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Comment by maweki

6 years ago

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.

  • That should be illegal.

    • I don’t really want to go back to a world where the expensive phone I carry has a high value on the black market because it can easily be reactivated by anyone, because that makes carrying it a liability. The flipside is obviously that I put a lot of trust in the company that owns the activation service, but I’ve accepted the tradeoff.

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.

  • Strange, right? It seems like in capitalism nothing is incredibly illegal for the rich.

You think that deactivating devices with customer consent is something that should land the CEO in prison.

  • No, but I think doing environmentally bad thing for profit and marketing it as environmentally good perhaps should. Climate change is a real issue, and companies abusing what little care people have for that issue are making people care less, threatening the ability to do anything about it, and so ultimately threatening us all.

    Abuses of social trust should be punished hard.