• Onno (VK6FLAB)@lemmy.radio
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    14 days ago

    Welcome to the “brand new world” of IOT hardware where you are the product and continued service depends entirely on how you can be monetized.

    • shalafi@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      I’m assuming it runs on AI and the company has to provide the backend. So yeah, if you purchase something that requires a company’s infrastructure, it can certainly be bricked.

  • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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    14 days ago

    All companies should be required to release their entire codebase under the GPL if the product is no longer going to be maintained by them.

    That way a community of people who actually care can maintain and improve it.

    I play several games that run on 20+ year old engines, long since abandoned by their original creators. The community reverse engineered the games and server infrastructure so they can still be run and enjoyed today. Same for all the folks who develop emulators and the entire ecosystem of ROM dumpers, readers, and handhelds that surround them.

    Capitalism is a cancer. So amazing that, at least in certain parts of the software world, we have something better.

    This is also a friendly reminder to donate to and support your favorite FOSS projects! they need all the help they can get. ❤️

    • pixelscript@lemm.ee
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      13 days ago

      I’ll do ya one further: Copyright should have the same lifespan as a patent. 20 years max. No extensions, no exceptions. I’d even cosider less time than that.

      If you retained the unilateral rights to copy your idea for 20 fucking years and you haven’t made your healthy profit on it already in that time, tough. Your work will forcefully enter the public domain so people who were likely actually still alive when it was culturally relevant get a shake with it.

      There is no reason why something created during my childhood ought to still be languishing locked up in trust of some dead man’s corporation by the time I’ve withered away of old age and my grandkids have done the same. The severe generational lag of culture and accessible technology created by copyright in its current form is absurd.

      If you want to chase your golden goose forever, keep making new iterations of it that have their own copyrights that fairly compete against everyone else’s in the marketplace of ideas. Get off your laurels. Get on your toes. Keep making new, inspired things. Earn your goddamn right to continue being seen as the rightful creator to follow up what you’ve previously made in the past.

    • ilmagico@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      They are considering it making it open source, among other options to keep the robots alive

    • jagged_circle@feddit.nl
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      13 days ago

      Not just Foss, but also open hardware.

      And Lemmy mods: stop banning open hardware projects. Just because we happen to sell stuff doesn’t make us spam

    • VonCesaw@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      um, my favorite streamer Pirate Software says it is impossible for corporations to provide code to extend the life of anything

        • morriscox@lemmy.world
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          14 days ago

          They sometimes use the IP of others and it can be a real headache or impossible to get permission from everyone.

          • cmhe@lemmy.world
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            14 days ago

            This argument seems hollow, releasing source code is not an all or nothing situation. They can just release what they are allowed to, and let the community replace the missing stuff.

            Releasing anything is better than releasing nothing and letting the community reverse engineer everything instead of just some third-party libraries.

            • NekuSoul@lemmy.nekusoul.de
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              14 days ago

              But also, in a world where such a law did exist, it would naturally force every third-party to create their contracts in a way that would allow the eventual release of the source code, or lose out on the deal and subsequently, the money.

              • cmhe@lemmy.world
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                14 days ago

                When we are talking about laws, yes you are right.

                I was arguing more about developers not releasing the source code on their own, when they stopped releasing patches, or even remove the game from stores or shutdown servers, while stating that reason: “We cannot because we use third-party stuff.”

                No, they just do not want to. They might even think that their past games are in competition to their current games. So they do not want people to play (and improve/mod) them anymore.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      While I agree in principle, a blanket enforcement seems like a great way for companies to purposely tank smaller entities just to get hold of their code/IP. Alongside this, it probably doesn’t help to just release the code, when these devices will run on web services, or perhaps even proprietary tech.

      In this case, it would be a great way to dissolve the company. Switch the endpoints over to a custodian project, have the servers owned and run through a community campaign, and open source the code and artifacts.

      • Lettuce eat lettuce@lemmy.ml
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        14 days ago

        In my ideal world, IP and copyright wouldn’t exist at all, but obviously that won’t happen in my lifetime.

        Neither would my suggestion of releasing any defunct software as GPL, sadly.

        The codebase the would be a great start, even if it previously ran on proprietary tech, having the codebase at least allows engineers to pull out the proprietary hooks and rebuild them to work with something open source.

