If it needs someone’s cloud servers to function, you don’t really own it.
We need consumer protections here, though.
Like 10 year money back guarantee or something. If the device becomes unusable due to actions outside of the device owners control, those in control should be obligated to reimburse.
Not doing so opens the doors to racketeering.
Not doing so opens the doors to racketeering.
That’s the idea.
I mean I haven’t seen it yet but for a simple example, imagine a Netflix competitor that says you just buy the device for $5,000. One time purchase. Free ad-free tv forever.
Let’s say they get enough
subscriberspurchasers to profit by year 3.Okay. Rug pull. Chapter 11. Sorry bye, thanks for all the fish.
or just install a rootkit on users’ computers …
Wow I forgot about switchfoot
Holy shit that just gets worse as you read it. These companies have always acted with impunity, and always will.
I don’t think we need to set a global minimum date, but the manufacturer should have to put a date on the box. If they don’t support the device up to that date (including security updates and maintaining any required cloud services) then the consumer gets a full refund with possibly additional damages.
I think of it like the digital version of a nutrition facts table.
Good idea. If we do this and also add some sort of positive label on devices that work locally and are interoperable it might start a positive feedback loop: More people become aware of the issue or simply want the device with the better label when choosing in a store, leading to more manufacturers producing more devices that aren’t cloud-dependent.
Right now I often see the opposite happening: Manufacturers who don’t even put on their packaging that their system is really just Zigbee under the hood for example.
Yeah. For sure. If your device doesn’t depend on a cloud service you can put that on your label and it is basically a gold star.
Although even local devices should get security updates. The radios and the firmware speaking the ZigBee protocol can have vulnerabilities.
I vote for forced open sourcing of the server side components and communication protocols. That way people can create custom firmware or build support into generic NVRs
Most customers would not be able to take advantage of this because they lack the skills to do so.
You don’t need every consumer to roll their own. If they’re obligated to provide server code, or an API, or whatever, stuff that sells at scale can be integrated into community projects. If you buy something obscure you might have issues, but you have options if you buy something mainstream and get the rug pulled.
Right, but what I’m saying is how many people do you think will be able to track down the new open-source project and connect it to their hardware?
You don’t think it will be mentioned in any of the articles about the hardware being abandoned?
But community projects would very likely also allow third parties to provide services that handled the legwork for customers if they preferred as well.
Because if the community solutions are good enough then half the articles about the shutdown will mention it
Word does spread and if there are enough of a group, people will likely setup 3rd party hosting solutions around supporting abandoned abut functional products.
But the secondary effect is likely to be that companies support their products for much longer.
If companies do that then it’s useful. Otherwise, open servers is a good thing, but is only a true solution for smart home hobbyists.
Ten years really isn’t that long.
This is a good place to plug* Home Assistant .
That combined with Thread/Matter ensures I own my own stuff, and they don’t need to report to the cloud.
It’s still a little rough around the edges, but I’d rather deal with the frustrations of bleeding edge open source than to just have tech I’ve built into my house expire at some company’s whim.
Check out some screenshots of home assistant dashboards.
* This is not an for profit advertisement. It’s all open standards, and you don’t have to give anyone a dime that you don’t want to. The whole point of this is to avoid vendor lock in and data collection. And to have your stuff keep working without internet.
Yeah.
This is why I bought myself some blink cameras. Obviously, privacy is shit (and I’ve factored this) and you’re affectively forced to pay for use their cloud service, but at least the (initial) purchase price is cheap.
But I’ve ‘bought’ cameras for far more, only for them to hobble functionality a few years down the line. And they’ve had vulnerabilities or whatever.
For the sensitive stuff, I have a camera with an SD card, but obviously phone notifications is a big selling point of systems like this.
Amcrest. Cloud service is optional, you can self host with their equipment, or use industry standard Onvif to integrate with any 3rd party (self hosting) hardware and software.
Yea… My current home automation is all local, but cameras are still an issue.
I’ve got 3 cameras running on a vlan, with no access to the internet.
Frigate / Home Assistant + tail scale (want to move away from this service) let me see my cameras remotely, receive notifications from events and even look at events / stills on my watch.
I have some cheap 5mp Reolink camseras, not the best for frigate but get the job done.
https://support.google.com/googlenest/answer/9257288?hl=en
Not only are they dropping support for it and unless someone figures out how to hack you just throw it away. But don’t worry, they won’t automatically cancel your subscription… that function keeps working.
just like how reddit allows you to pay for premium if ur account is banned. Gotta have the priorities set straight.
If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing. [yes, from the same guy who gave us “enshittification”]
Doctorow’s not wrong.
from the very link you posted (emphasis mine):
As Tyler James Hill wrote: “If buying isn’t owning, piracy isn’t stealing”
I’d heard and used both phrases before but didn’t realize they had the same author. Coincidentally, I recently reread one of his books, Little Brother, also by chance of reading about it on a Lemmy comment.
