Item — HN Reader

> Slingbox servers will be permanently taken offline 24 months after the discontinued announcement date (November 9, 2020), at which point ALL Slingbox devices and services will become inoperable.

This needs to become illegal. We need a law that requires companies who want to turn off required servers for products they've sold to either offer a 100% refund to everyone who's ever bought them, or fully open-source them so the community can make them work without the server.

8 comments

It seems a bit unreasonable to require a company to support a product for perpetuity. We already do have warranty laws that require products to do the thing they say they do for a reasonable period of time. Maybe we disagree on the specific duration, but I think few would agree that infinity is a reasonable number.

If a physical device is tied to a company's service and can only be used with that company's service, it's very reasonable.

What the company should do is rent you the physical device--not sell it to you. Cable companies operate on this model.

I'm not familiar if Slingbox's devices fall in this category as I've never used them though.

I don’t think the engineering of the device necessarily has any relevance to this problem. At its core, this is a consumer law problem, not an engineering problem.

We have laws to protect consumer because they have a right not to be cheated out of their money. We don’t make it the job of lawyers and legislators to make decisions about which engineering architectures are right or wrong.

If we decide that consumers should be able to reasonably expect their widgets to last X duration of time, then that right shouldn’t be predicated on an engineering decision the consumer knows nothing about or has no power to choose.

They shouldn't have to support it forever, but they should have to let someone else support it.

you either sell a service or a product, and must brand it as such. IF you sell a product you lose all rights to modify, restrict and do anything with the copy you sold.

Open sourcing sunsetted projects, seems like a really sane approach - because lets face it - it can, and is, used as a form of planned obsolescence.

Strawman. Not the argument of the person you're responding to.

In what way?

The 100%-refund-law approach could be interesting if insurance companies could be convinced to offer companies coverage for this scenario. It would set up a feedback loop where high premiums would incentivize companies to make their devices less likely to become inoperable.

I favor less onerous laws, myself. I think a big problem is that people are generally unaware of how dependent their tech is on company whims. A legally-mandated "ingredients list" or "smoker's warning" note detailing all service dependencies (and associated "stability score?") might help raise awareness.

My friend recently got a $6000 laser cutter that has a hard cloud dependency to do anything at all. It's all through their cloud interface. That thing scares the heck out of me. Just the other day it failed and just getting the error logs required a round-trip to support. It was just a dirty sensor. It constantly advertises its "premium" features and interrupts your workflow if the wifi is spotty (often the case in an industrial shop). I bet the machine will be a paperweight in 5 years, and require either wholesale replacement or a controller retrofit. In the meantime, I guarantee my offline CNC mill will be functional until it suffers some catastrophic hardware failure. Since it supports industry-standard protocols, I can use any of a hundred different software packages to run it, including several open-source ones. Unlike that laser cutter.

I’m assuming you mean vendor XYZ cloud dependency and not AWS/GCP/etc?

why does the vendor matter? The core problem is a dependence on ANY cloud, or any internet service.

I think the open-sourcing is probably more feasible, as some companies that discontinue services do so because they're shutting down and, thus, may not have cash to offer mass refunds.

I agree, but this might be impossible for companies that license various closed-source software from other companies. For example, slingbox may have licensed various hardware drivers, and don't have the right to distribute their source code.

I don't know what the right answer is, but I'm not sure "open source everything" is the right one in this case.

If there is a law mandating open sourcing in case like this because if they don't there is jail time for fraud, companies would engineer their products for such a case. That would put pressure on hardware vendors to develop open source drivers (btw, why not, they already sell the hardware?) etc.

I'd say there's a 1% chance that would result in companies grinding their operations to a halt until their vendors make open source drivers, and a 99% chance that they'd find immediate workarounds, like renting you the box instead of selling it.

If they don't have the right to distribute their source code, then it seems an appropriate legal remedy in this hypothetical would be:

* Make them open source the code anyway, and the licensors can pursue the company's estate for any associated contractual penalty

* Make the company refund the users and prioritize the users as creditors

Or:

* Make it explicitly illegal to create such products for which you haven't secured the rights to distribute the entirety of the codebase in case the company goes under.