        We need a right to repair but for software, sadly that also is a pipe dream in our current environment.

      • hdnsmbt@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        Companies already tank smaller entities all the time just to have less competition. I don’t think OC’s suggestion could accelerate this in any way. They’re already going at full speed.

  • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    Man those parents. Oof.

    I do not wanna be in their shoes.

    Telling your kid that needed an emotional support robot friend that the robot friend is going to take a nap for a long time and might not wake back up? Ooo boy.

    Helping a kid through a divorce is hard enough. This seems like a terrifying nightmare.

    • Etterra@discuss.online
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      14 days ago

      To be fair, electronics break all the time, and living pets die eventually - both things everyone needs to learn how to cope with, including children. This is just the Venn Diagram of those two pieces of reality.

      • peopleproblems@lemmy.world
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        13 days ago

        I imagine the children with these things are emotionally disregulated in some way shape or form. A small group of children sometimes don’t learn to self soothe when they are very young, others in ASD struggle with it for a lifetime. Some with ADHD have a very difficult time when their medicine wears off and their emotions kick back in to overdrive.

        For all those groups I mentioned, the whole concept of this thing was almost brilliant. Something that they can go to knowing it will be able to help them guide through emotions while mom and dad are doing something necessary like cooking or fixing something outside, or in the bathroom.

        If you haven’t had to deal with a child that has emotional regulation problems, then it is hard to explain the difficulty that the failure of this device will make. It is true that they will adapt it, they always do, that’s how things work. The problem is that the emotional disregulation leads to broken things at home, aggressive behaviors with peers, getting kicked out of preschool and day care, etc.

        It truly is a nightmare scenario. The parents have to prepare for all of these things and a new way to help their child through the limited existing means.

    • GHiLA@sh.itjust.works
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      14 days ago

      A parent with autism is probably seeing it as another “could’ve been” that they get to toss out now, likely paid for by insurance.

      I wonder how big that pile of products is, failed crap marketed to insurance companies and parents for autistic kids.

      Big business.

      • roofuskit@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        It’s not even a challenge, one drop of rogaine will brick any cat. All you have to do is touch them with it.

        Edit: don’t fucking do this you sickos.

        • Grass@sh.itjust.works
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          14 days ago

          oh my fucking god. is this why when I was a kid my friend’s cat went from super healthy to extremely sickly and died the next morning? his dad definitely used rogaine

          • roofuskit@lemmy.world
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            14 days ago

            It contains an enzyme their body cannot process and it effectively poisons them to death. I believe it attacks the nervous system.

            • Lost_My_Mind@lemmy.world
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              14 days ago

              Oh. Damn. Good thing I found this out.

              I mean, I never have actually touched rogaine, but this is kinda like when I was 4, and I was going to feed a dog a piece of chocolate. The dog wanted chocolate, I wanted to share, suddenly I’m getting my hand slapped and yelled at.

              Like c’mon! We JUST watched a seseme street last week about how good sharing is! Now my wrist hurts!

              THEN she tells me dogs can’t have chocolate! Like I’m just supposed to just KNOW a dogs digestive system! I’m still learning colors and shapes, and you’re asking me to know biology of dogs!

              So, no dogs have died from chocolate from me, and now I know if I lose my hair, and have a cat, I can’t have rogaine. Because I assume I’ll be sleeping, and you just KNOW my cat is gonna be the weirdo cat who licks people in their sleep. Suddenly I wake up with a dead cat.

              So good thing I learned now.

              • protist@mander.xyz
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                14 days ago

                Turns out dogs are perfectly fine eating milk chocolate. I know this because I had a dog who jumped up on a table and ate an entire package of Hershey’s kisses once. We thought she was a goner, but poison control said she’d be fine and she was. High quality dark chocolate is what poisons dogs

                • tuck182@lemmy.world
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                  13 days ago

                  Chocolate is what poisons dogs. There’s just a much higher concentration of it in dark chocolate than milk chocolate. Too much milk chocolate can still kill a dog, and “too much” isn’t even all that much. 8 ounces of milk chocolate for a 30 pound dog is enough to be concerned about.

      • Uriel238 [all pronouns]@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        14 days ago

        A clamp (padded, preferably) on the scruff of the neck will temporarily brick a cat.

        Try this only with familiar cats with whom you have rapport.

