 Tom here from Lauren systems and I shared my thoughts on the firewall in a previous video You'll find link down below But I wanted to share my thoughts and why I was so critical and why I still am and going forward don't plan to change my mind About these cloud focused or cloud only type of firewalls And it's because it's been done and failed and burned many people before now I'm just not gonna dive completely into every IoT device that was purchased has a cloud lock-in and that IoT company went out of business or decided to stop servicing their cloud controller and then the devices all go defunct We're gonna narrow it down to just a couple of them because I've had interaction with these companies Specifically Winston which I was emailing back and forth with back in 2019 with Winston privacy and their tall claims of privacy That kind of didn't make sense to me They seemed a very overstated and there was so much excitement in news articles that I just felt like it was all hype and it turns out Well, they burned everybody and kind of went defunct and so did the Kujo firewall who also burned people But let's go down memory lane and talk about those because I figured hey Why not discuss this a little bit of context of history of what happened to those cloud firewalls before? I was not ever and you won't find any Videos in my channel because I never did sign up for sponsorship with either one of these companies I just felt they weren't at all a good quality product and it turns out I was right I just didn't have to look anything beyond the terrible marketing to get that impression now The first one we're gonna talk about is Kujo the smart way to fight hacking Kujo smart firewall Protects your home and business from hackers and ships the next business day good marketing here and really cute branding They got these little eyes that light up on it to tell you things about it Some of the images are broke But I think we have a couple of me probably means different things when the eyes are half open or fully open You know letting you know whether that it's got an eye on those hackers maybe 329 thousand six hundred eighty six dollars by four thousand five hundred ninety four backers and Hey, that's nice and there's all kinds of nice tech articles And there's good reviews of these you know Kujo a smite firewall for today's connected devices and nice articles about it But much less nice is when security researchers and actual cyber security people take a look at it The cute branding didn't get by the team over at Talos and they had a whole summary of all the flaws in this device It just was not built. Well, it wasn't a great device and Not only that we'll scroll right here to the important part in 2021 Kujo AI decided to discontinue their home security firewall named Kujo despite selling a lifetime License because the clouds free forever folks We want to avoid subscription fees and I always look at are these business models by these companies? Sustainable on the product and I looked at this when they had reached out to me and I said, this is junk I don't understand this very well They make a lot of claims but you know once the bad articles started coming out in real security people took a look at it And of course they go. Well, we're in trouble. Let's discontinue it And of course everyone's firewall went belly up and that was the end of Kujo Well Kujo firewall Kujo AI is an American network intelligence software company So I think they took that money and set up putting a product and just built something else and pivoted into other Areas the next one and I had some back and forth because I didn't believe their claims either Winston take back control of your online privacy plug-and-play hardware That reclaims your use of the internet on all connected devices a home stop tracking spying and hacking And I'm like you're gonna stop hacking by plugging in a magic box We're gonna eliminate my problem with advertisers big tech and data brokers and ISPs and it's a lot of claims with a very little technical details I tried emailing them and only got replies back that were also pretty vague I a lot of people back when this was popular asking me about it because once again He had lots of good articles and it raised quite a bit of funding over half a million dollars so five hundred fourteen thousand six hundred sixty nine dollars and smaller number of hackers so people are you know willing to pay a little more we Have their website that I have to pull off of the archive because it's dead and Yeah, that's it the websites got all these claims on it But none of it matters because if you go to their actual website the websites gone and once again There was the next web had popular articles about it a fast company had popular articles about it But they went belly up and then all those turned into bricks and didn't do any of the things that they claimed Now leave links down below to those devices the kujo in a Winston So you can go through the history if you're curious yourself about them But my bigger point is these are the things you should be looking for Companies that make overstated claims that seem too good to be true offer you a free cloud forever with no subscription fees And all the things we like to hear but you have to consider what's gonna happen If those companies can't sustain or run out of that large investment of capital that started will they sell enough product? Will they sell enough? Subscriptions if they have any or will they switch it from non-subscription to subscription to try to sustain the cloud and if the Cloud goes away What's your risk? You bought a device that costs x and you hoped it would work for at least a few years But when the cloud goes away, it's more than just the subscription with these that go away and the threat intelligence feeds Some of them will probably completely stop working all together Winston had some type of mesh network They were trying to build and without the cloud controller to coordinate all that it kind of quits working all together And that whole site is gone and it all just kind of fell apart and everyone that had it is been left with a little Brick-sit in there that I don't know maybe if you're an enter pricing hacker You can do something else with but that isn't why you bought it and that's my point is just to be suspicious and raise awareness As always love hearing from you leave your thoughts and comments down below Let me know if there's an IOT company that burns you that you got a little bit too Well clued close to you said I want this cool IOT device and app and then it went defunct I know there's plenty of them out there So hey at least in comments and some of the ones that you know are memorable in your mind These are memorable to me because I had actually interacted and had people ask me years ago on YouTube Hey, what do you think of these and the company had actually reached out to me with their affiliate program? And I just had no interest in it So the that's why I brought these ones up and I do cover a lot of firewalls But leave your comments and your thoughts down below if you want to see more content from this channel like and subscribe And if you want to engage with me on this or other topics I've talked about head over to forums. Lawrence systems calm or just learn systems calm and hit me up on whatever socials I'm connected to at the time you're watching this video. All right and thanks you