That’s already the case with a lot of things. I have a 3D scanner and printer for fixing things. Just the materials are limited to plastics that don’t need to take on load bearing tasks. I could use stronger plastics, though, if I was willing to deal with the fumes.

But even the car thing is not the responsibility of the manufacturer to fix. It’s the owner’s responsibility and only of they actually are using it.

If companies have to update all products to keep up with modern safety standards, it would mean no new products would ever be made and the products would be exceptionally expensive since you’d only buy them once. That’s not the type of economic system we live in.

And no, a router that is defective is not going to tank the digital economy just because the manufacturer doesn’t fix it. Definitely not a d-link product. That’s why enterprise grade commercial products are so much more expensive. They are designed for longer life. If that’s what you want, then buy a commercial product and pay the company a subscription fee for support or warrantee in cases like this.

That’s not necessarily true. That’s a copyright issue. Now if d-link was to say that the product was not abandoned and thus the copyright is still theirs, then you might have a case that they need to fix the issue. That doesn’t mean they need to give you the code, but decompiling should be OK. But copyright laws vary quite a bit. So that’s a totally separate issue.

But you are welcome to write your own firmware and install it on the device in most localities. You just need write it from scratch, just like replacing a custom gear or motor in a vacuum would require engineering it to fit inside the case and connect with all the appropriate parts. Which you are welcome to do.

Those are things that get inspected regularly because of public safety issues, not ownership issues, and in the US at least, that only happens in a subset of states anyway. That is about using something you know will likely hurt someone vs using something you know will hurt you and possibly your customers. There’s a big difference in liability there.

Vacuums for example do not get regular inspections, and owners are allowed to use any product they want, even defective ones, in their own home or business, even if they pose, say, an electrical shock risk or something else that wasn’t something that would have made it fail its initial certification. We don’t force vacuum manufacturers to fix old product design issues.

And even if we did, how long back would we make them fix? Would 100 year old vacuums need to be brought up to modern safety standards like grounded plugs and all of the wiring to be redone to ground all the parts or more modern motors that use less power so they don’t need to be grounded? What if only one person in the whole world still uses that product?

It’s just not a reasonable thing to expect re-engineering old devices when a new potential owner safety issue is found.

This is a misunderstanding of how Amazon works. There’s a difference from them showing up as products on their “store” and them actually selling them.

Anything that was a product of that company will show if you go to their store and search for it. But if you look at the options for actually buying them you’ll see that they are being sold by third parties.

For example, if you go to this link https://a.co/d/eFXaSFJ for the DSR-150 you’ll see that there are only 3 sellers. The new is shipped and sold by HOLLITRONIC and the others are used and shipped and sold by other sellers. None of the products on the list, as far as I could find, were being sold by D-link or Amazon itself. D-link has no control over the Amazon marketplace and honesty Amazon doesn’t do much to control it even.

Sure, but then those new revisions that are currently being sold are what get updated. That’s perfectly reasonable. We don’t require physical products to go back and fix the old stuff they are no longer selling. If we said that a vacuum manufacturer has to go back and fix their old products for safety flaws to comply with modern standards, what about a company that has been around for 100 years? Do they have to go back and design and manufacture modern technology into those products that didn’t exist when they were made? What if only one person in the whole world is actually using that product anymore? How long do they need to continue to revise the product?

I’m not saying they shouldn’t fix the issue necessarily, assuming it’s even possible. I’m saying they shouldn’t be held to higher standards than any other product just because the engineering effort involved in software is undervalued compared to physical objects. If a product made 15 years ago didn’t follow modern safety standards and is no longer being sold by the manufacturer, we don’t make them update their old products.

As for tooling, yes, and with software it often requires “tooling” that no longer exists in order to develop the patch including hardware that may no longer be manufactured. It’s not like the product manufacturer manufactures all of the parts like circuits and microchips. Just like vacuum manufacturers don’t usually make the bearings and gears and such, they just assemble them. So same concept.

We may require them to keep parts with the existing design, but we don’t require them to fix safety issues that were not found to be out of compliance when it was originally approved for production. We might make them fix it if they’re still selling them, but we don’t make them fix these issues if they are not.

That’s assuming you’re looking for a replacement part. This is redesigning the product to work differently to fix a flaw. Like if you made a vacuum company use a different gear because the existing one was too fragile. That’s likely not something you can just swap out. First you need an engineer to decide what kind of gear and redesign everything around it to make the gear fit properly as well as creating a way for it to be easily installed by the end user or their repair service. You’re ultimately changing the functionality of the original product. Yes it’s flawed functionality, but there are tons of flawed products out there.

