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Firmware Upgrades For Everything
eggoeater writes "Forbes Magazine has an article discussing how more portable electronics are not only suggesting firmware upgrades, but requiring them in order to get all the features! Apparently the new Lyra A/V Jukebox will sometimes display a message stating that 'this feature will be available in future upgrades.' In addition, the article states that some patches are difficult and dangerous depending on the component. Some cell phone patches require a proprietary cable ($25) that will then wipe out your phone book. This raises concerns over alienating users that aren't tech-savvy and how this could affect perceptions of portable electronics as a whole."
The concept is called time to market, the price you pay is quality. This is what happens when a society values profits over sustainability. The more faceless, the less accountable. One million marketers can't be wrong. Dude, where's my shares?
Yes, I am cynical.
Let's start the discussion by raising the concern that if the majority of users aren't tech savvy and society is dominated by technology, doesn't this sound like a new dark age? History has shown that when the peasant mass is uneducated, the church and monarchy rule. Are we not heading in this direction again? Technology being the new "power"? How long until the masses catch up and stop being screwed?
I wouldn't have much of a problem with this if it weren't for the fact that updates tend to break stuff as often as it fixes them.
Even mobo manufactures say to upgrade only if the update fixes a specific problem you are having.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
If this culture develops in this industry, then it will be easy for big business to force customers to accept 'improvements' that they would rather be without.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
Sure it's dangerous, sure it can screw up your brand new DVD Player or home theatre system, so why not take it to a professional? Competitive rates assured!
Or let the luddites live without the 'features'. Face it, that's why we became techies in the first place, to profit from everyone else's technophobia.
and maybe you would get it right without needing to "update/mess about with" every 3months
the consumer is not your beta tester
"This raises concerns over alienating users that aren't tech-savvy and how this could affect perceptions of portable electronics as a whole."
Frankly, if I'm being forced to pay $25 for a cable to do necessary upgrades, you're going to alienate me whether I'm tech savvy or not. Especially if the 'unavailable' features were advertised as part of the item in question.
I think that this is kind of sad... I like upgradable firmware- witness the iRiver line of products- and hate to see it misused to sell cables. If we could come up with a standard cable scheme for portable device to PC interfacing... oh, wait... it's called USB A to USB Mini-B. Now, if only more manufacturers would implement it.
#define DRM chmod 000
This is just crap, if they wanna do this they should lower the retail price, then charge the difference by feature in the firmware upgrades. Who's to say they will ever release the features you already paid for...why should they since they have your money already?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I don't know why anybody would seek a non-upgradable piece of hardware over an upgradable piece of hardware. New features through firmware updates should be quite welcome to everybody who can follow the simple precautions necessary to update.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
I don't trust a feature not included with a shipping version to ever arrive. It's it not there when they ship it, I don't believe them when they say it'll be available in a "downloadable patch"; usually, it appears first in the next major version of software, for which you have to pay - which means that they have every incentive to not make it available for free, because that feature then becomes an upgrade-motivating differentiator.
Likewise with firmware in consumer goods. I don't trust them - if it's not there when I buy, I suspect they'll ship it in a "deluxe" version before they let me upgrade my DVD player/blender/mp3 player to get the same feature.
You ship the product when marketing decides it needs to be shipped, not when it's done. You make all the required features exist so that the bullet points are covered in the specifications, even if they don't work right all the time. The fixes come later, in the order of the number of complalints.
It sucks, but that's the way it is. Your product is either first, or it needs to be 10 times better than the other guy's product.
My other first post is car post.
This generations "Feature Will Be Available in future firmware upgrades" is really starting to sound like last generations "The Check is in the mail".
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Apparently the new Lyra A/V Jukebox will sometimes display a message stating that 'this feature will be available in future upgrades.'
I think that this is happening because vendors have determined it is better, from a marketing stand-point, to got a half-done product first to market and finish it later than it is to bring a complete product where the competition already has gained a user-base.
Thankfully, this is more difficult other industries, like automobiles. But as electronics take over more of our lives, I would not be at all surprised to see this happen in relatively strange places. I can see: "If you would like your SVT Mustang to travel over 50 MPH, please downlaod the latest firmware from ford.com."
