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.
I've found that "lifetime" warranties are often for the product's lifetime, not the life of the owner.
So a lifetime warranty on a dishwasher might be 10 years. Not sure how they get away with that, but I've seen it more than once.
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.
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.
"Lifetime" in a commercial sense is shorthand for "as long as we care to support the product" rather than "as long as the product works." The FTC, for example, lists 3 different interpretations of the term.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
Wait till their short attention span runs out and your 8 year old Alphabet car gets bricked rather than maintained. We need less of this fly by night tech in critical and long term installations.
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.
TFA & other stuff I’ve read on this accuse them of taking an affirmative action to destroy the hardware, IE “intentionally bricked.” Reality is that they’re turning off servers that the hardware needs to function. Net effect to the consumer is the same, but the inflammatory language is inaccurate.
If Google sent down a kill packet or firmware update that was intended to ruin a piece of hardware that would otherwise continue to function as-is if they hadn’t done so, that’s “intentionally bricked.” If they shutdown a server farm that consumers aren’t paying any on-going fees to make use of, that’s a different thing. Google has an obligation to not destroy something you bought, but they’re not obligated to keep providing you free server time.
Basically what I’m trying to say is read the fine print and check your entitlement. You chose to pay money for a product that was dependent on someone else’s charity to keep working. You backed the wrong horse.
If you can’t smash everything it needs to work with a hammer, you don’t own it.
You realize that was debunked, right?
http://www.theverge.com/2015/1...
I mean, it's great because it fits the assumed narrative, but there's actually no evidence to back up the claim.
That doesn't apply to this Revolv thing though; I have no idea what the hell they're thinking here at all.
Wood Shavings!
- Godai
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.
"In 1978, X10 products started to appear in RadioShack and Sears stores." (X-10 history). N.B. profanity does not help your case.
No thanks. Did that for a decade and I go tired of running multiple OSs. I have nothing against Linux. I was even a system administrator for Linux for a few years looking after the servers for a government website. My preference for the desktop is the Mac and I've moved onto doing development for the iOS and Mac environment.
That being said I do have a nice Synology NAS at home where I run my own file server, DNS, mail server, web server, and BitTorrent Sync client. It's also connected to the Internet via a VPN and all my computers on my home network use it as a proxy. I have my torrent client running on there. There are plenty of other options that can be added such as media servers. It's a really nice box and saves me from looking after another machine. All I had to do was install the drives, turn it on, and configure how I wanted the RAID set up. Yes, I paid for the convenience but I've had it 4 or 5 years and not had a problem with it, except my drives filling up.