        Don’t leave them for too long. A few minutes at most.

        • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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          14 days ago

          Why would you try that with any cat, especially one that you’re close to? The fuck.

          • Verat@sh.itjust.works
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            14 days ago

            But he only said he scruffed them (if I am reading it right), not that he grabbed them by the scruff, is this apparently something that is considered abusive or something? If a cat claws at my leg and I pinch there to make it stop that is absolutely not the same as grabbing them there. I would never actually try lifting them that way.

            • lad@programming.dev
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              14 days ago

              It doesn’t work on all the cats, though. Also, I heard that it’s not painful for a cat to be lifted that way, but I would prefer not to.

              Edit: I was wrong

          • Pennomi@lemmy.world
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            14 days ago

            That’s where the term “catatonic” comes from, or so I’ve heard, and it’s a reflex because mother cats carry their babies by the scruff of their neck. From what I understand it’s totally harmless.

            Someone who actually knows these things can correct me if I’m wrong of course.

    • medgremlin@midwest.social
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      14 days ago

      Careful with that one. Big pharma killed my cat once.

      My cat came down with Feline Infectious Peritonitis which is a coronavirus that is lethal to cats when the virus mutates and becomes FIP. FIP is 100% fatal without treatment, and there is now a treatment (originally developed at UC Davis) that is now owned by a big pharma company. They shut down the feline clinical trials in 2020 because they also make Remdesivir, and there was a concern that if there were any problems with the feline drug trial, the FDA might not approve Remdesivir for COVID. You can buy the drug on the internet from China, but it’s a 12 week course of twice daily injections, and you’re gambling on whether you got a good batch every time you get a shipment.

      By the time we found this out, it was too late to save our kitty, so he crossed the rainbow bridge.

      • nimble@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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        14 days ago

        I’m sorry to hear about your cat. 🫂

        Just to add on about FIP treatment— if your cat ever gets FIP then on Facebook look for “FIP warriors” or “global fip cats” (iirc) to find volunteers who can help supply medicine

        Also note that there IS an FDA approved compounded version but many vets aren’t aware about it, and even if they were aware since it is compounded they won’t have it in the office. This means that it will take a few days for you to order and treatment is often time sensitive from what I’ve heard.

        • medgremlin@midwest.social
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          14 days ago

          FIP Warriors is who we went through, but it progressed too quickly because the fluid accumulation was in his lungs, not his abdomen.

          That medication is quite new to the market and wasn’t available when this happened about 4 years ago, but I will mention this to our current vet so that she knows about it.

    • Nawor3565@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      14 days ago

      It sounds like they literally can’t refund people because the company completely ran out of money and is gonna be liquidated. Sucky situation for all parties involved.

      • uis@lemm.ee
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        14 days ago

        If only there was law demanding to refund broken products before liquidation.

        • bizarroland@fedia.io
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          14 days ago

          Or a law stating that in the case fair refunds can not be provided that the software needed for running the hardware becomes public domain and is published and released on a git maintained by the library of Congress.

        • Blackmist@feddit.uk
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          14 days ago

          And who is going to pay for that? If they could afford to refund all their customers they wouldn’t be going bust.

          • Zagorath@lemm.ee
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            13 days ago

            The law would probably make sure customers whose products are being bricked are counted as creditors. Ideally after employees (unpaid wages) and before investors. They may not get full refunds, but they’ll be entitled to something if it’s possible.

          • uis@lemm.ee
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            13 days ago

            Liquidatoon doesn’t mean they have no money. And they still have some assets.

            Also that’s why we should apply mandatory copy laws to software too.

      • Corngood@lemmy.ml
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        14 days ago

        Surely in that case they could open their software so the community can figure out what it would take to keep it running.

          • Corngood@lemmy.ml
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            14 days ago

            Yeah, likely true without some sort of legislation.

            Well at least there’s a business opportunity for someone to reanimate these things and use them to push gacha games and energy drinks on the innocent children they’ve bonded with.

        • TachyonTele@lemm.ee
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          14 days ago

          I think at this point they have far more important things to worry about than that.

      • Zak@lemmy.world
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        14 days ago

        What they probably can do is issue an update that lets owners point it at third-party servers, and publish the API. They might even be able to publish the source code, though there’s a chance they don’t own all of it.

