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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: 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.

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