Slashdot Mirror
Alphabet's Nest To Deliberately Brick Revolv Hubs
Nest, a Google-owned company, will deliberately break one of its own products come May 15. The company has announced plans to disable Revolv, a hub that allows customers to electronically control lights in their homes. Entrepreneur Arlo Gilbert raises some important questions: Google/Nest's decision raises an interesting question. When software and hardware are intertwined, does a warranty mean you stop supporting the hardware or does it mean that the manufacturer can intentionally disable it without consequence? Tony Fadell seems to believe the latter. Tony believes he has the right to reach into your home and pull the plug on your Nest products. [...] To be clear, they are not simply ceasing to support the product, rather they are advising customers that on May 15th a container of hummus will actually be infinitely more useful than the Revolv hub. Google is intentionally bricking hardware that I own. That's a pretty blatant "fuck you" to every person who trusted in them and bought their hardware. They didn't post this notice until long after Google had made the acquisition, so these are Google's words under Tony Fadell's direction. Revolv was acquired by Nest in 2014, and it is believed that all Nest wanted from the acquisition was talent and workforce. An older version of Revolv website reveals that its hub was marketed to have "free lifetime service subscription," "free monthly updates for additional device support," and "free future firmware updates to automatically activate new radios." James Grimmelmann, a professor of Law, tweeted, "I didn't realize that Revolv promised free lifetime service. That makes the shutdown a deceptive trade practice as well as an unfair one." Aaron Parecki, co-founder of IndieWebCamp, wrote, "Your friendly reminder that without open standards, you're not "buying" smarthome hardware, you're renting it."
Oh, fuck it. Be evil and a jackass.
Google is intentionally bricking hardware that I own. That's a pretty blatant "fuck you" to every person who trusted in them and bought their hardware.
How many times has Google said "fuck you" to people who trusted them and how many times have those people returned to Google for more? Who actually trusts Google anymore?
If you want a vision of the future, imagine a youtube comments section scrolling - forever.
If you don't control it you don't own it. This is the ugly side of IoT. I remember when the first NASes came out, it was great. You could, with a little firewall tweaking, have a hosted file server that you could access from anywhere. Cloud storage is the antithesis of this notion. Someone else takes care of it for you, but it's totally out of your control. They aren't your bits anymore and they could vanish at any time. The wife didn't believe me until Yahoo music shutdown and the albums purchased were just gone forever. If you can help it, always have something YOU control. Don't waste your hard earned money on some corporation's little experiment.
Isn't it then deceptive to not advertise the quantity of time that is considered to be "lifetime"?
Has anyone purchased this device within said quantity of time?
Does the expiration of my dishwasher warranty allow the company to send a guy to my home to permanently disable it?
All my liberal friends think I'm a conservative, all my conservative friends think I'm a liberal.
Firstly: to anyone who owns a nest and is counting their fleeting blessings that this will never happen to them, see you on the front page in a few years.
now, for the rest the slashdotters. stop with the internet of things, synergy of disruptive technology, cloud based "AAS" marketing hootenany and put the cool-aid back. These companies have no vested interest in anything but their shareholders. when Sergei buys a new island, when Tim buys a new ultra-yacht, when Satya or Ballmer or Gates or whoever runs the redmond money choo choo these days buys a new public school system and turns it into a mandatory code camp you can be sure they dont care about you or any of the products you use. Kindle, Nest, Facebook, and Google all exist solely to capitalize on your inability to understand your role as the product of these services, not the consumer. putting it "in the cloud" or buying into a "sharing economy" or whatever some ginned up marketing thirty-something spun across her blog is just fancy buzz jargon for giving up freedom.
You cant recall my books just because a publisher rubs you the wrong way, because they sit on my shelf after I buy them. You cant recall my email because some sender became non-commital about it, because it lives on my server now. And you can spin it all you want, but you cant do anything about the fact that I use a VPN and adblocker when I surf your "free" wireless. I dont get to experience your SRVFAIL redirection landing page because my DNS queries are my own. And until this cloud based abortion you call the future takes my rights and freedoms into consideration, I'll just exist as one more user you cant track, cant optimise, and wont target properly whos "experience" is "degraded" because I chose something besides serfdom on the internet I was promised would revolutionize the future youre slowly ruining.
Good people go to bed earlier.
It is amazing to me how bad of a company Google actually is, and yet there is so little repercussion. But in retrospect it becomes increasingly clear. Google is just the next Microsoft. Due to the complexity of computers the entrenched OS player(s) simply has too much power to run rough shod over their customers, and there is nothing anyone can really do about it.
:T:R:A:N:S:
It should only be OK to brick the devices if they refund the purchase price. Otherwise, it's theft.
Competition Good, Monopoly Bad.
Nah, but like all the other stupid home automation products out there, it's got an unneeded "cloud" component. Kill that and suddenly the server you used to interface with to turn your lights on isn't there anymore. Hilarity ensues.
Explain to me again why a home automation device that simply turns my lights on and off requires a company-owned server on the internet to operate?
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Internet of Things Owned By Somebody Else.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
.
The problem with home automation nowadays is that you have to rely on "the cloud" or some company to continue to support the product.
As we are seeing with Revolv, such a reliance is a significant disadvantage.
If you can’t smash everything it needs to work with a hammer, you don’t own it.
So, since I cannot smash gas stations and the petroleum industry with a hammer I do not own my car?
Silence is a state of mime.
Who do you think is going to pay for that extended availability, other than the consumer? That means that instead of buying $200 Nest thermostats that may or may not work for a few years, everybody is now forced to pay $500 for the same hardware just so that the company accumulates enough reserves to live up to the support guarantees you want to impose. And for what? Because economic illiterates like you don't understand how the real world works? And, of course, that still doesn't protect you from bankruptcy, technological obsolescence, or key employees leaving.
When you "buy" a $200 consumer device, you don't "buy" something in the sense of real estate. What you buy is maybe 20 months of prepaid service at $10/month. It's actually the same for most other things you buy: hammers, houses, cars, keyboards, computers, blenders, etc. That's why hardware gets depreciated. In fact, even with real estate, given taxes, you don't really "buy" it, you just pay a lot of points on a long term lease. Furthermore, when you buy a novel consumer device, there is always the risk that it won't work at all, or that it will last less long than you think. Again, caveat emptor.
So, start living in the real world and stop proposing harmful fixes for things that aren't problems for most people.