9 ms·

unlock

152 points by RobAley 8y ago

vthallam 8y ago
You'd think if you could trust anyone with uptime of the most important IOT stuff(locks, thermostat etc) , it would be Google. Yet here we are, smh! I like automating or wiring up my home with connected devices, this outage is making me thing twice.
- cookiecaper 8y ago
  Nest hasn't been that impressive to me, but they're better than a lot of other home automation/security providers, including the one who completely mishandled a security disclosure I made a couple of months ago. The issue was remedied, but it was very unprofessional, and I didn't bother doing digging deep. I am certain there are many other simple security issues with that platform, just waiting for someone to decide that they want to play a game with $IMPORTANT_PERSON_X's home locks. It's definitely wise to think twice before making your home's basic functionality, like allowing the owner to unlock doors, depend on systems that require an internet connection.
  - kridsdale1 8y ago
    Will you share the bad company so I can avoid it?
    - cookiecaper 8y ago
      While I'd like to, since I haven't gotten into the nitty-gritty, I don't want to name and shame based on presumptions, even if I have an isolated data point that supports them. I would just say to be careful whose devices you use. Do your research and understand that you're implicating not just your privacy, but your physical security, when you put remotely-controllable locks, blinds, etc., in your home. That's a position of high trust, and most home automation providers (possibly including Nest, but they're by no means the worst) aren't worthy of it.
- orthecreedence 8y ago
  Why not do it yourself over the LAN? Seriously, I dont see any point in having home data get sent to some scummy third party. I have a few of these "smart" devices in my home, and they are assigned to an IP block that has absolutely no internet access. They have to be controlled internally, and are not allowed to phone home. One of my next projects will be an open-source Alexa-like that runs completely in the LAN (unless you specifically ask for things like the weather).
  - jxcl 8y ago
    This already exists to some extent: https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/
Lord_Zero 8y ago
People unable to unlock their doors? I hope they give a detailed postmortem.
- Uberphallus 8y ago
  Or access their cameras. If it's not something dumb like DNS down, it's gonna be a popcorn-level postmortem.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- jclardy 8y ago
  Unable to unlock doors from the app or other automation - the keypad still worked. Still, this is the problem with all cloud based home automation platforms.
Uberphallus 8y ago
I was considering getting some of these devices but things like this scare the fuck out of me. Let alone if Nest goes away you end up with some useless bricks. Any suggestions for self hosted smart locks?
- Klathmon 8y ago
  Go with zwave. There are some gotchas (make sure you get a zwave-plus lock that incudes the AES security stuff), and you need a dedicated "hub" to communicate with it, but they are rock solid in my experience
- jclardy 8y ago
  I went Z-Wave with home assistant. Not the easiest in terms of setup, but everything is run locally (I started on an rPi but am now transitioning to a Intel NUC.)
  - Klathmon 8y ago
    I did the same, and I couldn't be happier with it. Home assistant is open source, written in Python, has a web based UI, and integrates with everything under the sun and is VERY welcoming to new components from outside people. I've contributed 2 so far, and I hope to have another that adds in daily electricity monitoring from my local power company ready soon. Hass is quite possibly the best run open source project I've ever been involved in.
- samstave 8y ago
  Schlagg
- verandaguy_alt 8y ago
  Coming from an infosec background and having touched on physical security, just don't use a smart lock: - Best case, even with a responsible implementation, you're introducing more variables than are necessary into a supposedly secure system. If one of your dependencies fucks up, your lock is exploitable. - Worst case, you have a typical IoT device, where the "S" stands for "security." - In _either_ case, you're likely still going to include a physical lock mechanism for keys as a backup -- so you're basically just increasing the attack surface (significantly, I should add) by doing this. Smart locks are currently high-risk appliances, and I'm fairly confident that most others with a security background will agree with me on that.
seandougall 8y ago
Title is a bit misleading, as the devices evidently didn’t stop working via physical controls. That said, were they... really not monitoring their service?
- cryptozeus 8y ago
  yeh but made you click :)
- Jemmeh 8y ago
  Sometimes monitoring fails too.
  - dark_ph0enix 8y ago
    Who monitors the monitors?
willsinclair 8y ago
Yikes. I would definitely be re-thinking my home security if I normally use my locks remotely and I was suddenly unable to. A house burglar could effectively use these tweets as push notifications telling them to go rob some smart™ homes in their local rich neighborhoods.
- Jemmeh 8y ago
  They just can't use the app to control it. The physical lock still works, so they just have to use the key. For a night it turned into a regular lock.
  - willsinclair 8y ago
    I'm just imagining the case where someone has gotten very used to using the smart lock in a way where they lock it remotely. I guess that could be blamed on the user, but it's definitely not going to encourage them to buy any more Nest products.
    - jessaustin 8y ago
      Yeah one could imagine the house locking itself when a car drives away.
      - Jemmeh 8y ago
        There isn't ifttt for Nest Secure yet, but it does integrate with Nest Cam and nest Thermostat. My workplace was across the street from my house though so I had trouble with the GPS stuff on ifttt when I tried it a few years ago. Bah.
