Cory Doctorow
If you own an Alexa, you might enjoy its integration with #IFTTT, an easy scripting environment that lets you create your own little voice-controlled apps, like "start my Roomba" or "close the garage door." If so, tough shit, Amazon just nuked IFTTT for Alexa:
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this thread to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/#graceful-failure
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Cory Doctorow
The problem with the "bionic eyes" that #SecondSight bricked wasn't that they helped visually impaired people see - it was that they couldn't be operated without the company's ongoing support and consent:
https://spectrum.ieee.org/bionic-eye-obsolete
It's perfectly possible to imagine a bionic eye whose software can be maintained by third parties, whose parts and schematics are widely available. The challenge of making this assistive technology fail gracefully isn't technical - it's commercial.
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Cory Doctorow
But the excluded middle here is: "No one should use one of these because they are killswitched. This is especially bad when a smart speaker is an assistive technology, because those applications are too important to leave up to the whims of giant companies that might brick them or revoke their features due to their own commercial imperatives, callousness, or financial straits."
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Cory Doctorow
Every IoT privacy or revocation scandal would provoke blanket statements from technically savvy people like, "No one should ever use one of these." The replies would then swiftly follow: "That's an #ableist statement: I rely on my automation because I have a disability and I would otherwise be reliant on a caregiver or have to go without."
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Cory Doctorow
The cheapest rhetorical trick of the tech sector is the "indivisibility gambit" - the idea that these prix-fixe menus could never be served a la carte. Wanna talk to your friends online? Sorry there's just no way to help you do that without spying on you:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/11/08/divisibility/#technognosticism
One important argument over smart-speakers was poisoned by this false dichotomy: the debate about #accessibility and IoT gadgets.
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Cory Doctorow
Software updates that take away functionality you want can be mitigated with the ability to roll back those updates - and by giving users the ability to apply part of a patch, but not the whole patch.
Cloud computing and software as a service are a choice. "#LocalFirst" computing is possible, and desirable:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/08/03/there-is-no-cloud/#only-other-peoples-computers
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Cory Doctorow
Tesla? Well, Tesla at least is refreshingly honest: "We have a killswitch because fuck you, that's why."
These excuses ring hollow because they conspicuously omit the possibility that you could have the benefits *without* the harms. Like, your tractor could come with a killswitch that *you could bypass*, meaning you could brick it at a distance, and still fix it yourself. Same with your phone.
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Cory Doctorow
An HP rep once told me they push deceptive security updates to brick third-party ink cartridges so printer owners aren't tricked into printing out cherished family photos with ink that fades over time. Apple insists its ability to push iOS updates revoking functionality is about keeping mobile users safe - not monopolizing repair:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/09/22/vin-locking/#thought-differently
John Deere's killswitches protect you from looters. Adobe's killswitches let it add valuable features to its products.
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Cory Doctorow
Money talks, bullshit walks. In any boardroom argument about whether to shift value away from customers to the company, a credible argument about how the company will suffer a net loss as a result has a better chance of prevailing than an argument that's just about the ethics of such a course of action:
https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/28/microincentives-and-enshittification/
Inevitably, these killswitches are pitched as a paternalistic tool for protecting customers.
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Cory Doctorow
Such a switch wouldn't have to come from a scrappy startup or a hacker's DIY solution, either. Take away DMCA 1201 and Walmart could step up, offering an alternative Alexa software stack that let you switch your purchases away from Amazon.
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Cory Doctorow
But those people have to convince their colleagues that they should do the right thing. Those debates weigh the expected gains from scammy, immoral behavior against the expected costs.
Without DMCA 1201, Amazon would have to worry that their decision to revoke IFTTT functionality would motivate customers to seek out alternative software for their Alexas. This is a big deal: once a customer learns how to de-Amazon their Alexa, Amazon might never recapture that customer.
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Cory Doctorow
An even bigger omission from this narrative is the fact that John Deere is objectively Very Bad At Security, which means that the world's fleet of critical agricultural equipment is one breach away from being rendered permanently inert:
https://pluralistic.net/2021/04/23/reputation-laundry/#deere-john
There are plenty of good and honorable people working at big companies, from Adobe to Apple to Deere to Tesla to Amazon.
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Cory Doctorow
Today, Deere's PR minions are pitching search-and-replace versions of this story about Israeli tractors that Hamas is said to have looted, which were also remotely bricked.
But the main use of this remote killswitch isn't confounding war-looters: it's preventing farmers from fixing their own tractors without paying rent to John Deere.
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Cory Doctorow
That's what Adobe did last year, when it literally stole the *colors* from your Photoshop files, in history's SaaSiest heist:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/28/fade-to-black/#trust-the-process
But when we hear about remote killswitches in the news, it's usually part of a PR blitz for their virtues. Russia's invasion of Ukraine kicked off a new genre of these PR pieces, celebrating the fact that a #JohnDeere dealership was able to remotely brick looted tractors that had been removed to Chechnya:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/05/08/about-those-kill-switched-ukrainian-tractors/
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Cory Doctorow
Selling your Tesla? Have fun being poor. The upgrades you spent thousands of dollars on go up in a puff of smoke the minute you trade the car into the dealer, annihilating the resale value of your car at the speed of light:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/
Telsa has to detect the ownership transfer first. But once a product is sufficiently cloud-based, they can destroy your property from a distance without any warning or intervention on your part.
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Cory Doctorow
That gun on the mantelpiece went off all the way back in 2004 and it turns out it was a *starter-pistol*. Pretty soon, everyone was getting in on the act. If you find an alert on your printer screen demanding that you install a "security update" there's a damned good chance that the "update" is designed to block you from using third-party ink cartridges in a printer that you (sorta) own:
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Cory Doctorow
The ability to revoke features after the fact means that companies can fuck around, but never find out. Apple sold millions of tracks via iTunes with the promise of letting you stream them to any other device you owned. After a couple years of this, the company caught some heat from the record labels, so they just pushed an update that killed the feature:
https://memex.craphound.com/2004/10/30/apple-to-ipod-owners-eat-shit-and-die-updated/
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Cory Doctorow
This is the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece, a moral hazard and invitation to mischief that tempts Amazon executives to run a bait-and-switch con where they sell you a gadget with five features and then remotely kill-switch two of them. This is prime directive of the #DarthVaderMBA: "I am altering the deal. Pray I don't alter it any further."
So many companies got their business-plan at the Darth Vader MBA.
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Cory Doctorow
Amazon can do this because the Alexa's operating system sits behind a cryptographic lock, and any tool that bypasses that lock is a felony under #Section1201 of the #DMCA, punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500,000 fine. That means that it's literally a crime to provide a rival OS that lets users retain functionality that Amazon no longer supports.
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Machismo
teknomunk
Machismo
teknomunk
Machismo
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