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

• frogpelt 11y ago
  The smart/connected device companies seem to be headed toward Hardware-as-a-Service for a business model. It's unsettling.
• chollida1 11y ago
  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, etc. I think most people would be rightly disappointed if their car was suddenly bricked and unable to work due to the car's manufacturer end of lifeing their car. Where is the line between bricking a $300 device and a $30,000 device? The only close analogy that quickly comes to mind is video games. Most now require online servers to play, or at least get the most out of them. Some companies like ID software have been good about releasing the required code to keep their games online long after they no longer want to support them, others companies have been, ummm, less willing or able to do so.
  • sharkweek 11y ago
    Ha - imagine a bank robbery escaping in a driverless car, only to have the manufacturer brick it during their daring escape.
    • cylinder 11y ago
      This can already happen with OnStar.
      • driverdan 11y ago
        But you can pull the SIM card from OnStar and the car will still work.
    • kefka 11y ago
      I can imagine a much scarier scenario... You use whatever app to summon a car. You give it a destination, and instead, the car makes a detour to the local police station. the address you entered is in a higher crime rate locality, and therefore the car owner approved further "screening". So the car goes to the local police station for a routine search of the car (authorized by car owner) and a dog search of you... That kind of future is one I am worried about.
      • anexprogrammer 11y ago
        There was a short story cropped up, I think here on HN, a few weeks back with exactly that scenario. My search-fu fails to find you a link.
        • kefka 11y ago
          You're right. I wasn't sure if it was here, reddit, or somewhere else. IIRC, it also had a quadcopter that jammed GPS or something, and the auto-taxi drove through a bridge and fell in the water.
        • shinykitten 11y ago
          http://motherboard.vice.com/read/one-star http://motherboard.vice.com/read/one-star
      • profeta 11y ago
        just because the car owner allow search of his property, it does not make your property available. and i am also pretty sure even a bad lawyer could get you a criminal kidnap case out of this.
        • bduerst 11y ago
          Hah. Has anyone been able to uphold a "You agree to being abducted" in a terms of service before?
          • dragonwriter 11y ago
    • 8note 11y ago
      it would be easier if the manufacturer has it drive you to the police station instead
  • Someone1234 11y ago
    You don't have to imagine, cars are already being remotely disabled on purpose due to late loan repayment[0]. [0] http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-luck-moving-that-car/?_r=0 http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2014/09/24/miss-a-payment-good-l...
    • ceejayoz 11y ago
      Only for borrowers with poor credit who explicitly agree to such a thing as a condition of getting a car loan, though.
      • Someone1234 11y ago
        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.
        • bduerst 11y ago
          Considering the competition for customers with good credit, I doubt that lenders will collude to have this included for all loans.
        • cududa 11y ago
          Sorry but none of this sounds insidious to me - if you don't pay for something, you don't get to use it.
          • mrweasel 11y ago
            Normally I would agree, but not when it's basic services. If you could see the damage it does to a family when water/gas/electricity is cut off, simply because they're poor, I don't believe that most people would feel that it's "fair". Also prepaid plans are somewhere between 150GBP to 200GBP more expensive peer year, which just adds to the cost of being poor.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • darkclarity 11y ago
    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.
    • syntheticnature 11y ago
      What's "amusing" to me is it seems that all except the very lowest end TVs come with "smart" features, now. The good news is that it's not really a differentiator, the bad news is that a poor integration can cause your TV to "boot slowly" -- my current TV, purchased for other reasons but with smart features included, won't let you use the input selection button until about 30s after being turned on from standby.
      • qb45 11y ago
        > my current TV, purchased for other reasons but with smart features included, won't let you use the input selection button until about 30s after being turned on from standby. Just about on par with those vacuum tube TV sets of the past millenium.
    • andoma 11y ago
      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
  • CM30 11y ago
    Not just disappointed. A car being in this same situation could be extremely dangerous to people riding in it, or just in the nearby area. Imagine if your autonomous car just stops midway along a motorway at 70mph, or in rush hour traffic, or in just about any other important situation. That's a situation that'd be pretty hard to avoid for a manufacturer, given all the timezones and places around the world that such a vehicle could be used. At least this device merely controls some devices inside a house, where it switching off is a simple inconvenience rather than a danger to life and limb. The solution to these problems is fairly simple, at least in theory. The 'smart' device simply loses any functionality dependent on the maker's network when services are shut down. Fewer people complain about a lot of Nintendo's games losing online functionality because there's a single player and various options that doesn't dependent on it. So if Mario Kart 8 or Luigi's Mansion 2 has its servers go offline, you've got a perfectly decent game which simply loses online multiplayer. In these cases, if the services goes away, it should simply become a normal device that the user configures themself independently of the company's network.
  • marcosdumay 11y ago
    The correct answer is that the car must have a documented API that can be served by anybody the owner choose to hire. That is not the answer most countries are implanting.
• zyxley 11y ago
  And here's another reason not to buy any Nest devices now that they're owned by Google. How long until Nest itself gets shut down?
• kefka 11y ago
  Ah. Now we see the end of the beginning of the age of IoT. I have consistently complained that these companies are completely deficient in requiring some cloud service (read: other peoples' servers). And guess why I had those issues? Because they offload all processing to these machines to retain control of them. I am not against companies trying to make a buck. Instead of tying your service that will explode, support open standards like MQTT, CoAP, and AMQP. Doing anything less shows to me that your business is a house of cards.
