Sorry, yeah, that first “should expect” was too off-the-cuff.
Let me say this again even more clearly: They’re bricking a product sold with a “Lifetime Subscription” after 17 months. That is not even remotely a “lifetime”, let alone “indefinitely.”
Nor is it merely cutting support. That usually means ending further development and tech support, not remotely bricking the product.
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It is Medium, after all. 
We, as consumers, should not put up with this crap. I understand that we may not be able to do anything about laws like the DMCA, because the companies that want such laws will always have more political “speech” than the rest of us. But if it won’t work without being tethered to the internet, I will not buy it. The biggest issue at our house with this has been video games, because I have teenagers. But we don’t have games that will not work unconnected. None of us have anything on “the cloud” that we do not have a backup of. Even then, there were lesson hard learned. my teenage daughter is more social than the rest of us, and an issue with similar names led to her icloud images and data being merged with her very conservative grandmother’s account. Grandma likes to use an ipad, and she was not pleased when details of her Grand Daughter’s life that she did not want to know about showed up. Big family drama ensued. We also have John Deere tractors, but we have learned to work on those without being constrained by the limits of Big Green. Most hardware, like our tractors, can be re-engineered to work well or even better than originally intended. I understand that I am not supposed to do so. I guess if they want to try to use force to stop me, it will be their decision to do so. Come to think of it, I have a Chinese-made high capacity ink tank system hooked up to my printer. They may decide that these things are worth sending a SWAT team on us, or calling in a drone strike. I hope not.
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I’d be curious to know how receptive, or not, these devices are to 3rd party firmware. Obviously this doesn’t help Joe User much either way, since he probably bought an ‘appliance’ because he didn’t feel like, know how to, or know that he had an option to, mess with zigbee-on-embedded-linux; but from the geek perspective(either owner, or someone who might pick one up on ebay) there is a big difference between “Yeah, servers are down; but you can still make it do your own thing” and “Yeah, servers are down; and the only payload cryptographically blessed to boot on the device relies on the servers; so STFU, DIAF.”
Also, when dealing with ‘cloud’ devices, there is an argument to be made that the mothership’s servers and whatever it is they do really ought to be included in the block diagram as equals of the rest of the components: if the device doesn’t work when example.com’s API disappears, is a box labeled “example.com API” connected to the system by TCP/IP any less valid than, say, a flash chip connected to the system by an MMC bus?
Also probably worth thinking about the difference between what one might call ‘user serviceable’ “cloud” devices and “cloud” devices that are effectively captive to the supplier forever(either because of cryptographic enforcement, because the ‘cloud’ magic that they require is simply not available anywhere else, or both).
A cellphone, say, isn’t going to be doing much cellphoning if the carrier goes belly up. However, as long as it isn’t SIM-locked, it’s pretty trivial to instruct it to seek services from some other carrier, and there are standardized mechanisms for doing so. Same with cable modems, email clients, etc.
Other ‘cloud’ things; Not So Much. Sometimes it is just a matter of lock-in. The ‘cloud’ portion might be little more than a thin candy shell over an HTTP or WebDAV or similar server; but if it is hardcoded to only work with the vendor’s SSL certs, sucks to be you(and, if the ‘cloud’ is battle.net, the vendor might go tactical nuclear asshole on you and argue that merely creating an interoperable 3rd party implementation is illegal because the DMCA. Not hypothetically or anything; seriously, fuck Blizzard. In other cases the ‘cloud’ portion may be a fairly giant pile of proprietary algorithms for which no real replacement exists, but there may be nothing preventing you from shimming in the best substitute you can find.
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I see two sides to this: side A: You’re an idiot for buying this spyware and bringing it into your home after almost a decade of warnings.
We don’t blame people who smoke and develop cancer for not reading the fine print that came on the box; we blame them for being idiots.
Side B: The laws are fucked. That means we’re fucked.
I’m starting to think there is no line that cannot be crossed; no horrible thing the powers-that-be cannot do that will cause the majority to seek change.
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Dunno that I can blame them for that.
When I bought a Withings weigh scale that could send information to my iPhone, it was a reasonable assumption that the two would communicating directly. There was no mention that they communicated only through a server in France.
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I guess they decided to take the “Rip the band-aid off” approach to this.
Sounds like Cory should have a word with @frauenfelder, who recently gushed on these very pages about the Glowforge, a laser cutter (misleadingly marketed as a “3D laser printer”) that suffers from these very same limitations. Cut the cloud because the company goes out of business or decides to move on to other products and your $4,000 laser cutter becomes a very large plastic paperweight.
