(I say this as I am currently charging a cheap doorbell camera I bought, so that I can start dumping data from it and reverse engineer its protocol, solely so that I can lock it down to my local network...We needed something at the time, or I would have bought something more expensive that had an open protocol...)
That would be a regression in terms of consumer rights, in my opinion. I don’t see why the EU shouldn’t legislate such that the right to control owned hardware becomes fundamental.
Although I think it's fair that the company not have to deal with a defect that is almost certainly caused by something you do to your device. Like, strawman, but early iPhones sometimes encountered issues while doing an untethered jailbreak, or people would install tweaks that were less than stable (even sometimes on relatives' or friends' phones), then they would walk into an Apple Store with weird behavior and expect the fix to be free. That shouldn't be covered by warranty.
Why should you have a right to operate the device in a dangerous way that the manufacturer engineered to prevent?
You may be happy to injure yourself and to disclaim your right to warranty but the manufacturer could suffer immense reputational damage if, say, your hacking the firmware of their humanoid robot results in it tearing off your head.
Those people rightfully were like why can’t we keep it and the company was like we have to run the services to manage it. Why not just open up the hardware and let it continue being used? Well if you put the wrong software and it ends up killing the person, the hardware company can be held liable.
Made me realize my dream of having an open-source car is never going to happen.
That is to a certain point. If deemed misuse would be harm against other people or circumvent export control. You may also restrict, who is allowed to do it. However, if software is the only protection against dual-use, tler might have a general problem.
But at the same time, risk profiles between different tools are different, and it is common to have special rules for some of them. Eg. guns already do.
While we might need to stop an unlicensed SW engineer to accidentally or purposely turn your housekeeping robot into a killer robot, the risk of them messing up their fridge is lower. Yes, your food could spoil and kill you, but your fridge could face a power cut and do the same.
So establish which devices have a higher risk and limit changes to those with more expertise — if it means licensed engineers, so be it.
The problem with allowing easy shell access is that any arbitrary command execution would be used by exploits, too. There are also a lot of social engineering schemes that bait users into running commands on devices. We don’t think about these risks as engineers, but you wouldn’t believe how many people will follow instructions to open something like the Chrome developer console and paste code blocks into it because some website told them to.
So a secure device is also a locked down device. Getting a shell is a vulnerability because it’s the avenue that exploits would use.
That’s why I’d be in favor of a one-way developer mode, which provided shell access but printed a big unavoidable warning screen in the boot loader.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. Asking people to give up their warrant isn’t legal, generally, so outside of very specific circumstances you have to cover warranty claims on the device, too. I have worked at companies that tried to offer some developer access like this, and the number of people abusing customer service because they got in over their heads with modifications and wanted a fresh unit or want CS to support their mods would make you face palm. So the compromises end up being things like only allowing ephemeral mods that get wiped at each reboot and other default-safe behaviors, but that doesn’t make people happy either.
I agree some big obvious scare message is good but actually voiding the warranty restricts user freedom.
Only thing is, if the company releases software updates to fix issues, they should by no means be expected/required to backport bug fixes to older versions just so that compromised devices can. There are certain warranty claims where the issues would be solved via software update, but thus are unavailable to people who are insistent on staying on a rootable version of the firmware.
At some point in the software as a service world (driven by web apps), we started accepting that a manufacturer can break the software we use (change it so it does not have the same features or even just UX we are used to), and is now mandated to provide security maintence but can still do that by simply forcing a customer to their new version.
I understand the economics of this, but this is why I loved LTS releases and their commitment to backport security vulnerability fixes.
Hopefully with GenAI, companies sprout that will support this for consumers too!
> You would take our sticks
Did you just completely ignore the entire point of my comment where I said I advocate giving people developer access?
Have all the sticks you want, but don’t come crying to the company if you hurt yourself.
No deal.