For crying out loud, equipment with unique recorded serial numbers was stolen, so the company is blocking the specific stolen devices. That makes perfect sense to me. Objecting to how they do it (bulking up software with a list of serials, requiring software to phone home, whatever) is fine and their customers have a legit basis to be unhappy if it's impacting their use, but people with the stolen devices? Those aren't SDRPlay's customers because SDRPlay hasn't been paid for those devices.
Quoting from the article: In a PR disaster the manufacturer gives "Because we can" as an explanation to make end user devices worthless.
I'll note that this complaint very carefully leaves out a key word: STOLEN. I'm not seeing the PR disaster except that it's going to seriously hurt their image in the community of people who steal stuff from warehouses. tiny violin plays sad music
If you've purchased one of these, as I said above you're not a customer of SDRPlay or one of its distributors because payment is part of a vendor-customer relationship. You're someone who bought "Bose" speakers out of the back of a white van in a parking lot. Get your money back from the seller - you may even be able to get the police report from SDRPlay if you need it for a chargeback - and tell SDRPlay where you bought it so they can try to track down the thieves.
Edit: reading the original SDRPlay forum posts, they ID the specific ebay sellers, note that this is the third time they've had things stolen like this and sold by the same accounts, and note that "We will NOT penalise innocent people so that assumption that this is our intent is frankly WRONG!!" Basically they're likely looking for anything like saved packaging, shipping return addresses, etc. to be turned over to the police. Also, this whole thing is about (in this case at least) a total of 39 devices. We're not talking about thousands of people affected.
SDRPlay: https://www.sdrplay.com/community/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=3225
Anyone who purchases tech devices owns some "pirate" content. When you buy a motherboard you don't know the pedigree of its hundreds of components. Trace each one and you will find a licensing or counterfeit issue somewhere. Should everyone be able to automagically brick counterfeit or stolen devices when those devices have been integrated, resold three times, and are now in the hands of innocent consumers? There are policy-based principals in western law that have long prevented such behavior in other arenas.
See: https://www.law.cornell.edu/ucc/2/2-403
Not exactly on point, but an example of how we protect good-faith purchasers, even black-market purchase of "stolen" goods.
https://www.cultofmac.com/246755/why-ios-7s-activation-lock-...
Which in typical Apple whining style complains how the sky will fall due to this new feature. And then it didn’t.
Caveat emptor. Buying from a 3rd party and presumably at a deep discount always carries a risk of goods being stolen.
PS. FTDI case is of no relevance here - they were bricking devices of _other_ vendors, not their own.
1 party has 100% of the information, 1 party has 0% of the information, and the burden is on the party with 0% information. That's absurd.
> The manufacturer is certainly under no obligation to support them.
Not support and bricking are two different things.
> In many states even unknowing possession of stolen goods is a crime
Generally the state has to prove the defendant took receipt of the items for an unlawful purpose. Ohio is an exception, but I'm not sure if there is another one.
> so many of the "users" here are in fact getting off lightly.
You use "many" incorrectly here: Very, very few are. Because very, very few jurisdictions make it a crime to unknowingly receive stolen property and even fewer would actually press charges even if allowed.
Your post is nonsense.
I've never heard of this. Source?
At least until Apple totally shuts down DIY repairs by authenticating the LCD, MAC, keyboard etc. upon startup.
Not if they’ve been resold since then. Then it’d just look like any other device on the used market.
The database behind that is apparently shared internationally between mobile networks, and most people would find a phone unable to connect to anything but WiFi useless.
After slowly getting into the manufacturing game myself and after USPS auctioned some of my cute early engineering samples that ended up on ebay, I definitely think this is totally reasonable from the manufacturer. Also the title of the article is already attacking the manufacturer. If you brick the devices, you hurt the person stealing and indeed it seems that this wasn't the first time it happened to them. On the consumer side maybe a discount would also be a nice gesture.
if i'm understanding you correctly, the postal service somehow ended up in possession of your early prototypes and they sold them to somebody who then re-listed them on ebay. was this a lost parcel situation?
After a month went by (adding to the already another month of delay) they said its on its way, etc. We randomly searched ebay with our brand name and saw an active listing with our prototypes in it. Other things in the box like our gopro were gone, but at least we found the prototypes and contacted the seller. The seller said that she got the items at an auction for items that couldnt be delivered a MONTH earlier, while USPS was telling us it was on the way.
Seller ended up giving us the prototypes for a small fee.
The reasons for this are obvious - to make it as hard as possible to sell stolen goods. The effects encourage the innocent purchasers to have some level of caution when looking at buying goods.
Does that mean they'll unbrick their hardware? That's about the only sympathy I'd expect after purchasing a product in good faith, and discovering that it was bricked or disabled by the manufacturer.
The one I bought came delivered in a plastic baggie in a padded envelope. It could have been stolen for all I know.
Is there a way to check which serial numbers were stolen? Can I demand a seller post a picture of the device with the serial number so I can check? How can I be sure they won't lie?
There isn't really a centralized or standardized way to do this, though. I guess if I'm buying some smart-ish hardware, I just have to google around for the company and hope I did a good job.
If you buy stolen good, you don't get to keep them. These are stolen goods, why would you ever expect the company to simply allow you to use it?
But you're right, in the end they are stolen goods.
> Back in October 2014, the FDTI manufacturer shipped a device driver that ... would make any operating system stop seeing the device by setting its USB product ID to 0 , basically killing the USB device.
Well, if that id can be set to 0, it can also be set back to original value, isn't it?
It’s not like this is a cellphone sold to my mom. It’s an extremely specialist product aimed at a group of users with vast electronics and reverse engineering knowledge. Probably won’t be long before one of them reverse engineers the device and releases the code to ignore the blacklisting.
Anyone know the technical details of how the blacklisting works?
In my experience, the kind of person who buys an SDR is (a) unlikely to appreciate a $400 device that phones home on boot, and (b) likely to reverse engineer the blacklisting code simply for the fun of it.
Everything I've learned, is that for capabilities like this, the good reasons are the justifications, and then the owners migrate to less good reasons. The overall distrust I have with these kinds of systems are that they are Treacherous Software/Hardware. This capability is something that shouldn't be implemented. No user in their right mind would - but the companies that wish to retain ownership rights after sale do.
I would also object to this 'hacking of these devices' as violations of CFAA. Yes, the devices had lost chain of custody, and were reported as stolen. That doesn't allow any entity to then engage in more illegal behaviors exigent to the initial situation. If I am being robbed, I am allowed to defend myself and my goods. However I cannot stalk the robber, and then bash his/her kneecaps in after the fact. 2 wrongs, separated by time, do not make a right.
