What a coincidence, I just got an email announcing that Breville intend to orphan my Joule sous vide stick: the existing app will stop working, the new app is only available the US and Canada and in parts of Europe.
Live in another country? You're s.o.l., it wasn't officially sold there. You need a new account as well, hope you like the TOS.
All of this for a device whose core functionality -- setting a target temperature, getting the current temperature and checking for error states -- is both trivial and has no inherent need for internet connectivity.
I suppose I should be grateful they're still supporting a device that's like 10 years old. Caveat emptor (I got it as a gift).
From get go I considered the whole design with no interface on device a bad idea... Apps can and will often go. Better to have also the local controls.
I have an Anova sous vide cooker that is also about 10 years old and has an app, but is fully functional without it.
When I bought it the app was free, but then later became a subscription addon. However they grandfathered all original owners into a free lifetime subscription. Pretty classy.
>a device whose core functionality [...] is both trivial and has no inherent need for internet connectivity.
For a while I've given a hard pass to anything which requires an app for such functionality, knowing full well that eventually I'll be locked out of it (not to mention the privacy implications of such designs).
Why would you say "semi-legally"? Nothing "semi" here. What is "semi-legal" is making hardware e-waste by deciding it is "no longer supported". It is "semi" legal because it is legal under the corrupt political systems in most of the world but is criminal against humanity and the planet we all call home. In that sense if you can prevent e-waste trough any means you are a hero.
.docx and .xlsx are also just zip files with XML and attachments. The bad thing is that the XML is Word's internal document structure serialized and behavior for some values is only defined in Microsoft's code.
I've worked on docx and xlsx import/export and the public documentation for the formats was sufficient for normal documents (maybe excluding some very exotic features). That was ca 2010.
Sometimes you also find hidden things lurking accidentally left behind in IPAs and APKs that are nice and juicy and realize they've been shipped on Google Play/App Store for years.
I've found everything from entire copies of internal company manuals to working test credentials for a physical place with a membership barcode in debug logs left inside the app from developers.
Also sometimes changelogs left inside by accident which include things like "It hasn't been sanitized for outside consumption and thus should remain internal
to <company>. Deliver it externally at your own risk of embarassment."
Even better, wait until people discover 7zip's 'parser mode' on Windows (especially). Right click a file -> 7zip -> Open archive -> #:e mode. Really fun way to quickly carve out files and snoop around. I use it like a poor man's binwalk to extract firmware files and updates and etc out of things to usual success.
(#:e Parser mode, ignoring full archives, and checks every single byte position of a file for 'start of archive' bytes to parse archives out of a larger file.)
I've found that Claude Code works well at reversing java applications. Even if it is fully obfuscated claude can restore sensible names for everything and understand how it all works and answer questions about what it is doing.
Interesting, I'd have assumed the guardrails would disallow them from doing anything like that, regardless of legality. Do you need to "convince" it to do it or no questions asked?
It is no questions asked. Even if you are reversing things like anticheats (I wanted to know the privacy implications of running the anticheat modules).
+1. While vibe-coding (natural language to code) is not such a great idea, we can always check the source, so vibe-reverse-engineering (code to natural language) may actually be quite useful.
Naming is an area where LLMs are useful; but I'd still use a regular Java decompiler (there are quite a few of these around) for the actual decompilation part.
It required a lot of manual work and for large apps like Minecraft it took teams of people to figure out what the symbol names should be slowly contributing a little bit every day.
For RE cases where I know the original compiler used (a bit harder on C compilers due to huge number of obscure optimization flags), I give it a feedback loop to write a function that compiles to the original machine code.
Live in another country? You're s.o.l., it wasn't officially sold there. You need a new account as well, hope you like the TOS.
All of this for a device whose core functionality -- setting a target temperature, getting the current temperature and checking for error states -- is both trivial and has no inherent need for internet connectivity.
I suppose I should be grateful they're still supporting a device that's like 10 years old. Caveat emptor (I got it as a gift).
https://community.chefsteps.com/discussion/78615/joule-sous-...
What has gone wrong with humanity, that we need to advertise that as a feature if you download a new app?
When I bought it the app was free, but then later became a subscription addon. However they grandfathered all original owners into a free lifetime subscription. Pretty classy.
The ability to cook with or without WiFi anywhere, anytime.
> You've always needed an account to operate your Joule Sous Vide with the Joule app. This is not a new requirement.
Absolute comedy.
I'm currently full QRO on the 13cm band with something around 1600W EIRP CW, and will be for several minutes until the curry base defrosts.
>1600W EIRP
Your local regulatory authority would like a word with you.
For a while I've given a hard pass to anything which requires an app for such functionality, knowing full well that eventually I'll be locked out of it (not to mention the privacy implications of such designs).
I encourage others to follow suit.
I moved to a different country and the app is not on google play store in the new geography.
Even when it is installed somehow it is absolutely unreliable in pairing or controlling the device.
Wish I had time to go on a quest and reverse engineer and build my own better controller.
EULAs be damned, even the DMCA has exceptions for RE in the name of interoperability and repair.
YOU
OWN
NOTHING
I've found everything from entire copies of internal company manuals to working test credentials for a physical place with a membership barcode in debug logs left inside the app from developers.
Also sometimes changelogs left inside by accident which include things like "It hasn't been sanitized for outside consumption and thus should remain internal to <company>. Deliver it externally at your own risk of embarassment."
(#:e Parser mode, ignoring full archives, and checks every single byte position of a file for 'start of archive' bytes to parse archives out of a larger file.)
ChatGPT is full of refusals and has to be jailbroken out of it.