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Comment by maweki

6 years ago

Why is that not incredibly illegal?

Because that's not going to be argued like that in court.

It may not be that hard to say that's its for:

- Preventing "counterfeiting" as in people salvaging their PCBs to put on "rogue" devices.

- Protecting their brand name as a "rogue" device may misrepresent what a proper sonos product actually is.

- Preventing misuse of the account that was registered on the device, hence protecting their customers personal data.

- Customers only use this mode when a product is not repairable.

That's the power of having a strong legal departement, pretty much anything can be argued even when everyone knows the real intent. When such things are done properly, it's really hard to prove the intent hence, the risk is pretty low of being fined anything.

  • Customers can’t use this mode when the product is not repairable in most cases as the SOC which is the only irreparable component needs to be fully functional.

    If your device cannot boot you can’t put it into recycle mode.

    This mode is designed for one thing only and that is to disable perfectly working devices.

    IIRC the device also needs to be within its warranty period for you to use recycle mode.

It's more-or-less equivalent to what the government did a decade ago in the "cash for clunkers" program, just wrecked via software instead of by replacing the engine oil with sodium silicate.

Why would it be illegal? And what’s the difference between illegal and incredibly illegal anyway?

  • There's "illegal but we'll do it anyway since any penalty is less than what we made because of it" and there's "it's illegal so let's not do it as it puts our CEO in jail".

    I thought this was obvious.

    • What would be illegal about it? Plenty of devices have hardware usage tied to software activation so there’s years of precedent of this being acceptable.

      2 replies →

    • ok but then from what I've observed of the world incredibly illegal would be if

      1. the CEO ripped off a bunch of rich people

      2. the CEO ran a cocaine smuggling operation with a handful of the board on their private jets.

      3. the CEO murdered the hot intern he was dating and made up a particularly inept story about having been out sailing when it happened, even though being found with her blood all over his luxury penthouse.

      1 reply →