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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: 2) by VLM on Thursday April 30 2020, @04:20PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 30 2020, @04:20PM (#988624)

    I'll still be ax-splitting my ten chords of firewood each year, well into my ninethies.

    My grandparents had a wood stove with an electric fan to improve heat transfer in the 80s. 1980s.

    Ideally, I could build you an IoT gadget that would flip that fan on when the temp was high enough and off when its cold. Why didn't my grandparents stove have a thermostat? Damn if I know. But I could build one pretty easy. Also if the firebox temp got to 2900F I could call the fire dept WRT your chimney fire. Also if the fire went out in the night I could ping your phone to wake your ass up and toss another log on rather than have to light a match tomorrow morn. And I could gather and sell aggregate data to retailers based on zip code estimating future sales based on actual hours of operation and MTBF figures. And I could sell aggregate data to envirowhacko organizations to predict air pollution based on wood fires and/or enviro benefits of not using clean nuclear and electric heat, or whatever axe they have to grind from either perspective.

    The problem is the IoT scene is pretty sick (as in ill) right now. So you'll get underpants gnomes business models of extreme incompetence and the device will get powned by russian hackers and chinese gray market clones will have old buggy security holes and it'll not work out of the box and we'll shut down the servers before amazon delivers the box.

    The point is IoT COULD be good, although competent management combined with race to the bottom business practices means it won't be, in general.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @07:57PM

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday April 30 2020, @07:57PM (#988691)

    The point is IoT COULD be good

    And nowhere in my post did I claim otherwise. All I said is to use technology to improve people's lives, not to make them even more of a lazy slob than they already are.

    But it seems like, whith some people, simply hinting at the possibility that maybe some technologies should not be used in some circumstances triggers a strong emotional, defensive, almost tribal reaction. The other replier to my OP is a perfect example of this.

  • (Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @04:57AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday May 01 2020, @04:57AM (#988823)

    I'll still be ax-splitting my ten chords

    Sure you will, you Racist Republican who hates his parents because they make you take piano lessons!