
Google’s outage meant some Nest users couldn’t unlock doors or use the AC - spking
https://www.fastcompany.com/90358396/that-major-google-outage-meant-some-nest-users-couldnt-unlock-doors-or-use-the-ac
======
geofft
The first post from jDantastic
[https://twitter.com/jDantastic/status/1135282856085852160](https://twitter.com/jDantastic/status/1135282856085852160)
was a lie (or at best a half-truth): you can just walk up to the Nest and turn
the knob, and that works fine without a network connection. In the replies,
Kelly Ellis (of _Ellis v. Google_ fame) calls him out on this, and he says a)
his Nest is behind a TV where he can't reach it, so he has to use the app, and
b) the post was intended for his followers only, who would have understood
this.

~~~
kayfox
> the post was intended for his followers only, who would have understood
> this.

Ive noticed this seems to be a theme for tons of Tweets that go viral
unintentionally and their originators then have to explain a whole ton of
stuff that all their followers understand.

Its like the Internet is peeking in on intimate discussions and grabbing bits
and pieces to create drama out of.

~~~
ballenf
Isn't it weird that people have intimate discussions on billboards next to
massive highways and then get surprised when strangers pay attention?

------
pdkl95
Dan Geer, in a recent keynote[1]:

>> The root source of risk is dependence, especially dependence on the
expectation of stable system state. Dependence is not only individual but
mutual, not only am I dependent or not but rather a continuous scale asking
whether we are dependent or not; we are, and it is called interdependence.
Interdependence is transitive, hence the risk that flows from interdependence
is transitive, i.e., if you depend on the digital world and I depend on you,
then I, too, am at risk from failures in the digital world. If individual
dependencies were only static, they would be eventually evaluable, but we
regularly and quickly expand our dependence on new things, and that added
dependence matters because we each and severally add risk to our portfolio by
way of dependence on things for which their very newness confounds risk
estimation and thus risk management. Interdependence within society is today
absolutely centered on the Internet beyond all other dependencies excepting
climate, and the Internet has a time rate of change five orders of magnitude
faster. Remember, something becomes "a critical infrastructure" as soon as it
is widely enough adopted; adoption is the gateway drug to criticality.

[1]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbDEbfijxNY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gbDEbfijxNY)
(plaintext:
[http://www.bsidesdc.org/history/geer.html](http://www.bsidesdc.org/history/geer.html)
)

~~~
titzer
What a great quote, thanks for this link. (I recommend reading the entire
article).

------
hjk05
A great example of how important gracefully failing is. Broken escalators are
just stairs, and broken smart-locks should just be locks. If that isn’t the
case, then they aren’t actually smart.

~~~
verbify
I think it is humorous that broken escalators is the go-to example of graceful
degradation, when in real life I've observed multiple times that when an
escalator is broken, they rope it off (this is not uncommon on London's tube).

Apparently when an escalator is broken the space between steps is uneven, and
the escalator is metal and sharp, causing safety issues (although I've written
other theories below in further comments).

~~~
acheron
Washington DC's metro is famous for broken escalators, and yes they usually
block them off.

~~~
yellowapple
Same with BART in the SF Bay Area. When the escalators _are_ working, they're
usually working the wrong way (i.e. the only escalator is going down instead
of up, making that escalator effectively useless except as a fitness machine).

------
masto
I find this journalism suspect. These devices all have local control. You
don't need the cloud to turn on the AC unless you want to do it remotely.
Ditto for door locks.

------
SquareWheel
Nest thermostats don't have physical buttons or touch screens?

edit: Alright, I'm convinced. Bad journalism. Flagging this post.

~~~
avidal
They do. You can turn them. Turns out this individual decided to mount his TV
_over_ his Nest[0]. So changing the temperature without the app requires
removing the TV.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/jDantastic/status/1135313567346036741](https://twitter.com/jDantastic/status/1135313567346036741)

------
kokx
It is too bad that it has come to this. To me, a door that cannot be unlocked
if it loses internet access or that I cannot change my heating or AC, is
unacceptable.

I have some privacy concerns when it comes to Nest and similar services. But
in the end, this is more important. This shows that if Google decides to pull
the plug on Nest, or decrease functionality (as they already did), I cannot
use (a part of) the device I bought.

~~~
avidal
The tweet is misleading. He mounted his TV on top of his thermostat[0]; and
I'm sure he knew full-well that it meant he wouldn't be able to change the
temperature without the app.

[0]
[https://twitter.com/jDantastic/status/1135313567346036741](https://twitter.com/jDantastic/status/1135313567346036741)

------
JohnJamesRambo
These are the kinds of things I want to tell the ISP repair guy when he comes
to fix our internet. Dude it’s 2019, when the internet goes down, EVERYTHING
goes down.

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Someone1234
This is an article about three tweets.

I looked at just the first tweet by "Danny" who shortly after tweeted it was a
joke. The third one by zeynep tufekci is a retweet of the "Danny" joke (with
the context removed by the article).

The only real tweet seems to be Chris Weix complaining about using Nest
cameras as a baby monitor (which is always remote/app).

------
zeveb
It's indeed important to note whether these devices have local control, but
it's also important to note there there's no reason that a smart device and a
smart phone cannot authenticate one another and communicate over a LAN.

I would hate to rely on my phone to unlock my door, only to find that when
Google has an issue my door is effectively a wall. I'd also hate it if the
lock opened on a loss of connectivity.

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Copenjin
An offline fallback would be the first thing I'd think about when developing
something like that (same thing for those non-IoT locks that work normally
when the power is out).

And looking at other comments it seems the people at Nest did too. I'd flag
this.

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LinuxBender
Our filtered water dispenser at work will not give you water if it loses
internet. There is no way to bypass this. Wifi goes offline, no water.

------
vortico
Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.

