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posted by martyb on Thursday April 06 2017, @03:17PM   Printer-friendly
from the device-went-doormant dept.

Denis Grisak, the man behind the Internet-connected garage opener Garadget, is having a very bad week. Grisak and his Colorado-based company SoftComplex launched Garadget, a device built using Wi-Fi-based cloud connectivity from Particle, on Indiegogo earlier this year, hitting 209 percent of his launch goal in February. But this week, his response to an unhappy customer has gotten Garadget a totally different sort of attention.

On April 1, a customer who purchased Garadget on Amazon using the name R. Martin reported problems with the iPhone application that controls Garadget. He left an angry comment on the Garadget community board:

Just installed and attempting to register a door when the app started doing this. Have uninstalled and reinstalled iphone app, powered phone off/on - wondering what kind of piece of shit I just purchased here...

Shortly afterward, not having gotten a response, Martin left a 1-star review of Garadget on Amazon:

Junk - DO NOT WASTE YOUR MONEY - iPhone app is a piece of junk, crashes constantly, start-up company that obviously has not performed proper quality assurance tests on their products.

Grisak then responded by bricking Martin's product remotely, posting on the support forum:

Martin,

The abusive language here and in your negative Amazon review, submitted minutes after experiencing a technical difficulty, only demonstrates your poor impulse control. I'm happy to provide the technical support to the customers on my Saturday night but I'm not going to tolerate any tantrums.

At this time your only option is return Garadget to Amazon for refund. Your unit ID 2f0036... will be denied server connection. [Ed's Comment: As of Apr 5, Garadget have apologised for this action and have restored connectivity]

The exchange then went viral, being picked up by the Twitter account @internetofshit and rising to the top of Hacker News.

Source: ArsTechnica


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  • (Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:29PM (5 children)

    by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:29PM (#489740)

    No, that's really not close at all. That's a company refusing to sell a product to a potential customer. I do disagree with Tesla on that and I don't think it looks good for them, but it is the right of a company to refuse to do business with someone. Ferrari did the same thing to some guy who complained about their cars in reviews, and then he became one of the main hosts of Top Gear (a very popular British show about cars) and now they're trying to backpedal, so companies do this kind of thing at their peril. It's one thing to toss out an obnoxious customer that's ruining the dining experience for everyone at a restaurant, it's another thing to refuse to sell to someone because you don't like their review, and then earn yourself a huge PR black mark for looking like you're retaliating.

    This is different, because the company has already done business with the customer: they sold him a product. Then they intentionally disabled the product after the sale. That's not only highly unethical, it sounds illegal to me (and should be if it's not). Of course, the product's continued functioning depends on the company's server being operational and allowing access to that customer, but that's the business plan the company chose, and the product is utterly useless without that service.

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  • (Score: 2) by Justin Case on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:41PM (2 children)

    by Justin Case (4239) on Thursday April 06 2017, @05:41PM (#489748) Journal

    the product's continued functioning depends on the company's server being operational

    Yeah, what kind of idiot would buy such a thing?

    I mean for FSM's sake, asking a server for permission to open my garage door???!!! Just... just... WHY?????

    Imagine widespread adoption, then the server is down for a day or the company goes broke (never happens right) and now nobody can go to work today? Or ever?

    Yeah I suppose you could get out and open the door manually. Oh the humanity!

    • (Score: 3, Informative) by Grishnakh on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:05PM

      by Grishnakh (2831) on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:05PM (#489766)

      This thing is just a glorified remote control. You can always use the radio remote that came with the opener, or the regular pushbutton on the wall.

      The whole point (as I understand) is so you can see the status of your door when you're nowhere near your home, and be able to open or close it from far away. So if you forgot to close the door when you rushed out of the house, you can now close it from work. You need a server because there's no easy way for idiot laypeople to have a device like this work without getting a dyndns address or something (which regular people aren't going to do), and because that's how IoT devices monetize: you pay a monthly fee for the service, so they make money off you in perpetuity.

    • (Score: 2) by Zz9zZ on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:47PM

      by Zz9zZ (1348) on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:47PM (#489794)

      Yeaaah, my guess is it's about security authentication so that someone can't use the app on their phone to open your door. Still stupid but hopefully at least a smidgen of reason to it...

      --
      ~Tilting at windmills~
  • (Score: 2) by Phoenix666 on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:28PM (1 child)

    by Phoenix666 (552) on Thursday April 06 2017, @06:28PM (#489779) Journal

    Yes, it rather reminds me of that Sci-Fi movie that came out a couple years back where companies would reposess artificial hearts and other organs that the recipients had stopped making payments on.

    IoT is a path to ceding total control of your life to faceless corporations. Corporations love that scenario, and therefore government (in the US) loves that scenario.

    What is to be done?

    --
    Washington DC delenda est.
    • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:07PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:07PM (#489834)

      Yes, it rather reminds me of that Sci-Fi movie that came out a couple years back where companies would reposess artificial hearts and other organs that the recipients had stopped making payments on.

      It's Repo Man where the movie was about prepossessing property that the current holders stopped making payment for. You know, like a car or a house since the organs were bought on credit. The payments in the movie were not for continual functionality.

      http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1053424/ [imdb.com]