Meh, as user friendly as things are getting now-a-days, flashing is gonna be a matter of a message appearing on the screen that says "new bios downloaded, press yes to flash". Either that or just get your neighboorhood 8 year old to come and do it for you. Granted, this could open up a whole new can of worms for the industry as far as exploits/virii/trojans. I predict we will soon see Anti-Virus software for cellphones/pdas/ect at this rate.
They've decided to start charging in advance for vapour-ware?
person will not tolerate it. If you advertise a feature, and it doesn't work, it's only a matter of time before you are sued.
/. come from a tme in the computer era where you had to 'fiddle' with stuff to get it to work, IRQ conflicts spring to mine.
many of us on
When a feature in your blender won't work becasue of a bug, people will stop buying your blender. It should just work without the user knowing anything about the inner workings.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
3. Make enough money on Product so that they can stay in businness and produce product "V2" that actually does have features X, Y, and Z (or maybe just X and Y).
Hopefully that staves off 4 for a while.
Worked for TiVo, sort of.
My other first post is car post.
The lesson to all of us is to carefully research anything we buy to find out if we will need proprietary cables or if features aren't available 'yet'.
None of us are forced into these purchases, with the exception of gift items. And if you recieved a techie gift, do the research before opening the package-you can stil return it, and I just recently found myself wishing I had when I recieved an mp3 player for christmas.
Guffaws aside, companies should theoretically respect users more when people refuse to buy badly implemented products.
If my answers frighten you, stop asking scary questions.
Something tells me these firmware fixes will soon become mandatory when lax manufacturers decide that it easier to require a firmware update than design the product correctly in the first place. But I wonder how many of these firmware updating utilties will be OS-agnostic? I'd bet most will require Windows to fix the broken firmware of many new products.
Soon a new microwave oven will require Windows and an Internet connection. ARGH!
Are there any OSS projects or standards creation efforts for universal, OS-independent, product firmware updaters?
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
New features through firmware updates should be quite welcome to everybody who can follow the simple precautions necessary to update.
Except that the customer has in most cases already paid for these features. At that point, who is to say these "features" won't turn into vaporware.
Now I've found my telescope (Meade ETX-125AC) Autostar computer can be upgraded, but with a special cable for my purchasing pleasure. Hm.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I had this same problem with a couple of games. Most notably, Ray Man 3 for the Mac.
:-)
I bought the game for about $50 for my brother. However, it mostly works, if you can deal with the problematic sound bug, which freezes everything at random, bad camera control using the mouse, and the inability to properly set custom keys to stick, among other things....and don't get me started with the Macally Shock II game pad I can't seem to configure to work right for me! (though I think that's Macally's fault)
I'm not very happy with feral (http://www.feral.co.uk)
Halo is another one, where if you use the 1.0 version for mac, and get the health pack, your screen goes completely black for like 10 seconds. Those could be the crucial 10 seconds in which you could just die if the Covenant is chasing after you, and you just stepped in their path because you couldnt see where you are going. I think this has been fixed now, but it was an annoying thing through the game.
Cro-Mag Rally (another mac game) had similar problems on Mac OS X. I even e-mailed the developer and didn't get a very encouraging response. Can't remember what it was or the exact tone...(kind of hard to note the tone through e-mail)
Maybe my problem is that I'm on the mac trying to play games, but from the article this seems to be the trend. I can't remember what other games I've had this problem with but I've gotten into the habit of looking for updates for games as soon as I get them. It fustrates me when it takes a long time for updates to come along.
This is specially fustrating when some games sell at a higher price for a Mac version versus the PC version...
Thank you for reading my rant
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For example: I spent a day and a half trying to upgrade the firmware on an otherwise useless SMC "PCI" NIC, the SMC EZ Connect 802.11b 2602W v.1, not to be confused with the v.2 or v.3 models with completely different chipsets. I say "PCI" because the NIC is actually the 2632W v.1 PCMCIA NIC in a PLX "riser."
Thanks only to Jun Sun's mini-HOWTO and "unofficial" firmware caches on the Web, I was able to upgrade the station firmware. Unfortunately, this did not result in the features I needed.
If vendors begin requiring consumers to flash firmware regularly, it needs to come out of the "underground" and be explained by the vendors. I'd also like to see DOS boot-disk-based firmware upgrade tools, like Dell's BIOS flash disks. I didn't like turning to Windows to run SMC's update program. (Linux and DOS attempts failed with this particular NIC.)