    • clgoh@lemmy.ca
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      14 days ago

      And Google refunded everyone who bought Stadia.

      But they both have deeper pockets than a startup.

  • azl@lemmy.sdf.org
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    14 days ago

    I would like to think the community could work out the API’s and replicate them on a free server, but if this was just a glorified Alexa box, there is probably a lot more server-side processing that needs to happen to keep it running.

  • Kokesh@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    It is sad to give your child emotional support robot to begin with.

    • Railcar8095@lemm.ee
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      13 days ago

      I get the feeling, but tools come in many shapes and forms. If this was truly helpful for any kid, it’s a fucking tragedy that’s bricked.

      I assume it relies on external servers for processing, so it was a matter of time though.

  • A7thStone@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    See there’s the problem right there. They shouldn’t have sold the robot. It should have been a subscription model, with micro transactions. That would have kept the investors flocking in.

    I’d like to say this is sarcasm, but unfortunately it’s the most likely lesson these ghouls will learn from this.

    • ATDA@lemmy.world
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      13 days ago

      Daily slot check in, pull the arm and the eyes display the slots. Ez money make me a CEO.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
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    14 days ago

    But the short-lived, expensive nature of Moxie is exactly why some groups, like right-to-repair activists, are pushing the FTC to more strongly regulate smart devices

    Which will be harder in the next 4 years. On the other hand, maybe it sensibilizes more towards cloud-indepent operation and Open Source.

  • werefreeatlast@lemmy.world
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    13 days ago

    Buy anything that must login to a web server not located at your house and expect it to get bricked when that server doesn’t work anymore. Simple…don’t. Plus they are clearly gaining something from you.

  • nucleative@lemmy.world
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    14 days ago

    I guess this device needed to connect to some remotely hosted server that enabled its functionality. And the company was losing money and hoping that sales would eventually pick up enough to make them profitable. But their latest investor decided not to put any more money in, and the company ran out of cash and can’t pay its bills anymore.

    The entrepreneur thought he could get more investor cash and ran the business in such a way that it would fall off a cliff if he didn’t. And… He failed to secure more financing.

    I have mixed feelings about products like this… If the device somehow needed to host an entire internet’s worth of data to function, it certainly wouldn’t have cost only $800. But when you buy a product that depends on the ongoing viability of the seller, you’re in a position of caveat emptor - You better vet them out yourself, especially if they’re new.

    Hopefully the founders feel some emotional attachment to their product and the trust bestowed upon them by their unknowing customers, and release whatever on the back end makes the thing work so that motivated customers could reactivate their devices somehow.

  • Allero@lemmy.today
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    14 days ago

    What are the genuine use cases for such a robot? For when the kid has issues communicating with other people?

    • Dragon Rider (drag)@lemmy.nz
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      14 days ago

      A robot has infinite patience and will never get mad or bully a child for fun. Ideally, this should also be true of a parent, but it’s not. From a less grim angle, a robot doesn’t have other responsibilities like work.

      For a kid who feels too shy to talk to people, a robot can be good for practice. But it requires a lot of attentiveness from parents to make sure the child doesn’t become dependent and moves on to taking to people once they get their confidence.

      Back when drag was a kid, we used imaginary friends instead of robots. But a lot of parents and children don’t believe in imaginary friends, which is a shame, because robots are a lot more expensive.

      • Allero@lemmy.today
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        14 days ago

        Yeah, kids focusing too much on their robot instead of other people is one of my concerns.

        A robot can teach the kid all the right things, but it will never give a kid the real social experience, which can get rough if a kid is not sufficiently exposed to it right from the start. Even now, as real human communication moves online in a large part, children grow up increasingly socially anxious and maladapted. From that position, I’m quite uncomfortable with “study from home” trends as well, as school is one of the key venues for IRL child-child interactions.

        On the other hand, I wonder what would happen if all kids first developed with perfect robots and then started interacting with one another. But that’s a subject for yet another unethical experiment.

    • EnderMB@lemmy.world
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      14 days ago

      It’s also probably a developmental aid also. As someone with a child, you’d be surprised at how laser-focused parents can be with regards to developmental delays or issues and ensuring that their kids have every opportunity to meet specific milestones.

      IMO while it’s absolutely not a replacement for human interaction, something like this with the right backing could be very useful to a lot of kids that need additional help.