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Take that - stupid beta users
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The post is misleading in several ways.
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Google isn’t doing anything to anyone’s hardware. They are killing the service that the hardware relies on as they bought the service to remove competition for their Nest system. Perfectly ordinary capitalism move. Now those Resolv users will either have the option of buying Google’s Nest hardware or doing without the service. The real villain is the DRM laws which prevent people from offering alternative firmware for the devices, but most average users really won’t have the tech savvy to make use of such an option.
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The dishwashers rejecting third party link is presented in the article as factual signs of things to come, when the article itself is a satire of Apple’s music streaming service. People do need to be aware that when they buy network-based hardware is that it’s just that… dependant on a network and they need to make intelligent choices based on the likelihood of that support network to be around in the long term.
Anything that talks to nearby devices via the internet is defective (by design?)
Sure it takes away the problems of “How do I adjust my thermostat from anywhere in the world?” by treating you like you are anywhere in the world at all times, but it also means that there has to be an internet-facing server to talk to you so you can talk to your devices. See above for one of the possible outcomes there.
It’s open source, runs on a Raspberry Pi (or practically anything else), and talks to pretty much any sort of device you might want to.
They also seem to have a cloud service to give you access to your devices without having to set up a VPN (not the kind they sell in the BB store.)
I’ve set it up on a Pi2 with a Z-Wave stick and I’ve got it working with a simple switch as well as a Z-Wave thermostat.
I’ll admit, this is way harder than purchasing something off the shelf and just plugging it all in. The documentation is not great, but there’s a good community around it and it seems to be a fairly active project.
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Google could release the firmware for open development though, yeah? It isn’t like DRM is tying googlebet’s hands.
Unfortunately if they weren’t designed to be open to begin with I think it will always fall under the ‘more trouble that it is worth’ category unless one of the founders who made a good chunk of change on the exit is going to invest their own time and money to releasing it into the wild or a bunch of the user base with explicit or tacit permission.
See the tale of the Chumby.
In this case, cutting support is bricking the product.
Google is shutting down webservices which the Revolvs depend on; they’re not sending the Revolvs a kill signal.
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No - read the small print.
Maybe arbitration, where they choose the terms and the arbitrators.
Google also spent an ocean of money lobbying for those DRM laws, crossing their collective fingers while speaking to the public about how horrible they are. For a while.
Great, I just picked up a Revolv on eBay. Now, instead of hooking it up, I will look at joining the lawsuit.
IIRC, Revolv is itself a local server, so the Google tie-in is apparently a FU backdoor control. I certainly didn’t know about it, and it seemed logical that I was buying something that simply would never be upgraded. Fool me once, but now I am more than willing to trade user experience for not giving Google control over my hardware.
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They - the company that they bought and assumed the responsibilities of - sold a service with a Lifetime Subscription. When you sell a lifetime subscription that depends on your server, you have a responsibility to keep that server running for a reasonable time.
The dishwashers rejecting third party link is presented in the article as factual signs of things to come, when the article itself is a satire of Apple’s music streaming service.
It’s more than satire. Printers, coffee makers and more do exactly what’s described.
People do need to be aware that when they buy network-based hardware is that it’s just that
This is nothing new. It’s a concept existing long before networks and home computers. If a company sells insurance, warranties or subscriptions, they can’t just walk away from their responsibilities.
It’s a different matter if they go under, of course. Another company can purchase the assets without taking on the responsibilities. But that’s not what happened in this case; Google bought the company.
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What this - along with the experience of Google Reader, Google Search Appliance, GTalk, and a number of other end of life decisions - has taught me is to never, ever trust Google and their related companies. I use iOS and you can be damn sure I’m never going to move to Android at this point. Our company invested significant time and energy to developing integrations for the GSA and that was pulled away from under us (although you’ll notice they treat their corporate customers better than individuals by giving two years notice of the retirement).
So, no to any google products except free search through the web (anonymously). I’m sure I’m far from the only person who feels this way, and that becomes a problem when we are technical architects who recommend and design solutions for customers. I have already told numerous clients not to use google docs and other google products because there is zero likelihood of support for them continuing in the medium to long term. I truly wonder what they see their long term business as being, or is it all just quarter to quarter planning?
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As a capitalist… what would be your incentive to do so? Say you’re the man in charge of Google Nest. It’s bottom line is all on you. Would you truly be incentivised to keep competition viable?