  • ape4 11y ago
    The Internet of Bricked Things.
  • ksenzee 11y ago
    > Because they offload all processing to these machines to retain control of them. That makes it sound like their primary concern is keeping control of the devices. In reality I think it's just laziness. We all know how much easier it is to support code running on a server than to support code running on hardware sitting on somebody's dusty garage shelf with no internet connection.
    • kefka 11y ago
      > That makes it sound like their primary concern is keeping control of the devices. In reality I think it's just laziness. I sincerely believe that many of these entrants into IoT do want to remain in control of the devices and the users who "rent" said hardware. I've seen laziness in code before. It's usually sloppy, unmaintained/badly maintained, and just messy. These products are polished, just work, and smooth... and make you go through their systems. That's an intentionally designed system. > We all know how much easier it is to support code running on a server than to support code running on hardware sitting on somebody's dusty garage shelf with no internet connection. Indeed true. I'm not advocating axing out those features. I said to add in another: which is to use open standards as well. I also develop IoT hardware (not for sale). I use Arduino Nanos, nRF24L01+ radio chips, whatever sensors/actuators for the hardware. For the software, I use Node-Red, Mosquitto (MQTT server), and Apache NiFi. For "cloud support", I use Tor Hidden Services at every gateway machine, and communicate between .onion addresses. I effectively treat all my machines in the world as a simple ethernet hub. I'm just an individual, and was able to figure all this out.
• zitterbewegung 11y ago
  Could you sue Nest / Google for this? Or would the EULA have something that says you have to go through arbitration.
• yardie 11y ago
  I'm not against IoT devices but when it requires an external service to work at all I put my foot down. I looked at devices like Nest but decided against it. My Synology NAS has some cloud like services but it does not require any external services to work. Just the way IoT should be.
  • mtgx 11y ago
    Once of the reasons why I thought it's stupid that Google's OnHub router (everyone still remember that one?) require an app that would only work over the Internet to set it up - when it could've easily been done over its own Wi-Fi connection. I do not want (most) IoT devices to be controlled directly over the Internet. For some it may make sense to do it like that, like say for surveillance cameras, but stuff like routers or coffee makers should be controlled locally.
  • alirazaq 11y ago
    Centralized IoT servers would be a lucrative target for hackers. And as much as I would like the luxury of setting my thermostat remotely as I'm leaving work; it's not worth making it accessible over the internet.
    • zeveb 11y ago
      > Centralized IoT servers would be a lucrative target for hackers. And as much as I would like the luxury of setting my thermostat remotely as I'm leaving work; it's not worth making it accessible over the internet. Well, that's a problem with centralisation. There's no reason that you shouldn't be able to connect directly & securely to your thermostat, or access it indirectly & securely via your router or home server. Among the issues of doing this are asymmetric Internet speeds and NAT, but those are solvable.
  • Tim61 11y ago
    Exactly. This isn't an IoT problem, it's a cloud-based systems problem. "Cloud" actually just means "someone else's computer", and that somebody will turn off their computer someday.
• Animats 11y ago
  This is a big problem for HVAC control devices that ought to last decades. Even Honeywell only offers a 2-year warranty on their Lyric network-enabled thermostat.[1] [1] https://customer.honeywell.com/resources/techlit/TechLitDocuments/95C-00000s/LyricWarranty_Retail.pdf https://customer.honeywell.com/resources/techlit/TechLitDocu...
  • maxerickson 11y ago
    Out of curiosity I went and found a random hydronic component. 3 year warranty: https://customer.honeywell.com/resources/Techlit/TechLitDocuments/68-0000s/68-3092.pdf https://customer.honeywell.com/resources/Techlit/TechLitDocu... 5 years on a simpler thermostat: https://customer.honeywell.com/resources/Techlit/TechLitDocuments/50-0000s/50-9363.pdf https://customer.honeywell.com/resources/Techlit/TechLitDocu...
• pm24601 11y ago
  And this boys and girls is why the IoT is only useful if you control the device.
• deleted 11y ago
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• SwellJoe 11y ago
  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 success. The level of security awareness the general public has is terrifyingly small, and companies are taking advantage of it to produce brickable devices. It is the legal variant of ransomware...They can hold your data hostage for any reason and at any time. You're completely at their mercy, with regard to pricing and availability, and you have to trust they won't fall on hard times, or get tired of running the service. This is the next front in the battle for electronic freedom, and lots of folks (even nerds) don't seem to realize it.
  • toomuchtodo 11y ago
    > I still can't believe something like Dropcam is such a huge success. The level of security awareness the general public has is terrifyingly small, and companies are taking advantage of it to produce brickable devices. It is the legal variant of ransomware...They can hold your data hostage for any reason and at any time. You're completely at their mercy, with regard to pricing and availability, and you have to trust they won't fall on hard times, or get tired of running the service. That is the difference between tech professionals and the general public. We care, others don't. Make it work, make it just expensive enough folks will buy it to fix their problem while you clean up, profit. If you want things to change, it'll only happen with regulation.
    • deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    • pdkl95 11y ago
      > We care, others don't. That's not a justification to add data stealing features and obfuscated dependencies to a remote, probably short lived server. We understand the nature of those features, others don't.
