This must be one of the very first video games I ever played. /1
This is a valuable lesson for any manufacturer: never awaken the nerd sleeping inside your customer, because his wrath shall be terrible.
In this case the warning was quite literal.
The company annoyed a buyer enough to push him into full blown nerd mode. He tore the product apart, reverse engineered every part, and then published a step by step guide showing exactly how to disable "kill switch" that prevented the use of the product without the vendor spying on the user.
What started as a minor grievance became a public, technical exposé that left the maker exposed and embarrassed.
Moral of the story: underestimate your users at your own peril.
The Day My Smart Vacuum Turned Against Me
Update: This post seems to have struck a nerve and went very wide. As I will not be able to answer every comment, I want to add a few points:
- The linked article was not written by me. It came to me on a different channel (Discord). I only wrote the post on Mastodon.
- The top image in the article looks AI generated. It is no a good image, but in my view less irritating than an advertisement (which is far more common).
- Some people suggest the article itself is AI generated. I don't think this is the case. I wouldn't rule out he author wrote the text in a different language and used AI for translation assistance.
- The claims in the article are not fully backed by the linked repo, but the general statement is correct and IMHO important.
#sustainability
