Smart Gardening Firm's Shutdown a Reminder of Internet of Things' Fickle Nature (arstechnica.com) 28
AeroGarden, which sells Wi-Fi-connected indoor gardening systems, is going out of business on January 1. While Scotts Miracle-Gro has continued selling AeroGarden products after announcing the impending shutdown, the future of the devices' companion app is uncertain.
This is about proprietary software, not IoT (Score:4, Insightful)
The Internet of Things is not a stupid idea. There is nothing really about IoT which dooms maintenance, necessitates insecurity, or all the other curses you see in IoT context. This is about proprietary Internet of Things. And (surprise!) all the same damn issues exist with tiny computers as exist with desktop computers.
When you buy an IoT thing and have this kind of maintenance problem, remember: it doesn't have to be that way. If it takes a failure to learn, then take that failure and learn. Learn exactly the same thing that RMS learned when he had printer trouble.
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It does have to be this way because big tech wants it this way.
You have Apple for example trying to make certs last 45 days as a standard. Why? Because it means your IoT widget will almost certainly stop working unless you let it call back to the mothership...
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Or the mothership calls it to update, which is what we do. Most consumer grade crap IoT wants a daily charge anyway, so phoning home isn't as big a deal was with a battery powered sensor.
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It sounds like you should call the police and report that big tech is holding a gun to your head, telling you that you are required to buy their products.
Other people don't have big tech's guns pointed at them, so at least for them, no, it doesn't have to be that way.
I didn't even have to read the rest of the sentence, to know that you're griping about proprietary software's unfriendly bullshit. And I agree with you that it's a
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You are missing the point. The issue is big tech is using their power to influence standards and exert control so your Pi and FOSS software stack are to painful to use for most people, no matter how much polishing the community does.
Sure you can build an IoT thing with your Pi; but nobody will be able to visit the management page with the boot loader locked phone unless you use one of 'their' approved CAs and if you wanted to create your own CA well FU, and if you wanted to put that device on an isolated n
Stupid consumerism (Score:2)
1. Buy product which celebrates the 'overglofification of technology'
2. Company behind the product, decides to go out of business, stop supporting the product, or didn't even test that it could run for a more than a few years without a software bug fix
3. Product stops working
4. Company sells its IP in other areas to another company, assets to another company and keeps all the 'liabilities for supporting existing products' for itself
5. Consumer gets angry at company for failed products
How many times has this
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It isn't even a proprietary software problem and is a forced cloud problem. NO PRODUCT in a home or business should require authentication and asking permission to control something behind your own firewall. It is the digital equivalent of buying a home and the real estate agent refusing to give you a key and saying you must ask them for permission everytime you come and go or want to change anything in your home. Cloud services in addition to local control and local API's are absolutely fine. But as the on
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It's a side effect of deny-inbound-by-default firewalls and widespread NAT.
If you make a device that is controllable directly then It won't work AT ALL if you're stuck behind CGNAT and don't have IPv6 (assuming the device supports IPv6, and the connection you're on does too).
Even if you do have IPv6 or routable legacy IP, you will still need to open it up on the firewall - try explaining how to do that to random users, or handling support calls for thousands of different types of router, or users stuck behi
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Absolutely incorrect. Devices were running built in web servers for command and control for many years before this cloud control crap started. Many devices, especially stuff like the enphase solar controllers I mentioned, should really be airgapped if you care about security. Set up a vpn and you are golden. Requiring cloud control is absolute bullshit. I even argue that broken communication SHOULD be the default unless a user takes sophisticated action to expose it to the internet. Make no mistake about it
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Make no mistake about it, cloud exists because they want your data and usage patterns.
That's not all. Frequently they want to create the option of using their check-point as a toll booth, a way to charge fees -- often for nothing (like in the old days of river tolls for barges).
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For the home maybe, for industrial or commercial use you can set up a tunnel through the firewall, with a 6-in-4 tunnel because IPv6 makes more sense even if the local ISP doesn't know what that is. Then you can have phone home for data collection, but phone from home to device for command and control and the firewall won't stop you.