        jessaustin 8y ago
        You weren't driving across the street, were you? b^)
dsnuh 8y ago
This is what the future will bring more of - not some all powerful AI - just a bunch of crap that didn't need to be tethered to the cloud that suddenly stops working without much explanation, as the Deal With It dog laughs and dons his sunglasses. Edit: typo
- cryptoz 8y ago
  The two things are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, as Nest connections broke last night, Google collected, analyzed, and used more information than ever before in its quest to learn and know everything and keep it all organized.
  - dsnuh 8y ago
    True. Maybe AI destroys humanity via constant trolling.
    - grogenaut 8y ago
      That's apparently how humanity is going to destroy humanity.
      - ratsimihah 8y ago
        If we're going down, we might as well have fun doing it no?
- dsnuh 8y ago
  Just wait until you are at Taco Bell, and you can't wipe the Cool Ranch Doritos Taco shell dust off your fingers because the Dixie servers are down. Yes, this is real. THE FUTURE EDIT! fixed URL: https://imgur.com/f5evsOe https://imgur.com/f5evsOe
  - mikestew 8y ago
    Driving the point home by posting a URL that returns 404?
yk 8y ago
On behalf of everybody who had entirely too much fun during internet of shit talks at the ten or so last congresses: If only somebody told us that would happen!
rjbwork 8y ago
There's a Nest system in the house I rent in. It didn't work from phone/web, so I just walked over to the actual thermostat on the wall, and it worked just fine. AFAIK from reading the Twitters last night, you could still punch the numbers into your home locks and get inside. So the things just took us back a few years in terms of smart phone access, but the core device still works.
- Navarr 8y ago
  Smart devices need dumb backups. It's perhaps fortunate for Nest customers that Nest knows that.
  - soylentcola 8y ago
    So far, the "smart" (read: network connected/controllable) devices I've owned have all had fallback options. I used to have a Nest at my old place but I left it when we sold (didn't feel like replacing it and couldn't find the old thermostat). If it somehow lost connectivity, it still functioned as a thermostat, albeit one with more potential for a software crash or firmware brick. Neither ever happened in the few years I had it. With Hue bulbs, if you can't control them due to not having your phone handy or LAN issues, you can always just flip the lightswitch off and back on to get them back at "normal" brightness and color. Again, it's not something that I run into often but if someone else is visiting and doesn't care if the lights are dimmed blue or whatever for movie watching, they can still use the lights as normal lights. Got a window AC in a small room that I can control via LAN but again, it still has a regular remote and buttons on the front if that fails or I want to disable it. The only things I typically run across in the consumer space that don't work this way are IP security cameras that depend on remote servers in order to work. The ones that won't just send an h.264 or MJPG stream over the LAN are forever off my list for this reason (as well as a dislike of recurring bills). But I at least understand why many people don't want to set up a NAS or spare computer running software to receive the feeds over their LAN so I get why they exist. I just don't particularly like them. I'll stick to IP cams on a separate local network that I can access remotely via VPN into my home network. If nothing else, I don't have to depend on anyone else's service and I don't need to expose some backdoor-ridden device to the WAN.
fredley 8y ago
On the one hand, expecting your remote-controlled lock to work all the time (as in 100% uptime) is unfeasible, since it is impossible to achieve 100% uptime. Almost everyone buying a smart lock probably expected it to have 100% uptime though, and I'm sure they didn't read the small print w.r.t. uptime SLAs. On the other hand, it's probably no more inconvenient than locking yourself out, something that happens every now and again for anyone. Except you don't have yourself to blame, but Nest.
- Erik816 8y ago
  I haven't locked myself out of my house since I was about 12, and the dumb lock on my house has had 100% uptime for the 10 years since we've moved in. So I don't totally get the appeal of a "smart" lock.
  - erkkie 8y ago
    Give access to cleaners? Renting? Airbnb?
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- unit91 8y ago
  Absolutely agree with everything except > On the other hand, it's probably no more inconvenient than locking yourself out... It looks like local control (i.e., with physical access) wasn't affected, so the only convenience lost was remote access. Not great when you've bought the product specifically for that feature of course, but still much better than locking yourself out.
  - fredley 8y ago
    I can imagine a few people couldn't get into their AirBnBs or whatever until the host schlepped across town, probably ruining their day. But yes, that's the risk of relying on a system as unreliable as the internet for such a task.
- 8y ago
peterwwillis 8y ago
Why would they depend on the internet to allow you to control a device at your home? NFC? Bluetooth? Wifi? Ignoring the obvious security problems of these devices being internet-connected, it's just a crap design from a usability standpoint. (where "usability" includes "can use it when the internet goes out")
- cabaalis 8y ago
  Perhaps the functionality of from-anywhere control led them to make internet the only available connectivity. If you assume the service and connection will be always available, why put multiple receivers on the device? Seems the problem here was in the assumption.
  - socrates666 8y ago
