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:
... Show more...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 exposรฉ 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.
Would you allow a stranger to drive a camera-equipped computer around your living room? You might have already done so without even realizing it.
The Beginning: A Curious Experiment
It all started innocently enough.
Harishankar (Small World)
Pottery by Osa
in reply to Pottery by Osa • • •Here is the original #clay. We found it in a construction site in Venice, just south of us. They were digging a retention pond beside a new road. The construction is now complete and the pond is filled with water, but for a moment the site was kind of like a playground for fossil hunters and clay diggers.
I've had a pretty difficult time working with this clay and incorporating it into my work, so I'm glad it could successfully serve another purpose. #wildclay #Florida
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LAUREN, Jill, MyrddinEmerys โ๏ธ๐น๐ท, Bill Minarik and The Lady (La Donna) reshared this.
LAUREN
in reply to Pottery by Osa • • •Challis2070
in reply to Pottery by Osa • • •Billy Smith
in reply to Pottery by Osa • • •Might be worth chatting with Jane Sidell and Fiona Haughey, as their work on Neolithic pottery techniques on the Thames claybeds would match with this. ๐
You can find Jane Sidell iva CoLAT:
colat.org.uk/about-us/
๐
About Us - CoLAT
ld_elliot (CoLAT)