Amazon Alexa is a graduate of the Darth Vader MBA

[justaprogressive]

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:

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:

[link:https://pluralistic.net/2023/10/26/hit-with-a-brick/|

Do you REALLY want one of these in your home?

[grumpyduck]

1. Nope.

No way.

[Wonder Why]

2. There's a sucker born every minute. I try to avoid being one of them.

If I need to turn off the lights, I get up and walk over to the switch.

If I need to find out the temperature, I use the radio, the TV or search with Duck-Duck-Go.

[slightlv]

3. No way...

not now, not ever that I can foresee. IOT was a good idea, but like most ideas that start out good, someone figured out how to make it evil... and now the evil outweighs the good.