It’s no surprise the author of that book has these views. I think I’ll read more of his work.
He is currently featured in a Humble Bundle, so if you read digital books (I use a tablet, my wife a ebook reader, but you can also use a phone or laptop) then you can get many of his books cheaply (without DRM, of course).
https://www.humblebundle.com/books/cory-doctorow-novel-collection-tor-books-books
Fantastic, I’ll certainly be making use of that. I’ve never been one for digital reading - I printed out Little Brother and read it that way - but with no DRM how could you complain. I appreciate the link.
recommend Walkaway (completely unrelated to the subreddit, they went in a very … *cough* different direction)
On your recommendation, I picked up a copy from my library this morning. Only had time for the first chapter, but I’m already liking it. Thank you.
This Doctorow fellow seems like he has some interesting things to say.
We need laws about refunds when they pull this kind of bullshit.
Or laws they have to make devices have a open API before shutting down servers.
This reminds me of how Google handled the stadia shutdown. Now many controllers have got a second life thanks to the option to enable bluetooth.
Still a limited time window for you to update the firmware before they got bricked.
They added another year to the window, in case you see one at the resale shop.
True. And communication was also not ideal.
That will never work either. They’ll just transfer it to a subsidiary towards the end and then shut down the company. Then there’s no one to enforce the law on.
“[Google] will give users an exclusive offer for a Self Setup System from ADT on us (up to $485 value) or $200 to use on the Google Store.”
Oh shit. Google doing this right!?
They also were pretty cool when shutting down stadia, full refunds and you keep the hardware.
True. They absolutely have their faults but they do seem to be handling hardware shutdowns like this morally.
Used my credit to buy my mom a new phone.
Google did a solid in this case.
I kind of understand that they can’t offer the cloud service forever - that’s OK, but I’d like there to be a local option then
I think they are selling hardware on reduced price so they can make money on cloud services. And by spying and selling customer data.
The problem is that investors want to invest in data collection, not in making new hardware and service.
Until that time,ight I suggest mailing the devices to congress.
There’s just no way mailing electronic devices to Congress would (rightfully) result in visits from several armed FBI agents.
Because?
Just returned 2 Eufy cameras because the company claims ownership of my video streams and won’t allow me access to those streams. Their website conveniently hides the fact that almost all of their cameras are locked to their base station or their cloud, and makes it look like the streams are readily accessible. Ultimately that means Eufy can pull the plug at any time.
Many people got wise to the printer ink racket, they’ll eventually figure out these cloud services are to be avoided too.
I got burned by MyQ garage doors and JuiceBox EV chargers doing a rug pull on their cloud platform.
Never buying another piece of smart home gear that doesn’t give full local control.
Look into ratgdo if your willing to DIY. Konnected is just about to release a version of the same. More costly but konnected actually has customer service.
Opengarage is also great. You just wire it into the same ports as your garage door button and you can then connect to it via its wifi app or home assistant. Works like a champ for $50.
Same folks that did opensprinkler.
RATGDO is great.
Perhaps it should be mandatory when selling a paired hardware/software product that the user can unlock it to install their own software, and that the manufacturer provide enough basic hardware documentation for a third party to develop software that can run on it.
The EU Data Act might partially apply, it requires companies to design their products so that any data they generate is locally accessible (that was my reading of it anyway) from sept 2025 onwards.
Normalize mandatory open source when a product is no longer supported. Either we pay for a service and they Replace it free of charge or we own it properly
- stop e-waste/ longevity
- Breed innovation
- Foster community engagement
- Boost educational value
- Improve compatibility and interoperability
- Empower user customization and flexibility
Google is giving Dropcam owners 50% off on Nest Cams, but that was a hard pass from me.
Only 1 hour or local storage, cloud backups are not end to end encrypted, and you have to use Google’s services / app.
I ended up buying a little Aqara camera. Video can be stored locally on SD card or NAS, and if you’re in Apple’s ecosystem, it supports HSV. So E2EE cloud storage + no need for the manufacturer’s app.
I really like the Aqara stuff I have now and have been looking for a good solution to replace my Xfinity home security system and hadn’t even considered them.
Do they have any outdoor cameras? My quick search didn’t find any.
They have a video doorbell, but that’s it for outside stuff. I ended up going with an Eve camera for outside and using HSV. So still remote storage, but at least it’s properly encrypted.
What’s HSV? Does the Eve integrate in with HomeKit/home assistant the way Aqara does?
HomeKit Secure video.
Eve is basically HomeKit-first right now. I can’t speak for home assistant unfortunately.
Rad. Thanks!
I can deal with no home assistant right now. I have everything bridged into HomeKit anyway.
Never buy a cloud-enabled device.
