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Polish Hackers Repaired Trains the Manufacturer Artificially Bricked. Now The Train Company Is Threatening Them (www.404media.co)

submitted 11 months ago by btp@kbin.social to c/technology@lemmy.world

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In one of the coolest and more outrageous repair stories in quite some time, three white-hat hackers helped a regional rail company in southwest Poland unbrick a train that had been artificially rendered inoperable by the train’s manufacturer after an independent maintenance company worked on it. The train’s manufacturer is now threatening to sue the hackers who were hired by the independent repair company to fix it.

After breaking trains simply because an independent repair shop had worked on them, NEWAG is now demanding that trains fixed by hackers be removed from service.

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[–] sanqueue@lemmy.world 64 points 11 months ago (1 children)

This is good. Someone did that for printers too

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 41 points 11 months ago (2 children)

And American Weight (?) digital scales. The ones that brick themselves after 2,000 uses because how dare you only pay once.

[–] jucelc@lemmy.wtf 31 points 11 months ago

Lol. Always suspected there was a scam there, but every time I bring it up in a conversation - people just call me a conspiracy theorist.

This goes for pretty much everything though. Planned obsolescence is real, but people think it's just the natural way of things.

[–] DeafeningDistance@feddit.ch 12 points 11 months ago (1 children)

is there an article about this? Would love to read about it

[–] Lemminary@lemmy.world 10 points 11 months ago

There is no article that I could find, so I guess you take my word for it. But I'll fill you in on why I said it from what I remember. You can make up your mind on this:

I was looking for a digital scale during the pandemic and naturally went on Amazon. I found some within my budget (I live outside the US) but most of them had multiple reviews complaining about a weird error that they couldn't fix. I did some digging around, yet nobody seemed to know what the error really was that was showing up after some time of prolonged use without signs of wear. Eventually, I got to a thread on some technical forum that said it was a software error that strongly hinted at planned obsolescence after so many uses.

The weird thing is that I can't find any of the models that had this on Amazon anymore but it doesn't surprise me after some of the shit I've seen on there with people manipulating reviews on other products I've bought. So I guess it could go either way for someone review-bombing the product or it being a real issue, but that doesn't explain the error showing up on other sites. I wish I could remember what the error code was.

If anybody knows anything more about this, I'd love to hear it. It certainly was a strange surprise that ended up costing me a bit more than I was planning to spend. But I guess bullet dodged?