Thanks to the openap-ct project's Linux floppy I was able to use prism2_srec to flash a different NIC, though.
Helevius
Overlooked in this is that when you connect your product to the 'net to download new firmware, the product could have the ability to be able to upload as well. Who knows what the firmware in your stereo, or TV may report back about your use?
Funny this should come up. I just spent the last day trying to wrestle with setting up a 54g bridge. If a promised feature doesn't work right out of the box, it should't be advertised on the box! First I went with d-link, because the box promised 108 mb speeds, using Super G. Only after I bought 2 of these bridges did I find on their Website in the small print that 108 speeds were not available until I downloaded the firmware upgrade, which was due out in the 3RD QUARTER of 2004!!! This seems like a pretty clear cut case of false advertising. I returned those items and bought 2 netgear 54g bridges, only to find out their was a flaw in the firmware and I needed to upgrade it. No problem, except that their upgrade utility for this bridge only works in Windows. This from a device that promises on the box thats it (and I quote) "works under any OS and any platform." I used one of my servers to run the upgrade and it fried the first one bridge. If this is the future of electronics, I'm very worried.
Consider this: most items that require firmware updates attach in some way to a PC, and get those updates through the PC.
What if there were some kind of a standardized firmware upgrade protocol (kind of like the windows automatic updater service-thingy) that kept track of your devices, notified you when updates were available, and flashed the updates for you?
End user no longer has to be very savvy, but rather just has to have the firmware updater software installed. Updater reaches out to product web services (provided by manufacturers) for each product it is aware of, and checks for updates, and downloads 'em.
Network devices (such as wireless routers) could find their own manufacturer, and update themselves (or not, of course, depending on user prefs)
Sounds like vaporware has moved from the soft relm to the hard relm. If the missing "feature" was advertized then I think there's a case for a lawsuit. Then again, I bought my PDA partly on the strength of a feature that is missing -- with no firmware upgrade available. Unless there's a class action, I'm screwed and they know it. But unless there's a fix, I'll never buy their crap again. If what this article says is true, then it's a short-term trend that will get the companies long-term problems.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
They could charge extra for updates.
RCA, makers of LYRA, has done worse though they advertised mp3Pro compatibility on their RD1080 but it did not use the psycoaudio data in playback (therefor using mp3Pro was useless). Close to a year later a firmware support the advertised fearture was released.
Although firmware upgrades could be a very positive thing for users, providing ways to customise and improve a device, they're also open to abuse. Apart from being a means to ship an inferior product earlier, this opens up an opportunity to control the consumer by messing with the normal product purchasing process. By doing this, the traditional rules of competition can be blurred enough for a company to succeed where it otherwise would not have.
The software industry has featured this idea for a while in a few forms: you buy the software, but then you don't really own it because you are just licenced to use it. Or you buy the software, but have to apply a critical update that comes with a licence change that changes it into something you wouldn't have purchased in the first place. Now, the hardware manufacturers can get in on the act, throwing the old rule book out the window. Companies will do anything to get ahead if they think they can get away with it. They're not people and have no sense of wrong or right - just a sense of profit or loss.
One of the things that people need to realize is that simple handheld pieces of electronics are getting more and more complex in their features and functions. And as they do this they will start to require just as much maintenance and patchwork as a regular desktop computer does. True, knowledge is power, and I watch all the time as my parents get frustrated with technology, but if you take it slow, read the help files and pay attention, people would be a lot better off. Things like AOL and Microsoft make people dumb, they need to realize that not all computer processes are automated and that sometimes things take some investigation. :)
The messiah has spoken, now we must follow.
t
Whether it's necessary or not, the manufacturers should make it easier. I own a Nokia 3560 cell phone and have been having problems with it shutting down randomly on it's own.
After searching newsgroups and web sites, I came to find out that it's a somewhat common problem that may or may not be fixed with a firmware upgrade. I decided that I'd like to give it a try and prepared to backup my phone only to find that I couldn't get the upgrade anywhere on my own. A check on Nokia's site shows that I can either send it in to them at my own expense or call them and try to use a local authorized dealer. Not wanting to lose the phone for 10 days and pay shipping, I called and got two locations here in Austin. I called the first who informed me that they had the firmware, but didn't have the special cable required. The second told me flatly that they couldn't do it.