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I have some amcrest cameras that are on PoE, save data to an SD card and aren’t connected to any amcrest cloud services. They work great. They have a viewer app that I remote into my network to review, but has no cloud connectivity outside of that. I have the switch and modem (and router) on a battery backup for the rare times I lose power.
As far as I can tell this is a minimally viable passably secure system that “just works”, requires no other hardware, and has local storage.
A few more steps such as a (edit: dedicated) hard drive backup, nvr and so on would be great, but my needs are currently met.
This or something like this might be of interest for someone trying to move away from highly cloud connected subscription services but who aren’t ready for a more “hobbyist” setup.
It took me longer to research a quality sd card (so many fucking acronyms) than it did to install and test my 4 camera system.
I don’t say this to rain on your parade at all (especially because you’reset already) but you could have probably used the SD card money to buy a cheap server for Frigate for even more functionality!
Yep. Just didn’t want more hardware than I already had (plus the cameras).
It’s great that there is a nice ramp of hardware and software you can scale with. Feel free to post that general setup architecture for others to consider too!
as a tech enthusiast myself, and i would assume you are one too. Please for the love of god store that video on a hdd, or at least good quality flash first. Get an intel optane module if you don’t want to think about it, those things have the write endurance of a fucking shipping vessel.
Flash is probably the single worst thing you can use for continual writes like that, it’s just universally bad quality. If cost is an issue you can get a used 4tb hdd for like 40 bucks second hand. You probably have one laying around already.
I do, I access them on the local network and the software has a local export feature. So I regularly write the SD card to my pc hdd and wipe the SD
Edit the cameras have overlapping fields of view and I live in a very low crime area so I feel I’ve mitigated my risk to my comfort. I would need multiple cards to corrupt at once, and a crime to occur, and for it to happen perfectly between my backup job for maximum impact.
Edit edit I was unclear in my original so I understand why you commented this, my bad I’ll edit
I backup to my PC but do not have a dedicated hdd for this task
yeah that’s definitely more sensible than what i had thought was going on lol. At that point i’d still probably write to the hdd directly, and use flash as a backup though. It’s also a lot more portable that way.
The flash cards are onboard the cameras, silly as it is. So it’s super convenient, provided they don’t all corrupt at once.
All cameras are well out of reach
oh well that’s just stupid frankly. I understand why, to some degree. But that kind of nullifies the entire existence of security if yeeting the camera and yoinking the card removes any shenanigans that could’ve happened lol.
meh, whatever.
Well you’d have to climb a house or a tree in ways that would be quite acrobatic, again to multiple cameras at once. These are not casually available and even with a ladder are quite a dangle. The trees they are in are not “good climbing trees” at all.
All while I’m getting alerts that there’s motion sent to email, (which I have greenlit to ping my notifications and buzz) and I could hit “backup” at any time by remoting to my PC and running the command.
If a 5 man team is arriving with tools and ladders and is aware of my situation the game is over anyway and I’m just calling the cops.
i suppose they could be recording over the network, but if a card in one of them fails that’s going to be quite the chore huh.
Their cloud system sucks, so I’m glad you don’t have yours connected to it.
good, this shits spyware anyway. Literally in fact, it’s hardware, that can be used to spy.
That’s enough of my anti-consumerism bullshit for the day though.
Non-cloud cams with an nvr all the way. I won’t touch the cloud based services. My go to is currently Reolink.
I built a few with ESP32CAM but its hard to get night vision and color camera with those. At least it’s mostly open source.
Mostly… does it ever worry you? That their’s something tucked away in that network blob.
I have at least a dozen running at any given moment… so I’m not really worried, but I can’t entirely banish the thought.
Someone’s working on an open source implementation of the low level wifi firmware for the ESP32, info here. Would be cool if they do actually manage to reverse engineer something usable.
I hope they can pull it off :-)
I’m an electronic security technician. My system is a mishmash of Axis, Hikvision, Bosch, UNV, and Arecont. Basically whatever customers throw away when they upgrade. As long as it can do ONVIF, I’m good.
Anybody need some commercial access control panels? I got a stack of those in the basement too…
And to shut down the day of a total solar eclipse? That’s extra mean.
270 euro 10 years ago but yeah.
It’s unclear to me what your point is.
Is it that this is roughly equivalent to €345 today, and we should point out the current worth?
Or is it that the purchasers go 10 years of value for €270 and so this is a big nothing burger?
A bit of the 2nd.
Beyond that: the streaming quality on them is poor compared to anything modern.
But mostly pointing out that it’s not modern €270 - an equivalently high end camera today is like €90 and a 1:1 replacement in terms of quality is like 20€.
“€20 Fully Functional Nest Dropcam Support ceased after 10 years” doesn’t have the same punch.
Wow, Google discontinuing something? Breaking news, unprecedented
