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
#2Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life
#3This 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.
Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life
#4This 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
Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life
#5To 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.
I *only* buy hardware that can be controlled and/or managed locally. Sure, it means some 'cool' gadgets aren't available in my world. But it does mean that what I buy will be supported and will just work.
If that means you buy PoE cameras and get a video storage solution? Well, so be it. That's the cost of doing it yourself, BUT it also means you have your own destiny in your control.
Whereas if you buy cloudcrap, *when* the company decides to alter the deal, you're at their behest. Dont like that? Too fucking bad.
Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life
#6Idea: Prosecute such companies for obtaining money under false pretenses. If you only get the thingie which you "bought" for a limited time - that is clearly a rental, not a sale.
Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life
#7In 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 (quoting) "control the program and what it does for them. When users don't control the program, we call it a 'nonfree' or 'proprietary' program. The nonfree program controls the users, and the developer controls the program."[a]
He was, and is, right about this.
Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life
#8To 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. I *only* buy hardware that can be controlled and/or managed locally. Sure, it means some 'cool' gadgets aren't available in my world. But it does mean that what I buy will be supported and will just work. If that means you buy PoE cameras and ge…
It’s not always clear you’re getting cloudcrap when you buy the product. Sure, you and I can do the research and see that it’s tied to a service that will eventually shut down, but do you expect 100% of people out there to understand this?
Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life
#9To 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. I *only* buy hardware that can be controlled and/or managed locally. Sure, it means some 'cool' gadgets aren't available in my world. But it does mean that what I buy will be supported and will just work. If that means you buy PoE cameras and ge…
Just because a device isn't cloud-connected doesn't mean it isn't designed for planned obsolescence. For example, the ongoing cheapening of major appliances, or the DRM applied to printer cartridges and coffee pods.
This is a legislation problem IMO: companies need to be held to reasonable expectations when they sell a product. My ink cartridge shouldn't say it's "empty" when the page counter reaches 100 [and it's still actually full]. Neither should cloud devices go to the landfill because the company selling them decided that they don't want to support them anymore.
Companies foisting negative externalities on us (like more e-waste) in exchange for more profit are a blight and should be treated (and prevented) as such.
Re: The cameras worked fine, but their maker said they had reached their end of life
#10This 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
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 paperweight should the cloud service disappear. The cloud service merely improves the product (e.g keeps video from surveillance cameras) but the cameras work without it, and you can set up your own recording if you want.