Manufacturer 'make worthless' users devices after some stolen from a warehouse
I can&#x27;t bring myself to be bothered by this - and wouldn&#x27;t be even if I were using these devices.<p>For crying out loud, equipment with unique recorded serial numbers was stolen, so the company is blocking the <i>specific</i> stolen devices. That makes perfect sense to me. Objecting to how they do it (bulking up software with a list of serials, requiring software to phone home, whatever) is fine and their customers have a legit basis to be unhappy if it&#x27;s impacting their use, but people with the stolen devices? <i>Those aren&#x27;t SDRPlay&#x27;s customers because SDRPlay hasn&#x27;t been paid for those devices.</i><p>Quoting from the article: <i>In a PR disaster the manufacturer gives &quot;Because we can&quot; as an explanation to make end user devices worthless.</i><p>I&#x27;ll note that this complaint very carefully leaves out a key word: STOLEN. I&#x27;m not seeing the PR disaster except that it&#x27;s going to seriously hurt their image in the community of people who steal stuff from warehouses. <i>tiny violin plays sad music</i><p>If you&#x27;ve purchased one of these, as I said above you&#x27;re not a customer of SDRPlay or one of its distributors because payment is part of a vendor-customer relationship. You&#x27;re someone who bought &quot;Bose&quot; speakers out of the back of a white van in a parking lot. Get your money back from the seller - you may even be able to get the police report from SDRPlay if you need it for a chargeback - and tell SDRPlay where you bought it so they can try to track down the thieves.<p>Edit: reading the original SDRPlay forum posts, they ID the specific ebay sellers, note that this is the <i>third</i> time they&#x27;ve had things stolen like this and sold by the same accounts, and note that &quot;We will NOT penalise innocent people so that assumption that this is our intent is frankly WRONG!!&quot; Basically they&#x27;re likely looking for anything like saved packaging, shipping return addresses, etc. to be turned over to the police. Also, this whole thing is about (in this case at least) a total of 39 devices. We&#x27;re not talking about thousands of people affected.<p>SDRPlay: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sdrplay.com&#x2F;community&#x2F;viewtopic.php?f=6&amp;t=3225" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.sdrplay.com&#x2F;community&#x2F;viewtopic.php?f=6&amp;t=3225</a>