• SEJeff 11y ago
  FWIW, I bought a Revolv hub looong ago before google bought them. They stopped updating the app and the hub when they were acquired by Nest, which is when it stopped being super useful. It has been mostly useless since then, and now the service no longer works. This sounds worse than it is as they more or less did this when they were acquired, since it was a very new product that hasn't had any updates since.
• rb808 11y ago
  I had a similar problem with Boxee Box which wasn't bricked but put the platform on end-of-life. Is really annoying to see the website talking about "We are excited about the next chapter for our team." Thanks guys. http://www.boxee.tv/ http://www.boxee.tv/ Luckily the box was insecure enough that someone found a hole to allow installation of Kodi.
• ars 11y ago
  Very cutesy title, but a very poor title. This is why I refuse to buy any 3rd party internet connected (I mean connects to a 3rd party, not just TCP/IP) appliance unless I can install anything I want on it. It doesn't matter if internet connectivity is required or optional - if I'm not in charge of the software on it, and it connects to a 3rd party I refuse to buy it. I have a feeling more and more people will refuse to buy these devices until this fad moves on.
  • frandroid 11y ago
    Nice for you to say as a developer, but not every customer cares about this. I mean of course one should be able to flash new firmware. But more importantly people like Google shouldn't brick devices the customer has bought, whether they can be flashed with a new / alt firmware or not.
    • kbenson 11y ago
      I think most customers that don't care about it are simple lacking the information to correctly assess the impact of it. I think accurately explaining a few of the possible downsides: - If your internet if not functioning, the device may or may not function - If the company that sold it to you closes, it may immediately stop functioning - If the company that sold it to you decides to discontinue the product, it may stop functioning - The company that sold it to you may remove or break functionality at any time. It may be left in this state for many reasons. And then pointing to concrete examples of products where each of these cases happened, which shouldn't be that hard to do, and how long it took to happen in each case (from initial product launch and from last device sold), would result in a lot of people caring about exactly this problem. In other words, I don't think it's that people don't care, it's that they don't know enough to know they care. It's a relatively new development, compared to items like cars, fridges and dishwashers, which is probably how a lot of people think about their appliance devices.
    • ars 11y ago
      It won't take many stories like this for the general public to be soured on any device that "connect to the cloud". Right now saying that is positive advertising - it won't take much for that to be a negative when people are deciding what to buy.
• SEJeff 11y ago
  This is also one of the reasons I've moved most of my "hub like" functions to home assistant https://home-assistant.io/ https://home-assistant.io/ which is open source 100% https://github.com/balloob/home-assistant 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).
  • zeveb 11y ago
    That's a really nifty bit of software; I look forward to checking it out. Sounds like it does what I want: runs on my desktop, can be made accessible to the world. That has security implications, of course, but those can be addressed.
  • hatsix 11y ago
    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.
    • zyxley 11y ago
      For Z-Wave, they use OpenZWave, which has a list of compatible controllers: https://github.com/OpenZWave/open-zwave/wiki/Controller-Compatibility-List https://github.com/OpenZWave/open-zwave/wiki/Controller-Comp...
    • SEJeff 11y ago
      Yup! https://home-assistant.io/components/#hub 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/ https://home-assistant.io/components/zwave/ Otherwise it works with vera z-wave hubs (https://home-assistant.io/components/vera/ https://home-assistant.io/components/vera/) or the ISY944
    • JshWright 11y ago
      I am in the very early stages of home automation. I've had a Nest for years, but only last week I installed a Z Wave dimmer (one of the Cooper Aspire series) and set up Home Assistant with with Aeon Labs Gen5 Z Wave dongle[1]. I've been very impressed with Home Assistant. The developer is very active, and happy to discuss development proposals in the project gitter.im chat room. [1]: http://www.amazon.com/Aeon-Labs-Aeotec-Z-Wave-Z-Stick/dp/B00X0AWA6E/ http://www.amazon.com/Aeon-Labs-Aeotec-Z-Wave-Z-Stick/dp/B00...
• maxxxxx 11y ago
  This is starting to be a real problem. What if Tesla decides to shut down their cars after 7 years or your phone stops working after 2 years? I bet somebody somebody will come up with an idea for a house that shuts down after a certain time. If you can't rely on ownership of something anymore we'll be in big trouble. Maybe there will be a countertrend where instead of relying on the cloud as storage/computing service computing and storage will go back to the customer.
  • maxerickson 11y ago
    We already have housing as a service (eviction is close enough to shutting down, so it has that to). It's not so bad, people generally understand the implications of renting and there are laws protecting their rights. I wonder if people were clearer that these gadgets were unlikely to stick around for 3 years if they would buy them at all.
• jdalgetty 11y ago
  There should be some sort of law saying that these types of things can operate in a basic mode without the need for an internet connection - at least post initial setups. There needs to be a way to protect customers from devices that don't really need the internet to function (like a nest thermostat) when they become obsolete.
• xianshou 11y ago
  Planned obsolescence is extremely prevalent (just see Apple's view on it - http://www.geek.com/apple/phil-schiller-thinks-its-sad-that-people-use-5-year-old-computers-1650316/ http://www.geek.com/apple/phil-schiller-thinks-its-sad-that-...), and this intentional bricking is a close and sinister cousin. Before the idea of regularly replacing your hardware was so widespread, companies needed to at least pay lip service to the idea of continuing support. Now that it's become the status quo to buy a new phone every two years, it looks like some are starting to conclude that the savings in support costs are worth the PR hit. Very pro-profit, very anti-consumer.
