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DJI Spark Owners Must Update Firmware By September, Or Their Machines Will Be Bricked (suasnews.com)
garymortimer shares a report from sUAS News: News has arrived of a mandatory firmware update from DJI. Owners of DJI's latest and smallest quadcopter must update their firmware by September the 1st or their machines will automatically ground themselves. The Firmware update apparently is to stop in flight shutdowns that have been occurring. So no bad thing to fix, a safety issue. Perhaps questionable is DJI's ability to brick other peoples property if required. The "Kill Switch" option is already causing consternation in user groups.
SaaS is a super dangerous concept that he majority of computer users have no idea of what's going to happen.
1 - Consolidation of services from standard capitalism. (I'm not arguing against capitalism.) As far as I can tell in my reading of history and experiences in life, all economies eventually end up as monopolies because users prefer simplicity.
2 - You don't own your products.
3 - What happens when the company goes out of business? We're basically banking our entire ownership of media on one thing. Either the owners of our current products will NEVER GO OUT OF BUSINESS (yeah, we're all using AOL--the last big tech company--right?) . Or 2), that somehow, through the "goodness of their hearts" all businesses will magically assume they might go out of business and have in their contract that your content must be transfered over. Except when they declare bankrupcy... what happens then? And what happens if people don't want to RUN the servers anymore? (Think of 90% of great FPS games from the 90's and 2000's that need dedicated, proprietary servers that were shut down.)
The ONLY thing that can save us is either moving away from SaaS, or, a law (good luck!) that stipulates that user content must be storable on the user's machine if no equivalent service is instantiated by the next company. And what if the next company has your stuff... but doesn't give a shit about your privacy and dumps adware into the old products? It's not like any company took someone else's products and bundled adware with it... ::cough::sourceforge::cough::
We are heading for a disaster and nobody even realizes it. What happens when we hit the next major recession / tech bubble burst? It's not like we're living in an era of super-hyper-valuation of unicorn startups with no viable income strategy yet. .. Oh... shit.
What is the alternative? The DJI drones are a generation ahead of anything else on the market ... and with an 85-90% market share, they have enough revenue to extend their lead.
Disclaimer: I have a DJI Mavic Pro. It is very nice.
DJI sucks. They're like a crappy Chinese GoPro knock off. You can buy kits from just about anywhere and get a much better copter for the same amount of money.
The hacking community have been pulling apart DJI drone software and firmwares for a while now. And the more they learn, the worst it gets. For example both the iOS and Android versions of the DJI GO 4 app have built in hot patch functionality (Tencent Tinker / JSPatch), then enables DJI to make unrestricted app modifications outside of the users control. This is in direct violation of app developer policies on both platforms. And after the community found out, DJI has been scrambling hard to avoid getting their apps banned. It is also speculated this is one of the primary reasons why DJI drones recently was banned from US military usage.