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IoT Garage Door Opener Maker Bricks Customer's Product After Bad Review (arstechnica.com)
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Denis Grisak, the man behind the Internet-connected garage opener Garadget, is having a very bad week. Grisak and his Colorado-based company SoftComplex launched Garadget, a device built using Wi-Fi-based cloud connectivity from Particle, on Indiegogo earlier this year, hitting 209 percent of his launch goal in February. But this week, his response to an unhappy customer has gotten Garadget a totally different sort of attention. On April 1, a customer who purchased Garadget on Amazon using the name R. Martin reported problems with the iPhone application that controls Garadget. He left an angry comment on the Garadget community board: "Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iPhone app, powered phone off/on - wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here..." Shortly afterward, not having gotten a response, Martin left a 1-star review of Garadget on Amazon: "Junk - DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY - iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products." Grisak then responded by bricking Martin's product remotely, posting on the support forum: "Martin, The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. I'm happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I'm not going to tolerate any tantrums. At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036... will be denied server connection."
When someone posted details about upcoming firmware online.
Did the guy agree that his device can be disabled at any time and the server side service is not a given?
. . . . . . reminding us that those buying IoT devices don't own anything useful, and that your f**cking GARAGE DOOR OPENER could be dependent not only on Internet connectivity but the continued willingness of a service provider (Garage Door Operation As a Service--GDOAAS?) to provide service, at whatever cost they deem fit. I'll leave my light bulbs, refrigerator, door locks, garage door opener, and thermostat off the Internet, thank you very much.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Other than a method to allow a hacker unauthorized access to your home, why on god's green earth would you need a wifi powered garage door opener *for your phone*, when the tried and true RF based ones have been around for decades?
i'm 34; am i too old to understand why people would want clownshit crazy things like this?
IOT is not great. The idea that billions of tiny insecure computers are all connected to the same public internet is absurd. Not to mention, everything is controlled through "the cloud" and service for a piece of hardware you bought could be terminated at any time.
Sometimes the customer is wrong
Sometimes a company should hire a blond Customer Service Lady that is unfailingly polite.
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
Won't buy anything that relies on an app for full functionality. These fly by night startups have a good chance of either going out of business or abandoning old models within a year or two. Stuff for my house needs to last 10 years bare minimum, ideally with zero fiddling, re-configuring, firmware upgrading, or other jack-assery.
Light switches fit that bill just great, so far apps don't have anything remotely close to that functionality to maintenance ratio.
The spelling is adequate for its intended porpoise.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
IoT should be about open protocols and services. Devices that can only connect to their proprietary servers should be called "AOL of things" instead.
Surely smart IoT device makers wouldn't eventually discontinue the service, like, oh, say, Plays For Sure did. Or Zune.
But then there are multiple security issues too. Including a hacker getting code into a device in your home, thus getting a beach head, no mater how well your firewall is configured.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Sometimes the customer is angry because their product does indeed not work, and doesn't get a timely resolution from the manufacturer.
Sometimes both people are assholoes.
FWIW, I'm not going to buy an IoT garage door opener that can be turned off at a whim of the manufacturer.
Internet of Tantrums.
My girlfriend had this opinion when running a coffee stand in a shopping centre. If a customer complained there would be one chance to remake the coffee. If they complained again they got there few dollars back along with a "We can't make a coffee to suit you. Go find someone who can and don't come back. We won't do any better tomorrow and we have other customers to serve".
Difference is, a good quality high volume low cost product that people line up for and sells in the thousands per day allows you to tell a few customers to go screw themselves. An expensive low-volume emerging product still heavily reliant on word of mouth does not.
The customer is always right.
That depends. The general public are assholes, and are very wrong very regularly. Walmart will regularly escort unruly customers out the door and politely request they never return, or at least recommend that they do "shop at Target from now on" when the customer suggests that's what they will do. Because they can afford to lose a customer or two and negative reviews aren't likely to have a huge impact on the company.
Now a small start up that has one product? You better be down your your knees servicing every customer that comes through the door, no matter what they do or say. Especially when your one product isn't that novel and will be copied by 15 companies within the year. (I mean, I didn't read the article, but what they describe in the summary sounds exactly like what one of the big garage door opener manufacturers built already)
ONLY apps can app apps, NOT LUDDITE software!
Apps!
a blond Customer Service Lady or these guys ...
This kind of retaliation is no different from a cellphone service provider jamming your RF signal. The FCC (if we still had one) should step in and either fine the manufacturer for retaliatory misbehavior, or punitively shut down their internet access for a nominal period (at least a week) for abusing the privilege of being online.
Doing this periodically would send a really constructive message to many others who routinely abuse others on the net, be they bad businesses or just trolls. Access to the net is a privilege, not a right.
Maybe, but the way you handle that is not by cutting of your nose to spite your face. All any other potential customer is gonna see is an unhinged asshole is the public face of the company.
