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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."
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.
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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.
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.
a blond Customer Service Lady or these guys ...
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.
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.
This device is not a garage door opener. It's an add-on for one, which connects it to the internet so you can check on the status of your door from a phone app (in case you're worried you forgot to close it).
The company disabled the cloud access to this guy's device, rendering it completely useless for the only thing it's good for. The customer couldn't get remote access working anyway, but that's the only thing that device is for! So instead of fixing his issue, they locked him out of using his own device (maybe some friend could have gotten it working for him), all because he posted a bad review. If you can't see why this is wrong on many levels, I can't help you.
If you're going to sell to the public you'd better thicken your skin a bit. Fighting a tantrum with your own tantrum is childish, and will cost this guy some business.
Bullshit. The device was bricked. The device is utterly unusable without the cloud account that it's linked to, so that's no different than "bricking".
No, making something that someone paid for unusable, after the sale, is NOT justified, ever, for anything. If you want to decline to provide further support because of abusive language, that's fine, even if that means they can't figure out how to get it working on their own, but that's very different from bricking it, which is utterly spiteful.
No, making something that someone paid for unusable, after the sale, is NOT justified, ever, for anything.
Uh, Samsung Note 7?
-- I have a private email server in my basement.