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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
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 06 2017, @08:17PM
I said "garage door opener", but I was actually over simplifying. Garadget's product is literally an internet-connected relay (plus sensors to detect the door's current state) that connects to your existing garage door opener; the whole point of this is to remotely command your garage door over the internet instead of or in addition to locally commanding your garage door with pushbuttons.
So if one buys this product at all, we can assume one already owns, or is buying simultaneously, a non-IoT, boring, dumb garage opener, and one is thinking about how to connect it to the internet. If one's thinking on this topic doesn't involve things like "which entities do I have to trust for this functionality to work at all", "which entities does this solution require me to trust", etc., well, maybe next time it will.
I would be sympathetic, if it was a situation like you're suggesting, where someone buying an opener who didn't especially want their garage door on the internet in the first place got that feature thrown in; it's understandable that they wouldn't think it through, would come to rely on it, and then would be unpleasantly surprised when it stopped working. But with a product specifically for adding internet connectivity...