Google’s Nest killing off old devices
Google is making customers’ existing devices useless, less than 2 years after the devices were available for sale, with only 2 months warning. This is one of the reasons I won’t spend money on the Internet Of Things shitshow. ‘”Which hardware will Google choose to intentionally brick next?” asks Arlo Gilbert. “If they stop supporting Android will they decide that the day after warranty expires that your phone will go dark? Is your Nexus device safe? What about your Nest fire alarm? What about your Dropcam? What about your Chromecast device?”‘
‘Devastating’ bug pops secure doors at airports, hospitals
“A command injection vulnerability exists in this function due to a lack of any sanitisation on the user-supplied input that is fed to the system() call,” Lawshae says.
:facepalm:(tags: security iot funny fail linux unix backticks system udp hid vertx edge)
Counting with domain specific databases — The Smyte Blog — Medium
whoa, pretty heavily engineered scalable counting system with Kafka, RocksDB and Kubernetes
(tags: kafka rocksdb kubernetes counting databases storage ops)
Is anyone concerned about the future of Nest?
wow, looks like Nest is fucked:
As a Nest engineer, I won’t say any numbers that aren’t public, but this company is already on deathwatch. Once that happens, most people will quickly have shiny paperweights because it’s a constant firefight keeping these systems up. We have $340M in revenue, not profit, against a ~$500M budget. No new products since the purchase, and sales/growth numbers are dire. Our budget deal expires soon, and all the good engineers on my teams have discreetly indicated they are going to flee once their golden handcuffs unlock (many have already left despite sacrificing a lot of money to do so). Tony and his goons demand crazy timelines so much that “crunch time” has basically lost meaning. Just when your labor bears fruit, they swoop in, 180 the specs you just delivered on, then have the gall to call your team “incompetent” for not reading their mind and delivering on these brand-new specs. I waste most of my time in pointless meetings, or defending my teams so they don’t flip their desks and walk out. People fall asleep in corners and cry in the bathrooms, health and marriages are suffering. Already the churn is insane, close to half the company if not more. Skilled engineers can tell the environment is toxic, so we’re filling vacancies with mostly sub-par talent.