When a device you purchase requires an internet connection, do you really own it?
No.
Our world is getting increasingly filled with stories of companies abandoning products or intentionally disabling them for reasons legitimate or arbitrary.
Sometimes it’s trivial things such as Nike self-tying sneakers (thought they certainly weren’t trivially priced). Sometimes it’s older (but still useful) computer gear that won’t get critical security updates. In the case of Joulee the free salvage Tesla — a fully paid-off car with an original sticker price of nearly $100,000 — it was a completely arbitrary decision by the manufacturer to disable an essential feature (high-speed charging).
Here at the island place, we just finished installing our solar plant. It’s great. We don’t have the option of grid power and, frankly, I don’t want it. Today, though, I read where a company has decided to remotely disable their inverters for internal reasons, leaving users who “purchased” inverters from them literally in the dark:
https://solarboi.com/2024/11/17/sol-ark-oem-disables-all-deye-inverters-in-the-us/
It’s easy and fun to use the internet-enabled features of these devices, but it’s clear that it’s time for an approach that doesn’t leave us vulnerable to a malicious or incompetent vendor. Most of these devices seem to offer a way to connect locally, then I can firewall-off any cloud connections. I’ll have to implement my own interface to check on device status, but that shouldn’t be too hard. It’s just one more thing to do because Big Tech cannot be trusted.
—2p