8 ms·

When did I turn from the enthusiastic kid who dreamed of audio-controlled personal assistants like this to a cranky old man who doesn't want anything remotely s

When did I turn from the enthusiastic kid who dreamed of audio-controlled personal assistants like this to a cranky old man who doesn't want anything remotely spy-possible in his house?

fluxquanta 11y ago
I think when we were kids we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with the outside world via the internet in order to perform its function. If all of "Alexa" was included in a disconnected local database I bet it would still be as appealing. Rosie on the Jetsons didn't have to "phone home".
- arien 11y ago
  Almost. More specifically, we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with a corporation that wants our info to make (more) money. The government option doesn't sound any better, either. I think they are rather creepy, because it's so obvious there is (or, could be) a hidden agenda.
  - fluxquanta 11y ago
    While indeed creepy, I ordered the original Echo as soon as it was made available, but I'm probably a special case. I live by myself and barely even speak out loud at home. If Amazon can somehow monetize my primary use of Echo as a glorified kitchen timer I will be impressed.
    - pc86 11y ago
      $180 for a kitchen timer seems a bit steep.
      - fluxquanta 11y ago
        It was $99 (there was a special offer when it was first announced at the end of 2014).
        pc86 11y ago
        $99 for a kitchen timer seems a bit steep.
        at-fates-hands 11y ago
        Considering most smartphones already have this app on them - I'm going to agree. FREE vs. $99? No contest there my friend
        fluxquanta 11y ago
        We all spend our money how we want, and cell phones most certainly aren't free, either. Aside from that, I didn't purchase the Echo with the intent of it being primarily kitchen timer. It just so happens that after owning it for over a year my usage of it is mostly limited to that. My usage is probably around 85% timers and alarms, 10% streaming music, 4% shopping lists, and 1% everything else.
        at-fates-hands 11y ago
        I'd be interested to find out how much you still use it a year from now. Do you think you've used like you thought you would, or did you have ideas about how you might use and those didn't pan out or the device didn't work very well for those?
        fluxquanta 11y ago
        I ordered it originally purely on the "Oh, cool gadget!" factor, and I was willing to part with $99 for it. I really didn't have a particular use case in mind at the start, but I was (and still am) impressed by the sound quality from such a small speaker. It's nice to be looking in the fridge and say "Alexa add X to my shopping list" or when my hands are covered with flour say "Alexa set a timer for 30 minutes" or whatever. And for those things it's worth the cost to me. Most of the features that have rolled out just seem gimmicky, though. Take the news briefing: It either provides too little info to be useful, or it drones on and I get annoyed by the voice which, while it sounds natural compared to Microsoft Sam, still feels cold and artificial. In general I like having more control over my internet actions. I'll never use it to order a pizza or anything from Amazon because I don't know what happens if it misinterprets me or I make a mistake. And the third party apps are clunky ("Alexa, ask X to do Y"). To sum it up, aside from the very basic features I've used since day one it just feels like a toy.
      - lukeschlather 11y ago
        I would pay $180 for a voice-controlled kitchen timer which did not need an Internet connection to function and had verifiably secure command log deletion. I'm less than enthusiastic about a $180 kitchen timer that uploads everything I say to the cloud for analysis, even if I understand that the analysis is to some degree necessary to improve the voice recognition.
        sib 11y ago
        While I hear what you are saying (no pun intended), it's important to be clear that it is not uploading everything you say to the cloud. It's uploading what you say once it wakes up by detecting the wake word, which is done completely locally.
    - tenpies 11y ago
      > I live by myself and barely even speak out loud at home. It occurs to me that the background noise in your home actually reveals a whole lot about the self: - What you're listening to and when - What you're watching and when - What type of gentleman's material you enjoy and when - When you leave home and get home - When you wake up, when you go to bed Some of these can be limited by the size of your house, but the trend in urban dwellings has been towards smaller so one unit could presumably capture every sound in your home.
      - tdkl 11y ago
        And at the end someone pays money for some company to install a device to collect all this. The tech insanity has really gone far ..
        kuschku 11y ago
        Finally the Telescreen is here.
      - fluxquanta 11y ago
        Your first three points are moot in my case because, as a testament to your mentioned small apartment size, I consume all my entertainment with headphones after some real passive aggressive comments from neighbors a few years back. When I wake, sleep, leave, and come home could be monitored by Echo, but it's also already being monitored by other devices I own, and it's data I'm not particularly concerned about at the moment.
    - _snydly 11y ago
