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If you excavate any square yard of ocean you'll find a bunch of sharks' teeth in the sediment. They're like tree rings for ocean paleoclimatology. They're 'high

If you excavate any square yard of ocean you'll find a bunch of sharks' teeth in the sediment. They're like tree rings for ocean paleoclimatology. They're 'high tech' (in the sense that an apex predator uses them), effective and constantly being replaced. Now do the same thing with a landfill and you'll find generations of silicon doodads in the strata. My point: we shouldn't be too surprised when things are disposable. Sharks' teeth aren't useful after they fall out. Companies can't be supporting ten generations of gadgets.

ralmidani 11y ago
What makes Nest's actions deplorable is not just that they don't want to support and maintain the product; they are also deliberately destroying pieces of hardware purchased and owned by customers.
- awinter-py 11y ago
  nest is doing the world a favor. we need to learn the lesson of closed hardware sooner rather than later.
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    The only people talking about this are people who already know the risks.
  - studentrob 11y ago
    I agree we need to learn the lesson, but am not convinced Nest's actions are overall beneficial. Learning a hard lesson isn't the only way to learn a lesson. We need more tech companies who can lead with positive messages about openness
- capote 11y ago
  Don't these pieces of hardware rely on their service being provided? Their service is what they want to shut down, after all; this can't have started from a desire to brick hardware devices.
  - ralmidani 11y ago
    The right thing to do, then, would be to release an update allowing users to direct the device to another server without having to violate DMCA's anti-circumvention clause.
    - capote 11y ago
      Isn't the server it connects to proprietary?
      - ralmidani 11y ago
        People can repurpose hardware to work with a new backend, but only if the hardware is unlocked.
- victorhooi 11y ago
  Have you got any evidence that they are destroying hardware? I know it sells headlines, but I've seen zero evidence at all to back up these claims. From what I can tell, they're simply pulling the plug on the service. They already stopped all sales of the units nearly two years ago - in fact, that's one of the first things they did when they bought out the failing Revolv company. So they've basically paid to keep it running for two years - and this is just speculation, but maybe they decided, this is enough, it's just bleeding money, we have zero revenue to show for it all (since we haven't sold any units in two years), we need to pull the pin on it eventually.
  - gnu8 11y ago
    More likely everything is running on autopilot, well documented so low level support personnel can address any issues that might crop up, and consuming a minimal amount of revenue since the number of Revolv users is fairly static and most likely decreasing over time. I doubt it costs more than $1000/mo to operate the Revolv infrastructure, not counting the humans supporting it, who are probably spending 80%-90% of their time on non-Revolv items anyway. The real reason for pulling the plug on Revolv is to try and drum up Nest sales, but it was executed poorly since they haven't made any particular effort to steer the screwed Revolv users to Nest, or offered any concession. Tony Fadell will no doubt shit his pants when he reads this post, but despite how accurate it is, I don't even work there.
    - dgacmu 11y ago