  • ProAm 11y ago
    The hardware should be leased then, or software should be open sourced at EOL so people can use what they have paid for.
  • Bud 11y ago
    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 product in question. Zero.
    • cdr 11y ago
      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.
      • Jtsummers 11y ago
        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.
• anexprogrammer 11y ago
  I really dislike the tendency of the new economy to simply pull the plug, not because of end of life, or unprofitability, but apparently because they're excited to work on something new. To hell with your exciting journey, I paid good money for something I'd like to work for a reasonable length of time. I want home automation and appliances to work until they go pop. It puts me off buying a lot of these things. We've already had smart TVs turning off features like Skype in 2 yo sets.
• jedberg 11y ago
  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 that they must release their API if they're going to shut down, or at least make reverse engineering the system legal.
  • jasonkostempski 11y ago
    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 :)
  • csours 11y ago
    I think the transition to a physical item makes a huge difference, mentally, to the customer: see also John Deere tractors [1] (and almost certainly automobiles in the coming years). You feel like you OWN physical products, even when they are tied to a service like this. 1. http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/ http://www.wired.com/2015/04/dmca-ownership-john-deere/
  • magicalist 11y ago
    > We need some laws to protect consumers, that either say that they must release their API if they're going to shut down, or at least make reverse engineering the system legal. The EFF proposed making a DMCA exemption for reverse engineering game server functionality when the official servers have shut down, making the game useless. And of course the industry (with a little help from the MPAA) has fought it tooth and nail: http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/04/publishers-fight-to-block-third-party-revival-of-abandoned-game-servers/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/04/publishers-fight-to-bl... Apparently "hacking" abandoned games encourages hacking in general, and, as in the classic orphan work argument, allowing reverse engineering for all abandoned works would rob publishers of the revenue for the tiny, tiny portion of them that they may (or may not) re-release some day. The Librarian of Congress gave limited approval of the proposal, allowing circumvention of the case you mentioned, where an online check is required just to play local single player, but not anything else. Creating a new multiplayer server, for instance, is still illegal. http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/u-s-govt-grants-limited-right-to-revive-games-behind-abandoned-servers/ http://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/11/u-s-govt-grants-limite...
• cwyers 11y ago
  This has been up for an hour and made the front page and we still don't have a Google Reader mention? Who are you and what have you done with Hacker News?
  • DennisP 11y ago
    Thanks for fixing that for us.
  • 8note 11y ago
    they did a lot better with closing Google reader than this. at least then, they gave you what you needed to get the same service through a different provider, whereas here, theres nothing
• jimrandomh 11y ago
  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 users could fix it themselves. Nest has also burned a lot of Google's goodwill with badly designed smoke detectors (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpsMkLaEiOY) and thermostats (http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-glitch-battery-dies-software-freeze.html http://www.nytimes.com/2016/01/14/fashion/nest-thermostat-gl...). And then there's this, on a recent HN thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11105510 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11105510 > "I still wake up with something like PTSD occasionally from getting yelled at and bullied by Tony Fadell almost literally every day while I was there." > "Tony literally stood up at an all-hands after the Alphabet thing and said "Fuck being Googley" (direct quote)." I think Google/Alphabet need to take a serious look at what Nest has been doing to their brand. A few thousand very-pissed-off people here and a few thousand very-pissed-off people there add up to a serious liability for a company like Google.
  • joezydeco 11y ago
    A few thousand very-pissed-off people here and a few thousand very-pissed-off people there... s/people/early adopters/
    • scrollaway 11y ago
      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.
      • jimrandomh 11y ago
        I read that slightly differently; selectively pissing off early adopters is worse, since they disproportionately influence products' odds of success.
• deleted 11y ago
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• raverbashing 11y ago
  To be honest, some things are better with old-technology Like the Bluetooth door lock fiasco, like some complaints about "you have to download an App to turn the lights on in this house", the IoT/"Smart Home" people are not accustomed to the reliability expected of such things Having a device that requires it to be online to work I can only accept if I don't "need it" (like to get in my home or heat it when it's cold - have fun heating your house after a snowstorm knocks your internet)
  • keithpeter 11y ago
    Could local building regulations not be used to require the existence of a heating system that can be turned on when mains electricity/gas is available i.e. some kind of manual over-ride to any digital control system?
  • keithpeter 11y ago
    Could local building regulations not be used to require the existence of a heating system that can be turned on when mains electricity/gas is available i.e. some kind of manual over-ride to any digital control system?
• iamleppert 11y ago
  This is the ultimate irony in that the only people I know who are obsessed with controlling things like the light bulbs in their home or regimenting the appliances and other devices to a strict schedule to their exacting demands are having the carpet pulled out from under them. Basically, enter your control freak with a penchant for organizing, classifying and making things that worked just fine before "smart" and "iOT" were mere buzzwords in a drunken dinner conversation with Tony Fadell now told they can't control a thing. "Sike!" Tony Fadell and the beloved Google had all the control the entire time. As if Google isn't collecting data in the background on when your lights were turned on. It's one thing if you're a nerd and build your own Arduino home controlled device as a hobby project. But I don't have sympathy for the class of consumers who buys these devices.
