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from the you-should-see-what-you're-missing! dept.
Guardzilla Shuts Down, Leaving Security Camera Customers Stranded:
Guardzilla, a small home security camera company, has quietly gone out of business, leaving behind unpatched security flaws, barely or nonworking cameras in lots of consumers' homes, and piles of essentially useless cameras that are still being sold at Bed Bath & Beyond, QVC, and other retailers.
Consumer Reports learned earlier this month that Guardzilla had closed its doors when our test engineers tried to follow up about security problems they found with the Guardzilla 360. We disclosed the issues to Guardzilla last fall. The company fixed one problem, but never addressed a second one.
The company has stopped responding to emails and its phone number is no longer working. A message posted on its website at the beginning of June reads: “We deeply regret that these troubling times have caused us to close our doors. We are sorry for any inconvenience this has caused, as we will be unable to continue support for the Guardzilla product line.”
Like other internet-connected security cameras, Guardzilla cameras stored users' video clips on corporate servers. The servers continued working intermittently until mid-June but now appear to be completely shut down.
[...] In addition to Bed Bath & Beyond and QVC, these cameras can still be purchased at Amazon Marketplace, Buy Buy Baby, eBay, and Newegg Marketplace. Consumer Reports reached out to these companies to find out why they continue to sell Guardzilla cameras. Only eBay had replied by the time of publication, and says it will continue to sell the cameras for now.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Grishnakh on Sunday June 28 2020, @12:55AM
It's actually an extra-cost feature (you have to pay $50 more for it, though I think they're moving to make it standard for all of them on the newest models). The main benefit is that you can see when the waste drawer is supposedly full, and also look at the history of the device, to see if there's a problem. Like any somewhat complex product with sensors and moving parts, things go wrong, and using the app lets you see when some sensor is having a problem or behaving erratically. If you're away from home, it lets you check on the box and see that it's going through a normal number of cycles every day, or if it's gotten stuck with some kind of error so you can call your cat-sitter and have them go over and check it out in person for you. Is this stuff absolutely necessary for a litterbox? Of course not. But for an automated self-cleaning box, it's a pretty handy feature, especially if you travel and leave your cats alone for a few days at a time. Also, one nice thing is that, beyond the initial cost, it doesn't cost anything to use. There's no monthly fees for using the app or the company's servers (and honestly, with the amount of data generated by this thing, and the total number of these wifi-connected litterboxes, it's so tiny that you could probably run the whole thing on a small server and still have very low load). And if the company ever shuts off the server or goes out of business, the litterbox will still work fine, though of course the phone app won't work, but the front-panel controls really do everything absolutely necessary, they just don't give you the connectivity, logging, or detailed information messages, and instead have some flashing lights you have to interpret.