Remote kill switches allow someone else to remotely terminate your access to parts or all of “your” product when they feel like it or by accident, and are yet another threat to individual freedom.
We have already seen the effects of this anti-feature on Mozilla Firefox in early May 2019, where Mozilla “accidentally” suspended all extensions ForSecurityReasons™.
Now imagine the same happening to your other things, like your “smart” heater in winter. Then you can only hope your oven is “dumb”, i.e. it works without thinking about whether it should or not. As a last recourse, you could use a hair dryer.
Then imagine getting stuck on the side of a motorway in an expensive luxury car without any physical defects, because some rogue employee at your car vendor’s headquarters pushed the wrong button.
I don’t care for which “good purpose” this scourge against freedom exists, the idea that someone can remotely press a button and cripple my product, whether accidentally or deliberately, is dystopian. I want to be in full control of my product.
In an ideal world, people would be repulsed by anything with a remote kill switch like they are repulsed by rotten food.
In general yes, but the Firefox example doesn’t really apply. Addons are signed with a key Firefox controls, which is something you can get around if you want by using the developer version. In general, addon signing is beneficial. I don’t remember exactly how Mozilla screwed up, I wanna say they allowed a domain to expire or failed to update the key/cert when it expired. Outside of conspiracy theories, why you put quotes around accidentally? It was a hassle I’m sure they’d have rather avoided.
Also, Firefox is open source, you could patch it to have another behavior if you want. In other words, you have as much control as you choose to take.
Yeah, example was kinda bad, people decided to make a fork without those things too, idk how it turned out. Still, the argument in the title applies at least.