I have it on two of my Roborocks and it rocks.

Depending on where he lives this might be illegal. Yes, we live in a cyberpunk dystopia where the manufacturer can break what you bought and then send you to jail for repairing it. You can read more about it here: https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Digital_Millennium_Copyright_A...

This shit is absolutely dystopian. The law must not just be reversed, manufacturers need to be taken to court for shoddy software. Insecure data collection and transmission should be treated the same as having unsafe electrical wiring. It is a defect that needs to be either fixed or the product recalled. As long as manufacturers are not just allowed to but rewarded for selling defective products this won't change. I expect the moment unsolicited data collection becomes a liability manufacturers will drop it like a hot potato.

You might be interested in this project https://valetudo.cloud/

They have a list of supported vacuums

People obviously find them useful. But I will reiterate a sibling comments recommendation, get one that can run Valetudo : https://github.com/Hypfer/Valetudo

When I bought my Roomba in 2013, it cost as much total as I pay my cleaning ladies to come once every two weeks. If your floors get dirty easily, it's not really going to get them spotless, but it'll get them far cleaner than they'd otherwise be.

Sure, but a cleaner coming twice is the same cost of a robot vacuum that will work for a couple of years, typically. They do an okay enough job, but they need to run daily, sometimes twice a day, to really keep up considering it's limitations.

I think it’s one of the most idiotic devices anyone could own. Buy a normal vacuum cleaner for half the price, spend 10 minutes a week vacuuming your apartment, and you won’t come home and find that your cleaning robot spent the afternoon choking on a shoelace.

Thankful for people like this - with kids and family and work I’d probably have had this sit bricked for a year in my garage before finding time to tinker with it. Now I can just never buy any iLife product ever.

We should probably update this story to link directly to the hackers blog, they deserve the credit! https://codetiger.github.io/blog/the-day-my-smart-vacuum-tur...

There is a significantly easier option (although still more work than just buying a vacuum and using it as the manufacturer intended): get one of the Valetudo supported vacuums[0]. This firmware replacement blocks telemetry and allows for near complete feature parity with the original firmware, and flashing is (usually) relatively simple. Certainly much simpler than the process described here.

[0] https://valetudo.cloud/pages/general/supported-robots.html

I don't. I take it home, open the package and return it as defective.

You see the same everywhere. Lawnmowers even. A goat is more user friendly.

That's always a good idea, but how many people have the resources to research these details? First of all you have to be aware that this issue even exists. Then you have to scrape the corners of the internet for whether an appliance has any anti-features, because no manufacturer will ever write "collects unsolicited data about you, we will break the appliance if you refuse us your personal information" on the box. And finally you need to be able to afford the time and patience for the whole process.

I don't own a smart vacuum cleaner because the trouble is not worth it to me. However, I can see smart vacuum cleaners being very good for elderly or disabled people, or someone who has very limited free time and could let the robot clean the house on its own while the owner is out. It is really disgusting that scumbag manufacturers are exploiting those people.

That's awfully generous. Forcing phone-home, remote control, data harvesting features to be always-on creates a huge amount of data that can be sold for a lot of money. It gets all the wrong people excited about investing and normalizing the level of intrusion into your privacy, with some faceless corporation harvesting gigabytes of data per month from the most intimate and vulnerable physical location in nearly anyone's life.

"Never attribute to incompetence that which can be attributed to malice" or something.

Clearly automatic beds have some degree of embedded software. The decision to put the controls in the cloud was certainly a conscious one.

And what the company did is a felony under CFAA.

Not really. They probably flagged this as someone modifying the device and thought it could be someone reverse engineering it.

The owner did not hack the vacuum, he blocked the IP address on his network for the telemetry server. Same thing tons of people do with Pi-Hole DNS blocking, for example.

There's no sane world where it is defensible to remotely brick a device because it can't communicate with a telemetry server.

> As the business running the servers of smart vacuums, if I saw an atypical device reporting in, without context, I too would kill that device.

If you want to block a device from accessing your servers because it's behaving in an odd way, such as this one that was contacting the update server but not the telemetry server, that's not entirely unreasonable. Sending it a command to modify its software to stop it from operating entirely is outrageous.

> Why would they not be homogenous?

Why would a business have the power to decide what should and what shouldn't be homogeneous about the property of others? A transaction took place, property has legally changed hands and the former owner is exerting control over property that isn't theirs any more.

How about if the builder of your house comes into your home via an access route unknown to you, and starts rearranging where things are placed, or where you and your wife are placed, etc. in order to maintain homogeneous layout?

The business has no right to remotely kill a device purchased by an end user.

Does low-effort rage-bait belong on HN? aka, are you f**ing kidding?