FTC Pushed to Crack Down on Companies That Ruin Hardware via Software Updates

They need to crack down on companies that ruin hardware (or will one day ruin hardware) when they shut off their last cloud server.<p>There&#x27;s no excuse for an appliance to brick itself or lose functionality just because of the manufacturer&#x27;s remote action. When I buy a device, I don&#x27;t want a perpetual, tethered relationship with the manufacturer in order to work the device. I don&#x27;t want it to ask the manufacturer for permission to run every day. I don&#x27;t want it to be dependent on the manufacturer to keep it alive. I don&#x27;t want to create an account. I don&#x27;t want to log in to the manufacturer&#x27;s servers. I don&#x27;t want them to know my IP address or my home address. Leave me alone, I&#x27;m just not that into you!<p>A hardware device should work on day 10,000 just as it worked on day 1. If you as a company can&#x27;t do that, you should not be able to sell the device (EDIT: OR at least you should be required to prominently mark the devices as &quot;dependent on the manufacturer&#x27;s servers&quot;)

What we really need are a variety of certifications enforced by the FTC, not blanket regulation. Like you can put a sticker on your product, which would be illegal for non-complying products to have. One seal could be for Open Source, another for Cloud-Free, Firmware Rollbacks, Telemetry-Free, E2EE, 10 years of replacement parts, etc.<p>It&#x27;s clear just from this thread that different people care about different things. And I&#x27;d rather see a certification that never gets used, than a whole kind of product removed from the market because the FTC got it wrong, and now it doesn&#x27;t make sense to produce it.

This reminds me of when Sony disabled their officially supported OtherOS support (used to install Linux and other os&#x27;s dual boot) with an update. Of course without the update, no access to the Sony Store, games that require the latest Sony PS3 stopped working, etc...

I will be frank: there are a ton of devices I have not purchased because of these potential risks and dependencies.<p>Just not worth the hassle.<p>I pretty much avoid newer cars for similar reasons. The ones I drive have no annoying screen. It is easy to setup a Bluetooth phone connection to either the factory radio, or an easily installed one. And I can do most repairs, need never talk to a dealer, they go for 100, often 200k miles after I buy them, get great fuel economy, and it goes on and on. I would be crazy to buy a new car.<p>The rest of what one might need?<p>Got a phone for that. In a pinch, an older car phone powered by a current phone hot spot works great too.<p>Music?<p>Got all the tunes I need on a storage device. Or pop a CD in. I like CD media, and this year it outpaced digital downloads.<p>Good. I like vinyl too.<p>I see people struggle with a lot of this stuff. No thanks. My life is nowhere near as enriched relative to the costs and risks.

I have been working to eliminate all my wifi IOT devices.<p>Years ago I gave them a separate guest network &#x2F; vlan to use, with only 5mbit of bandwidth.<p>The only thing I have left is some ip cameras and my roborock vacuum.<p>We seriously need a local first law that enables all these devices to work 100% on local wifi.

Make blowing eFuses in devices illegal. The device no longer belongs to the manufacturer and they should have no power to physically damage it, nor to compel me to allow them to physically damage it as a condition for use.<p>EFuses enable awful anti-consumer &quot;features&quot; like preventing firmware downgrades, blacklisting compromised cryptographic keys, and bricking devices remotely.

MS removed support for mixed reality in windows 11 24H2 which made all windows VR headsets unusable (except MS&#x27;s headset). I wonder if that counts.

We have been calling on laws to stop this practice for at least 2 decades now. Early examples include the bricking of PS3 Linux support and HP printer modules. This situation needs to change especially with so many cloud connected IOT devices. The law really needs to not just be about functionality loss or bricking remotely but also components that work without the cloud that can work locally.

<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;sousvide&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1e6su45&#x2F;anova_discontinuing_wifi&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.reddit.com&#x2F;r&#x2F;sousvide&#x2F;comments&#x2F;1e6su45&#x2F;anova_dis...</a><p>Morons.

The solution that would not require govt cost or enforcement is a legal change:<p>A company introducing a product that requires a connection to their service <i>MUST</i> maintain utility and features at the same or better for at least 7 years after the hardware product is last sold at a retail establishment (equal or expanded features and lower cost).<p>At whatever time they reduce features or increase cost beyond a faster level of inflation, they are required to release all related current source code, comments, documentation, test suites, etc. required to make usable all product features, into the public domain.<p>At that point, all parties are also fully permitted to use any measures to reverse engineer or otherwise hack the source code and firmware.<p>Simple: You maintain it, it&#x27;s yours as long as you want. You stop maintaining it, everyone else can do it for you.<p>Let the bean counters trying to cut this month&#x27;s bottom line costs fight with the IP lawyers trying to hide everything forever.<p>[edit: typos]

I&#x27;m scared for the next election, remember Ajit Pai in the FCC? If Lina Khan goes away the FTC will most likely get a corporate stooge and all the wins under her will be gone

I think what we really need is a mandate to open firmware for any hardware thats EoL. You should just have to pay an escalating fee, or at least be liable in a suit for damages when you EoL a product without opening up the hardware.

