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.
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.
Which is why you should only buy stuff that relies on local APIs and on board processing.
99.99% of the people willing to buy an emotional support robot for their children will have no idea what the words you said even mean.
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. ❤️
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.
They are considering it making it open source, among other options to keep the robots alive
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.
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.
um, my favorite streamer Pirate Software says it is impossible for corporations to provide code to extend the life of anything
They sometimes use the IP of others and it can be a real headache or impossible to get permission from everyone.
For big contracts between companies, this is actually done, in a way, through source code escrow. Would be nice if this was a thing for consumers as well.
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.
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.
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.
No thanks. I’ll get an emotional support cat and you can’t brick my cat. Take that, big tech!
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.
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
I’m unclear, and I’m not going to do this, but what does that do? Is it poison to them?
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.
Why would you try that with any cat, especially one that you’re close to? The fuck.
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.
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.
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.
Christ, even Amazon refunded everyone who bought a Glow.
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.
If only there was law demanding to refund broken products before liquidation.
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.
And who is going to pay for that? If they could afford to refund all their customers they wouldn’t be going bust.
Surely in that case they could open their software so the community can figure out what it would take to keep it running.
Their creditors would sue because thats an asset that can be sold to refund them.
