> Why would someone waste their time manually disabling a device?
What what makes you think it was manual?
> That makes me think that this device was doing something malicous to their servers, enough to trip an alert.
Sounds like a them problem, and not a problem that should affect the consumer (beyond losing functionality directly tied to the server, which bricking of any kind goes far beyond)
The article said that someone from the company logged in to his device and edited a file on it to disable it. Even if it was automatic someone would manually have to write a script to login and edit a file.
> The article said that someone from the company logged in to his device and edited a file on it to disable it.
I can't find that in the article. Could you quote it?
The closest I got to finding this is:
> The manufacturer added a makeshift security protocol by omitting a crucial file, which caused it to disconnect soon after booting, but Harishankar easily bypassed it.
> deep in the logs of his non-functioning smart vacuum, he found a command with a timestamp that matched exactly the time the gadget stopped working. This was clearly a kill command
> So, why did the A11 work at the service center but refuse to run in his home? The technicians would reset the firmware on the smart vacuum, thus removing the kill code, and then connect it to an open network, making it run normally. But once it connected again to the network that had its telemetry servers blocked, it was bricked remotely because it couldn’t communicate with the manufacturer’s servers.
Which to me reads 'automatic script on the server tells device to delete file and reboot, causing it to brick', using the same kind of mechanism that an automatic firmware update would use, not 'human at company logs into device and tells it to brick'.
What what makes you think it was manual?
> That makes me think that this device was doing something malicous to their servers, enough to trip an alert.
Sounds like a them problem, and not a problem that should affect the consumer (beyond losing functionality directly tied to the server, which bricking of any kind goes far beyond)