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

wsj.com

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

#71

Post by pxc »

arthurofcharn wrote: post #47
sircastor wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For a while I ran DDWRT on my routers, and spent hours learning about FreeNAS and ZFS. And I ran out of patience for it after a few years. I had more important things to do, and people to spend time with. My routers got replaced with Eeros and my NAS got replaced with a Synology. And while I don’t love that the former got bought by Amazon, both are pain free, and I spend a lot less time on them.

Good for you. If you want to have some non-free software in your home, you should have that choice. Someday, I will be skilled enough to run DDWRT on all my routers. But Everyone should have that choice, and plenty of consumer hardware is hardcoded to always serve their manufacturer, and not their owner. I will never again purchase hardware that I cannot control.

> Someday, I will be skilled enough to run DDWRT on all my routers

You probably already are! It's very easy to run an open-source firmware on a router that you purchase for the purpose. Don't bother with DD-WRT because it supports hardware that can only be driven by binary blobs tied to ancient kernel versions.

Just get something compatible with OpenWrt. My favorite manufacturer of this stuff essentially ships with OpenWrt plus an extra web interfaces, so you can just access the upstream web interface at a different URI if you don't want to install the latest firmware.

The standard OpenWrt web UI is as good or better than what your average router comes with. It's not harder to use.

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

#72

Post by omershapira »

The interesting arbitrage here is:

• Product BOM prices are more-or-less known by the public, product margin not as much

• Cloud prices are low

• Customers expect low product but high subscription prices

I wonder if consumer protection can make a separation like this work. The Playstation model (sponsoring the hardware assuming >100% ROI over the product's lifetime) is bad for small companies, and definitely bad for e-waste when they fail. But mobile phone contracts make it clear you can own the phone after the contract, and still need to pay service fees throughout the usage, and that's mostly considered fair; and could definitely be a lot worse in terms of e-waste.

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

#73

Post by Semaphor »

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 .

> They do own the camera. They just don't own the cloud service that makes the camera useful. Or even operable.

I don’t know the model, but the article makes it seem as if the cameras work perfectly well without it? I hate online-only products and think they are between scam and trap, but this seems more a case of false advertising than anything like that.

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

#74

Post by josephcsible »

_fat_santa wrote: post #33
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.

The FCC could have a rule when you are releasing "Cloud Connected" hardware that would specify that you must provide an "EOL plan" for when you no longer wish to support the hardware. A good example would be Sonos, they would be within their right to end official support for a speaker, but they must provide some EOL support that will let these devices function in perpetuity (or at least until the hardware breaks down…

Yes, and there should only be two choices for what the EOL plan can be:

1. Give everyone who ever bought the product a full refund

2. Publicly release all of the source code plus any and all private signing keys necessary to overcome tivoization

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

#75

Post by josephcsible »

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.

That's not quite sufficient, since the hardware could be tivoized. Releasing all of the company's private signing keys for it should be required too.

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

#76

Post by josephcsible »

alkonaut wrote: post #10
gedy wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It’s really hard for the average user to even tell what’s local and what’s not. Perhaps some labeling similar to energy efficiency labeling could be regulated where anything that doesn’t allow for use without the remote service gets a big red “D”sticker, while things that are completely local gets a big green “A”? Some of the best gear I have uses different cloud services but I won’t buy something that would be a pap…

> It’s really hard for the average user to even tell what’s local and what’s not.

Especially when there's no legal consequences for manufacturers publicly and unambiguously lying about it. Remember how Anker said that their Eufy product line stored all of your data locally, and then they didn't get punished when the truth came out?

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

#77

Post by [deleted] »

cs702 wrote: post #67
ilyt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

[deleted]

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

#78

Post by prpl »

There is probably a useful life of ~10 years on most types of consumer internet-connected hardware. I doubt these are 10 years old, but it would probably be in everybody’s interest to just say “we’ll support this connecting to the internet and requisite services for 10 years.” - Especially for hardware that could seriously infringe on a persons home privacy.

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

#79

Post by ilyt »

cs702 wrote: post #67
ilyt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I mean if you thought you will pay flat fee and get online hosting till the end of time (and most likely didn't read the fine print that said it isn't infinite in time), that's on you

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

#80

Post by ilyt »

indymike wrote: post #68
ilyt wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 happ…

Right but the selling point was never "... and you can just use your NAS to store it!". We can complain about their shitty e-waste producing model but also acknowledge it is not product targeted to nerds building their own video monitoring infrastructure, OSS or not.
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