Belkin shows tech firms getting too comfortable with bricking customers' stuff

I'm not against manufacturer stopping support for their Internet Of Shits devices, but there should be a law making it mandatory for them to release source code, protocol specs and whatever is needed so that a man of the craft could be able to do what is necessary to continue using the product that he bought.

I'd rather a law mandating that all devices include an 'offline' option for any hardware features that could conceivably support one.

I don't want to create an account for my toaster, nor have my lightbulb send updates to an analytics server, nor have my washing machine cease to function when my wifi goes down.

A ban on products tying hardware features to an internet connection would fix all those problems in addition to giving them theoretically eternal life.

I think the problem with this argument is that this is rarely the case.

99% of the time (including incident) they are not requiring an account for your toaster, or lightbulbs or your washing machine ceasing to function when your wifi goes off.

The issue is that you have a washing machine that you bought with a feature that you can watch the inside of the machine while it's running over wifi from anywhere in the world. Then the company "kills" their cloud features (like Belkin is doing wiht Wemo cloud features) and you no longer can watch your 4k stream of the washer working. Not even locally, not remotely, nothing. It's a feature you paid for, and 2 or 3 years down the line it's gone.

Some times the whole functionality of a device is a cloud connectivity, like a bridge or something, or a device that has 0 physical controls (for some design or ascetic reason) then yeah. Those devices would "cease to function"

Aside from really really maliciously designed products, most "smart" products I know of function perfectly fine as their dumb counter parts. The vast shocking majority of smart lights, smart switches, smart outlets, smart locks, and smart toasters I have seen all work as regular "dumb" version. But that's not why you paid the extra $40-$200 on it. Like a regular LED lightbulb is $4 and a Lifx wifi one is $30. It works fine as a regular lightbulb, you never need to do anything to it and you'd never know it has wifi in it.