IoT news of the week for April 7, 2023

Google’s home security products fly the Nest: Three years ago, Google announced a partnership investment into ADT, and more of the reasons why became apparent this week. On April 8, 2024, Google will end support for its Nest Secure home security products, which it stopped selling in 2020. Current subscribers will be offered their choice of a complementary ADT home monitoring system or a $200 Google Store credit. I suspect Google is refocusing on what it does well and letting other companies and/or partners pick up the security slack. Additionally, the Works with Nest program will end this September and the Google Home app will lose support for old Dropcam devices in April 2024. The end of the Works with Nest program shouldn’t have a huge impact, however, as the program should mostly, if not fully, be replaced by products using the Matter standard. (Google) — Kevin C. Tofel

HomeKit gets smoke detector monitoring from Starling: If you’re a HomeKit user and want a 24/7 monitoring service for your smoke alarms, you’re no longer out of luck. But you will need to buy a hub. The Starling Home Hub is just the one you want because this week, the company announced Starling Protect, a $7.99-per-month professional smoke alarm monitoring service. The hub is necessary because it bridges Google Nest smoke detectors with Apple HomeKit. Starling Protect also includes monitoring for Nest Secure home security systems, but that’s basically irrelevant now (see the Nest story above). Perhaps Starling will drop the subscription price for its Protect service as a result? (9to5 Mac)  — Kevin C. Tofel

Wait until I tell my wife that Tesla employees shared in-car video: Well this isn’t going to go over very well. Reuters this week reported that Tesla employees shared images and video footage captured by the vehicles between 2019 and 2022. Some were funny situations while others were terrible accidents. The footage was shared on internal messaging apps and not outside of the company, but that doesn’t make the situation any better. We bought a Tesla Model 3 about a year ago when downsizing from two vehicles to one. Notably, my wife and daughter were horrified to learn that the car captured footage not just from cameras outside the car, but inside as well. I immediately turned that feature off, but this story doesn’t exactly give me a warm fuzzy feeling. And I’m not looking forward to sharing the news with my wife. (Reuters)  — Kevin C. Tofel

The SwitchBot Hub2 includes Matter support: We love the unique SwitchBot products and I have a feeling we’re soon going to love them even more. The company’s newest product, the SwitchBot Hub2, brings support for Matter and all of the cross-platform features that standard adds. Priced at $69.95, the Hub2 has an informational display this time around, the aforementioned Matter support, two programmable smart buttons, room temperature and humidity sensors, and smart infrared controller support. We’re expecting to receive a review unit imminently, so stay tuned for our experience with the new SwitchBot Hub2 (9to5 Google)  — Kevin C. Tofel

Alexa could share your home network credentials: If you have an older second-gen Echo Dot, you won’t be happy to hear this. Apparently, with an old software exploit from the Amazon Fire HD tablet and a piece of tinfoil, you can short out the capacitors on the smart speaker’s control board. Why would anyone want to do that? To get access to the entire contents of the file system where you’ll find something both interesting and disturbing. On that model, Amazon stores your home network Wi-Fi credentials in plain text. Granted, this is a physical hack, so the chances of it happening are relatively low. Even so, it’s a terrible practice to store such data in plain text. Now what can we do with some parchment paper or plastic wrap? (HackADay) — Kevin C. Tofel

Securing constrained devices just took a quantum leap forward: Researchers at Washington University have figured out a more power efficient way to secure wireless transmissions from wearables and other constrained, battery-powered IoT devices. Typically security involves a random number generator releasing keys for each side of the wireless transaction, that use timing from a GPS system to make sure they are in sync. But GPS is power intensive, so instead researchers used a form of quantum tunneling to generate the random numbers in a technique they call synchronized pseudo-random-number generator (SPRNG). (TechXplore) — Stacey Higginbotham

Smart grid exec founds new smarter grid startup: Ray Bell, the former CEO and founder of both Silver Spring Network and Grid Net, has created a new company for the smart grid called Aetheros. Bell’s earlier startups focused on connecting meters to the Internet for remote readings and to help utilities understand the states of their energy grids. With Aetheros, Bell has created a middleware layer for utilities that now have to deal with their own connected equipment and interfacing with their end customers’ connected breaker boxes and vehicles. The grid is getting smarter, and Aetheros hopes to be the software layer that helps utilities and end customers navigate that intelligence. (Aetheros) — Stacey Higginbotham

Here’s a person who reviewed the Mill compost bin: Remember earlier this year when Matt Rogers, one of the Nest co-founders, released a connected composting bin? The beautifully designed bin takes food scraps and dehydrates them into chicken feed, which the consumer sends back to Mill, the company that makes the bin. Mill then distributes the feed to chicken farms. All of this costs $45 a month, but surprisingly, the reviewer loved the device. The reviewer lives in Brooklyn and is already a dedicated composter, and after testing the device for two weeks came up with a thoughtful article on the benefits of making composting easier and where such a device might fit within the overall garbage system. She even makes the case that the subscription fee might not be exorbitant, especially in cities where reducing trash production can also reduce your waste bill. I’m still not sold on the cost (although I’d love to replace my messy compost bin), but maybe we’ll see subsidies or pricing incentives that make it more accessible. (Slate) — Stacey Higginbotham

Look, it’s another Israeli OT security company: SCADAfence, an 8-year-old company that aims to boost security for operations technology networks, has scored $16 million in additional funding. This brings its total funding to $35 million. The funding comes from Fujitsu, Mitsubishi Electric, and Prosegur, all of which plan to resell or incorporate SCADAfence’s product into their own IoT offerings. (CTECH) — Stacey Higginbotham