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| What happens when your cloud service just pulls the plug - Insteon gone |
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| bdunham7:
--- Quote from: Bassman59 on April 18, 2022, 03:09:14 pm ---I think it's less that Ford turned off the 3G than the network providers turned it off. How long until the cellular hardware in early Tesla models stops being functional because the network providers decided they don't want to support the older networks? This is going to be a shit show. --- End quote --- I think it is up to the car manufacturers to support their product by offering an upgrade of the cellular modem as required. In Ford's case, they knew that AT&T was shutting off the 3G network, but in response they simply disabled the MyFordMobile website on the same day without even an explanation--the website simply no longer loads. The car can communicate with WiFi, so I still would have had some use of the remote features when it was at home. I would have paid a reasonable amount for a 4G modem. But instead I'll simply live without the few doodads that the app provided. |
| jonpaul:
a single EMP attack could kill all cloud, internet and devices over an entire continent or country Back to,1950, vacuum tubes will still work fine.. Checkout Starfish Prime Pacific nuclear test in 1952 Jon |
| xrunner:
--- Quote from: Bassman59 on April 18, 2022, 02:52:12 pm --- --- Quote from: xrunner on April 18, 2022, 12:25:54 pm ---Last week my Insteon hub's LED went red, indicating it couldn't communicate with the Mothership (Insteon's servers). After troubleshooting locally I searched online to see if others had the same issue. They did. Long story short - they just pulled the plug and quit with no notice to customers. Phone is disconnected, emails not answered. --- End quote --- Ah, the whole IoT landscape will be littered with the detritus left behind when cloud-based service providers like Insteon shut down. Insteon was not the first and won't be the last. Seriously -- what did end users expect? Obviously they expected that their ~$50 IoT gadgets would work forever. But think it through. These hardware gadgets get introduced and they require the cloud service because that's how they get the "access your devices from anywhere!" to work. But that cloud service costs money and the hardware gadgeteers were loathe to sell a product that also required a monthly subscription fee to maintain that cloud service. Of course at some point they realize that yeah, they can't keep subsidizing the cloud service that is just bleeding cash, so they have two options: Do what Wink did and say "pay us or your shit stops working," or just shut down. The obvious question: "who didn't see this coming from a mile away?" It's why you have to be careful and choose IoT devices that don't require talking to the cloud for access. The Ikea TRADFRI things are like that. I don't know what else. I notice that Insteon products are still being sold -- their website is up (the forum is not!) and there are links to big box stores and to the rain forest for Insteon-compatible products. It's a mine field to figure out what devices will work with local-only access and which require the cloud. --- End quote --- Yep Insteon devices are being sold, probably a mass dumping on Ebay until unsuspecting people realize what happened. Right in that it wasn't subscription so after the product is sold they have to pay to support it on the cloud. How many years 5, 10, 20 ... wait this ain't gonna be profitable! It's a really skanky way to dump people with no notice though. OK you are going to close down, shit happens, can 't you tell your customers a month in advance so they can prepare? You know the first day it happened I went to their status page to check it - https://www.insteon.com/systemstatus It still shows "All services Online" no known issues. :-DD |
| SilverSolder:
Unfortunately, only a minority of tech savvy people will be smart enough to avoid the "cowboy cloud" trap... Imagine the conversation with a car dealer in the future... "What do you mean, you don't want any Internet connectivity in the vehicle???" ...I just bought a Garmin GPS navigator for my car, because its built in GPS is getting long in the tooth and using Waze/Google Maps is hard on the phone (gets hot). Wow, what a pleasure! - Boots quickly, doesn't need connectivity (built-in maps), doesn't display advertisements. Optionally connects to your phone for traffic updates. There are still companies around that make quality stuff without trying to make you their slave for all future.... find them, and support them by buying their products! |
| SiliconWizard:
Anyone falling for cloud services for no good reason (do you really need a remote server to control your local devices?) just deserves what they get: privacy issues, unsollicited changes, failures, company pulling the plug... Funny thing is that the little benefits it has for the end-user can be more efficiently implemented with purely local solutions. Most of those cloud solutions are absurd from an energy point of view, yet we have no problem promoting that heavily while pretending we care for the environment. And, this cloud stuff lays the groundwork for a society of total surveillance. Consider yourself lucky when one such service fails, and it gives you the opportunity to reflect on that. For now, most of the cloud services are on a voluntary basis. Unless there's a big change, it'll be mandatory soon enough. |
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