While touring the house we eventually bought, my wife spied a Nest on the wall and said, "Oh, that's one thing bitwize is gonna want to rip out." Hooking your home up to the cloud and depending on cloud services for its operation just strikes me as the king of dumb ideas. You've got private, intimate data flowing to who knows where, cloud malfunctions affecting regular home operations (this has already happened at least once with the Nest), and what's discussed here: here-today, gone-tomorrow support with no recourse once the vendor decides to turn support off.
To me, the funny thing is that google could use brand awareness to engender trust. When I buy some new fangled toy, I often look for a trusted name, instead of something made overseas, with an incomprehensible name.
But it is almost the opposite. Fly by night names and resellers on amazon, are more stable than google. Some even have far better support!
Just bizarre.
Someone should tell google that outside of SV, people hate iterate often, hate fast change, and just want security updates and bug fixes, no feature changes, no gui improvements, just stable stable stable for decades.
And google could do it so easily! Shared dev platforms, long term support branches, they could own the world.
And they could open source old hardware firmwares at end of life. Strutt and preen about how they are the beautiful peacock of the OSS world, and do their best to keep old hardware from the trash.
Instead they are so short sighted, they can't see beyond a quarter. ChatGPT and its potential was well known, google is a subject matter expert, and yet they were astonished at the progess and press and bing?!?!
They have no vision, no look ahead, trash their brand, destroy their image, piss off consumers, and for what?
To dabble in things they well know will shut down tomorrow anyhow. Gee, great.
It's going to take a while before the general public realizes this.
You need to see multiple failures before you can move the needle on a giant. This is especially true of a popular brand which is seen on android phones everywhere and it's essentially intangible (one example: you buy an asus phone, you still see "with google", but you don't associate poor sw with google: people still blame asus).
It's also much slower for physical products.
If you don't buy new cars but go for the 10y low-mileage ones, you'll be about to start experiencing extremely shitty car infotainment systems where every system cloud feature is useless because the api endpoint is already broken.
For houses and appliances it's even longer.
The problem is those past products and broken cloud features will haunt companies even if they corrected themselves for newer ones. You can't get rid of those as fast as you drop cloud services and make people forget. Google (and others) will learn this the hard way, in the long term.
I was amazed - in a bad way - when we were looking into getting solar for our home and almost all of the systems relied on some kind of mobile app for their UI, often via a cloud service. These are systems that should have a working life of decades! What mobile or cloud platform today will even still be here and fully compatible in ten years? Want to bet tens of thousands on that?! (Plus of course all the usual "smart" home concerns.)
99% of solar/battery systems will work just fine with no internet connection.
In fact often the internet connectivity is a separate plug-in module you can just not install.
Loads of these devices get installed into garages and suchlike where the wifi is no good, so most installers will know that their systems can work without internet connectivity and will be used to installing them that way.
That all makes perfect sense and it's how we had always assumed these things worked. However we were told - by multiple installers - that they couldn't guarantee the products they were offering would continue to work for long without Internet access. Even if they didn't literally shut down with loss of power supply they wouldn't necessarily be configurable. That really matters with battery-backed systems where there are different strategies for charging them that might make sense depending on the conditions and expected usage.
It seems a particularly bad design because if the power is out in our area then probably so is the Internet. (Apparently our local ISPs haven't discovered putting a UPS in with their last-mile equipment yet.) And yet these were battery-backed systems that could take over supply for our own property during an outage so having access to their UI to change settings in the event of a longer outage could be important.
And worse still these things get inflicted on the next home owner.
I bought a house with a "smart" boiler and the UI and app are absolutely atrocious.
Worse still it doesn't have basic functionality like my parent's manual system had 40 years ago like temporarily being able to turn it on without changing the schedule, doesn't have a weekend setting, requires me to send my email address and address to a third party who then have full access to when I turn the system I to holiday mode. Basically a lovely treasure trove for thieves.
I don’t disagree with you on shitty UI, but I’m going to question “a treasure trove for thieves”. I just don’t believe there’s some sort of house thieve’s Union running attacks on boiler infrastructure in order to work out who’s on holiday this week, especially given the low penetration on those things meaning you’re going to get visibility into one in a hundred homes. It just seems so low value compared to driving round the block for a few days and seeing who’s car hasn’t moved.
Driving around costs gas and time every time you go do it.
Compromising the centralized server is a one-time cost; once you've snuck something in there to regularly send updates where you can see them, you get alerts on those 1/100 houses that are rich and dumb enough to pay for this overpriced "smart" boiler. Maybe you can even work out a way to let people all over the world subscribe to these updates for a fee and let them take the risk of actually breaking in and fencing stuff.
Heck, you could even hack your way into a bunch of other smart home servers, and bundle all of that up into a nice little darknet service offering regular updates of stuff like "everyone in a 20mi radius of a given point who is setting all their smart stuff to vacation mode". That sounds like it might be a pretty nice passive income stream if you don't care about the very obvious legal/ethical issues involved.
And maybe your nice little darknet service could also let people say "hey, do you know anything about jon-wood?" and reply with "why yes we do, here's a few hints, would you like to pay for more?".
The risk/reward calculations on this might only work out if you're a regular employee of a highly-organized crime ring instead of the mysterious hacker running a darknet site that serves as one of many hubs of a decentralized crime syndicate, I dunno. The hacker sure makes for a cooler story if you're writing a techno-thriller or a cyberpunk novel though. :)
This is an important principle. If essential systems in everyone's homes start depending on remote connections to work and/or including spyware that phones home with any kind of data about how the system is being used then that's a serious security and privacy concern. It's bad enough that we have metered supplies of various utilities and instead of the old "agent pops round to read the meter every few months" we now have smart meters phoning home with metrics every few minutes. At least the metering is there for a legitimate reason and the change to smart meters does have some real advantages including for the homeowner so the risk is more an unintended but unavoidable side effect in those cases. Almost everything else that goes under the "smart home" banner seems to be like smart TVs and connected vehicles: if it's phoning home then it's a good bet it's doing it for their benefit and not yours.
Jup. A family member has Nest thermostats. Server went down. The thermostats cranked up to 30C / 86F as the failure mode. Just makes no sense. I get that you don’t want freezing pipes, if the server goes down, but come on.
That sounds a bit far fetched to me, I have had my Internet go down multiple times and never have a Nest problem. In fact I don’t even think an Internet connection is required if you just want it to be a dumb thermostat.
The default safety settings on my nest is 45F for heat and 95F for AC. This setting is user adjustable so maybe your family member override it.
You are probably in the US. In Germany usually each radiator has a thermostat and you usually do not have wall thermostats unless you have floor heating.
That being said, I’ve double checked and it is Netatmo [0] and not Nest. The point still stands, that some cloud based home automation devices behave stupid if they cannot talk to the server.
I find this hard to believe. The thermostat has a local copy of the heat/cool setpoints, why wouldn’t it just keep using those if it can’t access the server? At a minimum it’s a bug, not just the normal operation when it can’t access the cloud.
