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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

#141

Post by extrapickles »

Pretty much the only reason why these devices are cloud connected in the first place is to allow people to easily control the device from their phone/laptop when away from home (Adding 5mb of webpage/API wouldn't increase the cost of a device that much).

What is needed is a easy to setup, widely supported VPN so people can leave their phones/laptops connected to the home VPN so they can access their smart devices. The VPN should be no harder to setup than Wi-fi as current VPN solutions are too much for non technical people. As a side benefit is it could cut down on the shenanigans mobile carriers can pull with rate limiting specific traffic as people could funnel all traffic through their homes connection.

Getting all of the various manufactures to support the same easy VPN standard would be the hardest bit, as the technical side is assembling already existing pieces into something easy to use.

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

#142

Post by andoma »

darkclarity wrote: post #33
chollida1 wrote: post #3

Wow, this is certainly something to think about in the age of the IoT's. I guess the question should be asked as to where the line is between when a user should and shouldn't expect a device to work. Especially in the coming age of drivers less cars. I can easily see a case where each driver-less car will need to talk to a mother-ship if for no other reason than syncing with other cars around it, getting new GPS maps…

I think the public will eventually notice that gadgets and appliances that rely on apps and internet access are a risky investment. Even multinational appliance manufacturers give up on the smart features in their TVs after several years. Forget the high end products with their fancy features and instead stick with reliable basic/mid range products that will last for decades rather than years.

Worst part is that every time I turn on my Samsung TV it notifies me that some feature that I have never used will go offline in ~2 months time. Of course, this notification comes with a few minutes delay, so it pops up just a few minutes into a show. gah

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

#143

Post by kuschku »

ceejayoz wrote: post #135
Someone1234 wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Most new homes get a prepay meter which they can wirelessly disconnect. I'm really not clear on why this is insidious. A utility worker has the legal right to come shut it off, why shouldn't they be able to do it remotely?

Because in most European countries, water is considered a human right: No one can turn off your water, your debt will just increase.

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

#144

Post by SEJeff »

hatsix wrote: post #68
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.

Yup!

https://home-assistant.io/components/#hub

But if you want to simply put home assistant on a raspberry pi and use the zwave integration natively you can:

https://home-assistant.io/components/zwave/

Otherwise it works with vera z-wave hubs (https://home-assistant.io/components/vera/) or the ISY944

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

#145

Post by mikestew »

maxxxxx wrote: post #51
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…

I hope there will be a trend where the computing power and storage goes from the cloud back to the customer's site. The internet should only be an addon for connectivity but not be needed for the device to work. Good old PCs weren't so bad after all. You had all your data and software locally and could do whatever you wanted.

See my other comment somewhere on this page. From my POV, Synology is in a really good place to pull this off. You can have one of their little boxes serve audio, video, keep your notes ala OneNote, all accessible remotely if need be. With just a liiiiiitle more, it could be your IoT hub.

Others outside Synology write stuff for those boxes, evidence that it's not locked down, so I suppose with enough hacking one could get a DropCam to work on a Synology box. But it would be a hell of a lot easier if Synology had a list of plug-and-play devices that they either build themselves or partner with another manufacturer. The latter is unlikely to happen, given the rent-seeking behavior we see out of manufacturers.

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

#146

Post by click170 »

fezz wrote: post #53
jimrandomh wrote: post #41

This is neither the first time Google's done something like this to customers, nor the first time Tony Fadell has been directly involved. When they pulled Google Glass from the market, it was concurrent with moving the Glass team to Fadell's leadership. They didn't go quite so far as to push an update to brick devices, but they left the software in a broken state, and refused to open source their fork of Android so u…

They can easily fix this. If they don't, it speaks volumes about how Nest/Google/Alphabets values customer relationships. Take all the other google services and imagine what would happen if google were just as reckless, especially with long life products like home installed devices. Home automation installation services or even contractors would also be cautious about Nest.

These shenanigans by Google and the numerous reports of the problems with Nest and their smoke detectors have basically guaranteed I don't include Google devices in my home automation setup. I would rather manually muck around with a raspberry pi and some random sensors bought online than rely on a Google product at this point.

There's a lot of room for a vendor to come in with open products, a pledge to maintain that open-ness, and decent integration to really take over the home automation market. I really feel like all the existing products are too proprietary to be of any interest to us home automation geeks.

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

#147

Post by astrodust »

scrollaway wrote: post #49
joezydeco wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A few thousand very-pissed-off people here and a few thousand very-pissed-off people there... s/people/early adopters/

Early adopters are people too. Of course, that doesn't mean they're not pissed off, so nothing in your comment invalidates the parent's. Edit: I assumed ill intent. Corrected it.

Nothing says "fuck you" quite like pissing all over the people that helped make your platform a success by being the first to commit to your product.

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

#148

Post by throwaway2048 »

SwellJoe wrote: post #126
mrexroad wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, sou…

"if anything, sounds like incredible ignorance on part of buyer?" I read the box. It listed a bunch of cool features. I bought it. Nowhere on the box did it say, "We will keep all of your video and there is no way for you to use this device without Dropcam.com acting as an intermediary." I'm sure if I'd read some reviews, it would have been more clear to me what I was buying. But, I've bought cameras in this category…

ah but you didn't read ALL of the 300 page EULA, and discuss with the lawyer its specific interpretations and possible outcomes, therefore this is really your fault you see...

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

#149

Post by SwellJoe »

dangoor wrote: post #86
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…

It seems like the complexity of getting around NAT/firewalls is likely to stymie a lot of potential users. Making a cloud service is a bad idea for all kinds of reasons, but it simplifies this important aspect of getting the device up and running.

Yes, that's absolutely an issue. And, it would even be OK, for me, to have that be the default, as long as they provide some other means of dealing with the device. WiFi isn't hard, at all. So give me a local web UI, and a way to store things locally or remotely using some standard protocol. That's dead simple to implement, and routers and printers have been doing it for a couple decades. Simply making the device usable without the cloud service would have been enough for me to not be so angry with Dropcam, and enough for me to feel like this is not a failure of ethics in the tech sector.

I've owned a number of devices in this category; the first was a Panasonic Petcam, which worked great for me, for many years. It had the ability to email me videos and photos, save to arbitrary FTP storage, etc. This was over a decade ago! If they could manage all that back then, why is it so difficult now, with networking tools being so much more advanced today?

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

#150

Post by ceejayoz »

kuschku wrote: post #143
ceejayoz wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Most new homes get a prepay meter which they can wirelessly disconnect. I'm really not clear on why this is insidious. A utility worker has the legal right to come shut it off, why shouldn't they be able to do it remotely?

Because in most European countries, water is considered a human right: No one can turn off your water, your debt will just increase.

Then the problem would seem to be illegal cutoffs, not the method with which they're performed.
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