  • spinlock 11y ago
    Do you have pull cords on all of your lights or switches on the wall? Controlling lights, etc... via IP is a natural progression. Yeah, early adopters are weird but you're crazy if you think this is just a fad for control freaks.
• zeveb 11y ago
  I think what users actually need is a smart home computer: one device, for the entire family, which provides sits on the Internet and provides secure access to home-network devices (e.g. security cameras, media players) and which gives easier-to-use (albeit perhaps less-secure) access to those things on the LAN. It could use containers to run blobs of code from different vendors. Given modern computing resources, it could actually be the computer, with mom & dad & the kids all using tablets, phones and lightweight network computers as little more than X servers. In this situation, there's no need to worry about a vendor's servers being shut down: one's own server continues to run, and continues to provide service. One has control, and yet for the vast majority of people who don't care, one needn't think about it until one wishes to.
  • bhauer 11y ago
    Agreed. In fact, there is overlap in what you've just described and what I call "Personal Application Omnipresence," [1] a model of computing where applications run to service you (and your family) but are made available to all of your IO devices (phones, tablets, desktop terminals). [1] http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao http://tiamat.tsotech.com/pao
  • mkutsovsky 11y ago
    what you are describing is a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudlet https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cloudlet which is a machine which sits on the edge and enables spinning up and down of vms for services in an isolated manner
  • ocdtrekkie 11y ago
    This is strongly what I've been advocating for. I use a desktop PC as my home automation controller at home. I feel that services like Sandstorm.io offer an amazing opportunity for self-hosted 'cloud services' in the future, and some of the good open source home automation software should replace what are currently cloud-based devices today.
  • schakrava 11y ago
    We are headed that way with Rockstor open source project. It's an advanced NAS platform based on BTRFS features and also has docker based app framework built-in called Rock-ons. Shameless plug, but only because it's highly relevant. More power on the edges of the internet please!!! rockstor.com forum.rockstor.com
• anigbrowl 11y ago
  This sort of behavior is going to boomerang back on them; at some point consumer annoyance will force the creation of rules similar to those the FCC promulgates about RF interference for electronic devices.
• USANEEDSHELP 11y ago
  Boo Hoo. What the author forgets is that you are not purchasing the product to own it outright. You are purchasing a license to use it at discretion of the manufacturer. Too bad there isn't an alternative product which you could own & it'll still work if the company goes out of business or if they decide to end support.
• mikeryan 11y ago
  I'll be really surprised if this doesn't turn into a class action lawsuit. I'd grab the popcorn on that one too, interesting legal questions.
• ecoqba11 11y ago
  They should at least open source their revolv server.
• deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
• rubyfan 11y ago
  Note to self: never buy a Google device.
  • matheweis 11y ago
    I bought my Nest before they were owned by Google...
    • rubyfan 11y ago
      Good luck with that
    • ocdtrekkie 11y ago
      So did I. But I managed to re-sell my Nest to someone else shortly thereafter. :D
      • rubyfan 11y ago
        There's a sucker born every minute
        • ocdtrekkie 11y ago
          I warned said user in advance, told them why I was selling it, etc. But they're a Google Developer Group leader and such, so they're kinda baked into the Google ecosystem. Who am I to argue? If he wants it, and I want to get rid of it, there's a deal!
• maxaf 11y ago
  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-dropcam-rooting-the-device.html http://blog.includesecurity.com/2014/04/reverse-engineering-...
  • x0x0 11y ago
    How long, as a practical manner, is google required to run these servers? Until all the devices die? 3 years? 5 years? Don't get me wrong, I'm with you. I think 4 years from sale is reasonable though. Whatever the commitment is, it should be on the packaging, and it would be nice if the various state and federal consumer protection laws were applied here.
    • maxaf 11y ago
      There should be something on the box or in the associated paperwork. Think "frustration-free service terms", similar to Amazon's frustration-free packaging. I shouldn't have to dive face-first into reams of legalese just in order to figure the half-life of my newly purchased gadget. "Forever" is definitely not the answer I'm looking for here, but there should be a date, and preferably a DIY way forward for those of us who're technically inclined and have stocked up on sufficient amounts of elbow grease. This could be accomplished similarly to the Parse sunset: the service won't run anymore, but here's all the stuff you need to get it going, good luck! I'll take that over the seemingly imminent paperweightization of my camera.
    • nostrademons 11y ago
      I think the business model of "selling things" may be out-of-date at this point, and instead we'll see companies giving away hardware that requires that you subscribe to a monthly service to use it. A number of old-economy businesses already do this, eg. razors, printers, car leases, apartments. Kinda ironic that this comes on the heels of the "ownership society" though.
• the_ancient 11y ago
  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.
• merpnderp 11y ago
  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.
  • on_and_off 11y ago
    ahh the nexus one and its ridiculously small system partition. I still love the design of this phone, but it has severe oversights as far as evolvability goes.
• bb101 11y ago
  Good to know this is how Nest operates. I will be steering clear of their devices in the future.
• JustSomeNobody 11y ago
  Why do people buy this crap?! Look, if you buy hardware that stores your data in "THE CLOUD", you're screwed if the company just decides to, well, do this.
