Soon you will be able to tell which coffee machine your coworkers own by observing which days they are grumpy after missing their coffee due to brand specific server outages.

Or was it that they just couldn't get their Ion to dispense the water they needed to brew?

https://www.avclub.com/guy-reviews-his-offices-terrible-new-...

Their Nest cams got hacked and they ended up on suspicious websites doing suspicious things, oh wait, someone covered that already.

Just wait until you are at Taco Bell, and you can't wipe the Cool Ranch Doritos Taco shell dust off your fingers because the Dixie servers are down. Yes, this is real.

THE FUTURE

EDIT! fixed URL: https://imgur.com/f5evsOe

Driving the point home by posting a URL that returns 404?

Fixed in edit?

Thank you, I was copying from the Imgur app on my phone and it kept giving me bad URLs.

What the frack? It shows up on my phone. I'm on mobile but Will fix it when I'm back in front of my desktop. It's just a stupid 8 second clip of a napkin dispenser, but now I am determined to share it with all you fine folk.

Still 404s for me.

Still broken

Nope, still 404.

Works for me - link shows some form of electronic napkin dispenser.

Your link 404s.

Nest Products are not dependent on the cloud to function locally. The smoke detector, thermostat, locks, and security systems still function without an internet connect.

That being said, without the internet you do lose functions that obviously rely on the cloud like using your phone to adjust your thermostat, phone alerts that your house is burning down, unlocking your door from your phone, or disabling your alarm from your phone.

Do those features need a cloud connection if I am on my own wifi?

Yes.

I'm split about if that's good or bad though. If they functioned without the cloud then the App would need to determine if it were on the local network or remote before attempting to initiate communication. There would probably also need to be an extra layer of host and client authentication.

The way the Thermostat and Smoke detector appear to work is by polling a remote service periodically for commands. This permits them to go into a sleep and preserve battery.

You could remove the cloud dependence by introducing a local hub that they could talk to instead which would permit the devices to remain unchanged but would introduce the added support complexity of a new device.

Alternatively you could have the devices remain awake listening for incoming client requests in addition to polling the cloud but that would be detrimental to their battery life.

The lease complex and most efficient way route is having the devices connect to the cloud.

It’s so silly, too. I played around with a Dropcam (I think that’s Nest now), and the fact that it uploads all the video data from my LAN over the internet to their server, only to immediately download it back to my same LAN for viewing is beyond ridiculous. It is a device that should work entirely unplugged from the internet, but here we are...

I get that the internet is used for controlling the device remotely, but those of us that don’t need that feature still have to pay the price of bandwidth waste and round trip latency. Mind bogglingly bad design.

> the fact that it uploads all the video data from my LAN over the internet to their server, only to immediately download it back to my same LAN for viewing is beyond ridiculous.

So you think the primary use case of a dropcam is for local live stream viewing? I would argue that's a boundary case at best.

I think there are pros and cons to both local and remote storage.

Streaming to the cloud is a much simpler solution. The device doesn't need local storage. The device doesn't need to run as a host to serve up streaming video to multiple clients. By removing storage and reducing processor needs and software complexity, you can make a much simpler and more reliable product.

By keeping storage remote, you're better preserving evidence from tampering or destruction.

The devices didn't stop working, just the remote control features. You could still walk over to your thermostat/lock and press it's buttons. I'm not sure if there is a remote control infrastructure that doesn't use "the cloud" that is feasible for consumer products.

If you get a smart lock, then you expect it to be reliable. What’s the point if you still need to carry your key around or sneak into your own home from time to time?

The two things are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, as Nest connections broke last night, Google collected, analyzed, and used more information than ever before in its quest to learn and know everything and keep it all organized.

True. Maybe AI destroys humanity via constant trolling.

That's apparently how humanity is going to destroy humanity.

If we're going down, we might as well have fun doing it no?