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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, Informative) by VLM on Thursday April 30 2020, @04:28PM (2 children)

    by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 30 2020, @04:28PM (#988630)

    If you use

    https://www.home-assistant.io/ [home-assistant.io]

    which does not phone home and is 100% local install, you can install ESP8266 and ESP32 based gadgets using

    https://esphome.io/ [esphome.io]

    and the two interoperate and plug and play to a level that's actually boring and not very educational in that its too easy, you're not really learning anything. Its cool that it works so well.

    I soldered a BME280 temp sensor to an ESP8266 and flashed the code and it just worked, immediately. The only fun you get to have is figuring out which I2C address your highly configurable sensor lives on, although they have troubleshooting systems to scan the bus to help out anyway.

    There are no middlemen with this design, its all local. The entire internet can go away and I'll still see and graph the temperature of my lab workbench uninterrupted.

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  • (Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday April 30 2020, @10:01PM

    by JoeMerchant (3937) on Thursday April 30 2020, @10:01PM (#988724)

    And, that's the ideal - I'm perpetually pissed when Comcast takes a dump and my internal systems go down with them. On the other hand, my IoT dependent devices are all basically toys - if I just walk over to the outlet and push the button the switch will switch.

    If there's an analyst warehouse somewhere in Wuhan monetizing the data they get out of when I switch my lights on and off, more power to 'em. My real complaint is the dependence on a cloud server that I just don't need - except in that 1/10,000 use case where the wife phones me while I'm away from the house because she can't find the button / figure out the software and I have to do it via my phone.

    --
    🌻🌻 [google.com]
  • (Score: 2) by The Vocal Minority on Friday May 01 2020, @05:58AM

    by The Vocal Minority (2765) on Friday May 01 2020, @05:58AM (#988829) Journal

    Thanks for the info!