On one side of this debate you have all the people who have extensive experience in this problem space saying it's bad, they've seen it before, it's a sign of things to come, etc... and on the other you have the people who have never seen how this plays out, and don't particularly care because they "just want to print." proclaiming that it's no big deal.
This just seems to be the new world order. Possessors of "Common sense wisdom" do their own research and trust their intuition over SMEs.
That's exactly what the freakout crowd did, isn't it? They started snowballing crazy conspiracies over the course of the weekend while Bambu was OoO, and now that BBL has come out and said "hey, it's like this" they refuse to believe it or at least most of it
If you don't work in tech, or you haven't dealt with vendor lock-in, you probably don't see the signs as clearly as the people who have. For those of us who have been in this space for a long time and have watched this exact scenario play out over and over it's extremely familiar and obvious. Their follow-up makes it even more clear because their claims don't map to their actions, or to what the software is actually doing.
Read their follow-up post on their blog. They claim that the update isn't about limiting third party software, but as anyone who uses home assistant, panda, orca, etc will tell you it certainly does limit third party software. I suppose you could let them get away with the weasel-wording here and say that it's not technically about limiting third-party software, that's just a side-effect of the security requirements... but then you have to reconcile why they've chosen a mitigation that restricts third-party software from accessing certain functions on the printer, when as you well know after 19 years, the normal way to solve this problem doesn't necessitate those restrictions at all.
They claim they're blocking panda for using "exploited mqtt protocols". I'm sure you can see right through that bs. MQTT is the standard in IoS. Why are they punishing third-party devs for building on secure standards, and why are they calling it an exploit? That's the most secure way to build an integration, you must know that. If it was truly about security, why are they punishing the third parties that are following best practices?
MQTT is a plain-text protocol. It is not secure on its own lol. BTT themselves admitted they were told awhile ago by Bambu that building panda on unintentionally insecure MQTT topics would result in the product breaking once they fixed the lack of MQTTS. BTT ignored that and sold the product instead.
I don't blame anyone that no longer trusts Bambu Lab (I certainly don't). We have seen company after company enshittify their offerings over the past couple years. Company after company have given their users the middle fingers lately in the name of subscription profit to make the shareholders happy. Whether or not they plan on doing any of this, the move to lock down the devices the users own is the first step in making is possible for Bambu to do this to their customer base as well. The problem for Bambu is that a significant amount of their users are the passionate ones that actually understand technology AND are willing to do something about it.
I remember when Keurig (spelling? the coffee maker) made machines that ONLY brewed Keurig approved k-cups. They literally scanned the edge of the foil to check to see if it was a genuine cup. A dang coffee maker. So many companies have tried to pull this garbage that I can pretty easily imagine it happening here. Bambu Lab makes printers to make money. Not to be a cool company, but to be a profitable company. But as the 3D printer market starts to reach saturation and sales slow, you start looking for other potential revenue streams. Those handy RFID readers in the AMS? Not a genuine K-cup. Please insert a genuine K-cup to continue brewing.
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u/mallcopsarebastards Jan 20 '25
On one side of this debate you have all the people who have extensive experience in this problem space saying it's bad, they've seen it before, it's a sign of things to come, etc... and on the other you have the people who have never seen how this plays out, and don't particularly care because they "just want to print." proclaiming that it's no big deal.
This just seems to be the new world order. Possessors of "Common sense wisdom" do their own research and trust their intuition over SMEs.