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posted by takyon on Thursday April 07 2016, @11:47AM   Printer-friendly
from the daily-reminder dept.

An article at The Electronic Frontier Foundation goes over a recent decision by the home automation company Nest to disable some of its customers' devices in May:

The Hub debuted in 2013 and was discontinued after Nest acquired Revolv in late 2014. One selling point was that the one-time payment of $300 included a "Lifetime Subscription," including updates. In fact, the device shipped without all of its antennas being functional yet. Customers expected that the antennas would be enabled via updates.

Customers likely didn't expect that, 18 months after the last Revolv Hubs were sold, instead of getting more upgrades, the device would be intentionally, permanently, and completely disabled.

The article also highlights the legal grey area for customers who attempt to keep their own hardware functional, due to "conflicting court decisions about the scope of Section 1201" (of the DMCA).

The EFF article links to a medium.com posting which goes over the experience of a user of the hardware in question:

On May 15th, my house will stop working. My landscape lighting will stop turning on and off, my security lights will stop reacting to motion, and my home made vacation burglar deterrent will stop working. This is a conscious intentional decision by Google/Nest. [...] Google is intentionally bricking hardware that I own.

Originally spotted at Hacker News.

Previously: Google Shows us the Future of Cloud-Dependent Home Automation


Original Submission

 
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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by bzipitidoo on Thursday April 07 2016, @04:39PM

    by bzipitidoo (4388) on Thursday April 07 2016, @04:39PM (#328538) Journal

    Yes. That was a big part of my move to free software in the mid 1990s. I pay good money and in exchange the copy I receive doesn't work well and isn't even fully functional?

    I paid for OS/2 3.0 (Warp), and did not learn until I'd opened the box that networking was not included. That's like buying a car and discovering the wheels weren't included. I paid for Master of Orion 2, only to find out that the multiplayer part wasn't finished. They tried to claim it was a bug, but it was simply not implemented. Took them 3 months to release a "fix". Charging money, lots of money, premium prices, for a copy wasn't good enough for these guys, no, they felt it necessary to rush out unfinished work, cheat, and try to squeeze customers for even more money. The last straw was Borland's C++ compiler. It had major bugs. Write a program that uses more than 64K of memory, and the Borland compiler would screw it up. Same program worked flawlessly when compiled with gcc/g++. The week I finally figured out why my program wasn't working and that it was a compiler bug rather than a mistake I'd made, as I'd assumed from the start, was the week I ditched MS DOS/Windows and the entire ecosystem of commercial software for Linux. Commercial was patronizing shit. Couldn't see under the hood to try to fix things. That wasn't _allowed_, be a good little child and don't bother your betters. Piracy? You naughty, naughty child. That privilege is reserved for MS, not little people.

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