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from the beating-back-corporate-giants dept.
Philips has backed down over its plan to keep out third-party bulbs from its Hue smart lighting system:
Dutch electronics giant Philips has been forced into an embarrassing U-turn over its plans to lock out third-party suppliers of light bulbs for its Hue smart lighting system. [...] Philips' customers have staged a very noisy protest at the move and the firm has backed down. In a statement on the Hue Facebook page, Philips gave a somewhat ungracious explanation about why it had reversed its earlier decision.
"We recently upgraded the software for Philips Hue to ensure the best seamless connected lighting experience for our customers. This change was made in good faith," Philips said. "However, we under-estimated the impact this would have on a small number of customers who use lights from other brands which could not be controlled by the Philips Hue software. In view of the sentiment expressed by our customers, we have decided to reverse the software upgrade so that lights from other brands continue to work as they did before with the Philips Hue system."
Previously: Lightbulb DRM: Philips Locks Purchasers Out Of 3rd-Party Bulbs With Firmware Update
(Score: 4, Insightful) by physicsmajor on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:22PM
If it's going in my house, and going to connect to any local out public network, I demand access to everything. Yes, this dreamscape limits my options and/or results in custom created solutions with Arduino/Raspberry Pi.
Long term, though, I have support and confidence these will never stop working. Support is not a problem. They will never have NSA mandated backdoors to create a foothold in my private LAN.
Stop buying this shit.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by gnuman on Thursday December 17 2015, @05:45PM
They will never have NSA mandated backdoors to create a foothold in my private LAN.
And how do you know that your Arduino / Rasberry Pi doesn't have a backdoor? Broadcom is suddenly a great, anti-establishment company?
(Score: 4, Insightful) by Gravis on Thursday December 17 2015, @06:48PM
And how do you know that your Arduino / Rasberry Pi doesn't have a backdoor? Broadcom is suddenly a great, anti-establishment company?
- The Arduino is a glorified breakout board for a simple AVR chip. How were you planning to access that backdoor? There is simply no way.
- The Rasberry Pi is much more complex and the Broadcom chip could contain a backdoor on the silicon or the graphics driver. The silicon backdoor would only be accessible if you connected it to the net via ethernet but the graphics driver backdoor could try to phone home by any means that the Linux kernel can access. Unlikely but doable.
However, I do understand the need for paranoia, so building stuff with softcores (CPU implemented on FPGA) is really the only way to be sure your stuff isn't backdoored... for now.
(Score: 1) by shrewdsheep on Friday December 18 2015, @04:50PM
However, I do understand the need for paranoia, so building stuff with softcores (CPU implemented on FPGA) is really the only way to be sure your stuff isn't backdoored... for now.
How do you think that is? I fail to see why an FPGA could not be backdoored. There could always be a "hard" silicon wrapper in the FPGA that would respond the same way a backdoor in a traditional CPU would. Granted, it would be more difficult to intercept meaningful data, however, if softcores would be based on open source designs that very limitation would even not apply.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Friday December 18 2015, @05:07PM
I fail to see why an FPGA could not be backdoored. There could always be a "hard" silicon wrapper in the FPGA that would respond the same way a backdoor in a traditional CPU would.
a) it would interfere with the I/O timing.
b) how would you know what I/O was mapped to what?
c) how would you know which CPU architecture was being used?
d) you are dumb.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday December 18 2015, @10:41PM
Last time I investigated, all of the software for "compiling" FPGAs was proprietary. Back-doors can be explained aways as sub-optimal routing.
OK, on a quick search, it looks like this is being scrubbed from the Internet: Reflections on Trusting Trust [cmu.edu]. An example of how copyright is censorship, I suppose.
(Score: 2) by Gravis on Saturday December 19 2015, @12:36AM
then check more often, dipshit. http://hackaday.com/2015/05/29/an-open-source-toolchain-for-ice40-fpgas/ [hackaday.com]