      > I live by myself and barely even speak out loud at home. Not sure how other people feel about talking out loud at home, but as someone who also lives alone (in a 250 sqft apartment) and always wears headphones, I can't really imagine talking out loud. Just seems weird for some reason. I never use Siri either. Wonder if that's a living alone thing, or a small apartment thing, or ...?
  - brooksc 11y ago
    Whenever I read these, I can't tell if the group is paranoid or prescient. But anyway I ordered one via my alexa. Amazon probably already knew I would.
  - api 11y ago
    Basically everything B2C today is a data play. Customers want everything to be cheap or free, so the only way to make money in B2C is to turn the customer into the product. It's a deflationary race to the bottom. The bottom is a hell where everything watches you and sells absolutely everything about you to whomever can afford to buy the data.
- wmeredith 11y ago
  This is exactly it for me. I'd buy an echo and a dot for every room if it didn't phone home.
- jdminhbg 11y ago
  > I think when we were kids we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with the outside world via the internet in order to perform its function. Human personal assistants were connected to the outside world -- how else would they make appointments and reservations, book flights, find out what the weather would be, etc.? The whole point is to be connected to the outside world, automatic or no.
  - gherkin0 11y ago
    > Human personal assistants were connected to the outside world... There's a difference between the "always on" communication these devices have and communication the user specifically requests. When I want to make an airline reservation, I'm requesting the device to send the booking information to the airline. I'm not asking it to send a recording to the mothership of everything that happened in my home for the last 5 hours, which a human assistant would never do.
    - fluxquanta 11y ago
      Hah, it'd be like hiring a personal assistant from a staffing agency who is constantly on the phone with the staffing agency parroting what you say.
    - sib 11y ago
      That's also not what's happening with Echo. You'd literally have a few seconds of audio being sent to Amazon and then some text (the result of the ASR) being sent to the third party ticket search / reservation system.
  - squeaky-clean 11y ago
    Sure, but I also wouldn't let a human assistant live in my bedroom 24/7 listening to everything I say. I would also choose my words and topic differently when a human assistant is around. You have to be able to trust that Echo isn't recording everything you say, unless you prefix it with "Alexa", and that this behavior will never change (say this is the behavior for the average user, but with a police warrant, they're able to tap your Echo). I'm part of the group that thinks the tradeoff is worth it for the convenience, but I understand why many people would disagree.
- kamaal 11y ago
  I wonder what sort of memory related tech it would take to pack nearly all of the internet in a small space, and have it incrementally update(the internet!) and yet write it in available memory. Besides any contact with outside world would need communication. So you can't have an entirely standalone gadget.
  - falcolas 11y ago
    Minus videos and images over a certain size... not all that much. And it would compress pretty well. I wonder if the internet archive has a record of the size required minus images.
officemonkey 11y ago
Don't forget the harried parent of a child with low impulse control. These things would be a lot less "Big Brother" for me if I had a mic key in my pocket that would only turn the mic on when I squeezed it.
- niels_olson 11y ago
  Hey buddy want to bet that Amazon is using this massive collection of voice to text to sell to other companies like Apple and Google?
  - officemonkey 11y ago
    Riight, because Siri doesn't generate enough voice data for apple.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
visakanv 11y ago
This is probably a function of the amount of bad news you've read over the years about people getting exploited, taken advantage of, spied on, etc. When you're a kid it doesn't even really seem like a thing.
- ethbro 11y ago
  When you're a kid, you generally assume people around you are all wonderful. ... Then you gain life experience. /75% jokingly
sschueller 11y ago
Couldn't legally the FBI get a court oder to be able to listen in on conversions in a room that has one of these? They already do that with car assistance services. [1] [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/court-to-fbi-no-spying-on-in-car-computers/ http://www.cnet.com/news/court-to-fbi-no-spying-on-in-car-co...
- e40 11y ago
  The answer is obviously 'yes'. If there is a way for Amazon to listen to conversations then a court can compel them to give the FBI access.
- tlrobinson 11y ago
  Echo (supposedly) doesn't start sending audio to Amazon until you trigger it with a "wake word", i.e. "Alexa". Of course: a) it's not open source so we can't be sure (aside from monitoring network traffic, which is probably encrypted) b) if the FBI is successful in compelling Apple to develop a backdoor for the iPhone there's nothing stopping them from compelling Amazon to do the same with Echo. c) better hope you don't say "Alexa" or something Echo mistakes for it.
  - e40 11y ago
    b) if the FBI is successful in compelling Apple to develop a backdoor for the iPhone there's nothing stopping them from compelling Amazon to do the same with Echo. No backdoor needed if they information is sent to Amazon. All that is needed is a court order for Amazon to hand it over.
