My mouse stopped working because Logitech's servers went down

64 pointsposted 2 days ago
by akshayy2a

16 Comments

danhau

a day ago

Apparently the preceding issue [1] on macOS of an out-of-date certificate wasn’t enough to drive away customers.

Plug-and-play peripherals relying on proprietary software was a mistake.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46548201

treesknees

a day ago

This isn’t a separate issue, this is a Reddit post from 3 days ago _during_ the certificate outage.

enigma101

a day ago

What in the flying F have we gotten ourselves into

dghlsakjg

a day ago

I have the same mouse. The mouse doesn’t “stop working”. The mouse stops being able to use certain proprietary features enabled by the companion software, and downgrades to a normal working mouse. Logitech have already fixed the software issue, so this is doubly deceptive. Yes, it sucks that you can’t use certain custom buttons, but the mouse functionality never went away.

millzlane

a day ago

How much it sucks depends on why you bought it. if you bought it to control a pointer, NBD. If you got it for the custom buttons, then it's a pretty big deal. Why those features need a server online to work is beyond me. Glad they got a fix though.

dghlsakjg

a day ago

They don’t need a server. The post is also wrong in that way.

The certificates for signing the macOS app expired. Because of that the patch needs to be manually installed instead of auto updating itself.

Things go wrong sometimes. This is mostly people catastrophising things on the internet for points.

justsomehnguy

a day ago

> Why those features need a server online to work is beyond me

They rewrite the functions on the fly. I.e. if Mouse4 is "navigation back" by default and you "set" it in the software to "Keyboard button A" then the software running on your computer (not the mouse) rewrites "navigation back" to "keyboard button A" on the go.

It's so bad what if you CPU is hogged then sometimes you would occasionally get the "real" button function (ie navigation back) instead of the "reprogrammed" one. Or sometimes - both.

It's utter bullshit of the design and the reason I threw that shit in the wall on day 2 and went to the store to buy Razer DeathAdder V2 HyperSpeed (R)(TM). Despite the ridiculous name and quite shitty application - most of the functions are actually stored on the mouse (besides some macro things, which is a pity, but again...).

Oh, by the way, the software I installed on my notebook to "program" that Logishit kept working, downloading updates, updating and not deleting the previous versions. I suddenly got "low disk space warning" and was like... what? And then I found this Logishit spent 20GBs of space for it. For doing nothing. Literally nothing.

But what is really puzzling is why @dghlsakjg is defending Logitech here. Maybe he has their stock or have some form of so called Stockholm syndrome.

silvanocerza

12 hours ago

All those features used to be usable even without their shitty software, as every configuration was stored in the mouse, as it should be.

The mouse was usable on every PC without the need to install anything, you had to configure it once and you’d be fine.

Logitech made the shitty decision some years ago to completely rewrite their mouse management software, so that it must be installed to use the main selling point features of the mouse. To be honest they left a way to store the configuration on the mouse, but they made it harder to find, configure and use it this way.

All this is a deliberate choice by Logitech to worsen the user experience just to gather your data.

user

a day ago

[deleted]

lapcat

a day ago

1) The submission title has been editorialized, contrary to the HN guidelines. The actual title of the Reddit post is "Logi+ Options is down!!"

2) The submission title is false. It was not a server issue but rather a native software issue.

justsomehnguy

a day ago

3) I really don't care if this is 'remote server' or 'native software' issue if I can't use the product I bought this my own money.

lapcat

a day ago

How is this reply relevant to my comment? What you care about is irrelevant to whether the HN submission title is accurate.

I'm not employed by Logitech, so I'm not here to handle your customer service complaints. In any case, Logitech has already released a fix, so I suggest that you contact them if you're still experiencing the problem.

justsomehnguy

7 hours ago

It is highly relevant because what should had been done in the firmware of the hardware instead was done in a very overcomplicated shitshow of a program what:

a) should be run constantly to rewrite the keypresses

b) can't be run if the certificate lapses

If Logitech goes out of business they would never renew the certificate and the hardware you bought for the options (and for Logi+ Options lol) would became just a regular mouse with a prebaked function keys what you can't do anything with - despite you probably overpaid for this mouse exactly because it was advertised what you can.

I encountered this issue this week. Went to Logitech website, downloaded patch, installed. Round trip less than 2 minutes. Really not a big deal .