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On 29 May, global peripheral giant Belkin will flick the "off" switch on its Wemo NetCam IP cameras, turning the popular security devices into paperweights.
It's not unusual for a manufacturer to call time on physical hardware. [...]
But this is a little different, because Belkin isn't merely ending support. It also plans to decommission the cloud services required for its Wemo NetCam devices to actually work.
"Although your Wemo NetCam will still connect to your Wi-Fi network, without these servers you will not be able to view the video feed or access the security features of your Wemo NetCam, such as Motion Clips and Motion Notifications," Belkin said on its official website.
"If you use your Wemo NetCam as a motion sensor for your Wemo line of products, it will no longer provide this functionality and will be removed as an option from your Wemo app," the company added.
Adding insult to injury, the ubiquitous consumer network gear maker only plans to refund customers with active warranties, which excludes anyone who bought their device more than two years ago. The window to submit requests is open from now until 30 June.
Customers will also have to provide the company with the original receipt, showing how much they paid for the unit. Though it shouldn't be too hard to fish out an Amazon invoice from an inbox, if you bought the unit from a bricks-and-mortar retailer, there's a chance you won't have that information to provide.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by Kitsune008 on Thursday April 30 2020, @01:39PM (6 children)
Four things are certain: the three stated, and IoT devices shall never be part of my home network.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Oakenshield on Thursday April 30 2020, @05:08PM (4 children)
You're probably not doing it right. I have a number of devices. I flash them all with Tasmota and point then to my Home Assistant (Hassio) manager on one of my Raspberry Pi's. If I need to make a change while I'm offsite, I run my VPN client on my phone and connect to my PFsense router. No leaks. No exposed services. AND NO RELIANCE on some cloud service that will disappear. There are a number of open source firmware projects for IoT devices that are in the users' control.
(Score: 2) by Kitsune008 on Thursday April 30 2020, @05:39PM (1 child)
I'm not doing it at all, and have no interest in doing so.
But if I were to do it, it would be a similar setup to what you describe.
Before retirement, I did network security for a living, and know how to do it correctly...no cloud or third party services required other than an internet provider.
IoT,Cloud services, etc.... Bah! Thin clients went out of style in the 1980's for good reasons, and I see no advantage for me to go way back to that setup.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @07:49PM
Thin Clients are not out of style. Just like Timeshare is not out of style.
All web pages are Timeshare.
All web oages are thin clients.
They are not created by your your system, nor are they showing you data from your system (mostly :) ). Now of days "fat clients" are these poor programmers trying to fit more processing by pushing all that work load via JavaScript or other "fucking large webpages" to your local machine to burn (steal) your processing power. That also makes you system more insecure since you are allowing a "foot hold" on your computer, so they can attach your computer and it neighbors.
IoT is nothing more than same game. Thin clients poor security having access to your network to crack your "home".
Los Vegas Hotel had an intrusion in their network by an IoT water heater for a fish tank in a restaurant. The IoT monitored the water temp and turned on an off the heater. Keep a log of the events. --ALL THAT COULD HAVE BEEN LOCAL-- but this was IoT and "BETTER"!!. Instead it was a "foot hold" on the internal network of hotel, and breaking came through it.
If you are going to have IoT, then seperate your network, so those devices are NEVER sharing your home real network. This includes TVs and other entertainment device. And do not let them use DLNA to access your windows boxes.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @08:38PM (1 child)
We have sent forth one of our precious offspring, to IT college. When they return we shall have the skills (and time?) to play admin to this level. We are people who expect devices we exchanged good coin for to plug-n-work, or be discarded like DRM-injected HP printers.
(Score: 3, Funny) by c0lo on Thursday April 30 2020, @11:30PM
Make more of those and you can start a cloud as a family business.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aoFiw2jMy-0 https://soylentnews.org/~MichaelDavidCrawford
(Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Friday May 01 2020, @04:00PM
I have a fair number of them (although I'm always looking for, or building, devices that have no cloud connections... live by the cloud, die by the cloud.) Devices that don't call home or otherwise seek the WAN, I don't mind having on my main network if I built them and so know exactly what they're going to do. Beyond that, you pretty much have to watch the network traffic from commercial stuff, and even then, there's no assurance they aren't just waiting a while to rain on your parade. So what to do?
The key right now, for me at least, is to have them on their own wifi network and that in turn on its own IP. That way they only pose a threat to each other. The cost of another WAN-facing IP will vary by ISP, but here, the cost was negligible, so WTH. 😊
The level of convenience for us is extremely high; we have a large space, and it can be a 60 foot walk to get to a light switch, or 75 feet plus a flight of stairs to get to the thermostat from the bed. It's really nice to be able to set the thermostat wherever we want it right from the bed, likewise kill any light we've forgotten by just saying "turn everything off."
IMHO, the whole cloud thing is 100% "doing it wrong", but for now, that's the way things mostly are. It reminds me of the idiot over-compression of audio - it "just happened" due to a confluence of strange user(listener)-preferences, and now we're kinda stuck with it.
When LAN-based speech-to-text reaches reliable, low-or-zero-cost performance levels, I suspect this will all change pretty quickly. Right now, decent speech-to-text pretty much requires a significant level of computing resources that isn't easily shoehorned into a small device. That's the holy grail of end-game IoT; break required ties to the WAN and things will be much much better.
--
What's the fastest way to tune a banjo or ukulele?
Wire cutters.