<
https://doctorow.medium.com/amazon-alexa-is-a-graduate-of-the-darth-vader-mba-1eeeb93a51fc>
"If you own an Alexa, you might enjoy its integration with IFTTT, an easy
scripting environment that lets you create your own little voice-controlled
apps, like “start my Roomba” or “close the garage door.” If so, tough shit,
Amazon just nuked IFTTT for Alexa:
https://www.theverge.com/2023/10/25/23931463/ifttt-amazon-alexa-applets-ending-support-integration-automation
Amazon can do this because the Alexa’s operating system sits behind a
cryptographic lock, and any tool that bypasses that lock is a felony under
Section 1201 of the DMCA, punishable by a 5-year prison sentence and a $500,000
fine. That means that it’s literally a crime to provide a rival OS that lets
users retain functionality that Amazon no longer supports.
This is the proverbial gun on the mantelpiece, a moral hazard and invitation to
mischief that tempts Amazon executives to run a bait-and-switch con where they
sell you a gadget with five features and then remotely kill-switch two of them.
This is prime directive of the Darth Vader MBA: “I am altering the deal. Pray I
don’t alter it any further.”
So many companies got their business-plan at the Darth Vader MBA. The ability
to revoke features after the fact means that companies can fuck around, but
never find out. Apple sold millions of tracks via iTunes with the promise of
letting you stream them to any other device you owned. After a couple years of
this, the company caught some heat from the record labels, so they just pushed
an update that killed the feature:
https://memex.craphound.com/2004/10/30/apple-to-ipod-owners-eat-shit-and-die-updated/
That gun on the mantelpiece went off all the way back in 2004 and it turns out
it was a
starter-pistol. Pretty soon, everyone was getting in on the act. If
you find an alert on your printer screen demanding that you install a “security
update” there’s a damned good chance that the “update” is designed to block you
from using third-party ink cartridges in a printer that you (sorta) own:
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/11/ink-stained-wretches-battle-soul-digital-freedom-taking-place-inside-your-printer
Selling your Tesla? Have fun being poor. The upgrades you spent thousands of
dollars on go up in a puff of smoke the minute you trade the car into the
dealer, annihilating the resale value of your car at the speed of light:
https://pluralistic.net/2022/10/23/how-to-fix-cars-by-breaking-felony-contempt-of-business-model/
Telsa has to detect the ownership transfer first. But once a product is
sufficiently cloud-based, they can destroy your property from a distance
without any warning or intervention on your part."
Another example that I have personally experienced: when we first got our
FetchTV set top box, it allowed backing up programmes recorded from broadcast
TV onto other devices over the LAN. But then the studios created a new
copyright in broadcast transmissions and demanded that feature be removed from
all the previously sold set top boxes.
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
