> To put bluntly, anybody who buys hardware that is inexorably linked to some cloud-crap should be ashamed of themselves and deserve the loss of money as a learning experience.This isn't "blunt", this is just cruel. Nobody "deserves" to be the victim of false advertising or broken guarantees, particularly when they can reasonably lack the necessary contextual knowledge to analyze them beyond face value. Most people do not have the time or the aptitude (which is developed through more time) to become a system administrator of nontrivial local computing resources, but still derive significant value from being able to things like remotely viewable cameras.
The lady mentioned in the article, the one who owns a pet-boarding kennel a few minutes down the road from her house, has her life materially bettered by being able to access cameras remotely, and her life is not materially bettered by becoming a sysadmin to get that except for the fact that she is downstream of bad actors.
The solution to this is not "well, everyone should be a sysadmin". The solution is "make the consequences of being a bad actor so petrifying that companies avoid doing so."
Candidly, I echoed a lot of the sentiments of your post when I was younger, more self-absorbed, and more confident of my ability to attain sufficient expertise in all walks of life to never need help. My attitudes changed as I grew older and it became clearer that I was just as fallible as the next person, just on different axes. I hope you get the chance to attain perspective, too.
We are, as it happens, all in it together, and the attitude your post expresses is counterproductive.