    Bad design. It should only depend on local net, and then raise an interface to outside world as needed.
- toomuchtodo 8y ago
  Could they create a way to host a service at your home for direct connect from the app so connectivity doesn’t rely on a cloud service? Sure. Most consumers don’t care though. I certainly don’t care. This is the first major Nest outage I can remember. It would take continued intermittent outages for me to re-evaluate my Nest devices at my homes. Either a cloud app is going to go out, or my home internet is going to go out. I don’t expect 100% uptime because I’m realistic, and expecting non-cloud infra devices with no time commitment is a pipe dream.
  - amluto 8y ago
    I had the impression that this capability was a hard requirement for HomeKit support. Go Apple.
  - socrates666 8y ago
    How do you feel knowing that you are being watched?
FrozenVoid 8y ago
SmartDevices are inherently fragile due orders of magnitude more points of failure. Instead of "Smart" functionality being optional it (due commercial interest) becomes core control circuitry on which the functionality depends. An example(hypothethical) SmartFishtank which dispenses food to fish with pre-programmed schedules and monitors/adjust water temperature. Its connected to internet and can be monitored remotely. Users can even upload new feeding schedules. What happens if its hacked? Fish can be boiled, starved or overfed because SmartFishTank has control over the whole device. In another corner there is a electronic fish tank with mechanical feeder that is set to one of 3 feeding modes. The fish tank monitors temperature and acidity, but cannot adjust it and only send a audible alarm or a SMS message. However whatever happens to the electronic components, they cannot harm the fish inside because its purpose is to just receive data.
cookiecaper 8y ago
Our Nestcam has been flickering on and off since about 3:30pm PDT yesterday. I assumed it was something with the wifi, but it looks like it's just upstream server issues. I guess that's a relief?
ianwalter 8y ago
Does anybody know if this has anything to do with GKE? Last night right before I noticed the Nest app was unresponsive, I noticed my entire Kubernetes cluster was randomly brought down. At first I thought it was for some kind of maintenance, but thought it was strange that it wasnt brought down gracefully. I still have no idea what happened.
- epc 8y ago
  As of a little over a week ago my nests (camera, thermostat) were connecting to AWS systems, not Google Cloud. Am traveling so can't tell if this has changed since then.
  - ianwalter 8y ago
    Ok, I guess I just assumed since Nest is a Google company... but I can check that. Thanks for the tip!
ttflee 8y ago
Please let me quote from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams: The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.
yk 8y ago
May be a larger Google problem, I just wanted to stuff a German link [0] into Google translate to post it here, and Google translate gives me a 403 Your client does not have permission to get URL / from this server. (Client IP address: 84.131.XXX.XXX) (That is a standard German Telekom IP, usually Google only acts up when I do anything funny.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17091962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17091962 (I got google to translate, still no luck with translate.google.de )
saudioger 8y ago
Smarthome devices that can't function at some level without a cloud service are trash. Do yourself a favor and skip wifi cameras all together, use an IP camera and a NVR.
- josefresco 8y ago
  IP camera's are a pain to "open to the world" - hence why "cloud cameras" have been so popular. I suspect there are now modern, IP cameras that aren't cloud reliant but the avg user doesn't care.
  - saudioger 8y ago
    It's kind of a combination of things — IP cameras definitely don't have the greatest software... and combined with shitty entry-level routers port-forwarding is definitely frustrating to the average person... then you get into dynamic IPs from ISPs, etc... It's just annoying that there's no middle ground between "hold my hand with a cloud service" and "I want to spend a little effort to not be 100% reliant on external services" Google could decide to fold Nest service entirely (luckily there aren't signs of that) and at this point you'd have thousands of thousands of devices in a landfill. It's so irresponsible. Historically you could have a CCTV setup running for 10-20 years without huge issues. >I suspect there are now modern, IP cameras that aren't cloud reliant It's surprisingly limited and still a bit expensive. Foscam/Hikvision have been getting better, but it still feels a few years behind when it comes to firmware... and the notification and advanced "human detection" are obviously better with a cloud service.
eanzenberg 8y ago
You are the beta-tester.
goombastic 8y ago
I get the feeling we have pointless products more often than not these days. All these advances, just to create a speaker that listens to you and helps you shop. And now this, there is going to be a whole lot more e-waste in the coming years because of manufacturer antics like this.
w0mbat 8y ago
I have had trouble with Nest devices staying on an IP address after the lease expires, messing up the network once that address gets used by someone else. I had to reserve IPs for each one in the end. More than once, I have had a Nest smoke alarm go off for absolutely no reason, in an empty house. It's always nice to get an alert on your phone at work telling you your house is on fire. I don't think their QA department is the best.
ggg9990 8y ago
When I had a landline, I literally never picked it up and had no dial tone. When I had an ADT security system, I never had a single failure with it. Meanwhile I have never regularly used a web service that didn’t have at least one outage.