This would of course cause less "innovation" in the field, though frankly, the planet needs less crappy IoT garbage that barely works and quickly turns into paperweights. But it could also open up some currently locked up parts of the industry. Less low-quality SDKs with per-seat licensing would also be a good thing.

Slingbox can't grant anyone else the right to distribute source code they don't have a copyright for, either. They could release it, but then everyone else could be just as liable as them if they redistributed it. It would be DMCAed to death (nobody would dispute it, since Slingbox is defunct). It doesn't just become public domain, it's still closed-source.

If they don't have the right to distribute the source code, then "open source the code anyway" doesn't really do any good. No one else will be licensed to use it even after the company discloses the code to the world. It would just be like if a hacker broke in and released their source code.

Probably, but give the company either option. They might be bought by someone bigger who would rather refund the cash.

open sourcing it is anti-SaaS, you cant get that MRR if you support on prem. Slingbox is in a fight for it's existence.

Why do we need a law? No one forced you to buy a Slingbox.

We shouldn’t automatically reach to government intervention to solve every one of our pet peeves.

I don’t buy random gadgets that require cloud support from no-name companies for precisely this reason. You’re free to do the same. Eternal support for your consumer electronics is not a fundamental human right.

My only Slingbox purchase was an early standalone model, that didn't need a cloud connection. Migration to cloud-centric models put me off their product, permanently.

You're right that the purchase was a choice, but we already have laws pertaining to fitness, minimum warranties, safety, etc. Without a method of looking into the future to know that a product will be bricked by the maker in a year or two, the next best safeguard is minimums for viability set by law.

Those laws and regulations are justifiable because the hazard of an unsafe product is worth the cost of the regulation to prevent, and their scope generally doesn’t exceed the bare minimum needed to ensure safety. There is no law that says, for instance, that the Slingbox has to be reliable, has to produce acceptable image quality, or has to be priced competitively. As a society we leave it up to the individual to make those judgements.

I am simply suggesting that the question of “How long will the manufacturer maintain the service this device depends on?” should fall in the category of those sorts of questions, and not the “Will this device kill me if I plug it into the wall?” category that regulation should be reserved for.

> Those laws and regulations are justifiable because the hazard of an unsafe product

Most consumer protection laws are not about hazard and safety. For example, credit card companies having to refund fraudulent transactions has nothing to do with safety and everything to do with protecting people in the vastly power-imbalanced bank-client relationship.

Actually there are regulations about reliability, etc. You can't make grossly misleading claims, Magnuson-Moss, lemon laws, companies are routinely punished via class action suits for poor products, and can even be charged criminally for bad products. It's not all just about safety.

Agreed, let's have fewer laws. Let's abolish the DMCA and copyright protection.

We need lots of laws for consumer protection. It's in society's interests to regulate business plans. This falls under right-to-repair.

Why do we need a law that bans lead paint and asbestos? Why do we need a law that requires cars to have backup cameras? Why do we need a law that requires buildings to have wheelchair ramps?

Because those things dramatically impact society's health and well-being and not being able to do whatever it is that a Slingbox does... doesn't?

e-waste is among the worst flavors of post-consumer waste. If a lack of corporate attention span is meaningfully driving up its creation, then it's probably in society's interest to pay attention to that issue.

> Why do we need a law that requires cars to have backup cameras?

That one is definitely part of the car upgrade treadmill rather than fully supported by evidence. It's also far from universal.

(See also "e-call", the EU proposal that cars should automatically text their location to the police when involved in an accident)

because cloud services for broadcast tv are none of those things.

TBH - I suspect that there probably are laws that cover this in some jurisdictions, which is probably why they're maintaining the service for two years...

If you've bought a new device and it stops working after two years, is it a bit crappy? Yeah, of course it is. Is it legally actionable? Probably not. (IANAL obvs).

24 was perhaps a bad number to choose, since I read that as 24 hours - which seemed a bit hasty. They could have written "November 9, 2022" or "two years" which seems further into the future.

I think this would just result in extremely crappy open source that would be near impossible to get running.

With so many products going to a subscription model, will this be a problem in the future?