This isn’t spare parts. This is asking for a new part to be designed and manufactured to replace an existing part. That takes time and money. Granted software doesn’t require mass production, but creating the initial version does take expertise and resources that may no longer exist in addition to the time and money.

As far as I can tell, those aren’t from authorized resellers or even from Amazon itself which they might have some ability to stop selling them. These are just people who are using amazon marketplace to sell off old stock like any other product. D-link hasn’t sold them for a while. But I could be wrong, I just haven’t seen any evidence that they are selling them. If Bissel had a vacuum that had a faulty gear that would break after a few years of use and they stopped making them, that wouldn’t stop someone from buying them up from Walmart or other store warehouses that no longer sold them and listing them for sale on Amazon or Walmart or whatever marketplace. That’s very common.

I mean this is pretty standard in all industries regardless of whether it’s a software flaw or a physical flaw in any other kind of product. What’s the likelihood of a vacuum manufacturer replacing a part in a 15 year old product that had a 1 year warrantee even if it’s a safety issue? Sure the delivery and installation is cheaper with software, but the engineering and development isn’t, especially if the environment for building it has to be recreated.

Not give up. Just move away from corporate owned social media which generally has biases baked in and allows for easy manipulation by the company. The one we’re on right now is not one of those and there are lots of other alternatives. Not that they’re perfect, just that money and especially wealthy individuals aren’t able to easily and singlehandedly manipulate millions of people by purging factual but dissenting information.

Yeah they may not cooperate with authorities, but I’m sure they’d be happy to sell it to contractors working on behalf of the government to the same ends. They already sell the info as it is.

I mean that’s standard practice. If a feature, product, or company develops a bad reputation, just rename it. If your market is large enough there will be enough people not paying attention to not realize it’s the same product.

He’s just trying to sell the upgrade so people will throw away their old cars and buy new ones. But that already happened with the last version and it still can’t do it. This won’t be any different with him in charge. Put an engineer in charge, invest in the tech, and you might get there. But Tesla is not going to ever get there while it needs to sell every incremental advance in tech rather than spending time and money on lots of iterations of prototypes that don’t need to be mass produced.

Lifetime of the universe is infinitely less than infinite time. So they solved for the wrong problem. Of course it may take longer than the life of the universe, or it may happen in a year. That’s the whole point of the concepts of infinity and true randomness. Once you put a limit on time or a restriction on randomness, then the thought experiment is broken. You’ve totally changed the equation.

You have to put on a show that you are sticking to those processes, on paper. But the fines for data breaches are generally way less than they save on not having a fully funded IT department and using security products that someone got a kickback for rather than the best product.

“Hacking” isn’t some magical, intensely creative process for geniuses loke on TV. For the most part, it’s usually just finding the really common things that IT departments don’t do because they are underfunded and treat IT people like replaceable cogs. There is software out there to exploit those deficiencies. So they are forced to do things like use default or obvious admin passwords because who knows who is going to be there tomorrow to fix something and without the proper tools to store credentials, there’s no way to properly secure things.

And when a security vulnerability is found, there’s a reason why many don’t bother informing the company before going to the media. Those companies pour tons of money into lawyers to avoid admitting the fault, often getting the innocent person who found the problem arrested, and never fix the actual issue. Just ask any pro whitehat security researcher not hired by the company all the things they have to do to protect themselves from being sued or arrested for “hacking” when they notice a problem.

And government technical auditors are a rarity because the regulators are underfunded. So they might go through some small list of things during regular audits, but they don’t know to check if a DBMS system that contains backups and is stored “in the cloud” is using a default password or other common hacking targets. Hackers don’t go after the primary infrastructure most of the time. It’s not necessary because there are so many sloppy processes or left over insecure projects that “the last guy” was working on or that got defunded before it was completed, but only the primary infrastructure gets audited usually because that’s all there is time and money for.

As for going somewhere else, there often aren’t other places to go and when there are they usually have the same problem because there’s very little reason for any of them to compete with each other. Most industries have consolidated so much that there are only a handful of parent companies left so it’s easy to collude just because their leaders are often all in the same room at conferences and such.

Yeah, considering how bad banks and other financial institutions are at IT security and the fact that there’s no incentive for a capitalist financial institution to fix that problem, it’s not a good idea.

It’s not the format that is the problem. It’s that old rich people from the broadcast industry decided that since they couldn’t compete with the communications and community industry they’d instead turn the communications platforms into broadcast platforms and tear down all of the community aspects. It happened to all of social media including more long form media as well. So if this project can avoid selling out or being manipulated by spammers into becoming yet another broadcast platform, it might have a shot.

I don’t want their money. Money means they’ll feel even more like they own it. I want them to contribute code to the projects and stop violating copyleft licenses and share the code they are creating.