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A comment on Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices. Parent comment

Re:Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old sma... by xg15 on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @02:41AM (#11428339)
This makes sense into you throw OTA updates and cloud services into the mix. I'm not sure how those would even be allowed by the "the software must not change" rule. But even if you interpret it generosity, shutting down the service or pushing an update that bricks the device is very clearly an update that breaks functionality. Wouldn't that be forbidden by the above rules as well?

Also, there are "hackable" products on the market, e.g. the OpenWRT routers. Those still seem to be allowed.

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Re:Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old sma... by iofj on Tuesday April 05, 2016 @04:00AM (#11428652)
Yep I would agree that breaking updates are a risk. In the case of a cloud service though, I'd bet the contract would specify a minimum maintenance duration very clearly spelled out, and that's going to be a few years, no more.

OpenWRT routers have been in the legal clear zone for a while (due to FCC exception for the WiFi bands), but that's changing [1]

[1] http://www.cnx-software.com/2015/07/27/new-fcc-rules-may-pre... (FCC page https://apps.fcc.gov/oetcf/kdb/forms/FTSSearchResultPage.cfm... )

People are somewhat confused about this. For instance you can change the firmware of smartphones, no ? Well, no, you can't. You see, what people call a cell phone contains a 100% locked down actual cell phone, and a PDA that's completely independent (and in some cases, more than one locked down system. E.g. NFC is it's own locked down system as well). These are fun things, they're smaller and smaller. In the last 2 years the actual cellphone, everything except the antenna fits in 0.5cm x 0.5cm x 0.1cm package that actually contains multiple chips. These things are connected to the audio devices of the phone, and therefore have sole control over what comes out of the speaker and where the microphone goes. They also have a serial network interface these days for 3G/4G, and the sim connects directly to these chips.

So technically android (or ios, or windows phone, or blackbery, ...) does not run on cellphones, it runs on the PDAs that we insert into cellphones. Therefore it does not need approval.

It also means that Android/IOS do not actually control (for example) the audio on smartphones, or whether a call is answered. Or whether, when asked for the location of the phone or the contents of SMS'es, or to call out and send out the audio the microphone receives, whether those requests are answered. Android/ios would never see those requests (though you may find the microphone suddenly doesn't work anymore in apps). And yes, this works even when there is no sim in the phone.

Whilst there are cellphones that don't provide law enforcement (I wonder if it's only law enforcement though) with these features, they're older models and are getting phased out. If you read this site, I bet your phone has these features. And like all features you don't control, you wouldn't like them if you knew what they were.

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