    - tlrobinson 11y ago
      Sure, but all you'd get are commands you give Alexa ("Alexa, turn off the lights", "Alexa, what's the weather today"), which I suppose could be interesting to law enforcement, but certainly not as interesting as the "full-take" of an always-on wiretap. I'm suggesting in order for the FBI to use Echo (or any other internet connected device that has a microphone) as a wiretap, the FBI could try to compel the manufacturer to write, sign, and push an update that causes the device to transmit audio to the FBI at any point. That would have seemed a little far fetched in the past, but the current FBI/Apple situation could set a precedent.
monkmartinez 11y ago
The enthusiastic kid would probably get distracted and discouraged when X can not do "What I really want, like Ironman." While the "cranky" old man has been mis-characterized as "cranky" because "cranky" is often confused with wisdom and experience.
revelation 11y ago
The moment you clamored for MIT embedded Linux software and the "let's kill all the GPL it's bad for startups" meme came up. So now this cool audio controlled personal assistant is just another gadget to buy more stuff from Amazon, instead of something you control.
- michaelt 11y ago
  Is this voice recognition stuff based on MIT-licensed open source speech recognition? I have a project that would benefit from good quality speech recognition.
  - revelation 11y ago
    Well, no, that's the other thing: "let's put everything in the cloud so nobody owns anything anymore!". Voice recognition is done on some Amazon server. If it goes down or changes API in five years, it will render this thing a brick.
danielrm26 11y ago
We'll be dead soon. Enjoy the little things.
- baby 11y ago
  Nice try NSA.
joshmanders 11y ago
In hindsight it all sounds amazing and ignoring the spy-possibilties, it gets old fast. I don't use Siri, and I can do alot of this with it. But since I got the first Siri enabled device, I've used it mostly just for joking around and my daughter asks her hockey scores. That's the extent of it.
edw519 11y ago
Exactly when did UnconventionalButTotallyLogical = CrankyOldMan ?
runjake 11y ago
Because when we dreamed of this as kids, the thought of the corporations behind these technologies that harvest our data for their gain didn't come up.
ryandrake 11y ago
I love "smart" devices, but hate "devices that needlessly insist on connecting to the Internet". One of the worst offenders is Dropcam. They have a super camera, easy to set up and use. Great picture quality. Would be an awesome baby monitor or "closed circuit TV replacement". But why the goddamn hell does it need to connect to the Internet? Why is the only option available to needlessly stream video out of my home network to the cloud, only so that I can then stream it back into my home network for viewing??? WTF? That's both a waste of outbound bandwidth and a waste of inbound bandwidth. I should be able to put it on my network, switch off the cable modem, and still be able to view video locally. How hard is that? I could do that with a webcam and a really long USB cable!
- tdkl 11y ago
  Ease of setup for regular Jane/Joe because they know shit all about router configuration. That's why devices just transfer everything over someone else computer a.k.a. "teh cloud".
- oaktowner 11y ago
  Their business model depends on some percentage of their customers using the subscription service. My guess is: if they offered the version you describe, they'd need to make it much more expensive. Which many consumers would find odd: the one with fewer features would cost much more. Granted, those consumers wouldn't be looking at the big picture...but I find many consumers don't. Up front costs matter a lot to consumers.
- Paul-ish 11y ago
  As dumb as it sounds, it is probably easier that way. Sometimes in LANs it is easier to get data out then back in. For example, a lot of dorm networks don't support Chromecast devices because chromecasts tries to multicast on the LAN for discovery, but dorms have networking policies that prevent this. A webcam that sends the data out to the internet then back would avoid the discovery issue by using an external webserver as a rendezvous point. I don't think people spend a lot of time thinking about their home networking. You could imagine most people just plug in their home routers and it is a crapshoot whether or not the router will support the necessary functionality, whereas a router will always enable communication to the outside world (or people would return it ASAP). With that said, this seems like a straightforward technical problem that may have technical solutions.
hyperbovine 11y ago
Yet I'm guessing you carry a smart phone in your pocket almost everywhere you go.
- jegutman 11y ago
  But phones don't have a microphone on them do they? :-)
  - bussierem 11y ago
    (should I tell him, guys?)
  - hyperbovine 11y ago
    Uhm, what?
    - jegutman 11y ago
      Sorry, I thought the smiley face would've been enough to give away the sarcasm. For some reason the /s felt like it removed the infinitesimal amount of comedy from my post.
wahsd 11y ago
When you realized that the government was making an all out assault on the most fundamental American rights and the civilian sector did absolutely nothing to assure your privacy and anonymity out of sheer greed and narrow minded foolishness that they would be undermining their own success. I am sure you would not have a problem using these kinds of systems if it were assured that you could not be tracked or monitored because the devices and systems were secured in overlapping ways.