But home IoT is all based upon being to market first, meaning generally substandard quality, short battery life, lack of security, and probably talks to a phone.
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Well, for simple home use, you're probably right. For industrial use it's different. The customer demands security, they demand that security be in place to prevent eavesdropping or unauthorized access, and so using PKI based certs makes sense. Also shorter cert lifetimes for better security than the average emarket web site. Certs are cheap, and plenty of them living together on the device, so some can be very short lived and regenerated only when needed. Handy stuff when you've got mutual distruct be
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Chamberlain garage door openers no longer have local API's and require asking permission of servers outside your control to open your own garage door.
With Chamberlain garage door openers, I highly recommend ratgdo: https://paulwieland.github.io/... [github.io] , it's a ESP32-based board that provides local control over the opener.
FWIW, Chamberlain's cloud is basically useless for the setup anyway. All it can do is trigger door open/close cycles. It can't be used, for example, to enroll temporary door codes.
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It is impossible to have a "forced cloud" situation unless the device is proprietary. If it ran Free Software instead, then that bug (where the owner can't edit which hosts to contact for whatever services) would/could be fixed.
Every gripe that you listed, is caused by it being proprietary.
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We sell industrial IoT, and we maintain them. It's the consumer oriented IoT to be wary of, they're all about getting money today and then vanishing tomorrow when the fad for smart sock warmers dies away.
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You just have to be a smart consumer. Only buy stuff that uses open protocols, or which can be hacked to do so. The big one is Matter, which works 100% local only (no internet access/cloud required), but a lot of devices can also have their firmware reflashed with the open source Tasmota which is compatible with Home Assistant and various other things.
With either of those you are not reliant on any server staying up, you control it all locally. Matter is a little worse in that you might need firmware update
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You just have to be a smart consumer. Only buy stuff that uses open protocols, or which can be hacked to do so. The big one is Matter, which works 100% local only (no internet access/cloud required), but a lot of devices can also have their firmware reflashed with the open source Tasmota which is compatible with Home Assistant and various other things.
With either of those you are not reliant on any server staying up, you control it all locally. Matter is a little worse in that you might need firmware updates from the manufacturer for security reasons, but even that can be largely mitigated with a properly segmented network.
Of course any solution involving reflashing firmware or hacking the code takes it entirely out of the world of consumer products and makes it a techie hobby or otherwise a specialized technical application. Even people who know how to do things like that (me) don't want to bother with a consumer product. I have a finite amount of time and the product is invariable supposed to provide a convenience, not extra work for me.
But it was supposed to be a miracle (Score:1)
Every sheet of toilet paper with nano sensors and GPS 3D print themselves with asteroid mined cryptocoin AI!!!
Glorious era we live in. Can we maybe make more useless e-trash requiring endless engineering meetings powered by Asana to decide what size the logo should be?
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But use too much of that TP you end up with assteroids yourself!
$600 flower pot (Score:2)
Just because you put a chip in it and called it smart does not mean anyone will pay a crazy price for something otherwise ordinary. I can get a flower pot, a light with a timer, and a soil moisture meter for a whole lot less than $600, and I never needed an app for that.
You cannot wish people into wanting a product like this. Juicero failed, now Juicero for plants failed, and Juicero for everything else will fail too.
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You cannot wish people into wanting a product like this.
That's true - but you can force them into either buying an IOT version of a product, or not buying the product at all. Gardening systems are one thing, and if you don't have one, it's not a big deal. But when you apply the same thef... er, business logic to glucose monitors and the like, prosthetic electronics, automobiles, etc, it's "their way or the highway". Except in the latter case, where the choice is NOT the highway...
We've moved on from internet-enabled devices to internet disabled devices, because
The cloud is a trap (Score:3)
Run Away!
If it needs an App ... (Score:2)
Then you are not buying it, you are licencing access to it, and you can lose access to the hardware at any time
Fortunately Works Fine Without App (Score:2)