I bought an 'Audrey' years ago - early touchpanel tablet meant for the kitchen counter. Had three buttons for 'channels' which meant url-for-specially-formatted-web-page, for news and weather and music.
Almost immediately 3Com discontinued support for those channels. So I thought "No problem; I'll just go into settings and change the URLs". Nope. No way to do that.
Early internet stupidity, where some marketing type figured "Capture the customer to our data stream so we can spam them". So screw the customer.
Couldn‘t you make a business out of supporting abandoned IoT devices. Make a small server that rewrites DNS requests and URLs so you can serve your own content to these devices. Or in the case of Zigbee emulate different Zigbee routers?
I know the chumby devices, and to a lesser extent the Dreamcast have been given a second life due to people reverse engineering and rewriting DNS requests. Those were consumer products with a passionate community around them though.
Almost immediately 3Com discontinued support for those channels. So I thought "No problem; I'll just go into settings and change the URLs". Nope. No way to do that.
Early internet stupidity, where some marketing type figured "Capture the customer to our data stream so we can spam them". So screw the customer.