SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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
(Score: 2) by HiThere on Thursday April 07 2016, @07:35PM
The thing is, the IoT isn't fundamentally a bad design, it's just that the implementation is crap. It should be based around a server controlled by the user who can plug things into it (i.e., register things) if he chooses, and one of the choices should be whether or not, to allow connection outside the local area, and that should be managed with routing tables...and, as I already indicated, should be an optional extra.
Unfortunately, the companies that are pushing it have unanimously decided that THEY should be in control. This results in multiple crap implementtions. I include in that TV sets that spy on you. The TV has NO need for non-local access, and should by default not have it. It should be possible for you to whitelist your phone so that you can, perhaps, record on-going programs that you hear about at work, but that shouldn't be the default. Et multitudinous cetera.
Javascript is what you use to allow unknown third parties to run software you have no idea about on your computer.