This should be read and understood by everyone and everyone needs to cancel their smart devices from Amazon. The company needs to be broken up.
I already did this by never getting smart devices.
Smart Devices are fine. Buy devices that use Z-Wave or ZigBee and run them with something like Home Assistant. All local processing, no internet needed.
The company needs to be broken up.
Because that solution worked so well in the telecomms industry.
We need a solution, but breaking up businesses isn't the only one - and arguably isn't a good solution when they can more or less carry on with the same practices under more complex ownership structures. A better solution is regulation and enforcement. The government is supposed to regulate to level the playing field between consumers and big business.
The government is supposed to regulate to level the playing field between consumers and big business.
Too bad our regulation framework is captured by the same people who own those companies and their friends.
I could understand suspending deliveries to keep drivers out of those situations as it's investigated. But what the actual fuck is going on where they suspended the family devices? What an actual joke. First off, Alexa is dogshit, and now you advertise that you'll just cut users off on every platform at a moment's notice? Why would anybody use it going forward?
There's a reason anybody even remotely familiar with computer security will tell you shit like this is a bad idea.
Laws need to be made against this shit ASAP. No company has a right to lock people out of their homes.
Reasons I try my hardest to use FOSS. This kind of shit is the stuff of nightmares.
Imagine a car company disabling your car.
-Elon has entered the chat.
Just another reminder that you don't own anything digital - companies do. Forgo these cheap cloud products, use hardware that you can control
The answer here are standards like Matter that are interoperable between brands. I get that if I buy all Amazon devices they are going to work better with each other. But if I buy a device from a different brand I should be able to choose whether I link it to Amazon or Apple or my own home-cooked thing. These easy cloud integrations are really important for mass adoption and for the non-tech savvy. They just shouldn’t be a lock in with no choices. 
the answer here is to not sign your life away to a corporate overlord that can end you at whatever imagined whim or accidentally flipped bit.
The answer here is that a digital first sale doctrine and protection of personal digital copyright are things that need better dictation into the already stated legal protections. We literally have a Constitutional right to the things we create. Congress has created protections for our creations via copyright. If you take a picture, you have instant copyright to it. You have a legal protection that you can cite to bring civil litigation to bear onto those who violate it. If Amazon takes your photos and locks you out, they cannot remove that copyright protection that you're entitled to. EXCEPT, when their TOS indicates that you and Amazon enter into a quasi-joint ownership of everything that you upload.
And that is the thing. We already have laws that protect consumers on all of this shit. Congress just hasn't indicated how those protections translate to digital goods and for the most part, they've left it up to the courts to dictate it, which has gone incredibly bad for consumers. Congress has the power to bring over buyer protections on goods into digital goods, they just won't.
That's what is so frustrating. We have protections, but just because it doesn't explicitly say "applies to digital goods too" the corporate overlords get to royally fuck us over. That I think is the most infuriating thing. If this was an actual physical photo that was in a lock box or something that I was making regular payments for and the bank just decided to not let me get to my lockbox. I literally have the ability to drag their asses into court and have explicit protections to make that bank, at the very least, let me get my shit out of their box. But if it's a digital photo in a digital lockbox, that answer is that I get to fucking pound sand if Amazon says so.
It makes no fucking reasonable sense why it is like this. With the context of greed, yes, perfect sense. But no reasonable person looks at the vast number of consumer protections enshrined in our law and then looks at the vast void of protections in the digital world and go "Huh, that makes sense."
ITT: people missing the point of the article
Racist Doorbell is the name of my new surf/punk band.
I just switched to reolink and am working to set up self hosting for this reason
same with those poor ppl that bought philipps hue stuff... now trapped in a cloud...that will sooner than later ask for money or strangle you
thing that baffles me is so many still root for some other cloud services like spotify, debris or whatever exotic service....
Best thing about Hue though is they are zigbee and you can pair them to any zigbee controller and control them with Home Assistant. That's what I did I ditched the hue hub and use home assistant. Best of both worlds. I get the good CRI of the hue lights without the cloud crap. On the other hand feel bad for those that use any WiFi lights that can't be used with anything other than the proprietary app.
For me, the most disturbing thing about Spotify is that I signed up for it three credit cards ago and somehow the billing has automatically transferred to my new card each time I had to get a new one. I've never had anything else that I've subscribed to with recurring payments do that.
It's a service your credit card company offers but most companies aren't signed up (I'm pretty sure there's a lot of paperwork)
The pearks of iot
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
