$100K In Bounties Offered To Revive Abandoned Smart Products

The non profit FULU Foundation said it will pay bounties of thousands of dollars to disable the digital locks OEMs use to kill smart products, prevent repairs, and force ads on owners.

You may not know it, but while you were out and about this past Saturday, October 25th, that sleek Nest smart home thermostat on your wall at home was silently being crippled. That’s right: the sturdy and reliable Nest device - which may have been serving you for more than a decade - lost many of its “smart” features including its connection to the Nest and Google Home mobile apps, cloud-based features like Home/Away Assist and multi-device Eco mode control. You can no longer check the status of your thermostat remotely or control it - changing settings and adjusting the temperature - using a mobile app. Nor will you receive notifications from the device.

That’s because Google, in April, announced that it was declaring an “end of support” for the 1st and 2nd generations of its Nest thermostats, which were sold between 2011 and 2014. In addition to cancelling the Nest’s defining smart, remote management features, that “end of support” also means that the Nest thermostats no longer receive software or security updates from Google which, the company warned “may lead to decreased performance with continued use” and leave the Nest thermostats vulnerable to cyber attacks.

Google is offering Gen 1 and Gen 2 Nest owners a discount on upgrading to Nest Gen 4 devices ($149) and help with recycling the discontinued hardware. But what if you want to just keep using your perfectly functional and superbly designed Nest for the decade (or two, or three) that it has left? After all, there is a rich ecosystem of free and open source smart home software that is more than capable of picking up where Google has left off, and keeping your 1st or 2nd generation Nest working - and even expanding its features and capabilities.

To do that, however, you’re going to have to figure out a way to disable the software locks that Google has placed on the embedded software that prevents Nest owners from being able to “flash” their own software onto the devices or connect it to third party, independent smart home ecosystems.

Bounties for freeing bricked, repair devices

But if you have an idea for how Nests (or other bricked products) might be liberated and kept working, you should know: there’s a sizable bounty waiting for you.

The FULU Foundation, a new non-profit under the leadership of repair expert and YouTuber Louis Rossmann, on Monday unveiled a bounty program for coders and others who can help to liberate bricked and hobbled hardware from the grips of manufacturers determined to walk away from their support of perfectly functional hardware.