When did I turn from the enthusiastic kid who dreamed of audio-controlled personal assistants like this to a cranky old man who doesn't want anything remotely spy-possible in his house?

fluxquanta 11y ago

I think when we were kids we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with the outside world via the internet in order to perform its function. If all of "Alexa" was included in a disconnected local database I bet it would still be as appealing. Rosie on the Jetsons didn't have to "phone home".

arien 11y ago
Almost. More specifically, we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with a corporation that wants our info to make (more) money. The government option doesn't sound any better, either. I think they are rather creepy, because it's so obvious there is (or, could be) a hidden agenda.
- fluxquanta 11y ago
  While indeed creepy, I ordered the original Echo as soon as it was made available, but I'm probably a special case. I live by myself and barely even speak out loud at home. If Amazon can somehow monetize my primary use of Echo as a glorified kitchen timer I will be impressed.
  - pc86 11y ago
    $180 for a kitchen timer seems a bit steep.
    - fluxquanta 11y ago
      It was $99 (there was a special offer when it was first announced at the end of 2014).
      - pc86 11y ago
        $99 for a kitchen timer seems a bit steep.
        at-fates-hands 11y ago
        Considering most smartphones already have this app on them - I'm going to agree. FREE vs. $99? No contest there my friend
        fluxquanta 11y ago
        We all spend our money how we want, and cell phones most certainly aren't free, either. Aside from that, I didn't purchase the Echo with the intent of it being primarily kitchen timer. It just so happens that after owning it for over a year my usage of it is mostly limited to that. My usage is probably around 85% timers and alarms, 10% streaming music, 4% shopping lists, and 1% everything else.
        at-fates-hands 11y ago
        I'd be interested to find out how much you still use it a year from now. Do you think you've used like you thought you would, or did you have ideas about how you might use and those didn't pan out or the device didn't work very well for those?
        fluxquanta 11y ago
        I ordered it originally purely on the "Oh, cool gadget!" factor, and I was willing to part with $99 for it. I really didn't have a particular use case in mind at the start, but I was (and still am) impressed by the sound quality from such a small speaker. It's nice to be looking in the fridge and say "Alexa add X to my shopping list" or when my hands are covered with flour say "Alexa set a timer for 30 minutes" or whatever. And for those things it's worth the cost to me. Most of the features that have rolled out just seem gimmicky, though. Take the news briefing: It either provides too little info to be useful, or it drones on and I get annoyed by the voice which, while it sounds natural compared to Microsoft Sam, still feels cold and artificial. In general I like having more control over my internet actions. I'll never use it to order a pizza or anything from Amazon because I don't know what happens if it misinterprets me or I make a mistake. And the third party apps are clunky ("Alexa, ask X to do Y"). To sum it up, aside from the very basic features I've used since day one it just feels like a toy.
    - lukeschlather 11y ago
      I would pay $180 for a voice-controlled kitchen timer which did not need an Internet connection to function and had verifiably secure command log deletion. I'm less than enthusiastic about a $180 kitchen timer that uploads everything I say to the cloud for analysis, even if I understand that the analysis is to some degree necessary to improve the voice recognition.
      - sib 11y ago
        While I hear what you are saying (no pun intended), it's important to be clear that it is not uploading everything you say to the cloud. It's uploading what you say once it wakes up by detecting the wake word, which is done completely locally.
  - tenpies 11y ago
    > I live by myself and barely even speak out loud at home. It occurs to me that the background noise in your home actually reveals a whole lot about the self: - What you're listening to and when - What you're watching and when - What type of gentleman's material you enjoy and when - When you leave home and get home - When you wake up, when you go to bed Some of these can be limited by the size of your house, but the trend in urban dwellings has been towards smaller so one unit could presumably capture every sound in your home.
