Comment by iforgotpassword
6 years ago
Ok, this seems really disgusting.
The post was lacking some context at first but from how I understand this, you can render your sonos device unusable voluntarily and in turn get a new sonos device for a little cheaper. This happens by marking the serial number of your device on the sonos servers as "recycled" making reactivation impossible.
And they're somehow marketing this "feature" as environmentally friendly because it somehow in some twisted sense means you recycle your old device for a new one.
I'm speechless.
Seems ripe for a hacking attempt. Being able to kill hardware with software always seems dangerous.
Do you think it’s really permanent though? I would assume Sonos maintains a list of the blacklisted devices and they could restore a device if they really needed or wanted to.
Your comment also made me wonder whether there’s such a thing as green hat? It doesn’t seem like there’s much of an economic incentive for a hacking attempt but I’d imagine Sonos would take a very different approach to recycling if every active device was suddenly put into “recycle” mode and this program was in the headlines.
I think "green hat" would be the hacker who figures out how to reverse the bricking.
According to the twitter thread their ``recycle mode'' works by blacklisting the device's serial number in the mfg's database to prevent it from working, so depending on what you want to do with them they might be perfectly functional.
That sounds like Sonos can easily reactivate them, right? That's not a bricking, is it?
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I’d guess it also deactivates the speaker and you need to add it to a Sonos account to activate it and add it to a group. This would prevent that.
I will never buy a Sonos product, and no one else should either.
Truly disgusting.