I bought some awful WiFi lightbulbs a few months ago. The short version: they introduced terrible vulnerabilities on your network, they violated the GPL and they were also just bad at being lightbulbs. Since then I've bought some other Internet of Things devices, and since people seem to have a bizarre level of fascination with figuring out just what kind of fractal of poor design choices these things frequently embody, I thought I'd oblige.An entertaining read, if you are entertained by knowing that horrible design choices and GPL violations in this device are not your problem. :)
(it is still a shame that as a community we don't have the resources to do GPL enforcing in the myriad of cases like this.)
Tyng-Ruey Chuang, Danc likes this.
>> Freemor:
“Too bad they were so awful. but sounded like a nice bit of hacking so hopefully that was fun.
Your site being behind Cloudflare definitely not so fun. (I really really hate CF and with good reason).”
my site? do you mean http://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/ (that's not my site, just something that I read on planet debian and considered interesting enough to share)
Sorry.. I miss understood.. Thanks for correcting that. :)
How can you tell there aren’t resources to do GPL enforcement?
@Kete Foy well, conservancy is still trying to fund their enforcement work and hasn't reached the target, gpl-violations remained in hiatus for a long time, and AFAIK those are the two groups who were doing most of the enforcing from the community POV.
I'm not saying that there aren't resources to do enforcing at all, just that there aren't enough to go against every violator who releases a sell-and-forget device like the ones above on the market.