Wyze - Still Sending Data Back to China
Wyze's recent line of thermostats have involved a mysterious partner from China, a company known as Degrii. We look into what little is known about Degrii, and follow the technical data, across the next series of posts, back to Beijing.
Somewhat recently, Wyze launched a thermostat with the company Degrii.
What’s Degrii?
Not much is known about Degrii. It seems to handle the scheduling of thermostat temperature rules, as well as interconnect the various devices that make up the power and cooling of a home or house.
Their site, a Shopify front end where the main content is just the front splash page, only contains the following other pages:
They have a lot of users, almost all through Wyze, as the following quote demonstrates:
Wyze Smart Thermostat, the product we developed in collaboration with Wyze, has earned the trust of 300,000 active users.
Their seems to be a lot of technology in what they offer / bring to the Wyze platform:
With over one hundred patents involving particle aerodynamics, mechanical systems, and artificial intelligence, Degrii never ceases to break the limits and create better smart home devices.
They also list the following “Cooperated Partners” [sic]:
Finally, there is mention of something called the “Mars” thermostats:
Degrii DNS:
For over a year, Degrii/Wyze hosted with Alibaba, a major Chinese cloud provider. To their credit, they seem to have gone with at least the US-side of the small remaining American operation that Alibaba has left.
If we dive into the particular IP address (47.88.60.185) that Degrii was hosting on during that time, we can see that they shared it with a company known as “petsupplier.cn”:
By investigating that domain, we will see that the real name of the company Degrii co-hosted with for over a year is the “Dongguan Wanshun Ribbon Company”.
Who is the Dongguan Wanshun Ribbon Company?
The websites wsribbon.com and juststrap.com, mentioned in the screenshot above, do not appear to be active anymore, and the Facebook page has not been posted on since 2019. What is going on here?
For now though, we will pull on another thread.
Zhongqing Technologies:
If we examine the patents and trademarks that Degrii has filed, we see that the attorneys for a company called Beijing Zhongqing Technologies, also known as CoClean, have appeared to have filed them.
Who is Beijing Zhongqing Technologies, and what is their association with CoClean? We will answer this question in the following post in a few weeks.