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Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

nytimes.com

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Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#191

Post by insaneirish »

PhantomGremlin wrote: post #130
insaneirish wrote: post #79

It was never great, and it's been worse and worse since Google bought them. Examples of some issues with mine: 1. It doesn't honor DHCP lease expiration [1]. It will happily keep using its IP without renewing its lease. I've had situations where it's gone long enough without a lease renewal that another device has received its old IP and caused a conflict. 2. It constantly disassociates from the AP, and decides to co…

It doesn't honor DHCP lease expiration I don't know what you're using as a DCHP server, but the servers I've used try hard not to hand out the same IP address to a second device until after handing out all possible IP addresses. Which means my network would need something close to 256 different DHCP clients before having a problem. I do have some flexibility at home because I run my own dhcpd on OpenBSD, rather than…

Funny enough, I do this as well (OpenBSD but with dnsmasq for easier DHCP/DNS integration). At the time I was having the DHCP issue, I had my OpenBSD router behind my ISP's router in order to preserve some cable box functionality. I also kept "untrusted" devices like the Nest using that router.

I've since ditched my cable boxes and thus the ISP router and now just have untrusted devices in a separate VLAN walled off from my other networks.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#192

Post by freehunter »

imh wrote: post #108
BookmarkSaver wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a bullshit argument. They do read your heart rate. But they explicitly say that it isn't up to a medical or diagnostic level of reliability. Everything has some level of quality or tolerance expected. Car parts break all the time, it is just a normal part of owning a car. You don't get to sue a car company when your battery dies and you need a jump. You only get to do it when there is a significant or dangero…

Maybe your experience is different from mine then. My device was inaccurate enough to be useless. Further there doesn't seem to be any allegation that people are expecting it to have a medical or diagnostic level of reliability. That seemed to be a throwaway line in OP's article, not something core to the lawsuit. As far as I can tell from other news sources, they are suing because it can't read heart rate for crap.

You're exactly right. "Diagnostic level" of testing would tell you the difference between 120 and 121 bpm. Fitbit would read 85 bpm. That's not even close to right, which means it's completely useless for what it's marketed as.

With the same logic as Fitbit, my watch tells reads my heart rate. Right now it's saying my heart is beating 9:21am. Sure, that's not as accurate as a real medical device, but it's a number so it's in the right ballpark.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#193

Post by mavhc »

kuschku wrote: post #136
meesterdude wrote: post #87

This offers an interesting insight into the Internet of Things. Take something simple, and tack on a bunch of new technology that is subject to failure. Don't be surprised if it fails. To be fair, the issue isn't that there was software involved; digital thermostats have that. I think more telling was the level of complexity, which allows for a lot more to go wrong. Combined with a poor process behind update validati…

In general, the way IoT is treated is wrong. Startups try to treat IoT devices as a standard arm or x86 processor with some additional GPIO pins where they read info, deal with it, and write info. No real-time guarantee, a level of QA similar to websites or consumer software, etc. And here is what previous companies building smart devices (say, SIEMENS) treated them like: As extended microcontrollers. Put all the cri…

On the other hand, then you get people who've no idea about network security doing things, so a lose-lose situation.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#194

Post by ocdtrekkie »

kuschku wrote: post #133
jkestner wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At what point is this just a matter of complexity growing beyond its masters' capacity to manage it? Computers interacting with all sorts of analog systems are going to have a million edge cases. But it's just beginning. Give them the ability to interact with other connected objects, and your potential problems proliferate. Add a smart garage door opener, and you may not figure out how that's connected to your thermo…

But that is not the case. Any non-hip, non-fancy, non-SV thermostat control system doesn't have these bugs. Sure, those systems don't come in fancy design, but they will work offline, they will work in every edge case, and they'll cost twice of what Nest costs. Treating IoT devices as if they'd be consumer software, with updates every week and constant internet access has never worked, and probably never will.

As my new 3DS game had to get a software update before I could play it, I realized software engineers did a lot better job releasing working software before there was a way to fix your bad software post-release.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#195

Post by ocdtrekkie »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #165
kuschku wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But that is not the case. Any non-hip, non-fancy, non-SV thermostat control system doesn't have these bugs. Sure, those systems don't come in fancy design, but they will work offline, they will work in every edge case, and they'll cost twice of what Nest costs. Treating IoT devices as if they'd be consumer software, with updates every week and constant internet access has never worked, and probably never will.

