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Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

arstechnica.com

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Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#121

Post by crazygringo »

throwaway48476 wrote: post #113
crazygringo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, courts don't just make up precedent out of thin air. Courts follow laws as written, and make decisions and establish precedent whenever laws are vague, in edge cases, or when laws conflict. But for stuff like this new laws are absolutely required. Why would you prefer unelected judges to be making stuff up, instead of democratically elected lawmakers whose literal job it is to decide these kinds of policies with…

Differences of interpretation effectively are making up precedent. Circuit splits exist because of this.

That's what I said -- "whenever laws are vague". And it's not "effectively" -- that's a major part of what precedent is.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#122

Post by crazygringo »

keraf wrote: post #96
Philip-J-Fry wrote: post #9

Are they just banking on people not caring enough or knowing about the refund process? Clearly it can't be better off for them to refund hundreds of thousands maybe even 1m+ people. We need laws that step in to make this impossible. Hardware should be designed so that it can be reused. Make it so that people can just reflash the memory at a minimum. There's no reason for something like this to become e-waste. And the…

The lack of care for e-waste produced makes me sick. Spotify should at least open the hardware or sponsor a contest for a smart re-use / open source firmware for the device, would probably cost them less at the end and make them look better.

This is going to be a hot take here, but honestly I'm not that concerned about e-waste, in the grand scheme of things.

What about cars, air conditioners, dishwashers, fridges, furniture, clothing? What about when we throw all of those out?

The amount of e-waste I've gotten rid of over my life is miniscule both in terms of weight and volume in comparison to the things I've listed.

I think we confuse environmental impact with cost. Just because a phone and a fridge both cost $1,000 doesn't mean they're equivalently bad to throw out. A device like a Car Thing is nothing compared to, say, an air conditioner. Even if it was half the price.

It's like when people want to make sure Apple will take their AirPods back for recycling, but have no problem with tossing single-use AA batteries in the trash. They seem to be mistakenly measuring by purchase price rather than actual environmental impact.

I mean, I definitely think it's important to recycle e-waste. But I just don't understand when people don't seem to care when their old air conditioner gets taken away but care about old phones, when one AC probably contains more materials than all the cell phones they will ever buy in their lifetime.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#123

Post by eurleif »

hbn wrote: post #114
eurleif wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, but that's just when Google will stop hosting the tool that lets you reflash it. The tool works without Google's servers, and is already hosted elsewhere: https://github.com/luigimannoni/stadia-controller-flasher?ta...

Well, a community effort to reverse engineer the process and deobfuscate the javascript is keeping the tool alive. If they didn't step in to archive it, seemingly the cutoff would have been real. It would have been a better testament to their commitment to prevent these controllers from becoming e-waste if Google just hosted an open source version of the flashing tool on their github from the start.

As far as I know, the reverse engineering/deobfuscation is only for the purpose of allowing third-party firmware to be flashed instead of the Google firmware for Bluetooth. If all you want to do is archive the tool for the latter, you merely have to copy the files from Google's site.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#124

Post by xp84 »

midtake wrote: post #60
Gasp0de wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We live in a time where AI chatbots speak way better english than outsourced support workers in 3rd world countries.

We live in a time where AI chatbots speak way better English than most native English speakers.

I'm wondering whether soon we'll see the outsourced CS chats run through a 'small' efficient LLM to 'clean up' (or in some cases, just re-localize) the English of such workers to match the locale of the caller.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#125

Post by throwaway48476 »

crazygringo wrote: post #121
throwaway48476 wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Differences of interpretation effectively are making up precedent. Circuit splits exist because of this.

That's what I said -- "whenever laws are vague". And it's not "effectively" -- that's a major part of what precedent is .

Every law is vague if you're a lawyer.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#126

Post by Anthony-G »

When I read stories about companies like Spotify creating e-waste like this, I think it’s worth pointing out that commercial companies don’t have to behave this way.

As a counter-point, back around 2008, I purchased two Squeezebox music players from Logitech (digital music players that Logitech had acquired from Slim Devices: high quality DACs that supported every audio format, gap-less playback, synchronised playing on multiple devices, and were very configurable).