152 points by RobAley 8y ago

You'd think if you could trust anyone with uptime of the most important IOT stuff(locks, thermostat etc) , it would be Google. Yet here we are, smh! I like automating or wiring up my home with connected devices, this outage is making me thing twice.

cookiecaper 8y ago
Nest hasn't been that impressive to me, but they're better than a lot of other home automation/security providers, including the one who completely mishandled a security disclosure I made a couple of months ago. The issue was remedied, but it was very unprofessional, and I didn't bother doing digging deep. I am certain there are many other simple security issues with that platform, just waiting for someone to decide that they want to play a game with $IMPORTANT_PERSON_X's home locks. It's definitely wise to think twice before making your home's basic functionality, like allowing the owner to unlock doors, depend on systems that require an internet connection.
- kridsdale1 8y ago
  Will you share the bad company so I can avoid it?
  - cookiecaper 8y ago
    While I'd like to, since I haven't gotten into the nitty-gritty, I don't want to name and shame based on presumptions, even if I have an isolated data point that supports them. I would just say to be careful whose devices you use. Do your research and understand that you're implicating not just your privacy, but your physical security, when you put remotely-controllable locks, blinds, etc., in your home. That's a position of high trust, and most home automation providers (possibly including Nest, but they're by no means the worst) aren't worthy of it.
orthecreedence 8y ago
Why not do it yourself over the LAN? Seriously, I dont see any point in having home data get sent to some scummy third party. I have a few of these "smart" devices in my home, and they are assigned to an IP block that has absolutely no internet access. They have to be controlled internally, and are not allowed to phone home. One of my next projects will be an open-source Alexa-like that runs completely in the LAN (unless you specifically ask for things like the weather).
- jxcl 8y ago
  This already exists to some extent: https://mycroft.ai/ https://mycroft.ai/

Lord_Zero 8y ago

People unable to unlock their doors? I hope they give a detailed postmortem.

Uberphallus 8y ago
Or access their cameras. If it's not something dumb like DNS down, it's gonna be a popcorn-level postmortem.
deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
jclardy 8y ago
Unable to unlock doors from the app or other automation - the keypad still worked. Still, this is the problem with all cloud based home automation platforms.