They need to go after Peloton with their new activating fee on used bikes. But I also see car manufacturers doing this (ruining hardware through software updates). For example I’ve now started receiving random ads popping up on my screen, which is needed for basic things like climate control, pushing me to activate a Sirius XM trial. I didn’t get those before until an update was forced on me - the car gave me three attempts to ignore the update and then said I am out of delay attempts and that the update will be installed when the car was stationary.

I had a PS3 that I used 99.99% of the time running Linux (e.g. for Cell development). When portal 2 came out I thought it might be fun to play, ... the startup had some updates that it needed to run... and bam, my Linux install was inaccessible. WTF.<p>But hey I got paid $10 for my trouble in a class action lawsuit.

There&#x27;s a lot of stuff like this that should be very illegal and include excessive fines and jail time to stop it from happening. Buying something and then having the manufacturer take features away is a major bait and switch in the best case. It&#x27;s fraud. Turning off cloud servers and abandoning hardware leaving it useless when it could be made useful if source code was released should be just as illegal. They need to start cracking down on these horrid business practices.

Previously:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41455273">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41455273</a><p>Actual letter: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;advocacy.consumerreports.org&#x2F;research&#x2F;group-letter-ftc-software-tethering&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;advocacy.consumerreports.org&#x2F;research&#x2F;group-letter-f...</a><p>(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41455726">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41455726</a>)

I had a bose sound bar, just a week outside of warranty, brick itself with a forced update. Surprisingly, bose replaced the sound bar when I contacted them for support..

Oh, this is just useless cloud (read “dream of perpetual revenue with additional “convenience services”) features from the era of IoT hype. Now things started integrating AI features which are more integrated into the whole system and needs more “cloud” access. Once the AI hype falls(either bubble bursting if glorious “auto-complete” marketed as novel thing or consolidated by few key uses similar to image processing, pharma etc) and these “AI” integrations are shut down as “unsustainable”, the devices will be also bricked.<p>Cloud(read IoT fever) at least can be mitigated by somehow mocking the thing the device is looking for, the unpredictable AI mocking is …

They need to force hardware makers to publish all the information needed to use the hardware with customer supplied software.<p>This does not have to be a release. But at a trigger point. EOL announcement, or on an update that removes previously available features, or after 2 years after the first sale of the device.<p>There should be zero exceptions. If a hardware provider can’t do this they should be forced a full refund of the device and any software components bought tied to said device.

Spotify Car Thing. Facebook Portal. I&#x27;ve been hosed the last few years by this (but at least got my money back from Spotify).

I think that everything that runs software should have an unlockable bootloader and sufficient hardware documentation for third parties to develop software. I&#x27;m not big on government mandates, but I might make an exception for this.

The recent Synology update removed Video Station and HEIC support from Photo Station. I&#x27;m annoyed that they can arbitrarily remove consumer focused functionality in an update like that. There has been quite a bit of grumbling in &#x2F;r&#x2F;synology about this.

RIP OG iPhone SE that was rendered useless by a growing iOS.

LG Smart TVs, for sure

I originally thought this might&#x2F;could be an US portion of the Stop Killing Games campaign - until I read the &quot;hardware&quot; part of the title.

Are they growing to crack down on Apple? Or are they the only ones allowed to make money by limiting software capabilities?

Given recent rulings by the US Supreme court, how much actual authority does the FTC have left?

I can’t help but this of my aging apple MacBook. I once had full functioning, non subscription versions of both windows office suite and Adobe photoshop and illustrator. Neither of those packages of software work now and the integral MacBook battery is swelling and a would be a total pain to replace.

Someone wrote a letter to the FTC?<p>Is this like some obscure government rule where the FTC can&#x27;t do something until they receive a letter in the mail? What is this world we live in? Are they not aware of what is happening in the world? Do all government agencies enforce their mandates by mail order?

Hello, HP!

Great news for anyone who owns a “Smart TV”

Can&#x27;t wait for Amazon to be held responsible for force-bricking Firesticks in order to drive new sales, alongside their paywalling of Ring devices, after not disclosing the multiple data breaches that occurred.

I wonder if a severe crisis that makes it difficult to source hardware (such as a global war) would unfuck this issue. People would need to scrounge and fix what they have and will be rightfully outraged that these devices aren&#x27;t truly &quot;theirs.&quot; Today nobody cares (by nobody I mean average users) because it&#x27;s trivial to just replace things.

cricut needs to be investigated for this.

Judging by the URL, the full name of the article is &quot;FTC pushed to crack down on companies that ruin hardware via software updates or annoying paywalls&quot;.<p>Regarding annoying paywalls, it&#x27;s ironic that the page says &quot;Checking your browser before accessing this site.&quot;, &quot;Please allow up to 5 seconds...&quot; and then keeps showing the wait sign indefinitely.<p>I guess Techdirt site could be a subject to FTC push?

Call me old fashioned but who needs the FTC when you can just not buy the thing (or sell it) if you don&#x27;t like it? Remove regulation and more competition will spring up to make every type of customer happy.