Honeywell Lyric thermostat(lyric.honeywell.com) |
Honeywell Lyric thermostat(lyric.honeywell.com) |
Maybe they could have some success against Nest by playing off of some people's privacy concerns around Google.
At any location that has one of these installed on a weak WiFi network (an unfortunately likely combination), it would be feasible to crack the network and brute force disable the alarm from the outside, disabling the alarm before ever setting foot inside.
Let's just say I wont be buying any Honeywell products in the future.
No thanks. I don't want to reward that behavior.
Is there a third option here?
I'm okay with this.
1: http://hackaday.com/2013/01/31/turning-the-belkin-wemo-into-...
> The Lyric Thermostat is currently available exclusively through Honeywell certified contractors.
It does say it will be available for self-installation "soon." However, so far this continues the long-standing tradition with HVAC companies.
Wow
It looks terrible unless you're in full screen.
It breaks scrolling.
Fonts are some unreadable superthin sans-serif.
Flat drawings of real stuff that are hard to understand and take over the foreground.
Urgh.
Laughable how long it took them -- Honeywell should have completely owned this market.
Next up for disruption is home security.
True, with respect to "smart" thermostats. But Honeywell already owns the thermostat market, and it's much larger than the "smart" thermostat market.
Prior to this release, Honeywell seemed to be playing Blackberry to Nest's iPhone: "we own the serious market. Only kids and geeks would want a 'smart' ${device}". And then suddenly one day everybody wanted one, and the incumbents were blindsided to realize that they didn't understand their market as well as they'd thought.
There's no reason at all that Honeywell shouldn't dominate the smart thermostat market, other than that they couldn't be bothered to. In a couple of years when no homeowner is going to want to buy a new house with a "dumb" thermostat, they'll need to have something attractive in that space. I bet more is riding on the success of this release than you'd think.
I really don't like the idea of my home reporting everything to third parties. If I want access to things on my home LAN, it should be through my own VPN and not a third party.
For example, there were many incidents in January [1] where houses with Nest thermostats malfunctioned in the middle of a serious cold snap. One reason was that the batteries went dead in some thermostats, but normally the battery shouldn't be needed in normal operation when it's wired properly. Guess what, it wasn't wired properly by the homeowner. There should be a built-in diagnosis for that.
Another reason was that Nest sent a firmware update to thermostats in early January--in the middle of a cold winter? Where was their risk assessment on that? Maybe there's little risk of frozen pipes in Palo Alto, but it's a major risk in the eastern and midwestern USA.
[1] http://techcrunch.com/2014/01/06/nest-4-0-firmware-battery-p...
But still, Belkin is a company that has sold technology products for a while now, and even they couldn't get it right.
The internet of things is miserable from a security standpoint. The bottom line is even with a security-minded approach, we will always be behind the newest attack vector, and to make matters worse no one really takes a security minded approach.
Slightly off-topic, but this is why we shouldn't hook things like the power grid up to the internet. and i personally don't want my fridge, thermostat, and lights to be hackable
Plotting the difference between inside and outside temperature versus time and looking for the intervals where they're closest together (that is, when Nest isn't working hard to make you comfortable) probably correlates very strongly with whether you're home at those times.
You might be comfortable with Google being able to predict when you'll be home. I can imagine a lot of people who wouldn't like that at all.
In many places it will be. Want to buy a Nest in the UK? Guess what, you can't install it yourself: Nest will send a contractor along to install it for you. Many countries highly regulate heating system installation, for good reasons. Even if you're in a jurisdiction where this isn't a problem, the majority of thermostats get replaced along with other HVAC work (new boiler, new pipework, etc), which is going to be done by a qualified contractor.
It didn't involve any tools beyond a screwdriver and the instructions were dead simple. I wouldn't hesitate to install another replacement unit myself.
That's my point, though. Most people aren't home DIYers.
I also had no trouble with my Nest, but most of the people I know probably would have had a local handyman install it.
