this post was submitted on 20 Nov 2024
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I mean this is pretty standard in all industries regardless of whether it's a software flaw or a physical flaw in any other kind of product. What's the likelihood of a vacuum manufacturer replacing a part in a 15 year old product that had a 1 year warrantee even if it's a safety issue? Sure the delivery and installation is cheaper with software, but the engineering and development isn't, especially if the environment for building it has to be recreated.
What you're saying is perfectly reasonable, but also doesn't apply here because they're still selling this router new on the D-link Amazon store.
If you're going to stop supporting a product, you should also stop selling it.
As far as I can tell, those aren't from authorized resellers or even from Amazon itself which they might have some ability to stop selling them. These are just people who are using amazon marketplace to sell off old stock like any other product. D-link hasn't sold them for a while. But I could be wrong, I just haven't seen any evidence that they are selling them. If Bissel had a vacuum that had a faulty gear that would break after a few years of use and they stopped making them, that wouldn't stop someone from buying them up from Walmart or other store warehouses that no longer sold them and listing them for sale on Amazon or Walmart or whatever marketplace. That's very common.
Some of them are being sold on the official D-link store on Amazon.
This is a misunderstanding of how Amazon works. There's a difference from them showing up as products on their "store" and them actually selling them.
Anything that was a product of that company will show if you go to their store and search for it. But if you look at the options for actually buying them you'll see that they are being sold by third parties.
For example, if you go to this link https://a.co/d/eFXaSFJ for the DSR-150 you'll see that there are only 3 sellers. The new is shipped and sold by HOLLITRONIC and the others are used and shipped and sold by other sellers. None of the products on the list, as far as I could find, were being sold by D-link or Amazon itself. D-link has no control over the Amazon marketplace and honesty Amazon doesn't do much to control it even.
This is why a number of countries have laws saying spare parts must be made available for a number of years past being sold. Well beyond what the warranty is.
How is this significantly different?
I'd also settle for releasing 3D models of out-of-production parts so they can be 3D-printed by enthusiasts.
Story time: in my second-gen Mazda Miata, I closed the centre console lid on a piece of cardstock by accident and it snapped the plastic piece that latches the lid shut. The part previously sold for ~$10 but they stopped producing it as a standalone part at some point and the only way to acquire it was to buy the $100 centre console lid assembly.
Software 100% needs to be included in support.
Old devices that become vulnerable but still accessible on the internet, eventually become part of bot nets producing DDOS and other network attacks.
This isn't spare parts. This is asking for a new part to be designed and manufactured to replace an existing part. That takes time and money. Granted software doesn't require mass production, but creating the initial version does take expertise and resources that may no longer exist in addition to the time and money.
You think spare parts don't cost money? Wearhouse space is expensive. Massive part stores have to be made. That's all expense needed to take on by auto manufacturers. Why would software be different?
Either that or they keep all the tooling, which again is expensive. And people need to know how to use the tooling too.
This isn't a "it'd be nice" kind of patch. This is exactly how we get massive bot nets for DDOS attacks. Devices become vulnerable, scans go out on the internet looking for devices they can exploit, and when they do, they gather bot nets.
It's also not creating something new. It's fixing your shit. They don't have to create the entire software stack from scratch, just fix the exploit. If they can't reasonably do that, then these devices need to be taken offline.
I'm not saying they shouldn't fix the issue necessarily, assuming it's even possible. I'm saying they shouldn't be held to higher standards than any other product just because the engineering effort involved in software is undervalued compared to physical objects. If a product made 15 years ago didn't follow modern safety standards and is no longer being sold by the manufacturer, we don't make them update their old products.
As for tooling, yes, and with software it often requires "tooling" that no longer exists in order to develop the patch including hardware that may no longer be manufactured. It's not like the product manufacturer manufactures all of the parts like circuits and microchips. Just like vacuum manufacturers don't usually make the bearings and gears and such, they just assemble them. So same concept.
We may require them to keep parts with the existing design, but we don't require them to fix safety issues that were not found to be out of compliance when it was originally approved for production. We might make them fix it if they're still selling them, but we don't make them fix these issues if they are not.
We do take cars that fail safety inspections off the road. You are correct, we don't hold them to higher standards, but that's not a reason why we also shouldn't remove genuine hazards off the roads.
If a car is far more likely to kill someone, it shouldn't be on public roads either. Just like devices that can't be update don't belong on public nets. The risk to the broader public is to big IMO.
I work for a manufacturer with part catalogues going back to 1921, and while the telegraph codes no longer work, you could absolutely still order up a given part, or request from us the engineering diagram for it to aid in fabricating a replacement. You can also request service manuals, wiring diagrams, etc. Don't all half-decent manufacturers do this?
Been there done that. Got the tee shirt.
While good support to customers is very valuable, trying to support a product that is decades old and shares nothing in common with current products is a plain waste of time energy and money.
It would require someone to search out all the documentation needed to make that one part, then you need to figure out the correct process to make said part, determine if you have material on hand or need to special order something, then try to find that one old jig/fixture needed amongst a building full of 100's of such items for the right one. Then you need to be sure that the the complete fixture is there and nothing is worn out beyond use. Then you need to make time to insert this one-off semi-custom part into the manufacturing process.
By the time you do all this, that one 20 year old obsolete part will have perhaps cost you thousands of dollars and you still haven't made the first piece of swarf. Imagine the shock and surprise that customer would have when they get the bill that accurately reflects the true cost.
Oh, I've seen or rather heard the gasps of surprise you speak of, my friend. I remember about ten years ago getting a request to source a specific part out to Nunavut, in the Canadian Arctic. It was would have been pricier than just getting a whole new unit, for their purposes. We did provide them with the engineering drawings so that they could get a local shop to machine the parts, but I don't know if they ever went that route.
That's assuming you're looking for a replacement part. This is redesigning the product to work differently to fix a flaw. Like if you made a vacuum company use a different gear because the existing one was too fragile. That's likely not something you can just swap out. First you need an engineer to decide what kind of gear and redesign everything around it to make the gear fit properly as well as creating a way for it to be easily installed by the end user or their repair service. You're ultimately changing the functionality of the original product. Yes it's flawed functionality, but there are tons of flawed products out there.
Oh, most products and components go through multiple revisions to account for either flaws in the original design or to comply with local laws (for example, health and safety requirements that did not exist at time of original design). I believe it's imperative for every business to keep on top of these things.....but perhaps I'm a bit naive.
Sure, but then those new revisions that are currently being sold are what get updated. That's perfectly reasonable. We don't require physical products to go back and fix the old stuff they are no longer selling. If we said that a vacuum manufacturer has to go back and fix their old products for safety flaws to comply with modern standards, what about a company that has been around for 100 years? Do they have to go back and design and manufacture modern technology into those products that didn't exist when they were made? What if only one person in the whole world is actually using that product anymore? How long do they need to continue to revise the product?
Yes they do, but half decent manufacturers are extremely rare.
No. That is phenomenally uncommon. To the point it's almost unheard of.
Now I wish you'd tell us what the company is so if I ever need anything in that industry, I'd know where to buy from.
I wish I could be more specific, truly, but I would be putting myself at serious risk of doxxing myself, and I've made fun of a lot of bad people across Lemmy (and Reddit, once upon a time) that I would be putting myself and others at risk of retribution.