In September, Logitech sent an email to Harmony Link owners stating that the six-
year-old product, which lets you control your TV via an app on your phone or tablet, will cease to function after March 16, 2018.
On a typical Wednesday in November, due to the mysterious forces that govern the web, the story suddenly blew up after newer posts to Logitech's forums caught the eye of Reddit, spurring a tide of angry (and amusing) comments.
The ire was fued by claims that Logitech was censoring the words "class action lawsuit" in the forums, replacing it with "***** ****** *******." The words were visible in spots when I looked at it, but there were tips in the Reddit thread about circumventing the censorship with unicode characters, which could be why.
One source of umbrage is Logitech's somewhat tone-deaf offer of a 35 percent discount off its newer Harmony Hub smart-home controller, which added a physical remote (now with Alexa!). After all, what's to stop it from bricking that after a few years, too?
And of course, it renews the debate over cloud-enabled devices and the implicit problem that a company can kill hardware that you've bought because it has the right to disable the software or services that you license to enable it to function.
CNET did not rate the Harmony Link highly when it was released, saying, "you're better off with a standard Harmony remote." https://www.cnet.com/news/logitechs-plan-to-brick-harmony-link-suddenly-enrage-the-web/