    - tdkl 11y ago
      And at the end someone pays money for some company to install a device to collect all this. The tech insanity has really gone far ..
      - kuschku 11y ago
        Finally the Telescreen is here.
    - fluxquanta 11y ago
      Your first three points are moot in my case because, as a testament to your mentioned small apartment size, I consume all my entertainment with headphones after some real passive aggressive comments from neighbors a few years back. When I wake, sleep, leave, and come home could be monitored by Echo, but it's also already being monitored by other devices I own, and it's data I'm not particularly concerned about at the moment.
  - _snydly 11y ago
    > I live by myself and barely even speak out loud at home. Not sure how other people feel about talking out loud at home, but as someone who also lives alone (in a 250 sqft apartment) and always wears headphones, I can't really imagine talking out loud. Just seems weird for some reason. I never use Siri either. Wonder if that's a living alone thing, or a small apartment thing, or ...?
- brooksc 11y ago
  Whenever I read these, I can't tell if the group is paranoid or prescient. But anyway I ordered one via my alexa. Amazon probably already knew I would.
- api 11y ago
  Basically everything B2C today is a data play. Customers want everything to be cheap or free, so the only way to make money in B2C is to turn the customer into the product. It's a deflationary race to the bottom. The bottom is a hell where everything watches you and sells absolutely everything about you to whomever can afford to buy the data.
wmeredith 11y ago
This is exactly it for me. I'd buy an echo and a dot for every room if it didn't phone home.
jdminhbg 11y ago
> I think when we were kids we didn't think that the personal assistant would have to communicate with the outside world via the internet in order to perform its function. Human personal assistants were connected to the outside world -- how else would they make appointments and reservations, book flights, find out what the weather would be, etc.? The whole point is to be connected to the outside world, automatic or no.
- gherkin0 11y ago
  > Human personal assistants were connected to the outside world... There's a difference between the "always on" communication these devices have and communication the user specifically requests. When I want to make an airline reservation, I'm requesting the device to send the booking information to the airline. I'm not asking it to send a recording to the mothership of everything that happened in my home for the last 5 hours, which a human assistant would never do.
  - fluxquanta 11y ago
    Hah, it'd be like hiring a personal assistant from a staffing agency who is constantly on the phone with the staffing agency parroting what you say.
  - sib 11y ago
    That's also not what's happening with Echo. You'd literally have a few seconds of audio being sent to Amazon and then some text (the result of the ASR) being sent to the third party ticket search / reservation system.
- squeaky-clean 11y ago
  Sure, but I also wouldn't let a human assistant live in my bedroom 24/7 listening to everything I say. I would also choose my words and topic differently when a human assistant is around. You have to be able to trust that Echo isn't recording everything you say, unless you prefix it with "Alexa", and that this behavior will never change (say this is the behavior for the average user, but with a police warrant, they're able to tap your Echo). I'm part of the group that thinks the tradeoff is worth it for the convenience, but I understand why many people would disagree.
kamaal 11y ago
I wonder what sort of memory related tech it would take to pack nearly all of the internet in a small space, and have it incrementally update(the internet!) and yet write it in available memory. Besides any contact with outside world would need communication. So you can't have an entirely standalone gadget.
- falcolas 11y ago
  Minus videos and images over a certain size... not all that much. And it would compress pretty well. I wonder if the internet archive has a record of the size required minus images.

