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Vacuum bricked after user blocks data collection – user mods it to run anyway

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IMO a company should lose all control over technology once you've purchased it. Doesn't matter if it's "smart" or not. If the company wants to do something like telemetry, they can buy a license from you for that data. See how they like it when the tables are flipped.

3 months agoby ethin

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503560

which points to the actual blog of the author on github, instead of a news coverage of it.

3 months agoby habibur

A good time to point out https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo.

I haven't tried it personally because my particular model of vacuum has some complicated and potentially destructive procedure to get the required access, but there's quite a few models where it can be installed easily.

3 months agoby brenainn

First of all, it's Android Debug Bridge, which gives him full root access to the vacuum, wasn't protected by any kind of password or encryption.

Good. You bought it, you own it.

(I have no skin in this game --- my vacuum is as dumb as they come, and can be fixed with basic machine shop tools.)

3 months agoby userbinator

"From there, he built a Raspberry Pi joystick to manually drive the vacuum, proving that there was nothing wrong with the hardware."

He should make these and sell them. It would be worth it to just drive it in "discovery" mode and give it the exact path to follow while cleaning. The constant inability to learn the floor plan is beyond annoying.

3 months agoby dylan604

I wish I had the abilities of the engineer, plus the time he could devote to the problem.

3 months agoby sema4hacker

Never connected my Roomba to the internet and it has worked fine for the past several years. It insists that I should connect to it via the app to resolve the occasional minor issue, but I would always ignore those. It's starting to show its wear and it's probably time for a new vacuum. I'm not sure if I'll be able to bootstrap one without connectivity, nowadays. Any good recommendations out there?

3 months agoby booleanbetrayal

I wish every product like this had giant warnings on the box, in the online listing, etc.

I bought a robot vac (after owning an early roomba for some time) - Opened it up, ready to use it - instructions said download the app to make it work.

It's back in it's box somewhere around here and never used.

3 months agoby stevenicr

Whenever I read about robovac. I wonder gow good are these robot vacs really?

Maybe it is just me, but surely would be less effort to hire a cleaner and they can do more than just vacuuming.

3 months agoby StarGrit

When smart devices started becoming common I looked at them and made the decision that it was a hard no from me - I didn't trust that they'd secure the data properly, I didn't trust the privacy aspect and I really didn't trust that they'd continue to support the product for the life of the hardware.

Here we are 10-15 years later and I see no reason to change that view in the slightest.

It surprises the none-techies I know that I don't have any smart devices in my home because they assume I would been a computer geek but its because I'm a computer geek that I don't.

My hoover is a switch connected to an electric motor, I can service it with a phillips screwdriver.

Even my TV is just a fedora box connected to a regular Samsung TV (which has never been on the network and never will).

3 months agoby noir_lord

Thanks for sharing. Removed this company from my list.

3 months agoby markus_zhang

Probably a felony under the DMCA.

I'm reminded of when AWS us-east-1 went down and all the beds made by EightSleep (business model: Juicero for beds) became disabled. EightSleep put all the significant control for their beds in the cloud, doubtless because they couldn't or didn't know how to hire embedded engineers, and the only devs they could find were node.js flunkies who only knew how to do cloud. Looks like the makers of this vacuum did the same thing; they didn't know how or didn't want to build just enough smarts to do the localization and mapping itself, and said "fuck it, we'll do it in the cloud".

3 months agoby bitwize

How did we let things get to this point? (A rhetorical question.)

3 months agoby Sharlin

I block this nonsense before it gets to the cash register.

3 months agoby m463

Sounds like the "remote kill switch" was probably "log buffer was full", given that it comes back to life when used on a different network.

3 months agoby CGamesPlay

I suspect this is not the full story. Why would someone waste their time manually disabling a device? That makes me think that this device was doing something malicous to their servers, enough to trip an alert.

3 months agoby charcircuit