How about keeping somewhere NEAR on the OP's topic?
I think it's on topic. The OP is asking for ways to make it harder not only to copy a device, but to repair it. Once the decision has been made to intentionally make it hard to repair a product, it's reasonable to suspect the manufacturer of intentionally limiting its service life in other ways.
My thinking has always been that no manufacturer would implement a "lifetime counter" because the risk -- meaning the product of the probability of being caught and the consequences that are likely to ensue -- would be horrific. Then Dieselgate came along.

So much for my thinking.
In general, though, I still believe that Hanlon's Razor applies more often than not. Seagate's firmware problem was probably just a matter of using a 32-bit timestamp counter someplace where 64 bits would have been better. Rest assured, they didn't make money selling drives that fail early, because people who buy lots of hard drives tend to keep track of such things.
Likewise, the reason why cars last 100,000 miles before becoming uneconomical to own is simply because few people want to pay for new cars that last 200,000 miles before becoming uneconomical to own. Porsche says that 70% of the cars they've ever built are still on the road... but in a world where every car has to meet that standard, billions of people are going to have to do without any cars at all. Whether that's better or worse for humanity is definitely off topic, but the point is irrefutable.
At the end of all of this bloviation lies a simple question of engineering ethics. If someone asks for advice on how to make their product worse, they will need to get it from someone besides me. I buy lots of stuff myself, and I don't want it to to be more expensive, harder to repair, or for that matter, harder to understand.
You mean the guy who called everyone who would not give him the answer he wanted a troll and has not come back for a page and a half.
The funny thing is that he was actually calling
me a troll. I dislike how EEVblog gives us like 15 seconds to correct a mistake or clarify a point before appending
Last edited on $DATE by $NAME, who is either trying to hide something or needed to think his half-baked post through a little further. So I usually just delete my post when I need to edit it, and then resubmit it as a new one. Occasionally this breaks causality. The lesson for the OP is to use the Quote button when setting out to call people trolls, lest he troll himself.
