Google reaches into customers' homes and bricks their gadgets

[SteampunkBanana]

I think I prefer the other option the world has been working towards of not putting out landmines in the first place and killing kids going for water in five years.

[RogerStrong]

@SteampunkBanana

As a side note, most of the reason that Hollywood exists in California is that it was as far away as they could get from Edison and his legal reach about how exactly his film inventions were supposed to be used.

Edison was the original movie pirate. He would illegally obtain copies of films (like Le Voyage dans la Lune / A Trip to the Moon), mass-duplicate them, and show them across the US. Often with the original filmmakers uncredited altogether.

He also had a history of patenting other people’s inventions.

[Peitro_Aretino]

Sony did something similar with their standalone DVRs. These expensive devices were built with an exclusive agreement with Rovi, the company that makes TV schedule guide software. The Sony machines were built with no way for the user to set the date or time. It had to be acquired over the air from Rovi software used by broadcast stations to supply scheduling info. When Rovi decided to stop supplying broadcast stations with its service, it in effect bricked all Sony DVRs. They could still record in real time and play, but scheduling a recording manually became an arcane and impractical exercise in translating the unit’s erroneous time/date into the equivalent for the actual time/date. The hardware was booby trapped as well, and was banjaxed by any attempt to change the HD or tinker with the electronics. Sony told its unhappy customers to get flocked.

[RogerStrong]

It’s worth mentioning Blu-Ray discs, which use High-bandwidth Digital Content Protection (HDCP) system. HDCP has multiple encryption keys, assigned to different manufacturers. If one of the keys leaks, it could be “revoked” - future Blu-Ray releases would refuse to play on devices with that key.

Meaning that your Blu-Ray player would simply stop working with new movie releases, because Sony for example had a security breach.

The only reason that hasn’t happened is that the master key also leaked, making revocation of the other keys pointless.

Back in 1998 more than 200 consumer electronics, security, ISP and recording industry companies came up with the Secure Digital Music Initiative (SDMI). This had key revocation and other nasty features. While that fell apart thanks to public resistance, some of the features live on, unused, in SD cards.