a>