Google's Nest is disabling some of its customers' old smart-home devices
I bought a Dropcam when they were a new thing. When I realized they did literally everything via a cloud service and would be a brick without that service, I was furious. The incredible arrogance of a company making a webcam that sends your video to their servers, and provides no means to use the camera in a secure&#x2F;local fashion, was astonishing to me.<p>I still can&#x27;t believe something like Dropcam is such a huge success. The level of security awareness the general public has is terrifyingly small, and companies are taking advantage of it to produce brickable devices. It is the legal variant of ransomware...They can hold your data hostage for any reason and at any time. You&#x27;re completely at their mercy, with regard to pricing and availability, and you have to trust they won&#x27;t fall on hard times, or get tired of running the service.<p>This is the next front in the battle for electronic freedom, and lots of folks (even nerds) don&#x27;t seem to realize it.