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After Outrage, Logitech Gives Free Upgrade To Owners of Soon To Be Obsolete Device (gizmodo.com)
It looks like Logitech didn't anticipate the barrage of criticism it received after announcing this week that it would be intentionally bricking its Harmony Link hub next March. The company is now reversing course. Its Harmony Link will still die next summer, but if you own one, the company is happy to give you a free upgrade to the more recent Harmony Hub model. From a report: Originally, Logitech planned to only offer Harmony Link owners with active warranties free upgrades to its new Harmony Hub devices. But for people out of warranty -- possibly the majority of Harmony Link users, as the devices were last sold in 2015 -- they would just get a one-time, 35 percent discount on a new $100 Harmony Hub. However, after customer outrage, Logitech revised it plans and announced that the company will give every Harmony Link owner a new Hub for free. Additionally, users who had already used the coupon to purchase a new Hub will also be able to contact Logitech in order to obtain a refund for the difference in price. However, Logitech is still not planning to extend support for the Harmony Link. The company says, "We made the business decision to end the support and services of the Harmony Link when the encryption certificate expires in the spring of 2018 -- we would be acting irresponsibly by continuing the service knowing its potential/future vulnerability."
Their security claim is bullshit, you can't tell me they shipped a device without a way to upgrade firmware.
Here's a coupon to buy the new model.
Sure hope we don't brick the new one too.
Why are they building a non-renewable expiration date into a hardware product? And perhaps more importantly, what is the expiration date of the new hardware product? Do they even tell the users what that expiration date is when they purchase it?
> If it's going to be smart, it had better connect to my smarts, not some remote server.
We've seen enough now that even the technologically illiterate should be starting to understand that if you buy something that requires an Internet connection, you're getting a service that can be terminated at any time.
And if there's no ongoing access fee... the probability of having the plug pulled on the system increases exponentially with time.
"OK, we can't support this thing forever, here's all the source code and protocol manuals so you can set up your own servers to make it do whatever you want"
The reason there's so much outrage over a glorified TV remote control system is the principle of the whole thing. It reminds people that no matter how much you spend on an electronic gadget, if it relies on a "cloud based" back-end in some manner, you don't *really* own or control it. You just paid to use the thing for as long as the manufacturer deems it worthy of continuing to allow it to operate for you.
Perhaps the most extreme example of this today is the Tesla Motors electric car? You can spend 6 figures on the performance version of a Model S and yet it's still subject to firmware updates Tesla pushes out to it. Not only can they cap and uncap your driving range at will, but they routinely make use of a feature that locks you out of all remote control to your vehicle (commonly done when a Tesla service place has the car overnight for maintenance). The reasoning is sound enough; they don't want you trying to manipulate things like the power windows or horn or lights while it's being worked on. But it still proves they have the "master switch" to turn your ability on and off to communicate with your vehicle that you paid for.
And here's an example of them turning off the "emergency braking" feature on the Model 3's for owners:
https://jalopnik.com/tesla-tem...
I've been saying for years that companies are being "penny wise, pound foolish" trying so hard to "cloudify" their operations. There are things that lend themselves well to being cloud-hosted, like email. (Whether you run your own mail server or not, you're still pushing and pulling everybody's content over the Internet, through other email servers that you don't control at all. And typically, the amount of time your in house I.T. staff will have to spend to address Exchange server related issues doesn't make good economic sense vs. outsourcing all of those issues up to the chain and paying for the mail hosting.) But typically, you're giving too much control and trusting too much security to 3rd. parties. Where I work, we have a DropBox business subscription. Great product and solves a lot of issues for us, but they just did a price increase that will cost us thousands more per year. It was already a pretty hefty expense that keeps going up as the company adds contractors or freelancers who need to share team folders with our employees. Before long, it'll reach a point where it's financially more sensible to host the content ourselves with a "private cloud". Except now, it's a MASSIVE hassle to retrain everyone on a new product and migrate all the data to a different platform. Could have all been avoided if we just tried to do this ourselves from the start, rather than being tempted by the instant gratification of DropBox.