So, why are these two places listed with Nokia if they won't perform the service and what the hell is the deal with needing a special cable? Why can't I just transfer the firmware upgrade to my phone via IR or bluetooth, run it and have it restart and apply the upgrade?
After all this, I've decided to live with the problem. Not very satisfying at all.
- I bought a 4x DVD burner less than a year ago and had to firmware flash it. I can get an 8x now for less.
- Firmware flashing an 802.11g laptop wireless card went wrong and broke wireless networking on my laptop. As I hadn't set a system restore point, I had to re-install windows.
- I rushed out and bought SuSE Linux 9.0 for AMD64 as soon as it came out. Had to wait months for drivers to support my SATA drives and the onboard ALN on my MoBo.
I'm done.Video jukeboxes... I'll wait until trailer-park mamas are trampling each other at Walmart to get the $35 Christmas special model made by Kwok-tek or some other manufacturer you never heard of before.
- Greg
Start a happiness pandemic
its a flaw NOT a feature. User-hostile features like DRM and the miriad, complicated upgrade schemes, authentication and registration hurdles will either have to dramatically improve (ie benift the user directly) or go away.
Quack, quack.
This is hardware in software style and i dont like it, not one bit. Hardware have up until pretty recently been fairly free from these kinds of problems. If i buy a product i assume its tested and works. If it dont work i just return it and i wont spend any time fixing something that was broken when i bought it. I dont like to become an engineer on the behalf of the company that got my money.
Software has been sold with insane conditions that people take the responsibility off of the manufacturer but that is because software has been treated as art and not as real products. Hardware on the other hand do not have those conditions so when you buy something and it doesnt work, return it. The only way to remedy this problem is if enough people stay away from companies following the path of almost ready hardware. If its broke, they should fix it, not us.
HTTP/1.1 400
This is an interesting trend.
If you buy something at a store in cash, the can put those 'by opening this you agree' contracts on them, but those don't mean much and they still can't identify you.
By making you get an update they can collect information on you, which has dollar value, and more importantly, get you to click and EULA on the firmware which extends to other things as well as saying that it can be ammended at any time and remain binding.
This is creeping into everything. I just sent away for my credit reports today. If you get your credit report from a credit agency through the web, they make you click an agreement which covers all sorts of things in addition to making you waive certain rights under the FCRA in some cases, as well as asking for all sorts of information in order to give it to you which is not required. If you send for it by mail, you only have to give the information required by law and you waive no rights.
If you make enough noise, you can probably get them to send you the update in the mail, but you still must identify yourself to them and the effort is not worth it.
The article doesn't mention it, but it's not about time to market, or cutting corners or anything. They want to 1) identify the customer 2) get them to enter into some sort of agreement.
As a techy I agree with you in concept but no matter what we do we are NEVER going to change Joe Sixpack. This is where it falls on the software engineers and the hardware engineers to design better. As our technology becomes more complicated (and more heavily depended upon) it should become more transparent, not require more unnecessary technical reading for the user.
The true beauty of technology should be judged in its apparent simplicity.
Quack, quack.
1) Announce Product with features X, Y and Z
2) Ship Product with feature X
3) ???
4) Go bankrupt.
Nope. Look at this way. Product is loss leader, cable and other bits to upgrade are Profit.
Go on, doubt me, I dare you.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Something I learned a long time ago. Don't EVER make a purchase you'd find useless if a promised future feature/accessory/upgrade doesn't actually happen! I've seen companies promise accessories down the road that don't actually happen. Features that should only require a firmware upgrade turn out not to be possible without a hardware change. My personal favorite for a while not has been HDTV upgradable TVs - a couple of years after you buy that new TV, are you SURE that company would be happy developing new accessories for "last years model" or do you think they'd MUCH
rather sell you this years model... Are you sure that new DRM standards aren't going to cripple the possibility of that future accessory upgrade you were promised?
The Danger Hiptop (T-Mobile Sidekick) has a particularly good way of doing updates. Updates are downloaded over-the air (using the GPRS connection) in the background. Because the device is always-on, a 2 megabyte update can be recieved over an otherwise slow GPRS connection without disrupting the user. When the update is finished downloading, the user is prompted and can choose to apply the upgrade or wait until later. If they choose to install, the update is verified (signed hash) and installed, and the device reboots. All data is left intact.