Uberphallus 8y ago

I was considering getting some of these devices but things like this scare the fuck out of me. Let alone if Nest goes away you end up with some useless bricks. Any suggestions for self hosted smart locks?

Klathmon 8y ago
Go with zwave. There are some gotchas (make sure you get a zwave-plus lock that incudes the AES security stuff), and you need a dedicated "hub" to communicate with it, but they are rock solid in my experience
jclardy 8y ago
I went Z-Wave with home assistant. Not the easiest in terms of setup, but everything is run locally (I started on an rPi but am now transitioning to a Intel NUC.)
- Klathmon 8y ago
  I did the same, and I couldn't be happier with it. Home assistant is open source, written in Python, has a web based UI, and integrates with everything under the sun and is VERY welcoming to new components from outside people. I've contributed 2 so far, and I hope to have another that adds in daily electricity monitoring from my local power company ready soon. Hass is quite possibly the best run open source project I've ever been involved in.
samstave 8y ago
Schlagg
verandaguy_alt 8y ago
Coming from an infosec background and having touched on physical security, just don't use a smart lock: - Best case, even with a responsible implementation, you're introducing more variables than are necessary into a supposedly secure system. If one of your dependencies fucks up, your lock is exploitable. - Worst case, you have a typical IoT device, where the "S" stands for "security." - In _either_ case, you're likely still going to include a physical lock mechanism for keys as a backup -- so you're basically just increasing the attack surface (significantly, I should add) by doing this. Smart locks are currently high-risk appliances, and I'm fairly confident that most others with a security background will agree with me on that.

seandougall 8y ago

Title is a bit misleading, as the devices evidently didn’t stop working via physical controls. That said, were they... really not monitoring their service?

cryptozeus 8y ago
yeh but made you click :)
Jemmeh 8y ago
Sometimes monitoring fails too.
- dark_ph0enix 8y ago
  Who monitors the monitors?

willsinclair 8y ago

Yikes. I would definitely be re-thinking my home security if I normally use my locks remotely and I was suddenly unable to. A house burglar could effectively use these tweets as push notifications telling them to go rob some smart™ homes in their local rich neighborhoods.

Jemmeh 8y ago
They just can't use the app to control it. The physical lock still works, so they just have to use the key. For a night it turned into a regular lock.
- willsinclair 8y ago
  I'm just imagining the case where someone has gotten very used to using the smart lock in a way where they lock it remotely. I guess that could be blamed on the user, but it's definitely not going to encourage them to buy any more Nest products.
  - jessaustin 8y ago
    Yeah one could imagine the house locking itself when a car drives away.
    - Jemmeh 8y ago
      There isn't ifttt for Nest Secure yet, but it does integrate with Nest Cam and nest Thermostat. My workplace was across the street from my house though so I had trouble with the GPS stuff on ifttt when I tried it a few years ago. Bah.
      - jessaustin 8y ago
        You weren't driving across the street, were you? b^)

dsnuh 8y ago

This is what the future will bring more of - not some all powerful AI - just a bunch of crap that didn't need to be tethered to the cloud that suddenly stops working without much explanation, as the Deal With It dog laughs and dons his sunglasses. Edit: typo

cryptoz 8y ago
The two things are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, as Nest connections broke last night, Google collected, analyzed, and used more information than ever before in its quest to learn and know everything and keep it all organized.
- dsnuh 8y ago
  True. Maybe AI destroys humanity via constant trolling.
  - grogenaut 8y ago
    That's apparently how humanity is going to destroy humanity.
    - ratsimihah 8y ago
      If we're going down, we might as well have fun doing it no?
dsnuh 8y ago
Just wait until you are at Taco Bell, and you can't wipe the Cool Ranch Doritos Taco shell dust off your fingers because the Dixie servers are down. Yes, this is real. THE FUTURE EDIT! fixed URL: https://imgur.com/f5evsOe https://imgur.com/f5evsOe
- mikestew 8y ago
  Driving the point home by posting a URL that returns 404?

yk 8y ago

On behalf of everybody who had entirely too much fun during internet of shit talks at the ten or so last congresses: If only somebody told us that would happen!

rjbwork 8y ago

There's a Nest system in the house I rent in. It didn't work from phone/web, so I just walked over to the actual thermostat on the wall, and it worked just fine. AFAIK from reading the Twitters last night, you could still punch the numbers into your home locks and get inside. So the things just took us back a few years in terms of smart phone access, but the core device still works.

