We need a law that companies provide device owners root access for every end of life device.
That’s something the EU would do, but never America.
How about a free gun at the end of life of any device?
NOW we’re talking!
I think medical device manufacturers should have to support their products for some definite length of time—maybe 10 years?—or not be allowed to make devices at all
Medical devices are already supported for a very long time. At least the official ones used in hospitals.
I was thinking about implanted devices, e.g. Second Sight https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-60416058
For software too, if a company has sold software and then goes out of business, it should have to give all licensed users permanent access to use it. Preferably also the source code. (Ideally we’d have open source options for everything but that’s not always practical or possible right now.)
It would be one thing for a corporation to misuse the term open source as they’ve been doing lately. It’s pretty bad for one of the biggest and oldest tech news sites to be doing it.
More like ArseTechnica, eh?
Basic documentation does not equal open source.
Toaster ovens from 40 years ago did better. They came with a technical diagram.
That’s a pretty cool thing to do
And they didn’t do it. The headline is misleading.
PDF reference of the API here: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2026/01/2025.12.18-SoundTouch-Web-API.pdf
They’re never getting those integrations back though, e.g. Spotify. Those are usually implemented in each company’s servers rather than something that can be brokered locally through an API. That needs to change
No.