I guess it depends on how you define "Evil." If by evil you mean they are willing to screw many individuals for their own profit, then most corporations are indeed evil. If you mean they are willing to use superior market share to destroy competition (thus hurting "consumers," who are really just individuals), then some are evil (I'm not convinced most, just a fairly large number).
/.. Simply because someone holds an opinion different from yours does not make them wrong; nor does your naive analysis of the corporate economy of America make you wrong. (Our economy is Capitalist like the Soviet Union was Communist-- that is, in name only.)
If by evil you mean allow others to die so they can profit, then a slightly smaller number are evil.
The point is, there is some definition of "evil" for which a lot (if not most) corporations are evil.
My definition is simple: if a corporation is willing to harm others in its pursuit of profit, it is evil. By this definition, quite a few are evil. Since this is condoned (and encouraged!) by our government, it seems to get worse.
Now, you can argue that corporations don't make these decisions, individuals do, but that is simply prevarication. Groups of people will do things indivduals will not; this makes the group culpable. (Now, defining the individuals within the group may be difficult.)
So how do you as an individual get around this? Easy, instead of rushing in to buy something and then whining about it later, read some objective reviews of the products you buy, talk to people (either in the real world or online) about them, and lastly take all the advertising you see with a grain of salt.
This is excellent advice, and I certainly agree with it; but that doesn't change the economic reality that sometimes, there is only Hobson's Choice, at best. In some areas, if you want phone service, you must use the single provider in your area. This is just one example among many.
Further, consider how people have been reduced to "consumers." Between that and, "worker," that is our role in society-- to work, and to consume. Who profits most from this? I'll bet you dollars to donuts (Mmmmm.... Krispie Kreme....) it isn't the individual.
I don't take exception to your arguments. I take exception to the reference to the "uninformed opinions" so popluar here on
Just because you are right about unthinking consumerism driving shoddy workmanship in the electronic gadgets sector does not negate the evil nature of many corporations. Enron did not happen in a void.
Microsoft is to software what Budweiser is to beer.
I don't think that the general public wants to be lied and cheated. They want features, yes, but they want to actually get those features. The current "it's normal and expected to get shafted" situation is not normal, and not what that public was asking for.
In fact, it's the textbook study of why society needs laws, and why they have to be applied. Because otherwise what happens is that the crooks create a pressure on everyone else to be a crook too.
E.g., if you let some merchants sell contraband or counterfeit goods, it will create a pressure on the other merchants to start selling contraband or counterfeit too. Otherwise their prices won't be competitive. So everyone starts trying to outdo the others in how much of their merchandise is from dubious sources.
The same happens here. Once a company is allowed to cut costs by shipping non-functional products, it just puts a pressure on everyone else to do the same thing. Because otherwise someone who actually spends the time to finish and thoroughly debug a product, can't compete with the snake oil peddlers on either price or time to market. So everyone starts trying to outdo the others on cutting down quality.
That kind of thing doesn't go away by itself. Never did, never will. You need a legal system to stop it.
And saying that everyone needs to waste countless hours of their life trying to avoid getting screwed is, if you'll pardon my saying so, completely idiotic. It's as idiotic as saying that your only recourse to spam should be sorting your mails yourself by hand.
There are laws and courts of law for this kind of thing. If I sell you a house which isn't even built yet, you'd sue the pants off me. If I sell you a car, except what I can give you is just two wheels and a spoiler, you'd sue the pants of me. No "EULA" will let me say it's OK to shaft you, in any other industry.
It's time the same applied to software too. (Yes, including firmware.)
Because this kind of generalized thievery and snake oil peddling is already too high a cost for society as a whole. Not only hundred billions of dollars per year are lost to basically legalized scamming in this industry. We're also talking billions of hours total shaved off people's lives, where they have to work around bugs or to read reviews to make sure their new product will even work at all.
Those hours by themselves are too high a cost.
A murderer can be put to death for... what? Shortening someone's life by, say, 20 years? That's approximately 20 * 365 * 24 = 175,200 hours.
Well, these scammers cost society as a whole a thousand times more hours off everyone's lives. Each year.