And ironically, IoT devices could be much more reliable if not done by the SaaS startup playbook. Just don't be greedy and stop with the cloud bullshit. A lot of IoT devices are just some hobby-grade projects put in nice packaging and launched into stratosphere on investor-fuel marketing boosters.

I certainly can't complain about my INSTEON thermostat. It won't win any design awards, and doesn't have a color screen or a touchscreen. But it works well, and I can interface my computer with it. It also works when the Internet is down.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#196

Post by kuschku »

jarek wrote: post #189
jerf wrote: post #183

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Call me a curmudgeon, but I'm yet to see a coherent explanation of what IoT is supposed to do for me as a homeowner. I think "all the household IoT stuff is toys" is rather directly connected to the fact that I just don't have massive problems I need solved with the Internet in my house. Of course the resulting market is nothing but toys; there doesn't appear to be any space for non-toys. (I see the commercial and ci…

Eh... there's some value, it's just really badly implemented currently. A selling idea of the Nest is that it keeps your house warm when you're there, and not-frozen when you're not, and it will do so efficiently, so that the house is warm when you arrive home but not long before. Now of course you can just turn up the heating as you walk in the door wait a few minutes to heat up, it won't hurt. But if technology can…

Another thing that you can do is tracking which products you have in your fridges, freezers and cupboards – and when you want to know where something is, you can just do "Jarvis, do we have another bottle of ketchup?" – "Yes, it’s in Kitchen Cupboard Number 2 Left"

In fact, I’ve actually designed something similar to that, but a lot simpler. A simple barcode scanner where you check in new products you buy, and check out products you throw away.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#197

Post by mikeash »

freehunter wrote: post #190
bpchaps wrote: post #147

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at a complete loss of words at why you think that's even in the same class of support...

Why? He said tech support, the link given has a number for tech support. Seems pretty similar. Honeywell also has a wifi smart thermostat that is controlled by an iPhone app and competes with the Nest. Seems pretty damn similar.

Everything electronic needs tech support. You could have a 100% reliable product that's nothing more than a single button that literally does one thing when you press it, and you'd still need tech support because people will call in and ask you how to use it, or why it doesn't do anything when they don't push the button.

Criticizing Nest for having tech support is just silly. Much better to criticize it for the actual stupid failure being experienced by the original commenter.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#198

Post by pqs »

osi wrote: post #184
pqs wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sleeping with heating on seems a waste of energy to me. At least in Spain. I have a dumb thermostat. It doesn't even have a clock. It just has two buttons, one two increase temperature, the other to decrease it. In winter, during the day, I put it at 20C. At night, I put it at 15C or lower (which stops heating, as the house temperature decreases to about 17 or 18 degrees during the night, without heating). It works l…

You should get a simple programmable thermostat that just lets you put temperature at given times. Will automate away what you forget to do.

Yest, it would be better. But this happens once or twice in a year. It's really not worth it.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#199

Post by mikeash »

BookmarkSaver wrote: post #100
imh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't matter. It says it can read your heart rate. That's what it advertises as. It should be able to do so. I'm curious if there are legal precedents on how accurate a thing must be to advertise as a being a measurement device.

This is a bullshit argument. They do read your heart rate. But they explicitly say that it isn't up to a medical or diagnostic level of reliability. Everything has some level of quality or tolerance expected. Car parts break all the time, it is just a normal part of owning a car. You don't get to sue a car company when your battery dies and you need a jump. You only get to do it when there is a significant or dangero…

Where do they explicitly say that? I poked around their site and all I could find was mountains of bragging about how awesome their heart rate measurement technology is, and a few disclaimers about how it might not work if your activity involves rapid arm movements, like boxing. But maybe I missed the other disclaimers.

Re: Nest Thermostat Glitch Leaves Users in the Cold

#200

Post by mikeash »

manojlds wrote: post #67
imh wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't matter. It says it can read your heart rate. That's what it advertises as. It should be able to do so. I'm curious if there are legal precedents on how accurate a thing must be to advertise as a being a measurement device.

All mobile phones advertise calling. All of them warn that they are not meant for emergency calling.

Is that true? That would be rather odd given that they are required by law to be capable of it, to the extent that it has to work even when you don't have an active mobile account for the device.
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