• tomc1985 11y ago
  >1 points by tomc1985 10 days ago | parent | on: OneDrive reduces free tier from 15GB to 5GB >Never trust the cloud, it will always stab you in the back... eventually Posted this before, got downvoted... ...posting this again, and will probably get downvoted again... Seriously people, suck it up and run your own shit if it matters at all
  • lmartel 11y ago
    Lots of people here undoubtedly agree with you, but you're probably going to get downvoted again, because: Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading. Please don't bait other users by inviting them to downvote you or announce that you expect to get downvoted. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  • kennu 11y ago
    You can do that if you have unlimited time. Eventually there's just too much "own shit" to take care of, if you keep adding all kinds of services. This is quite familiar to me, having run a bunch of email/web/container/database/file servers for personal use. After a while, it's pretty tempting to just trade money or privacy for time and convenience.
    • rimunroe 11y ago
      Also if you know how to do it in the first place, have the resources to afford learning-related mistakes, etc.
    • tomc1985 11y ago
      Hence the "suck it up" part. Find the time.
  • deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  • kefka 11y ago
    I do trust the cloud. But I also don't trust other peoples' servers (what we usually think of the cloud). Clouds I trust: IPFS (interplanetary filesystem), Tor. I store .5 TB in IPFS right now, and it just works. Nobody can stop me, nobody can "remove" my access, and it's permanent as long as a single copy on the internet still exists. I also use Tor Hidden Services, where I get my own domain name [hash].onion . With a script I wrote for Linux,every program can handle .onion addresses natively. Nobody can stop this, or even detect it well. That means every node on my network is secure and anonymous in its location. I'm looking for a 3rd piece: a way to run distributed applications across a pool of machines. Ethereum seemed to be a way, but the speeds are rated in instructions/second. Undoable. I want to add all my machines to a computing cloud and do work on all of them. That still doesn't look like it exists, yet.
• jacquesm 11y ago
  Companies are getting more and more creative with interpreting what 'ownership' actually means. Books you've bought evaporate, equipment stops working, cars that can't be serviced other than at authorized dealerships and so on. Ownership is a term that has been stretched way beyond the breaking point. Any device that needs an internet connection in order to function should be leased, not bought.
  • Aelinsaar 11y ago
    On the upside, the respect of consumers for the concept of "IP" is getting creative too, and with 3D printing exploding, I'm not sure that this is a war companies want to engage in.
  • rdtsc 11y ago
    Well it was apparently leased, just the customer wasn't informed about that. The nice side benefit is they get to have a nice container of hummus at the end -- don't have to return it. Then these companies complain and cry how everyone is pirating things and nobody wants to buy their products. A lot of people in Western countries, I feel use pirated products not because they don't have the money to pay, but because it is a better user experience -- no forced commercials to watch, FBI warnings over which you can't fast-forward, music doesn't disappear if they buy a new device and so on.
    • 21echoes 11y ago
      > Then these companies complain and cry how everyone is pirating things and nobody wants to buy their products To be fair, I think you'll find that there's very little overlap.
• outside1234 11y ago
  Google basically paid a billion dollars to Tony Fadell to get him to come to Google. I wonder how they feel about that "investment" now.
• eykanal 11y ago
  This has been going on for, oh, a few hundred years, in many different industries. They even have a word for it: "renting". You get something for a while, and then when the term is up, you're done with it. You can extend the lease and they can agree to let you do so, but when you're done you're done. The only issue here seems to be that the COMPANY views the transaction as a rental while the CONSUMER views the transaction as a purchase. Legally, I'd be willing to bet good money that the company is "correct", but I'll also bet that same cash that they'll always lose in the court of public opinion.
  • srathi 11y ago
    Interestingly, all the robots are leased, not purchased, from US Robotics and Mechanical Man, in the fictional universe of Isaac Asimov.
    • bsder 11y ago
      Not all. There was one very prominent robot that was responsible for that rule. See the story: The Bicentennial Man
• falcolas 11y ago
  With all of the love for Tesla and their v3 of late, it's worth remembering that Tesla can and does brick their cars as well. http://syonyk.blogspot.com/2016/03/is-tesla-building-throwaway-cars.html http://syonyk.blogspot.com/2016/03/is-tesla-building-throwaw... If it has software, and automatic update capabilities, it's never yours.
• FussyZeus 11y ago
  Do not trust the cloud. Do not trust the cloud. Do not trust the cloud. If you didn't build it and you don't know where it is, it could go away at any time for any reason and you will have zero recourse. DO NOT. TRUST. THE CLOUD.
  • whazor 11y ago
    I would say that paid cloud works okay. At least there is some incentive for them to keep it online.
  • techthroway443 11y ago
    Are you from the future
  • Roritharr 11y ago
    I'd say make sure that you are paying a fair amount of money. Otherwise you are stuck in a "kinda free"-Tier that might not get the legacy attention that you might expect.
    • FussyZeus 11y ago
      As a OneDrive user, I can assure you this isn't necessarily true.
  • walrus01 11y ago
    Do not trust the butt. Do not trust the butt. Do not trust the butt. If you didn't build it and you don't know where it is, it could go away at any time for any reason and you will have zero recourse. DO NOT. TRUST. THE BUTT.