Navarr 8y ago
Smart devices need dumb backups. It's perhaps fortunate for Nest customers that Nest knows that.
- soylentcola 8y ago
  So far, the "smart" (read: network connected/controllable) devices I've owned have all had fallback options. I used to have a Nest at my old place but I left it when we sold (didn't feel like replacing it and couldn't find the old thermostat). If it somehow lost connectivity, it still functioned as a thermostat, albeit one with more potential for a software crash or firmware brick. Neither ever happened in the few years I had it. With Hue bulbs, if you can't control them due to not having your phone handy or LAN issues, you can always just flip the lightswitch off and back on to get them back at "normal" brightness and color. Again, it's not something that I run into often but if someone else is visiting and doesn't care if the lights are dimmed blue or whatever for movie watching, they can still use the lights as normal lights. Got a window AC in a small room that I can control via LAN but again, it still has a regular remote and buttons on the front if that fails or I want to disable it. The only things I typically run across in the consumer space that don't work this way are IP security cameras that depend on remote servers in order to work. The ones that won't just send an h.264 or MJPG stream over the LAN are forever off my list for this reason (as well as a dislike of recurring bills). But I at least understand why many people don't want to set up a NAS or spare computer running software to receive the feeds over their LAN so I get why they exist. I just don't particularly like them. I'll stick to IP cams on a separate local network that I can access remotely via VPN into my home network. If nothing else, I don't have to depend on anyone else's service and I don't need to expose some backdoor-ridden device to the WAN.

fredley 8y ago

On the one hand, expecting your remote-controlled lock to work all the time (as in 100% uptime) is unfeasible, since it is impossible to achieve 100% uptime. Almost everyone buying a smart lock probably expected it to have 100% uptime though, and I'm sure they didn't read the small print w.r.t. uptime SLAs. On the other hand, it's probably no more inconvenient than locking yourself out, something that happens every now and again for anyone. Except you don't have yourself to blame, but Nest.

Erik816 8y ago
I haven't locked myself out of my house since I was about 12, and the dumb lock on my house has had 100% uptime for the 10 years since we've moved in. So I don't totally get the appeal of a "smart" lock.
- erkkie 8y ago
  Give access to cleaners? Renting? Airbnb?
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
unit91 8y ago
Absolutely agree with everything except > On the other hand, it's probably no more inconvenient than locking yourself out... It looks like local control (i.e., with physical access) wasn't affected, so the only convenience lost was remote access. Not great when you've bought the product specifically for that feature of course, but still much better than locking yourself out.
- fredley 8y ago
  I can imagine a few people couldn't get into their AirBnBs or whatever until the host schlepped across town, probably ruining their day. But yes, that's the risk of relying on a system as unreliable as the internet for such a task.
8y ago

peterwwillis 8y ago

Why would they depend on the internet to allow you to control a device at your home? NFC? Bluetooth? Wifi? Ignoring the obvious security problems of these devices being internet-connected, it's just a crap design from a usability standpoint. (where "usability" includes "can use it when the internet goes out")

cabaalis 8y ago
Perhaps the functionality of from-anywhere control led them to make internet the only available connectivity. If you assume the service and connection will be always available, why put multiple receivers on the device? Seems the problem here was in the assumption.
- socrates666 8y ago
  Bad design. It should only depend on local net, and then raise an interface to outside world as needed.
toomuchtodo 8y ago
Could they create a way to host a service at your home for direct connect from the app so connectivity doesn’t rely on a cloud service? Sure. Most consumers don’t care though. I certainly don’t care. This is the first major Nest outage I can remember. It would take continued intermittent outages for me to re-evaluate my Nest devices at my homes. Either a cloud app is going to go out, or my home internet is going to go out. I don’t expect 100% uptime because I’m realistic, and expecting non-cloud infra devices with no time commitment is a pipe dream.
- amluto 8y ago
  I had the impression that this capability was a hard requirement for HomeKit support. Go Apple.
- socrates666 8y ago
  How do you feel knowing that you are being watched?

