From Newsgroup: comp.misc

A hardware geek bought a robot vacuum cleaner, checked on his network
traffic out of curiosity, and discovered that the device was sending
personal details about the layout of his home back to a central server
-- which he hadn’t agreed to. So he set his home firewall to block
access to the vendor’s telemetry servers ... only for the vacuum
cleaner to stop working altogether a short while later.

He sent it in to be fixed, after which it would work again for a few
days, and then stop again. After a few rounds of this, the repairers
refused to look at it again, claiming it was “out of warranty”.

So he opened it up to take a closer look, including adding connectors
and writing some custom scripts to test out the various parts. He
verified that they all worked ... and that the whole OS setup was a
security nightmare. He also discovered, from a log file, that a
particular command had been sent from the vendor’s server at the
moment the device stopped working. When he undid the effect of that
“kill” command, his vacuum cleaner worked again.

So he’s using it again, on his own terms ... and presumably with all
Internet access completely blocked.

<https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/big-tech/manufacturer-issues-remote-kill-command-to-nuke-smart-vacuum-after-engineer-blocks-it-from-collecting-data-user-revives-it-with-custom-hardware-and-python-scripts-to-run-offline>
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