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posted by Fnord666 on Thursday April 30 2020, @01:26PM   Printer-friendly
from the S-in-IoT-stands-for-security dept.

Three things in life are certain: Death, taxes, and cloud-based IoT gear bricked by vendors. Looking at you, Belkin:

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.


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  • (Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:18PM

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 30 2020, @03:18PM (#988591)

    The real surprise is I guarantee there will be amazon and ebay 3rd party resellers selling the devices for full list price after the servers are decomissioned.

    Personally, I'd buy a device for $2 to $5 just to disassemble and screw around with the camera component. Is it SPI or I2C or something weirder? Is there a jtag connector on the board, maybe? Could be kinda fun. But I'm not going to pay normal list price for a bricked device.

    Note that I'm just picking on amazon and ebay for fun; I guarantee there will be 1K legacy brick and mortar stores still selling them too.

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