Be careful hosing it down or scrubbing it. Those radiator fins are delicate and shouldn’t be bent or broken.
I won’t say don’t do it because I dunno, its probably fine. But watch a how to video or read up on it first. Just don’t put a firehose on it.
The esp32 supports efuses that can be used to require a signed binary to boot. So they could lock their hardware to only work with their binary. Source code wouldn’t matter.
Of course if the source is open you can buy and put together your own hardware and then put their code on it.
I’m not advocating what they’re doing. Rent seeking is rent seeking even if they need to recoup development costs. I’d rather pay for open hardware and software with no monthly fee.
Nobody is doing anything malicious. This didn’t start happening until reddit went public and decided to block their API.
What’s probably happening is they’re worried too many requests are coming from one ip address and you might be scraping their precious data to train your LLM.
If there was any justice their stock would be sliding further into the toilet because the first time anyone saw that notice they just quit going to the site entirely.