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The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life

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Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life

#61

Post by fallinghawks »

gedy wrote: post #4
voisin wrote: post #3

This problem will only be solved by legislation. If countries seek to reduce e-waste they need to force electronics makers to ensure a minimum length of support on the same conditions as existed on the date of sale - say 10 years.

Or vote with our dollars and reject "cloud" connected devices

I prefer local storage as well, but the downside is the potential for data loss to theft. Non technical consumers may not realize that if the SIM is physically on the camera, and the camera gets stolen, they lose everything. Camera systems that store the video on a hub indoors are the best IMO.

Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life

#62

Post by anotherboffin »

themitigating wrote: post #18
voisin wrote: post #3

This problem will only be solved by legislation. If countries seek to reduce e-waste they need to force electronics makers to ensure a minimum length of support on the same conditions as existed on the date of sale - say 10 years.

More government regulations?

If the manufacturers can’t figure this out on their own, then yes, by all means.

Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life

#64

Post by chiefalchemist »

voisin wrote: post #3

This problem will only be solved by legislation. If countries seek to reduce e-waste they need to force electronics makers to ensure a minimum length of support on the same conditions as existed on the date of sale - say 10 years.

Perhaps. But the hardware isn't the issue here. The hardware works, but the company is no longer offering free software / storage. The customes need to switch to a paid plan.

While it makes a case for self-hosting your software that doesn't come for free either. Ideally, you get to control your own destiny, but not for free.

The lesson? Nothing is free. There's always cost / risk; hidden or otherwise.

Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life

#65

Post by kevincox »

andyjohnson0 wrote: post #60
cs702 wrote: post #7

In short, the people who "purchased" these cameras do not own them. Specifically, the owners of these cameras may own the hardware, but cannot use it because they do not own nor control the software that runs it. Richard Stallman predicted this decades ago . Regardless of what you think of him, he was the first person to come up with the idea of free open-source software expressly to give users the ability to (quotin…

> In short, the people who "purchased" these cameras do not own them. They do own the camera. They just don't own the cloud service that makes the camera useful. Or even operable. Reminds me of Cory Doctorow's story Unauthorized Bread .

> but you can never have control over a service someone else runs

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-s...

Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life

#66

Post by dzikimarian »

m463 wrote: post #53
vouaobrasil wrote: post #39

A lot of people advocate for traditional cameras gaining some sort of smart interface to facilitate sharing or some other such features. What they don't understand is that traditional cameras work extremely well with their dedicated but seemingly outdated interfaces, and moreover, they prevent things like this from happening. Replaceable batteries, replaceable storage, and "primitive" but exceptionally functional fir…

"smart" televisions just means long boot times and... intrusion. Why would smart cameras end up any different? I will say the DSLRs understand the necessity of immediacy - turn it on and take a shot. (well, there is the "turn it on" part) Honestly I don't know why phone cameras haven't understood the immediacy thing. why not dedicate one button to ALWAYS take a picture, getting the shot even at the expense of acciden…

Maybe not one, but double-press power and then volume button and you have photo pretty fast.

Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life

#67

Post by cs702 »

ilyt wrote: post #54
cs702 wrote: post #7

In short, the people who "purchased" these cameras do not own them. Specifically, the owners of these cameras may own the hardware, but cannot use it because they do not own nor control the software that runs it. Richard Stallman predicted this decades ago . Regardless of what you think of him, he was the first person to come up with the idea of free open-source software expressly to give users the ability to (quotin…

Not that I disagree but in this case it seems to be mostly about "free" cloud storage ending: > Starting April 1, the company would no longer support models that included no-fee seven-day rolling storage of video clips—a well-advertised selling point. And cameras were still being able to be used with external storage > Instead, Arlo device owners could upgrade to one of the company’s paid plans, starting at $13 a mon…

> Not that I disagree but...

:-)

Keep in mind: Customers thought they were purchasing cameras with seven days of storage.

Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life

#68

Post by indymike »

ilyt wrote: post #54
cs702 wrote: post #7

In short, the people who "purchased" these cameras do not own them. Specifically, the owners of these cameras may own the hardware, but cannot use it because they do not own nor control the software that runs it. Richard Stallman predicted this decades ago . Regardless of what you think of him, he was the first person to come up with the idea of free open-source software expressly to give users the ability to (quotin…

Not that I disagree but in this case it seems to be mostly about "free" cloud storage ending: > Starting April 1, the company would no longer support models that included no-fee seven-day rolling storage of video clips—a well-advertised selling point. And cameras were still being able to be used with external storage > Instead, Arlo device owners could upgrade to one of the company’s paid plans, starting at $13 a mon…

> Which is... exactly what you'd have to do with fully open source system anyway, buy a box to store it or pay someone for storage.

Wrong. I'd simply host the video on some device I have sitting around. Storing streamed video isn't hard to do and there are many ways to do it that take little effort. Being forced to pay money for something I already have capability to do is the problem. It's wasteful and makes me happy I did not buy Arlo's product.

Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life

#69

Post by kragen »

fsflover wrote: post #22
voisin wrote: post #3

This problem will only be solved by legislation. If countries seek to reduce e-waste they need to force electronics makers to ensure a minimum length of support on the same conditions as existed on the date of sale - say 10 years.

Minimum length of support is not necessary. It's sufficient to force the companies to release the software as FLOSS after the support is ended.

while this would be an effective defense, it isn't an effective legal policy

at the point that the support is ended, the company isn't making any more money on the product, so legal remedies like forbidding its importation or halting its manufacturing would be ineffective; even remedies like fines and injunctions to specific performance might be ineffective if the company no longer exists or no longer exports to your country, or if they've laid off the people who knew how to compile the firmware

so to have an enforceable law you need to require the release (or at least deposit) of the complete corresponding source code up front, not at some future time

Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life

#70

Post by chrisdalke »

tarotuser wrote: post #48
chrisdalke wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like a very tech-centric perspective. I agree with you, if you restrict this to the very IT-savvy group, but this shifts the blame away from companies’ bad design/behavior. Most people have no understanding of the difference between a cloud-connected device and one that just uses WiFi or BLE locally to communicate with an app. I’d say if you work for a company that produces this kind of crap IoT, shame on…

Wow.. the cognitive dissonance here is staggering. Nowhere did I say "build it yourself". There's plenty of turnkey commercial/industrial solutions that are also plug-n-play. Most even have PoE already built in. The problem with them for end-users: you front-load the cost to initial build. The real problem for users with cloud-crap is that it's exceptionally hard to assess risk with cloud crap. As for me, my simplist…

I did not suggest that anyone should DIY their IoT hardware. My point is I don’t find utility in shaming users for buying cheap cloud-based products - the average user doesn’t care or know about the tech choices, they just want to be able to change their light colors, play multi-room audio, etc.

Yes, a subset of consumers will find local-based IoT products and vote with their wallets, and there are great companies serving that market (at a premium). However, the financial incentives push most companies to produce WiFi/internet connected crap. It’s clearly cheapest to build on a ESP-type WiFi platform and build a bad cloud app.

I think the only way you really stop this is with strong financial penalties via regulation. I’d want two pieces:

Fines for cloud exfiltration of analytics or WiFi data beyond the base functionality of an application. Funding for FCC or other organizations to actively investigate reports of this.

Fines when companies “remotely” brick IoT products that are EOL by shutting off a cloud API. Something of this type should push companies away from any sort of cloud-based infrastructure because they’d need to maintain it for much longer. (Admittedly not well-informed here and maybe this is in progress already?)

I understand your perspective is that we can’t trust the government to properly regulate that, and maybe true. But it’s also unrealistic to expect most users to be well-informed. Even if most adults made that choice you still have a huge market of college students buying cheap crap.

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