Re: What A Time To Be Alive
It's partially good design in having local control (does Nest have that ? I''m not sure). But it's bad (read : venal, customer always comes last) to tie the remote service into a single point of failure.
Of course, most customers want it in a box and no thinking. I'm sure Philip's have done a reasonable job on that or they'd be on the remainder shelves already. And they're not : I tried to get one in the Maplin firesale but they all went before they'd dropped to retail price. So they're an attractive item, for whatever reason.
A reasonably professional IoT device though would have :
1. Default fully-local control (not set it up on the net then fallback to local. Full.)
2. A provisioned service from the manufacturer, secure, reasonably reliable, easy to use. 'Free', paid, whatever as long as it's clear upfront. Points off for 'free for the first year'.
3. The option to move the remote control from the manufacturers' service to another, whether your own or a 3rd party. Documented, secure, no opt-out cost. Possible even if the manufacturer's servers fall offline one day and never return.
I don't honestly know whether Phipps or Nest offer that (I wanted a bargain offer to find out!) but anything less than that is just junk or, worse, a scam that deserves the full scorn of the anti-IoT peanut gallery.
There have been a few people doing studies of IoT devices with an interest in security. They don't generally do a good job of also evaluating threat models, they're more interested in the publicity of 'I found a hole'. But it seems to me that such a review should also examine business models.
Update : just saw MartinB105's post. Philips appear to be pretty close to the above. ++