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Jibo, the $899 'Social Robot', Tells Owners in Farewell Address That Its VC Overlords Have Remote-Killswitched It (boingboing.net)
Reader AmiMoJo writes: Jibo was a "social robot" startup that burned through $76 million in venture capital and crowdfunding before having its assets were sold to SQN Venture Partners late last year. Earlier this week, reporter Dylan J Martin tweeted a video of a $899 Jibo robot bidding its owner farewell, announcing that the new owners of his servers were planning to killswitch it; the robot thanked him "very very much" for having it around, and asked that "someday, when robots are more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said 'hello.'" Then, the Jibo performed a melancholy dance.
This JIBO just looks like an animated Alexa, that piece of hardware only stupid people buy.
It really is an internet of shit. Not everything needs to be connected to "the cloud". I actively avoid cloud based devices because I cant truly own them. Why would anyone spend close to $1k on something that could stop working at any time?
Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.
Earlier, makers of appliances had to build their systems to last just long enough to make it through warranty, which is a gamble. The item may fail too early or, worse, too late. Now they can determine when it fails you.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
A little bit of good news though: companies have started offering refunds when they shut down vital online services. Microsoft did it with their band fitness trackers, and Sony is doing it with a game that was supposed to be free to play online "forever".
We need to keep pushing for this to be the norm. Make retiring services that products depend on expensive for the manufacturer. Make them think hard about committing to long term support before making features dependent on cloud services.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
Everyone eventually has their own proprietary-software-abandoned/fucked-me experience. Some peoples' experiences are delayed, some people have it quick. Some people lose $20, some lose $200, some lose $2000. Some people get attached and then angry at the loss; some people shrug and let it go. Some people need simply a larger quantity of lessons than others.
It took me a couple decades, from about 1980 to somewhere around 1999-2002, before I finally had enough, so I'm not going to mock the people who threw away $900, I guess. But I would ask 'em, "Is that enough yet? Or do you wanna go for another round of abuse?" Whatever floats your boat, man.
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
I don't think this will accomplish what you think it will. Look at it this way. They are refunding at most the purchase price, probably less in a lot of cases. In the mean time they get to hold your money, and collect the interest / investment revenues. They also get to monetize having you connected however they do that. Maybe is showing ads, maybe its in app purchases that won't be refunded, maybe selling your data whatever..
They are not going to let you disconnect, they are just going to structure the deal financially for them such that it works like whole or most formulations of universal life insurance. They know they are mostly going to have to payout eventually probably even more than they will collect in premiums directly but the deal is structured such that most of the time they will be able generate enough revenue off the capital over time to be profitable.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.
It amazes me how many people seem used to that already and accept it as normal.
Because they've been doing it for years.
Look, you and I and plenty of the Slashdot crowd know how to fix our own computers and run our own servers. How many people have depended on you / the IT guy at work / the Geek Squad to keep their computers running? Most of them. To them, 'trusting someone else with their data' is, ultimately, all they've ever done. To top it off, in most cases they end up paying less and getting better services in the process. If they've been burned in one form or another over the years, that effect is even more pronounced.
You and me and the rest of the people who prefer self-hosted solutions are in the extreme minority because we see services come and services go, and we invest our time and our data into them. The Snapchat crowd sees data as transient, and backups too complicated and generally unnecessary. I mean, they'll realize in 20 years that they have no photos of their lives to show their children, but 'long term thinking' is not a favored mindset at this point in time.
With everything disposable and transient, 'everything-as-a-rental' and no concept of the value of ownership, the fact that few consumers insist on self-hosted solutions is completely unsurprising to me.