... for reminding everyone not to buy things that require cloud access to be useful.

It's about time we get some legislations which protect customers from companies stopping services or going out of business and thereby "bricking" a product you bought.

They'd have to deposit sourcecode, patches, server installs etc. in some trust which then has to release these things to customers.

that's true... Education and alternatives would indeed fix many problems there...

No. The poachers are poor, stupid fucks who need the money and couldn't care less for the animals.
The ONLY way would be going after their "customers".
Anyone buying that stuff should face at least from half a year's salary to serius prison time.

But I can imagine that most of them sit in Russia, China and maybe Japan. And their government doesn't give a fuck, too. So, little hope there...

When you have that kind of money that the billionaires mentioned have, it's not about money anymore, it's about power.

As their first working fix was blocking Port 7547, one can safely assume that the TR-069 implementation of specific router models were targeted. 3rd party routers are/were completely unaffected.

People are either too stupid or deliberately abuse the feature to extort money from the company.

Humanity isn't ready for "assisted driving" because whenever something goes wrong, it's the system's fault.
When we have a car in which you can sleep until you arrive at your destination, we can call it "autopilot". Until then, just enable "adaptive cruise control" and be done with it.

Comic Sans comes to mind...

Yes: "YAY! A way to avoid the Idiocracy scenario"

Mere words can't even begin to describe how irrelevant this is!

Maybe they align with the direction of wind, not to get their sense of smell distracted by their own feces?

Quite interesting

Reminds me of how lmsensors bricked some Thinkpads during the I2C probing process. It overwrote some bytes in the "security chip" and wrecked a checksum which prevented the machine from booting. IBMs answer was to replace the mainboard. You could reprogram the chip, but the information was hard, if ever, to get. Some guys offered reprogramming services for a hefty fee.
The main reason was that the security chip, wich was a extended I2C eeprom (24RF02) reacted differently to commands as its non-security counterpart.

1n35e.png: my new Wallpaper :)

Seriously... I love to tinker and I love taking things apart and fix or hack them, I've been doing it since 25 years already. BUT I also like my iPhone and iPad because they're the only things I own where I'm not tempted to tinker around. I like that! The things just work and they do anyting I want. I stopped jailbreaking after I found out, that the only things gained are stupid customization gizmos I don't need. Like already stated: If you don't like the product don't buy it! What do you all hope to gain from your crusade? Couldn't you use all the hate-time to do something productive? Yeah I know, since I own apple products I'm tainted and couldn't possibly be objective... sigh...

Who are alo men...