There was another one like this recently... a ham radio software maker. The software "Ham Radio Deluxe" was rendered useless through an authentication server if the customer left a bad review. Since ham radio call signs were used as the product key, they simply banned a call sign in their server.
No matter who dies it- it's very bad karma.
Another consultant who stuck it out.
"We are the Priests, of the Temples of Syrinx..."
Even if the customer is legitimately throwing a tantrum, there are still better and worse ways of responding. The company in this case could have continued trying to help in the hopes of fixing the problem and getting the guy to change his review. Or it could have been polite about offering a refund, waiving restocking fees, etc. Throwing its own tantrum in response to a customer tantrum is neither productive nor likely to generate good publicity. Instead, it's likely to make people think the customer may have been on to something with his complaints about poor support.
There's no point in questioning authority if you aren't going to listen to the answers.
I haven't figured out what law yet, but I get the feeling that blocking all functionality of a customer's electronic device out of spite, and specifically a device for access control to a dwelling, might not have been a legal act. There might be penalties under civil or criminal law.
I'd cut more slack for an Open Source developer who simply refused to help the user because of abusive language, since that developer isn't being paid and the user didn't pay anyone for the software or service. But to lock out a paid customer...
Bruce Perens.
Screw up a firmware update resulting in a device that can not be recovered (short of using jtag or something similar), that is a bricked device.
Removing access to a critical part of a service for a product you own, just results in a useless product, but it is not bricked.
I came, I conquered, I coredumped
Heh. When I replaced the old, malfunctioning opener on my shop I went with a unit that's capable of being connected to the Internet (Liftmaster "MyQ" technology) but I didn't even use the components of the system designed for this purpose. Instead I continued to use a Genie trigger and doorbell button to activate the door from inside the shop.
We had a garage door problem on a different door and needed to call a service tech in to resolve it quickly. When he saw how I'd rigged my Liftmaster he literally said, "you can do that?!" Apparently Liftmaster has been in the habit of not disclosing that the doors can be operated without the MyQ stuff.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
Yes. Refusing to do business with someone for reasons outside of the various protected classes is a choice a business can make. In a lot of cases that's a bad choice since your competitors who don't do that will have a bigger market of potential buyers. However, sometimes a customer can be unprofitable and it might make sense. You'll note that land lords do this all the time, as do credit card companies - though they do have some clear not-generic-business reasons. Some restaurants will often refuse service to people who don't meet a dress code. Many stores will refuse to do business with someone who is abusive to their staff. And so on.
However, destroying the product that you have already sold to someone is an entirely different matter. That really should be obvious.
If the seller is simply denying access to a server, that's legal unless specified otherwise. That's the problem with buying something that requires somebody else's servers to work.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
far too easy to spend money and have it be useless
It's cruel to make porpoises have to use a garage door remote. They don't even have fingers to use the phone app.
So they need to use a flipper phone?
You have the right to remain sentient. If you give up the right to remain sentient, you will be elected to public office
The whole point of this thing (as I understand it) is to give you access to your garage door from far away, over the internet. Having a locally-connected networked device that can't access the internet would make this impossible.
I agree that giving vendors access to your devices through some cloud interface is very dangerous, but I'm not sure what the alternative is unless you're going to roll your own.
Come back one year!
First, people are misusing the term "bricking" in this context but I understand why. One COULD say they EFFECTIVELY bricked the device because the idiot (pardon my French) blocked the IoT Mac Address/ID of the device but technically the device wasn't actually bricked. It was effectively bricked by in fact being blocked from the required server for to have a chance of working (not that it was from the report).
Now that constitutes removing the primary function advertised/sold to the customer which legally he doesn't have the right to do unless: 1. The customer has been fully refunded + any damage caused in using his product. 2. The customer is committing acts that harm the functionality of the devices for others. 3. The customer has been proven a public threat through use of the services (basically a superset of 2). This business is probably sunk and will harm (and this is perhaps a good thing) the IoT business sector in general because people are finally becoming aware what installing IoT (I like to pronounce "idiot") devices for security in their homes; The provider of the 3rd party server could lock them out, let others in, all sorts of stuff. But I digress.
The customer can sue the manufacturer/service provider because he withdrew the core component before refunding him. That is a classic breach of contract. This business is probably finished because the owner has not only shown poor judgement, lack of legal knowledge and a serious emotional impulse control problem, but in addition to all this, a lawsuit could well bankrupt him. And the evidence is on the Internet for all to see. (and he even admitted it on the Internet...)
"Imagination is more important than knowledge" - Einstein
... for reminding everyone not to buy things that require cloud access to be useful.
It's about time we get some legislations which protect customers from companies stopping services or going out of business and thereby "bricking" a product you bought.
They'd have to deposit sourcecode, patches, server installs etc. in some trust which then has to release these things to customers.
Crivens! I kicked meself in me own heid!