OT, but anything automatic was manually and intentionally implemented at some point

But is it malicious or innocuous? I could see just the assumption being made that if it hasn’t phoned home it must be malfunctioning and ask risk mitigation then force it to brick. It’s not super unreasonable considering very few people will ever block the comms.

How is that reasonable? What about loss of network access makes vacuuming less safe?

I wouldn’t argue it’s reasonable, but these kinds of decisions get made without much thought all the time whether we like it or not. It’s possible they just didn’t give it much thought. Or, it was just a directive from Legal and so nobody asks questions. Possibly the marketing team doesn’t even know this got made and still touts it as “works offline”.

I’m not really defending it but pointing out this is still on a different plane than outright maliciousness.

it's not loss of network access, it's partial network access. There still got to be _some_ connection to get this 501 command.

I think OP said it claimed to be able to work offline.