Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers' stuff

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/07/belkin-shows-tech-firms-getting-too-comfortable-with-bricking-customers-stuff/

by speckx • 1 year ago

89 38 1 year ago

tocs3• 1 year ago

Do not buy stuff you do not own.

barbazoo2• 1 year ago

It is as "easy" as that. My assumption is these are mostly optional things we think we "need" so a little friction finding something that doesn't suck isn't the worst thing. Reigns in our consumerism a little bit too.

sam_lowry_• 1 year ago

Google or Apple phones also?

alnwlsn• 1 year ago

In parallel, learn to modify stuff you don't own so that you do own it.

supportengineer• 1 year ago

Rules out any vehicle for sale in the US today with a built-in cellular connection.

quantified• 1 year ago

I haven't bought for a long time, are these required to run the car? Or is it just prohibitively obscure to disable it (smash the antenna or connect it to ground, for example).

greatgib2• 1 year ago

I'm not against manufacturer stopping support for their Internet Of Shits devices, but there should be a law making it mandatory for them to release source code, protocol specs and whatever is needed so that a man of the craft could be able to do what is necessary to continue using the product that he bought.

thomassmith65• 1 year ago

I'd rather a law mandating that all devices include an 'offline' option for any hardware features that could conceivably support one.

I don't want to create an account for my toaster, nor have my lightbulb send updates to an analytics server, nor have my washing machine cease to function when my wifi goes down.

A ban on products tying hardware features to an internet connection would fix all those problems in addition to giving them theoretically eternal life.

Angostura• 1 year ago

I love this idea. But “ features that could conceivably support one.” is going to be the tricky bit to regulate

eddythompson80• 1 year ago

I think the problem with this argument is that this is rarely the case.

99% of the time (including incident) they are not requiring an account for your toaster, or lightbulbs or your washing machine ceasing to function when your wifi goes off.

The issue is that you have a washing machine that you bought with a feature that you can watch the inside of the machine while it's running over wifi from anywhere in the world. Then the company "kills" their cloud features (like Belkin is doing wiht Wemo cloud features) and you no longer can watch your 4k stream of the washer working. Not even locally, not remotely, nothing. It's a feature you paid for, and 2 or 3 years down the line it's gone.

Some times the whole functionality of a device is a cloud connectivity, like a bridge or something, or a device that has 0 physical controls (for some design or ascetic reason) then yeah. Those devices would "cease to function"

Aside from really really maliciously designed products, most "smart" products I know of function perfectly fine as their dumb counter parts. The vast shocking majority of smart lights, smart switches, smart outlets, smart locks, and smart toasters I have seen all work as regular "dumb" version. But that's not why you paid the extra $40-$200 on it. Like a regular LED lightbulb is $4 and a Lifx wifi one is $30. It works fine as a regular lightbulb, you never need to do anything to it and you'd never know it has wifi in it.

altairprime• 1 year ago

In lieu of a law, a class action against Bellingham that publicly states “we will settle for $1 in exchange for you publishing all protocol docs, device firmware source code, and any private keys used to authenticate firmware installed for these devices, so that competitors can pick up where Belkin left off” would absolutely hold their feet to the fire on this.

greatgib2• 1 year ago

Sadly in most countries we don't have "class action".

superkuh2• 1 year ago

This all started with software and because we didn't stop it there it'll keep happening to software that runs hardware.

There was a popular game called "Rocket League" that Psyonix company sold and ran the infrastructure for for many years. But then Epic corporation bought Psyonix for Rocket League's playerbase to bootstrap their proprietary game delivery service. 6 months later everyone who had bought the game for Mac or Linux could no longer play. Epic just stole it from them. No recourse. Not even outrage beyond the effected. It was just accepted as a standard business practice.

sigwinch28• 1 year ago

Via Wikipedia:

The developer offered full refunds to the game for macOS and Linux owners regardless of how long they had the game.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rocket_League#Free-to-play_tra...

https://www.rockpapershotgun.com/rocket-league-ending-mac-an...

kmerfeld• 1 year ago

Its less bad that they offered refunds, but why would it that make it ok? If you buy a car, and the company lights it on fire and then offers you a refund is that ok? You'll still have the burnt husk if you choose not to take the refund

They broke something after they sold it

bobmcnamara• 1 year ago

Brutal.

