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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 hardw

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.

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.