Sep 07, 2026
Your GM car tracked how you drive and sold it to your insurance company, who then used it to raise your rates.
Your GM car tracked how you drive and sold it to your insurance company, who then used it to raise your rates.
Echelon shipped a firmware update that pushes a subscription and bricks your bike unless you stay online.
A July 2025 Echelon firmware update blocked third-party fitness apps and tied its bikes and treadmills to server authentication, forcing owners toward a subscription, and while a FULU bounty winner built a fix, Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to release.
Published Sep 14, 2026
What happened
Echelon sold connected bikes and treadmills, from $500 up to $2,495. Many customers bought them because they could pair their own devices and use their own apps to monitor and track their workout data.
A July 2025 firmware update pushed by Echelon Fitness retroactively blocked third-party fitness applications from connecting to its devices, removing a key feature from the device.
The firmware required server-based authentication, so the machine now has to connect to Echelon’s servers and receive an unlock key every single time it starts up. Without that server handshake, users have reported that the equipment is completely non-functional.
The change also blocked the third-party apps people specifically bought these bikes to use, and getting full functionality back now means paying Echelon's subscription, which costs up to $40 per month or $400 per year.
FULU put up a $20,000bounty to unbrick these machines. Ricky Witherspoon won it by building a working fix, but Section 1201 of the DMCA makes it illegal to release. That means the law now protects Echelon's lockout instead of the people who bought the bikes.
Echelon calls the people trying to restore their own bikes "bad actors,” but we call them owners. FULU exists to make sure owning something means actually controlling it, and that is a fight worth joining.
FULU's takeaway
Echelon removed third-party app support from equipment people paid up to $2,495 for, made the machines check in with its servers every time they start, and now charges up to $400 a year to restore what owners already had.
Why this is a law problem
Most of these entries involve a digital lock guarding copyrighted software, and a lock like that sits under Section 1201 of the DMCA, 17 U.S.C. 1201. Subsection 1201(a)(1) makes it unlawful to bypass a lock that controls access to a copyrighted work, even when no copyright is infringed. Subsections 1201(a)(2) and 1201(b)(1) separately ban making or distributing the tools that do the bypassing.
Every three years the Librarian of Congress can exempt narrow classes of uses from the first ban. An exemption expires after three years and has to be re-argued, and the rulemaking has no authority over the tool bans, so a granted exemption still leaves no lawful supplier for the means to use it. FULU exists to reform or revoke this statute.
If you want this law changed, donations fund the work. FULU is a 501(c)(4). Donations to FULU are not tax-deductible, which is the tradeoff for being able to lobby without a limit.
Nothing on these pages says any company named here violated Section 1201. FULU is not a law firm, and this is not legal advice.
The original post
The slides below are the originals as posted. Where a slide and the text on this page disagree, go by the text; the text is the corrected, sourced record. Some slides also print an old wiki address that no longer works. The links on this page are current.
Originally published as an Instagram carousel on Sep 14, 2026: See Instagram post.
More entries
Aug 31, 2026
Google remotely stripped the smart features off the thermostat still on your wall.
Google remotely stripped the smart features off the thermostat still on your wall.
Sign Up for Alerts
Want to know when it’s time to act?
Join the movement to put power back in the hands of consumers. Sign up to get no-spam alerts about campaigns, legislation, and actions you can take to protect ownership rights.