[gstar]

It 100% is designed so that you have to use their hardware.

[cameldrv]

The biggest maker of garage door openers in the U.S. has done the same thing. For a button that goes on the wall to open the door, now it sends an encrypted code instead of just shorting two wires so that you have to use their button instead of a regular doorbell button like people have been doing for decades.

[cyberax]

I can't recommend ratgdo (Rage Against the Garage Door Openers) project highly enough. It implements the protocol and allows you to interact with the door: https://paulwieland.github.io/ratgdo/

The protocol itself is crazy, with obfuscated ternary data (instead of binary). People who reversed it are heroes.

[spikej]

Which company, and which product did you see this with?

[WWLink]

I blame it on cybersecurity experts lol. They probably went all alarmist and decided that having that was a giant security risk.

[Arrath]

God that's just insane.

[Liquix]

so if the company has established they're willing to go that far to lock customers into their ecosystem and milk for $$$... it's not inconceivable that they also engineered (or chose not to fix) the cheap flash + chatty logging hardware failure for the same purpose.

[raxxorraxor]

I would switch brands instantly. This is a company that has no customer orientation and I have never seen a company recover from that (they might have financial success, but they will never create good products again). They probably will sell you expensive crap. This time the device was fixable, but the manufacturer worked against the user on that.

[yuye]

Seems those tablets die not long after the warranty expires.

I'm willing to bet money on that it's planned obsolescence, especially considering their "technology keeps moving forward" bullshit.

[datavirtue]

Companies don't encrypt anything unless required. Except for code and databases...they encrypt and obfuscate those to keep people running back to them.

Source: my customers