      I should note that I think this whole thing was handled poorly, and I think there's a lot of room for our entire industry to come up with some best practices surrounding sunsetting (and, in my happy place with free ponies for everyone, mandatory open-sourcing of the backends needed with clear instructions for how customers can switch to running their own. But that's my free pony land.) But that said, I think it's more than that. There's no such thing as autopilot on the Internet, particularly for a company that deals with customer PII (and I count the ability to control stuff in your home in that category. :-). You can imagine the rathole -- we've all been down it a few times: You need to upgrade the kernel/libc on your EC2 instance because of the security vulnerability du jour. But libraries X and Y won't run after the upgrade, so you need to upgrade them. But the developer of those libraries changed the interface, so now you need to... yadda, yadda. One or two of those changes you can probably just hack in, but depending on how disgusting the codebase is (and let's be honest here - it was an acqui-hired startup that was probably in panic mode towards the end!), at some point, it starts looking like a choice between a total rewrite or tossing it to the wind. Suddenly that takes you up to an FTE, who in the valley is going to cost you >= $20k/month. Then you divide by the # of still-active devices (I have no idea what this # looks like) and suddenly it looks like a big resource drain for no benefits. (Imagine, for example, that the engineers became aware of a firmware-level vulnerability that exposed all customer devices to remote exploits and control -- and somewhere between the acquisition and then the build system for rebuilding and testing the firmware had gotten screwy. Or the last set of test devices in the lab finally broke. Or that, plus it turns out the remote firmware update mechanisms had never worked in the first place, and fixing all the bugs would require not just fixing them, but actually creating and deploying an entirely new update path. Or, or....) Of course, one can wish that were the case something like that, it had been communicated. My fingers are crossed that maybe Nest - and other companies - can use this as a learning experience and come up with policies, with teeth about acquisitions, governing the sunsetting of cloud based services that are essential for the operation of customer hardware. I'm not optimistic yet, but I'm glad to see the EFF raising the issue.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
Dylan16807 11y ago
>Companies can't be supporting ten generations of gadgets. Yes they can. Car companies support ten model years and more just fine, and keeping servers alive is a lot easier than constantly replacing mechanical parts.
- victorhooi 11y ago
  Yes, but how many cars do you know that sell for $300? This sort of logic is enshrined in consumer law as well - the courts idea of a reasonable lifetime for a product is tied to the amount you pay. If you buy a $50,000 car new, sure, a reasonable person could expect it to last 5-10 years. You buy a $200 webcam? I somehow doubt you'll be able to argue that it must work 3 years later - if it does, great. If it doesn't, well, what's a reasonable lifetime? And a lot of armchair commentators seems to underplay the amount of sheer engineering effort or cost involved in these sorts of things - it's not a case of spinning up some AWS instances, and hacking together some PHP on your weekend and deploying. To get a reliable service, with some decent SLA, which handles changing load and tolerates failures probably takes significant infrastructure (cloud or bare-metal), as well as a team of software engineers and site reliability engineers. Not to mention support teams.
  - kinsho 11y ago
    > And a lot of armchair commentators seems to underplay the amount of sheer engineering effort or cost involved in these sorts of things - it's not a case of spinning up some AWS instances, and hacking together some PHP on your weekend and deploying. I see this all the time with people that know zilch about technology, but it really disappoints me when I even see my fellow technologists underestimate the amount of engineering effort it takes to get something simple like a server up and running reliably.
    - Dylan16807 11y ago
      Here's the thing. Creating and updating a system costs a lot more than leaving it alone. They already did the expensive part. To abandon basic maintenance is pretty disappointing.

