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Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

uk.businessinsider.com

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Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#61

Post by mrexroad »

SwellJoe wrote: post #19

I bought a Dropcam when they were a new thing. When I realized they did literally everything via a cloud service and would be a brick without that service, I was furious. The incredible arrogance of a company making a webcam that sends your video to their servers, and provides no means to use the camera in a secure/local fashion, was astonishing to me. I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge succe…

counter point: i pre-ordered dropcam for the reason that it was limited to cloud-use only. I wanted something dead simple to use so my wife / house sitter / etc could easily move it as needed, we had access anywhere without configuration, and devops/it being handled by someone else incase i'm not around. Classifying their cloud-only product design decision as "incredible arrogance" quite a stretch... if anything, sounds like incredible ignorance on part of buyer?

To your point about it being a brickable device... I figured by the time the product was "bricked" (e.g. company going bust, product end-of-life, etc), that the hardware would be so out of date that it'd be time to replace it anyway.

With that said... after Nest acquired them, there's been no new meaningful features, no decrease in price, no new camera features, etc. I cancelled the "DVR" plan and will be finding an alternate system later this year.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#62

Post by USANEEDSHELP »

Boo Hoo. What the author forgets is that you are not purchasing the product to own it outright. You are purchasing a license to use it at discretion of the manufacturer. Too bad there isn't an alternative product which you could own & it'll still work if the company goes out of business or if they decide to end support.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#64

Post by zeveb »

alirazaq wrote: post #28
yardie wrote: post #10

I'm not against IoT devices but when it requires an external service to work at all I put my foot down. I looked at devices like Nest but decided against it. My Synology NAS has some cloud like services but it does not require any external services to work. Just the way IoT should be.

Centralized IoT servers would be a lucrative target for hackers. And as much as I would like the luxury of setting my thermostat remotely as I'm leaving work; it's not worth making it accessible over the internet.

> Centralized IoT servers would be a lucrative target for hackers. And as much as I would like the luxury of setting my thermostat remotely as I'm leaving work; it's not worth making it accessible over the internet.

Well, that's a problem with centralisation. There's no reason that you shouldn't be able to connect directly & securely to your thermostat, or access it indirectly & securely via your router or home server.

Among the issues of doing this are asymmetric Internet speeds and NAT, but those are solvable.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#65

Post by Someone1234 »

ceejayoz wrote: post #55
Someone1234 wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You don't have to imagine, cars are already being remotely disabled on purpose due to late loan repayment[0]. [0] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-l...

Only for borrowers with poor credit who explicitly agree to such a thing as a condition of getting a car loan, though.

For now. But if most lenders require this you couldn't have much of an option to say no. They always test things like this with the market most easily exploited.

Reminds me of prepaid gas and water meters in the UK. They started out only doing them for those who missed payments or had poor credit, but now they're everywhere. Most new homes get a prepay meter which they can wirelessly disconnect.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#66

Post by zeveb »

SEJeff wrote: post #23

This is also one of the reasons I've moved most of my "hub like" functions to home assistant https://home-assistant.io/ which is open source 100% https://github.com/balloob/home-assistant I was burned by them buying Revolv, the most promising of all hubs due to having multiple antennas and touted as supporting multiple new protocols via software updates (which never happened post merger).

That's a really nifty bit of software; I look forward to checking it out.

Sounds like it does what I want: runs on my desktop, can be made accessible to the world. That has security implications, of course, but those can be addressed.

Re: Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices

#68

Post by hatsix »

SEJeff wrote: post #23

This is also one of the reasons I've moved most of my "hub like" functions to home assistant https://home-assistant.io/ which is open source 100% https://github.com/balloob/home-assistant I was burned by them buying Revolv, the most promising of all hubs due to having multiple antennas and touted as supporting multiple new protocols via software updates (which never happened post merger).

So... are there any hubs that specifically work with home-assistant? I like the idea of home-assistant, but I've already got a ton of z-wave already in my house.
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