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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: 2) by Grishnakh on Sunday June 28 2020, @12:59AM
Except in the case where a company builds in a time-bomb that bricks the device after some period of not receiving some special encrypted package from the company's servers.
Why would any company do this? I've never heard of any IoT device that did anything like this, and for good reason: what's the point? 1) There's too much potential for customer returns (people plugging it in and not bothering to set it up on WiFi for a while), and 2) it would cost real money in engineering time and development, and 3) what do they have to gain, besides just being evil? Rationally-run companies only do evil things to their customers when they stand to gain a lot from it, like preventing them from using 3rd-party printer ink so they're forced to buy overpriced ink from the manufacturer.
If you want to be completely evil, you design your device to work properly for a month until it needs a new authentication key
Yeah, and now you have countless customers returning bricked products under warranty, and your company goes out of business.