• ChuckMcM 11y ago
  It is a sad evolution of things. What happens to your Model S if Tesla goes out of business? The whole "remote compute / hosted" thing is a challenge. I hit it recently when I was looking to demonstrate an old game that used to run on Win98 and realized the version on the CD was unplayable and the servers where it originally downloaded the 2 gigabyte "patch" was no longer online. I found an older image of my C drive from back in the day and with a lot of work got that running under vmware workstation, only to have it still be unusable because I couldn't get the vmware version to simulate a 3D card that DirectX 4 would talk to. So well and truly dead as far as I am concerned. So having all this stuff depend on other stuff which is only relevant at the current point in time where all the systems are online, is a recipe for massive loss of infrastructure support. The whole "long lived home server" thing starts to become a compelling response.
  • scrollaway 11y ago
    This is something that hits gaming especially hard, yeah. It sucks. What especially sucks is most people don't understand the downsides. Most people don't understand that their kids won't be able to play or even look at those games. Most game devs don't even realize it. I had an interesting chat with one of the WoW devs a few months back and I asked him what his thoughts were on the ephemerality of what's created. Not only how nobody will experience the content but how all the lessons learned from creating the content, all the man-years spent in creating the art, the design etc are also lost. Well, he didn't really have an answer, I think the question just made him feel bad. Understandable.
  • saalweachter 11y ago
    We really do work in an impermanent field. The day we stop pulling weeds it all slowly fades away.
• whitegrape 11y ago
  Google's done a lot of crappy and questionable stuff over the years, but intentionally bricking devices is unquestionably evil.
• drdaeman 11y ago
  From the article: > The fact is that I can fix the problem by purchasing a replacement device such as a Samsung SmartThings hub. (emphasis's author's) No chance. Most'll never learn. I wonder, how many hardware-driven-by-the-cloud businesses (home automation, "smart" routers, etc) have SLA contracts that require providers to actually maintain their service (including security updates etc) for any extended period. Guess, not many. Out of curiosity, I've tried to search for, say, "Google OnHub SLA" and found... nothing.
• mikestew 11y ago
  I wish Synology would get on the stick and and make/acquire a Dropcam-like device for their NAS products. Why would Synology, a maker of mass storage appliances, head off to the topsy-turvy world of consumer products? Look at their software offerings that run on their hardware. DS Note, an Evernote/OneNote competitor? They have put a non-trivial amount of work to produce it, and it's good enough I use it in lieu of aforementioned products. Does it sell more NAS products? Dunno, I'm assuming it must. I just know that all of my notes stay on a machine that I own. That machine is five or six years old, and Sinology continues to crank out updates for it. When they stop, my box will still work. DS Note is just one example, there's buttloads of software that Synology cranks out for these little boxes, including security cam software. Problem is, tracking down which camera works with the NAS is non-trivial, and frankly more trouble than I care to expend. Now if Synology said, "here's a $200 camera. Point it at your NAS. All data stays on your local network, no 'cloud' services to rely on. Sorted.", I'd buy four of them that same day, no questions asked, shut up and take my money.
  • Dnguyen 11y ago
    I run MotionEyeOS on a raspberry pi and store my images and video on a NAS. Doesn't have to be a Synology.
  • magicalist 11y ago
    Don't people already do this with Synology NAS boxes? Just a normal IP camera, writing to storage and with remote access set up it should work. Not consumer plug and play, but I swear I've read about people doing this...
    • mikestew 11y ago
      Oh, people do it. I was going to do it, but there's a list of hundreds of compatible cameras. Of those hundreds, which ones suit my needs? Which ones are less than $300? What is the definition of "works"? (There's "works, but...", and then there's "works out of the box with five minutes of configuration, and here's a link to the settings you want".) IOW, yes, there is a currently available solution. What there isn't, AFAICT, is a "click here, wait two days for Amazon, have it running five minutes after you open the box" like Nest or Withings.
• dheera 11y ago
  I think this is an inherent problem of the design of hardware-software-cloud combined products. Forget Google for a second; what if this was a startup that simply ran out of money and shut down? They wouldn't have money to run their servers, and the software portion that relies on servers would necessarily fail with the company's loss of funds. What are you going to do, ask the founders and investors to support server costs out of their pockets post-shutdown? Google isn't any different; they have the right to pull the plug on server-side stuff and make whatever budget cuts they need to make in order to keep their company running and keep their shareholders happy. It might affect customer relations. You might choose not to buy their products again. But they have that right. They can also choose to continue to keep the service running at a loss in order to keep customer relations happy for future products, and build a good reputation. They would have to weigh the pros and cons of this, given that the number of Nest users is miniscule compared to other Google products. It's their decision. Keep this in mind when buying any hardware that comes with a cloud-based software component. You also have the choice not to buy such products. On another note, I have my thermostat controlled by an Arduino and web interface run on a Raspberry Pi. It's not going to be shut down any time soon.
• extrapickles 11y ago
  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.
• pessimizer 11y ago
  Cool. Now you will be expected to replace your smoke alarm, thermostat, and security system on a 6-12 month cycle like they already expect you to do with your telephone. Anybody willing to invest in smart windowpanes? Attic stairs as a service? Is there any way that we can rent people's own hands back to them? Some sort of a glove that analyzes everything you touch and only pays taxes in Ireland?
