You can sell them in good faith, as long as you explain that the back end service will end in December. Then someone who doesn't know that will not get ripped off, but someone who wants a cam to hack could be happy to get them.
My gf sold a broken dishwasher this week; her ad was pretty explicit as to its condition (multiple problems) but someone came by and happily bought it. He turned out to be an appliance tech and said he knew exactly how to fix it and then could resell it.
I wonder whether Amazon could be convinced to free the specs required to hack these devices. That would spare them from the eWaste bin. Perhaps craft an open letter and get other owners to sign it? I’m sure HN would help spread the word….
The real lesson here is never to buy cloud enabled hardware. The vendor will always pull the plug eventually.
> On the bright side, Amazon will send a complementary Blink Mini (plus a year of Blink Subscription Plus) to all affected customers. The Blink Mini is nearly identical to the old Cloud Cam, though of course, its a bit more modern and offers better integration with Alexa devices.
I'm going to send mine to ewaste.
Ending support for hardware made exclusively for an online platform with no offline or local network support is infuriating.
I think it depends on what every other customer does now. If everyone floods the second hand market with second hand, soft-bricked cameras because Amazon hates the planet for some reason, people might buy them and hack them.
I don't expect anyone interested in running their own firmware will be buying spyware from Amazon, though, so existing support is pretty much non-existent. It's only a matter of time before someone will take this opportunity to find security flaws in the software, which will no longer be patched, and hopefully you'll be able to use your camera again.
If you have the space, stuff it into your attic and wait, or get hacking yourself if you have the time. Otherwise, at least take it to a recycler to lessen the environmental impact of this crap just a tiny bit.