ralmidani 11y ago

What makes Nest's actions deplorable is not just that they don't want to support and maintain the product; they are also deliberately destroying pieces of hardware purchased and owned by customers.

awinter-py 11y ago
nest is doing the world a favor. we need to learn the lesson of closed hardware sooner rather than later.
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  The only people talking about this are people who already know the risks.
- studentrob 11y ago
  I agree we need to learn the lesson, but am not convinced Nest's actions are overall beneficial. Learning a hard lesson isn't the only way to learn a lesson. We need more tech companies who can lead with positive messages about openness
capote 11y ago
Don't these pieces of hardware rely on their service being provided? Their service is what they want to shut down, after all; this can't have started from a desire to brick hardware devices.
- ralmidani 11y ago
  The right thing to do, then, would be to release an update allowing users to direct the device to another server without having to violate DMCA's anti-circumvention clause.
  - capote 11y ago
    Isn't the server it connects to proprietary?
    - ralmidani 11y ago
      People can repurpose hardware to work with a new backend, but only if the hardware is unlocked.
victorhooi 11y ago
Have you got any evidence that they are destroying hardware? I know it sells headlines, but I've seen zero evidence at all to back up these claims. From what I can tell, they're simply pulling the plug on the service. They already stopped all sales of the units nearly two years ago - in fact, that's one of the first things they did when they bought out the failing Revolv company. So they've basically paid to keep it running for two years - and this is just speculation, but maybe they decided, this is enough, it's just bleeding money, we have zero revenue to show for it all (since we haven't sold any units in two years), we need to pull the pin on it eventually.
- gnu8 11y ago
  More likely everything is running on autopilot, well documented so low level support personnel can address any issues that might crop up, and consuming a minimal amount of revenue since the number of Revolv users is fairly static and most likely decreasing over time. I doubt it costs more than $1000/mo to operate the Revolv infrastructure, not counting the humans supporting it, who are probably spending 80%-90% of their time on non-Revolv items anyway. The real reason for pulling the plug on Revolv is to try and drum up Nest sales, but it was executed poorly since they haven't made any particular effort to steer the screwed Revolv users to Nest, or offered any concession. Tony Fadell will no doubt shit his pants when he reads this post, but despite how accurate it is, I don't even work there.
  - dgacmu 11y ago
    I should note that I think this whole thing was handled poorly, and I think there's a lot of room for our entire industry to come up with some best practices surrounding sunsetting (and, in my happy place with free ponies for everyone, mandatory open-sourcing of the backends needed with clear instructions for how customers can switch to running their own. But that's my free pony land.) But that said, I think it's more than that. There's no such thing as autopilot on the Internet, particularly for a company that deals with customer PII (and I count the ability to control stuff in your home in that category. :-). You can imagine the rathole -- we've all been down it a few times: You need to upgrade the kernel/libc on your EC2 instance because of the security vulnerability du jour. But libraries X and Y won't run after the upgrade, so you need to upgrade them. But the developer of those libraries changed the interface, so now you need to... yadda, yadda. One or two of those changes you can probably just hack in, but depending on how disgusting the codebase is (and let's be honest here - it was an acqui-hired startup that was probably in panic mode towards the end!), at some point, it starts looking like a choice between a total rewrite or tossing it to the wind. Suddenly that takes you up to an FTE, who in the valley is going to cost you >= $20k/month. Then you divide by the # of still-active devices (I have no idea what this # looks like) and suddenly it looks like a big resource drain for no benefits. (Imagine, for example, that the engineers became aware of a firmware-level vulnerability that exposed all customer devices to remote exploits and control -- and somewhere between the acquisition and then the build system for rebuilding and testing the firmware had gotten screwy. Or the last set of test devices in the lab finally broke. Or that, plus it turns out the remote firmware update mechanisms had never worked in the first place, and fixing all the bugs would require not just fixing them, but actually creating and deploying an entirely new update path. Or, or....) Of course, one can wish that were the case something like that, it had been communicated. My fingers are crossed that maybe Nest - and other companies - can use this as a learning experience and come up with policies, with teeth about acquisitions, governing the sunsetting of cloud based services that are essential for the operation of customer hardware. I'm not optimistic yet, but I'm glad to see the EFF raising the issue.

deleted 11y ago

[deleted]

Dylan16807 11y ago

>Companies can't be supporting ten generations of gadgets. Yes they can. Car companies support ten model years and more just fine, and keeping servers alive is a lot easier than constantly replacing mechanical parts.

victorhooi 11y ago
Yes, but how many cars do you know that sell for $300? This sort of logic is enshrined in consumer law as well - the courts idea of a reasonable lifetime for a product is tied to the amount you pay. If you buy a $50,000 car new, sure, a reasonable person could expect it to last 5-10 years. You buy a $200 webcam? I somehow doubt you'll be able to argue that it must work 3 years later - if it does, great. If it doesn't, well, what's a reasonable lifetime? And a lot of armchair commentators seems to underplay the amount of sheer engineering effort or cost involved in these sorts of things - it's not a case of spinning up some AWS instances, and hacking together some PHP on your weekend and deploying. To get a reliable service, with some decent SLA, which handles changing load and tolerates failures probably takes significant infrastructure (cloud or bare-metal), as well as a team of software engineers and site reliability engineers. Not to mention support teams.
- kinsho 11y ago
  > And a lot of armchair commentators seems to underplay the amount of sheer engineering effort or cost involved in these sorts of things - it's not a case of spinning up some AWS instances, and hacking together some PHP on your weekend and deploying. I see this all the time with people that know zilch about technology, but it really disappoints me when I even see my fellow technologists underestimate the amount of engineering effort it takes to get something simple like a server up and running reliably.
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    Here's the thing. Creating and updating a system costs a lot more than leaving it alone. They already did the expensive part. To abandon basic maintenance is pretty disappointing.