• theandrewbailey 11y ago
  It's time that IoT vendors understand that they are making devices that are a part of homes themselves, and those things have lifecycles of decades, not months. Many people like to not unnail and unscrew everything every 2 years because the manufacturer decided to not maintain them anymore. Whereas the dumb equivalents didn't need that much maintenance to begin with. How many phones and computers have you replaced in the past 20 years? When was the last time you replaced the outlets you plug them into? IoT has a long way to go to be viable for people like Moms and Dads. > The fact is that I can fix the problem by purchasing a replacement device such as a Samsung SmartThings hub. It’s not terribly expensive, a few hundred dollars. Many people will think that is terribly expensive to keep novelty automation happening. And from what I've heard about Samsung's touch screen refrigerators, I bet that it's lifecycle won't be any better. https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/calendar/UhfpcwO0X0c/paA4iQNen9IJ https://productforums.google.com/forum/m/#!msg/calendar/Uhfp...
• hackbinary 11y ago
  I was going to get a Nest, but now I'm having serious second thoughts.
• plorg 11y ago
  On the other hand, this seems to provide a really good opportunity to hobbyists, if they can get the ball rolling quickly enough. If the problem with smart-home devices is their over-reliance on the cloud, the best solution would be to create a self-hosted system. Expensive, powerful, otherwise-bricked devices provide a great incentive to create such a system. As inspiration I am thinking of the Pogoplug devices that seem to be littered around thrift stores and "sold-as-is" bins. Without a connection to the previous owner they are bricks - the default web interface doesn't even come up if there is a registered user, and they can't be de-authed without the original user signing in. But they have multicore ARM CPUs, a decent amount of RAM, multiple USB ports, and even SATA ports. Canny users have found ways of popping a shell, rooting them, and turning them into home servers to do myriad tasks (there are versions of both Arch and Debian targeted at many versions of the Pogoplug). I don't own any smart home devices, and I'm sure it would require a non-trivial amount of work to get a self-hosted system running, but it would be great as a platform for hobbyist experimentation. Particularly these Revolv devices which contain radios to communicate on multiple protocols.
• sparr0 11y ago
  Is there room here for some sort of industry body or label group to promote a "Works Offline" sort of brand, like organic and kosher food labels? Device makers would get to use the logo if their device wasn't utterly dependent on cloud services.
• hoodoof 11y ago
  Why buy from a company that kills your purchase at some time in the future?
• unclebucknasty 11y ago
  The problem with some of these IoT products is that they are more focused on being a vector or platform for broader automation than they are at doing one thing well. Nest (the thermostat) itself is completely overrated, and is an over-engineered and unnecessary "solution" to a problem that's already been solved.
• pfarnsworth 11y ago
  This is a relevant thread on reddit: https://np.reddit.com/r/Nest/comments/4dbbgh/is_anyone_concerned_about_the_future_of_nest/ https://np.reddit.com/r/Nest/comments/4dbbgh/is_anyone_conce...
  • Analemma_ 11y ago
    That top comment - oh dear. Of course, it is an anonymous Reddit comment, so approach with skepticism, but FWIW, it does match up with what I have been hearing through other channels like Glassdoor and old-fashioned gossip.
• tiff 11y ago
  Hm. This is why we need a non-cloud based alternative to existing smart home hubs. Check our approach: https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protonet-zoe-start-your-secure-smart-home-now/ https://www.indiegogo.com/projects/protonet-zoe-start-your-s...
• walrus01 11y ago
  I don't understand why anyone would buy a home automation/smart-home device that can't work fully independent of "the cloud" (butt) with local management. If I can't talk to it over private IP space and run a local daemon/server on the same layer 2 ethernet fabric to manage it (eg: Unifi), I don't want it. If I want to remotely access a camera or something like dropcam I am perfectly capable of VPNing in to my own home network to do so. I don't need the butt.
• mdip 11y ago
  There's really no good reason for this kind of behavior from Google. They have the infrastructure to continue to support old products and they don't do this every time they do an acqui-hire. I recall years ago when I was a huge SageTV fanatic. They acqui-hired the company behind SageTV and integrated their product into Fiber (yet another reason for me to be jealous of Fiber). The products were immediately pulled from market but generally continued to function for years (I'm not sure how long since I abandoned the platform and went full-on cord-cutter), but last year they decided to fully open-source the code. Yeah, it would have been nice if it was done much sooner, but at least they gave enthusiasts of the platform an opportunity to pick up where the company left off after they were acquired and their core product was force-pivoted. It seem to me that something similar could have been done here but they opted not to. That's unfortunate and it will play into my ever growing concerns about committing to any google product beyond search[1]. [1] I'm GMail and Android committed to but I'm not happy with the rapid, radical changes happening on that platform, either. Though they're unlikely to sunset the product any time soon, it appears to be evolving into something that's so different that I can no longer call it the same product I fell in love with years ago.
• kordless 11y ago
  This is a bigger problem than anyone realizes. The thermostat in my home had been here for probably 30 years and worked fine. Then some idiot went an bought a Nest and replaced it. Me.
• Loic 11y ago
  I repeat myself like an old scratched LP, you should build your smart-home around an open standard like KNX[0] which is supported by 100's of hardware vendors, many software vendors including OSS and can fully run without any kind of server. [0]: https://knx.org/ https://knx.org/