Like the repo man leaving you a tip.

superkuh2• 1 year ago

I have tried to keep the Psyonix wikipedia article true to reality if you look at the change history but there are people working for Epic heavily whitewashing it and I didn't want to force (wiki) arbitration or cause a disturbance after the first couple edit/revert battles. The Rocket League one is even harder to keep true.

Basically, they said they were stealing the Mac and Linux Rocket League versions because they wanted to go full directx 10 instead of 9. But the fact that the PS3 is still a first class client running Directx 9 even today shows this is/was a lie. Epic lies quite a bit. In fact when they bought Psyonix they loudly announced there would be no changes, it'd stay rocket league. But of course that lie only lasted 6 months. And now they re-write the wiki pages to pretend it was always the plan.

Anyway, I didn't want a refund. I wanted to keep playing rocket league. And now I cannot play. That's wrong. They bricked my game. And everyone thinks that's A-OK. Just like when they'll brick your modem, or your fridge, or maybe your car. Frankly, having any software in a $thing is a huge risk these days given the status quo.

PaulKeeble• 1 year ago

The Sony playstation 3 was another example where it let you run Linux and then people found a way to use the hardware to its fullest (the coprocessors were locked in Linux) and Sony pulled support. Took some court cases but customers got partial refunds then too. HP also lost a lawsuit on blocking ink jet cartridges too.

I think this law needs to move to basic consumer protection and under the protection of a quango and they have a lot of companies to go after now.

surgical_fire• 1 year ago

It's almost like that in the absence of proper government regulations corporations are free to screw up consumers. And of course they do, why wouldn't they?

benoau• 1 year ago

Really just an extension of the "Stop Killing Games" initiative, "Stop Killing Everything Else", even the Belkin devices that will survive through HomeKit are tied to an iOS device with a limited support period! Buy a new everything every 5 - 10 years or your stuff might get bricked or left to fend for itself without security patches. The whole tech industry needs to change.

AndrewDucker• 1 year ago

This is why I'm buying "smart" things only if they either work fine without the internet or if they are part of a standard.

My washing machine tells me when it's done, and that's handy, but if it goes away I can still wash clothes. My smart bulbs work with anything that supports Thread/Matter.

Gigachad2• 1 year ago

It’s often impossible to tell before you purchase if connecting it to the internet is optional or not.

apparent• 1 year ago

HN discussion from yesterday's announcement:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44524063#44527939

OptionOfT• 1 year ago

I have a couple of shades with Somfi motors, and got one of those Bond bridges with it, to connect it to Home-Assistant.

Except you cannot add stuff to that bridge without registering the device to your account. The resale value of the device drops to zero once their server dies, as you cannot add it to a new account, or add new devices to it.

The 1 redeeming factor is that you can control the devices that you have set up in an offline manner.

But I'm still on the lookout for a fully-functional ZWave to Somfi bridge.

And articles like this actually show that I was right in returning my ceiling fan that was Home-Depot-Data-Collecting only. Now I have a more expensive, but HomeKit capable Hunter (which is absolute hell to set up).

schappim• 1 year ago

I want to shout out to https://usetrmnl.com for showing folks how to actually handle the situation of ensuring that your IoT device will never be bricked.

They released and sponsored open-source servers for their e-ink display in multiple languages: https://github.com/usetrmnl .

I have never seen a better run, community focused IoT hardware company.

anotherevan• 1 year ago

Ummm, you probably should disclose that you're listed as a backend and hardware engineer on the about page. https://usetrmnl.com/about

JonChesterfield• 1 year ago

I've got Sonos' least smart speaker. No microphone.

Can't stream to it, can't connect to it at all since they trashed the app, said app is mandatory. It's a doorstop, living on as a reminder that I should have rejected it the moment it refused to run without a phone attached.

Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers' stuff

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