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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

#71

Post by Jtsummers »

cdr wrote: post #52
Bud wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That Phil Schiller quote is, frankly, a pretty lousy attempt at establishing that that is Apple's "view" on planned obsolescence. The swipe at Apple in this context is absurd. I have 15-year-old Apple products that are still working perfectly well. I have a 9-year-old iMac on my desk that is still up 24/7. I have zero (0) Apple products that have been unceremoniously bricked by Apple in the way Google is doing to the…

Google has nothing to do with it. Nest is a subsidiary of Alphabet, and even then the responsibility is 100% with Nest and not Alphabet. Tony Fadell comes from an Apple pedigree, if we're blaming one of the two.

The name change to Alphabet and movement of project/product ownership to Alphabet's subsidiaries is a recent thing. People will, for quite some time, equate Alphabet and Google when speaking about the parent company (Alphabet) in relation to other subsidiaries.

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

#72

Post by maxaf »

As a longtime Dropcam owner, I find this very unsettling. Truth be told, Dropcam service has steadily decreased in quality ever since the Nest acquisition. Not a month passes without an unexplained multi-hour outage; our mobile apps are randomly logged out every few days, requiring us to enter lengthy passwords while nervously wondering what that motion alert might be about. One day the whole Nest rigmarole will become inconvenient for google and poof - our $200+ camera will become yet another paperweight.

My only hope is that FOSS will become an option for these devices. There have been examples[0] of Dropcams getting rooted, so perhaps not all is lost here.

[0]: http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/04/reverse-engineering-...

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

#73

Post by the_ancient »

2 Words for people

Open Source...

and/or

Open protocols

if you buy into a proprietary systems, with proprietary software and walled gardens, I have no sympathy for you.

Consumers need to demand companies adopt open source software and open protocols, this is not the first shutdown of this type, and it will not be the last.

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

#74

Post by roel_v »

mhurron wrote: post #40
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…

> 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 I basically say the same thing about every 'smart home' device. I would love to be able to query my thermostat to find out when and how long it turned the heat/AC on and whatnot, but I only want it to talk to my local wifi and devices. I don't want it to use a cloud servic…

There are plenty of smart home devices that work without any form of internet connection. Have been for 20+ years, too.

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

#75

Post by jasonkostempski »

jedberg wrote: post #36

It's interesting how so many people think this is a new problem because of IoT. This problem has existed for years with games. If you had a game that had to be online to play, and the company decided to stop running the servers, you were screwed. Sure, sometimes people reversed engineered it, and while the company usually didn't care, it was technically illegal. We need some laws to protect consumers, that either say…

I'm with removing any law that says reverse engineering is illegal (regardless if some company is in business or not) but it would be unfair to require a company that's going out of business to do costly work before they're allowed to not exist anymore. It would be also be unfair to require all products be guaranteed to work forever. Consumers just need to educate themselves and if they can't accept the potential loss they can just not buy the product and maybe tell company that's why they're not buying it so the company can maybe improve the product. All I'm trying to say is, please, no more silly laws :)

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

#76

Post by blacksmith_tb »

mrexroad wrote: post #61
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…

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…

I went with a Xiaomi Yi for all those reasons - it's a quarter the price, and I doubt Xiaomi will be very inclined to share my data with the powers that be in the US (and their sharing it with the powers that be in the PRC is not likely to affect me). Of course, it's inherently absurd that these devices don't allow you to stream the video off of them yourself, it makes them e-waste in the making. Possibly someone will figure out a way to install friendlier firmware on them via the micro-sd card...

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

#77

Post by ghaff »

SwellJoe wrote: post #48
mhurron wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 I basically say the same thing about every 'smart home' device. I would love to be able to query my thermostat to find out when and how long it turned the heat/AC on and whatnot, but I only want it to talk to my local wifi and devices. I don't want it to use a cloud servic…

After the Dropcam fiasco, I wondered if there would be a market for secure smart devices with an open API. To me, it's an obvious benefit and one that I would buy (whereas I won't buy the cloud-based devices of this sort), but I suspect the ease of use of something like Dropcam trumps all of the other considerations. I even considered doing a Kickstarter to build something in that space; the technical side, both hard…

I haven't tried it personally but I know a few people who think highly of SmartThings [1], which is a relatively open platform. I've also experimented with Raspberry Pis. However, to be honest, there are a fairly limited number of "smart" things I can do around my house which would be genuinely useful.

[1] http://developer.smartthings.com/

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

#78

Post by merpnderp »

Reminds be of when I bought a Nexus One because Google promised it would receive updates as soon as they were ready. The next Nexus device came out with the update, and my Nexus One didn't get it. I think it came out a half year later, but by then I'd moved on to cyanogenmod and then to iOS and never looked back. I've been weary of Google ever since.
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