Now I'm not asking to actually give those marketroids a death by firing squad. But throwing some of them in state jails would be a damn good start.
Either way, again: history has shown again and again that this kind of thing needs laws. And it needs them actually applied.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
- Always make the original firmware / bios available. Keep in in some form of ROM if possible.
- Always permit a fallback to the original firmware / bios (because the original should be available, as noted above). You almost need a pin or switch to do it, similar to the dip switch on some motherboards which restored default settings. Ideally, it would be nice to see a firmware loader in ROM, which could then manage and select among different firmware versions on a device, accessed through some key sequence, available for a second or two on power-up.
- No extra tools or hardware should be required. I don't even have a floppy drive hooked up anymore.
- No special operating system should be required (Windows-only firmware upgrades, anyone?). For firmware upgrades to be robust enough to make me feel all warm and fuzzy, all that should matter is getting the new firmware file into the device, over an industry-standard protocol, and you then automatically load the new firmware the next time you boot (including a check for corruption in the firmware upgrade file).
- User data and settings should be maintained through the upgrades. If new settings are available / old options are removed, then it is the manufacturers job to avoid screwing things up, not the device owners job to reset / reload everything.
Oughta cover it. In a perfect world.Slashdot - the place where you can look like a genius by restating the obvious
Not if someone was just ignorant and thought "Oh that looks pretty, maybe it will work well".
However, advertising that a product does X Y and Z, when it only does X is a form of what we call "Fraud" specifically "False Advertising" that *is* a crime most places.
I do however agree that companies get blamed more than they should because more often than not problems people have with products are from assumptions they've made about the product without investigating to see if their assumptions prove true.
Think about it... user buys product now, with a hot new feature promised within a short time via firmware download.
... but the software running on the computer can disable it, so you can't get a perfect digital copy of that music file you're playing.
... Whenever a company does something like this, dollars are involved....
e -people-dependant-on-them's worth.... ..."You can NOT leave the magic!"
Now, three months later, the download that enables that feature comes out, but lo and behold - the download also includes a bunch of "features" you don't want - such as DRM or embedded advertising.
It's happened before... my sound card (A SB Audigy) has a digital 5.1 output
Or, take the case of ReplayTV - most people don't know or realize this, but the OS in the ReplayTV can be set up to display advertising on the pause screen - it was only used once IIRC, but there's nothing saying that the owners of ReplayTV can't do it again. The ReplayTV is particularly nasty in this since the files that run the ReplayOS are in fact digitally signed so you can't "tinker" with the operating system.
What am I afraid of? The general public is getting used to paying monthly fees to have things that were previously "free" - Cable TV, for example. Radio will probably end up going the same route - check out XM and Sirius Radio. Now, imagine if you bought a hardware device - for example a PDA. Right now, I can go to Best Buy and drop a few dollars on a Palm Tungsten something-or-other... and it's _mine._ I don't have to pay Palm one red cent over that initial purchase I made if I don't want to.
Now imagine 10 years from now - you go to Best Buy to pick up that PDA. But now, instead of paying a few hundred dollars once for a Palm Pilot, you now have to pay to purchase the unit, PLUS subscribe to some sort of subscription service if you want your PDA to, for example, connect to your PC.
Already the world of personal gadgetry is heading this way. Check out the "Get it now!" service from everyone's favorite cellphone carrier. You have to pay to download a game, PLUS you have to pay a monthly fee (if the author of the game wants you to) - and many cell phones now have the ability for the carrier to "turn off" certain features on various cell phones.
The same thing goes for my ReplayTV - two exact same models hardware-wise - the exact same software inside! Yet, on the newer "5500" series units, two features (commecial skip and Internet Video Sharing) are disabled. One option bit in the internal "registry" turns these features off. Now, this was in response to a settlement with Hollywood, but what is to prevent hardware manufacturers from doing the same thing for profit? Or, charging you a monthly fee to enable certain features - if you don't pay, the features are disabled! It's not like a service is being provided, since all you are paying for is a little "command" to be echoed to your device to enable whatever it is you're doing - similar to cable boxes of old that could have their IR receivers disabled by the cable company if you weren't renting a remote from them - so you couldn't use any universal remotes for free.
The long and the short of it
Just my pissing-and-moaning-about-companies-trying-to-mak
-RickTheWizKid