$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.
That includes a more than $12,000 bounty for coders who can reactivate or enable the smart functionality of Nest 1st and 2nd generation thermostats via a non-Google platform such as Home Assistant and use commonly available tools and low-cost computer hardware.
The Nest bounty is part of a larger bounty program to support the right-to-repair and digital ownership movements as manufacturers maximizing the use of software locks, digital rights management (DRM), and proprietary hardware ecosystems to impose conditions on device owners and impose.
“When Americans brought technology into their home, they didn’t realize they were signing over their ownership rights in the process,” said FULU Executive Director Kevin O’Reilly in a statement. “It was a bad deal, and it’s not a deal they should have to accept. Our bounty program is all about tipping the scales back toward the consumer.”
In recent years, stories about abandoned products have ranged from the $800 Moxie AI-powered robot to the Fisker Ocean, a cutting edge electric vehicle that sold for more than $50,000.
Fulu’s bounties are designed to promote open-source projects, reverse engineering efforts, and legal or policy work that foster device repairability and interoperability.
Bounty for Xbox drive replacement tops $30,000
The FULU bounty for Xbox Series X, for example, currently totals more than $30,000, including more than $10,000 in donations from the public.
To win the bounty, a candidate must make a modification to the software or firmware of an eligible Xbox Series X motherboard or disk drive that enables the replacement of a disk drive with one not originally paired to the motherboard. The fix must not use components from the original disk drive (i.e. the circuitry from the original drive) for the drive replacement to work.
Nest: a symptom of a larger problem
Google’s decision to walk away from support for its widely deployed Nest thermostats are an example of the growing practice of vendors abandoning products and depriving owners of features that they paid for and expected to benefit from indefinitely.
Rather than hanging customers out to dry with crippled smart features and slowly degrading hardware, Google should instead provide the public with the “complete source code” behind its Nest Thermostats, said Denver Gingerich, the Director of Compliance at the Software Freedom Conservancy.
In developing its thermostat, Nest used software under the GNU Gerneral Public License (GPL), an agreement that requires the company to provide its source code in exchange for use of the free software.
“Nest chose to use software with a built-in right to repair in its thermostats,” said Gingerich, SFC’s Director of Compliance. “But they took those rights away when they locked down the Nest devices and failed to provide the complete source code for Linux, one of those software projects. Owners should already have the right to update and fix their devices as they desire.”
In addition to the Nest and Xbox bounties, Fulu currently offers an $11,000 bounty for disabling ads on Samsung Family Hub Refrigerators and slightly more than $10,00 for a one-time modification to the hardware or firmware of a GE Refrigerator to disable DRM features that restrict the use of third party water filters. A similar bounty is offered for coders who create a one time modification for the Molekule Air Pro or Air Mini+ that enables the use of third party air filters with the Molecule app, or another app capable of interfacing with the filter and fulfilling the same features.
While the bounties are likely to draw interest and attention, they may not be easy to share with the broader device owner community. That’s because terms of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) a 1998 law intended to prevent piracy includes Sec. 1201, which outlaws the circumvention of “technological protection measures.”
While numerous exemptions have been since been granted for purposes of repair, security research and maintenance, the tinkerers and innovators who develop repair alternatives to manufacturers’ locked-down methods are prohibited from making them available to the public. That prevents third-party tools from entering the market - an outcome that may not have been imagined at the time the law was passed
“Technology has changed a lot in the 27 years since Congress passed the DMCA,” said O’Reilly in a statement. “Sec. 1201 is in clear need of a revamp. It’s due time that lawmakers recognized the thing that’s obsolete here is not anyone’s device — it’s the law.”
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