Google
 

Aardvark Daily

The world's longest-running online daily news and commentary publication, now in its 30th year. The opinion pieces presented here are not purported to be fact but reasonable effort is made to ensure accuracy.

Content copyright © 1995 - 2025 to Bruce Simpson (aka Aardvark), the logo was kindly created for Aardvark Daily by the folks at aardvark.co.uk



Please visit the sponsor!
Please visit the sponsor!

You will never own it

21 Jan 2025

"You will own nothing and be happy".

Sadly, this appears to be the future, certainly where whatever you're buying involves a degree of connectivity.

Whether it's a car, a wireless CCTV camera, a printer or just about anything that connects to the internet, your latest purchase is probably going to disappoint you at some stage when the manufacturer decides to downgrade its functionality or simply discontinue support.

The reason for this is that a growing number of products now rely on a cloud-based server for critical parts of their functionality or for ensuring a regular stream of bug-fixes and updates. If that cloud-based server disappears for whatever reason, sometimes the devices that connect to it just stop working.

Likewise, even though you may have bought a product with features X, Y and Z, the manufacturer may decide that features X and Y now require the payment of an additional annual subscription -- and there's nothing you can do about it.

Sadly, there seems to be very little in the way of legal protection against this sort of thing so it pays to be awfully careful when choosing your products these days -- as a whole lot of 3D printer users found out to their cost recently.

One of the best, if not *the* best, 3D printers on the market today are the ones made by a company called Bambu Lab.

They have been described as "the Apple of 3D printers" thanks to the way they have created stylish and very easy to use 3D printers that come with a price-premium and a somewhat closed ecosystem.

The process of 3D printing requires several steps and one of the critical ones is running a program called the slicer. It is this software that turns the 3D design file into a series of commands that the printer then uses to print that design one layer (slice) at a time. Users can be quite religious about which slicer program is best and although the Bambu Lab printers come with their own branded slicer, many folks prefer to use their own favourite one instead.

Until now, this was a pretty simple operation, thanks to an API that allowed the writers of 3rd-party slicer programs to interface with the Bambu Lab printers so that files could be quickly processed and sent to the printer over a LAN or WAN.

Suddenly however, the company has said "nope, not any more".

In this blog post, Bambu Lab claim that many day-to-day operations with its top-line printers now require cloud-level connectivity so that they can be "authorized" by the company. This is all allegedly in the name of "security" (cue Tui's ad).

What it actually means is that now the company can see exactly what you're printing, when you're printing it and if they choose to, actually prevent you printing it.

To be fair, you could still dump your slicer file onto an SD card and manually start a print job but the printer was sold with the promise that you could automate this process so in effect, it has been "downgraded".

Naturally, owners of these machines were outraged and vented their spleens on social media platforms across the Net.

This was the company's response and it's basically just a "trust us bro" statement.

It will be interesting to see whether those affected will accept the company's promises but it's also worrying that they could perhaps simply be joining the "you will own nothing and be happy" mentality that is sweeping through corporations around the world.

The great concern within the community of Bambu Lab users is that this latest update is in preparation for the roll-out of subscription based services. That is to say, some of the features that were part of the product when they bought it will be withdrawn and only made available for a monthly or annual payment. That would go down like a lead balloon for sure.

I guess the takeaway from this is that we should be *very* careful when selecting new products and look closely at just how reliant those products are on connectivity. If they require the internet to function and especially if such functionality is reliant on servers operated by the manufacturer, try to find an alternative. E-waste piles around the world are rapidly filling up with devices that have effectively been bricked when the manufacturer has gone out of business or just says "end of life" and turns off those servers to save money.

Don't be a casualty!

Carpe Diem folks!

Please visit the sponsor!
Please visit the sponsor!

Here is a PERMANENT link to this column


Rank This Aardvark Page

 

Change Font

Sci-Tech headlines

 


Features:

The EZ Battery Reconditioning scam

Beware The Alternative Energy Scammers

The Great "Run Your Car On Water" Scam

 

Recent Columns

Superhero or snake-oil merchant?
Elon Musk made a post on X yesterday. He said...

NVIDIA gets it wrong, again
NVIDIA is the undisputed king of GPUs...

Disinformation, who decides?
Ever since the mainstream media found itself floundering in the new world of internet...

Privacy is no longer an option
Wow, the UK is a mess right now...

Spying, the smart way
news of the day seems to be the suggestion that the Five-Eyes spy network may be dismantled...

All is lost (political commentary)
Deviating from the normal sci/tech content today because...

Too rich to prosecute?
If you defraud people of money, you will likely be caught...

Que les guerres commerciales commencent
Allow me to translate the title of today's colum...

The danger of bureaucracies
Yesterday, lives were lost in the USA as the result of what I believe are bureaucratic bungles...

How did this happen?
Helium is an inert gas that is lighter than air. In fact it's the second-lightest element, coming in just behind hydrogen...