They discontinued these products four years later (2012) but kept their mysqueezebox.com online service running up until the start of this year (2024). They kept the user forums running and archived the knowledge-base wiki. Most importantly, they open-sourced the stand-alone server software for running a local Squeezebox server and continued to pay the main developer to maintain the project for more than a decade after they discontinued the products. He’s still the lead developer and project maintainer of the server software, now called Lyrion Music Server: https://lyrion.org/

Correction: the stand-alone server software was always open source, specifically GPLv2. In addition to the audio quality and features, that was one of the selling points for me. It being written in Perl, meant that it was both cross-platform and easy to run on a GNU/Linux system.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#127

Post by xp84 »

cqqxo4zV46cp wrote: post #56
hoherd wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spotify almost certainly developed Car Thing using license encumbered software, and this illustrates how encumbered licenses are anti-freedom and are causes of unnecessary e-waste. Thankfully folks have started organizing to reverse engineer the device: - https://github.com/err4o4/spotify-car-thing-reverse-engineer... - https://hackaday.com/2024/05/30/old-spotify-car-thing-hacks-...

[flagged]

That is hard to hear, given how unacceptable it seems to us to waste this hardware, but it's frustratingly true. Lots of devices have been made and EOLd which had reusability potential after that happened, devices which nobody went to much trouble to lock down, and yet we all know 99% of them went in the landfill anyway. Even the ones 'hacked' will probably go in the landfill anyway, just a couple years later. Unless we really believe that those of us nerds who reflash them, are truly using those devices as a substitute for some new gadget we would have purchased. Somehow I doubt this is usually true.

As an example, how many old hacked Wii consoles are being actively used today in a way that makes us genuinely believe that someone is using it as a substitute for a new gaming console? And that sucker, by the time all of its official support ended, was so simple to hack that I think it's equivalent to an officially unlocked bootloader.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#128

Post by autoexec »

School-Cotton wrote: post #80
crazygringo wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, courts don't just make up precedent out of thin air. Courts follow laws as written, and make decisions and establish precedent whenever laws are vague, in edge cases, or when laws conflict. But for stuff like this new laws are absolutely required. Why would you prefer unelected judges to be making stuff up, instead of democratically elected lawmakers whose literal job it is to decide these kinds of policies with…

At least in the U.S., I (like most people) trust unelected judges much more than the (quasi-democratically at best) elected legislature.

I suspect that the more you looked into what specific judges do the less you would trust them. It's rare that a judge gets much media attention outside of major scandals ('cash for kids' for example) and most people would struggle to even name one who wasn't a supreme court justice. We're far more familiar with the shortcomings of our representatives so we're less trusting of them. That doesn't make judges more worthy of trust though.

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#129

Post by monknomo »

crazygringo wrote: post #122
keraf wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The lack of care for e-waste produced makes me sick. Spotify should at least open the hardware or sponsor a contest for a smart re-use / open source firmware for the device, would probably cost them less at the end and make them look better.

This is going to be a hot take here, but honestly I'm not that concerned about e-waste, in the grand scheme of things. What about cars, air conditioners, dishwashers, fridges, furniture, clothing? What about when we throw all of those out? The amount of e-waste I've gotten rid of over my life is miniscule both in terms of weight and volume in comparison to the things I've listed. I think we confuse environmental impa…

imo, the appliances breaking is also a choice and one that is a real shame. No one actually wants to buy new refrigerators or dishwashers, and the improvements in that space have all be pretty marginal.

Fast fashion is shame too - clothes ought to last a bit as well.

And cardboard/particle board furniture that services .5-1.5 moves is also basically bad.

Cars have been steadily increasing in durability and reliability for decades

Re: Spotify won't open-source Car Thing, but starts refund process

#130

Post by xp84 »

hn_throwaway_99 wrote: post #75
murillians wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Car Thing was only a remote for your phone's Spotify app. It was targeted towards people that had bluetooth or aux inputs to their car's stereo, but not Apple CarPlay or Android Auto that allowed you to control Spotify directly through the radio.

I have a Car Thing for my 2015 Chevy Volt, and I really enjoyed it. For exactly the reasons you mention, it lets me control Spotify with a great UI. I can also just play my phone over Bluetooth but it's not like I can select different playlists, browse songs, etc. from my car's dashboard - all I can do is go back or forward. I'm also surprised they're bricking Car Thing. Given how it works, I didn't realize it would…

Seriously. I don't know anything about mobile development, but once it's working in the first place, how hard is it to just NOT delete its API hooks from the codebase. As a developer, I can only guess that maybe the code which supports it, or the code where it has to poke its fingers into into in order to be able to draw its UI, is poorly-architected and removing the Car Thing code across the board will allow them to more easily refactor or something.
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