FrozenVoid 8y ago

SmartDevices are inherently fragile due orders of magnitude more points of failure. Instead of "Smart" functionality being optional it (due commercial interest) becomes core control circuitry on which the functionality depends. An example(hypothethical) SmartFishtank which dispenses food to fish with pre-programmed schedules and monitors/adjust water temperature. Its connected to internet and can be monitored remotely. Users can even upload new feeding schedules. What happens if its hacked? Fish can be boiled, starved or overfed because SmartFishTank has control over the whole device. In another corner there is a electronic fish tank with mechanical feeder that is set to one of 3 feeding modes. The fish tank monitors temperature and acidity, but cannot adjust it and only send a audible alarm or a SMS message. However whatever happens to the electronic components, they cannot harm the fish inside because its purpose is to just receive data.

cookiecaper 8y ago

Our Nestcam has been flickering on and off since about 3:30pm PDT yesterday. I assumed it was something with the wifi, but it looks like it's just upstream server issues. I guess that's a relief?

ianwalter 8y ago

Does anybody know if this has anything to do with GKE? Last night right before I noticed the Nest app was unresponsive, I noticed my entire Kubernetes cluster was randomly brought down. At first I thought it was for some kind of maintenance, but thought it was strange that it wasnt brought down gracefully. I still have no idea what happened.

epc 8y ago
As of a little over a week ago my nests (camera, thermostat) were connecting to AWS systems, not Google Cloud. Am traveling so can't tell if this has changed since then.
- ianwalter 8y ago
  Ok, I guess I just assumed since Nest is a Google company... but I can check that. Thanks for the tip!

ttflee 8y ago

Please let me quote from Mostly Harmless by Douglas Adams: The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair.

yk 8y ago

May be a larger Google problem, I just wanted to stuff a German link [0] into Google translate to post it here, and Google translate gives me a 403 Your client does not have permission to get URL / from this server. (Client IP address: 84.131.XXX.XXX) (That is a standard German Telekom IP, usually Google only acts up when I do anything funny.) [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17091962 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17091962 (I got google to translate, still no luck with translate.google.de )

saudioger 8y ago

Smarthome devices that can't function at some level without a cloud service are trash. Do yourself a favor and skip wifi cameras all together, use an IP camera and a NVR.

josefresco 8y ago
IP camera's are a pain to "open to the world" - hence why "cloud cameras" have been so popular. I suspect there are now modern, IP cameras that aren't cloud reliant but the avg user doesn't care.
- saudioger 8y ago
  It's kind of a combination of things — IP cameras definitely don't have the greatest software... and combined with shitty entry-level routers port-forwarding is definitely frustrating to the average person... then you get into dynamic IPs from ISPs, etc... It's just annoying that there's no middle ground between "hold my hand with a cloud service" and "I want to spend a little effort to not be 100% reliant on external services" Google could decide to fold Nest service entirely (luckily there aren't signs of that) and at this point you'd have thousands of thousands of devices in a landfill. It's so irresponsible. Historically you could have a CCTV setup running for 10-20 years without huge issues. >I suspect there are now modern, IP cameras that aren't cloud reliant It's surprisingly limited and still a bit expensive. Foscam/Hikvision have been getting better, but it still feels a few years behind when it comes to firmware... and the notification and advanced "human detection" are obviously better with a cloud service.

eanzenberg 8y ago

You are the beta-tester.

goombastic 8y ago

I get the feeling we have pointless products more often than not these days. All these advances, just to create a speaker that listens to you and helps you shop. And now this, there is going to be a whole lot more e-waste in the coming years because of manufacturer antics like this.

w0mbat 8y ago

I have had trouble with Nest devices staying on an IP address after the lease expires, messing up the network once that address gets used by someone else. I had to reserve IPs for each one in the end. More than once, I have had a Nest smoke alarm go off for absolutely no reason, in an empty house. It's always nice to get an alert on your phone at work telling you your house is on fire. I don't think their QA department is the best.

ggg9990 8y ago

When I had a landline, I literally never picked it up and had no dial tone. When I had an ADT security system, I never had a single failure with it. Meanwhile I have never regularly used a web service that didn’t have at least one outage.