Slashdot Mirror
Nest Reminds Customers That Ownership Isn't What It Used To Be (eff.org)
Alphabet-owned Nest recently announced that it will be turning off Revolv Hub next month. An anonymous reader shares an article on EFF, a privacy rights group: Nest Labs, a home automation company acquired by Google in 2014, will disable some of its customers' home automation control devices in May. This move is causing quite a stir among people who purchased the $300 Revolv Hub devices -- customers who reasonably expected that the promised "lifetime" of updates would enable the hardware they paid for to actually work, only to discover the manufacturer can turn their device into a useless brick when it so chooses. This is far from the first time that customers' software and electronics have been downgraded by manufacturers. Updates can disable features the customer paid for that have fallen out of favor with the vendor, as when Google disabled privacy settings on Android or Sony took away the ability to run GNU/Linux on a Playstation 3. Manufacturers can even render a device unusable until the customer "agrees" to new terms of use, as Nintendo did with the Wii U. Other software and devices, including some video games, are designed so they simply stop working when they can no longer dial home to a server run by the vendor.
Dear Canucks, under your provincial consumer protection laws(varies by province) you are likely entitled to a full refund of the product price regardless of when you bought it. Revocation of a lifetime agreement, even when the company is bought out is considered a breach of said warranty and support agreement under the law, and you are permitted to a full refund. Remember, if refused it only costs $20-40 to file in small claims court over this, and you do not have to settle for arbitration in Canada, jumping through that hoop is not required.
Om, nomnomnom...
Because limiting control to vendor-only is part of the "smart" in "smart home". If the owner (or "inhabitant") has control, then its automatically dumb and anti-progress. Your homes become the colonization ground for the big tech companies. And you even pay for it, willingly. What a great accomplishment of the marketing department.
If a majority of the people don't like it, the companies will find ways to lure them to do that deal. But they always will do products as restricted as possible, that still sell, because with that they can make most money. That's the new business model of the digital age. It will come to other areas too.
In the end we will have re-introduced serfdom, you don't own anything anymore, but the companies control every tiny part of your life. The owners of the companies will be the new upper class.
We are shutting down your pacemaker at the end of this month as we are focusing on artificial hearts instead.
We recommend getting your affairs in order prior to that date.
As a sign of thanks for your years of loyalty, we've randomly picked the exact time that your pacemaker will stop working, so your actual death will still be genuine surprise.
We hope you continue to use our products for years to come,
The Nexus 4 *never* had LTE enabled in official software builds. It wasn't FCC certified to use LTE. The fact that they made the unsupported hack to enable LTE more difficult with a firmware update is not a remotely comparable situation to this. And besides, I did have LTE enabled on my Nexus 4 (was possible even with the most recent updates using hybrid radio firmware) but left it off most of the time. The power hungry first-gen LTE radio made the already bad battery life of the Nexus 4 even worse.
The product will 100% stop working as sold. Period.
Sure, it's not technically bricking the device, but they're throwing all functionality away, telling you it won't work, and basically saying you could feel free to replicate the service by writing your own app, server, and re-engineering the protocol to recreate what you have to recreate the functionality.
But it's a completely dishonest thing to claim that article lied about bricking the device.
You will 100% end up with a non-functioning device, and none of the parts to make it work without a considerable amount of engineering going into it. Like, a massive bit of engineering and creation of infrastructure.
This is kind of like Boeing saying they'll no longer support your aircraft, but you're free to go and build your own aircraft maintenance program by reverse engineering the plane you have. It's pretty much bullshit.
The product has neither functionality nor value without the stuff which makes it work, so for all intents and purposes, they really have bricked the damned thing, because it will entirely cease to function as sold to you.
The hub will DO ABSOLUTELY NOTHING after that date. That's not just remote functionality, that's all of the damned functionality. And that's what Revolv's own FAQ says.
How you can claim that making it 100% useless is any different isn't the same as bricking is beyond me.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
Technically Alphabet was created to protect the Google brand from the evil they do.
Seriously, I've never had a light switch or door key get bricked by the manufacturer. The more I go through life the more I want less electronics in places where the value is dubious. My time is worth a lot, and having to unearth documentation, or deal with software revisions is a real pain. I want the Easy Button for all the day to day stuff I don't want to think about.
There will always that small subset (over represented here) that get joy and fulfillment fiddling with things for the sake of fiddling with things. In some parts of my life I am the same. Home automation is not one of them. Having the source code to compile my own distro for home automation is not desired, I want it so simple and bullet proof that I never have to think about it after installation, or I don't want it (no matter what "it" is).
My fridge should never phone home, get viruses, get bricked, lose/gain features, spy on me, or have a touch panel. It should make cold using the smallest amount of energy for as many years as possible, full stop.