officemonkey 11y ago

Don't forget the harried parent of a child with low impulse control. These things would be a lot less "Big Brother" for me if I had a mic key in my pocket that would only turn the mic on when I squeezed it.

niels_olson 11y ago
Hey buddy want to bet that Amazon is using this massive collection of voice to text to sell to other companies like Apple and Google?
- officemonkey 11y ago
  Riight, because Siri doesn't generate enough voice data for apple.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]

visakanv 11y ago

This is probably a function of the amount of bad news you've read over the years about people getting exploited, taken advantage of, spied on, etc. When you're a kid it doesn't even really seem like a thing.

ethbro 11y ago
When you're a kid, you generally assume people around you are all wonderful. ... Then you gain life experience. /75% jokingly

sschueller 11y ago

Couldn't legally the FBI get a court oder to be able to listen in on conversions in a room that has one of these? They already do that with car assistance services. [1] [1] http://www.cnet.com/news/court-to-fbi-no-spying-on-in-car-computers/ http://www.cnet.com/news/court-to-fbi-no-spying-on-in-car-co...

e40 11y ago
The answer is obviously 'yes'. If there is a way for Amazon to listen to conversations then a court can compel them to give the FBI access.
tlrobinson 11y ago
Echo (supposedly) doesn't start sending audio to Amazon until you trigger it with a "wake word", i.e. "Alexa". Of course: a) it's not open source so we can't be sure (aside from monitoring network traffic, which is probably encrypted) b) if the FBI is successful in compelling Apple to develop a backdoor for the iPhone there's nothing stopping them from compelling Amazon to do the same with Echo. c) better hope you don't say "Alexa" or something Echo mistakes for it.
- e40 11y ago
  b) if the FBI is successful in compelling Apple to develop a backdoor for the iPhone there's nothing stopping them from compelling Amazon to do the same with Echo. No backdoor needed if they information is sent to Amazon. All that is needed is a court order for Amazon to hand it over.
  - tlrobinson 11y ago
    Sure, but all you'd get are commands you give Alexa ("Alexa, turn off the lights", "Alexa, what's the weather today"), which I suppose could be interesting to law enforcement, but certainly not as interesting as the "full-take" of an always-on wiretap. I'm suggesting in order for the FBI to use Echo (or any other internet connected device that has a microphone) as a wiretap, the FBI could try to compel the manufacturer to write, sign, and push an update that causes the device to transmit audio to the FBI at any point. That would have seemed a little far fetched in the past, but the current FBI/Apple situation could set a precedent.

monkmartinez 11y ago

The enthusiastic kid would probably get distracted and discouraged when X can not do "What I really want, like Ironman." While the "cranky" old man has been mis-characterized as "cranky" because "cranky" is often confused with wisdom and experience.

revelation 11y ago

The moment you clamored for MIT embedded Linux software and the "let's kill all the GPL it's bad for startups" meme came up. So now this cool audio controlled personal assistant is just another gadget to buy more stuff from Amazon, instead of something you control.

michaelt 11y ago
Is this voice recognition stuff based on MIT-licensed open source speech recognition? I have a project that would benefit from good quality speech recognition.
- revelation 11y ago
  Well, no, that's the other thing: "let's put everything in the cloud so nobody owns anything anymore!". Voice recognition is done on some Amazon server. If it goes down or changes API in five years, it will render this thing a brick.

danielrm26 11y ago

We'll be dead soon. Enjoy the little things.

baby 11y ago
Nice try NSA.

joshmanders 11y ago

In hindsight it all sounds amazing and ignoring the spy-possibilties, it gets old fast. I don't use Siri, and I can do alot of this with it. But since I got the first Siri enabled device, I've used it mostly just for joking around and my daughter asks her hockey scores. That's the extent of it.

edw519 11y ago

Exactly when did UnconventionalButTotallyLogical = CrankyOldMan ?

runjake 11y ago

Because when we dreamed of this as kids, the thought of the corporations behind these technologies that harvest our data for their gain didn't come up.

ryandrake 11y ago

I love "smart" devices, but hate "devices that needlessly insist on connecting to the Internet". One of the worst offenders is Dropcam. They have a super camera, easy to set up and use. Great picture quality. Would be an awesome baby monitor or "closed circuit TV replacement". But why the goddamn hell does it need to connect to the Internet? Why is the only option available to needlessly stream video out of my home network to the cloud, only so that I can then stream it back into my home network for viewing??? WTF? That's both a waste of outbound bandwidth and a waste of inbound bandwidth. I should be able to put it on my network, switch off the cable modem, and still be able to view video locally. How hard is that? I could do that with a webcam and a really long USB cable!

tdkl 11y ago
Ease of setup for regular Jane/Joe because they know shit all about router configuration. That's why devices just transfer everything over someone else computer a.k.a. "teh cloud".
oaktowner 11y ago
Their business model depends on some percentage of their customers using the subscription service. My guess is: if they offered the version you describe, they'd need to make it much more expensive. Which many consumers would find odd: the one with fewer features would cost much more. Granted, those consumers wouldn't be looking at the big picture...but I find many consumers don't. Up front costs matter a lot to consumers.
Paul-ish 11y ago
As dumb as it sounds, it is probably easier that way. Sometimes in LANs it is easier to get data out then back in. For example, a lot of dorm networks don't support Chromecast devices because chromecasts tries to multicast on the LAN for discovery, but dorms have networking policies that prevent this. A webcam that sends the data out to the internet then back would avoid the discovery issue by using an external webserver as a rendezvous point. I don't think people spend a lot of time thinking about their home networking. You could imagine most people just plug in their home routers and it is a crapshoot whether or not the router will support the necessary functionality, whereas a router will always enable communication to the outside world (or people would return it ASAP). With that said, this seems like a straightforward technical problem that may have technical solutions.

hyperbovine 11y ago

Yet I'm guessing you carry a smart phone in your pocket almost everywhere you go.

jegutman 11y ago
But phones don't have a microphone on them do they? :-)
- bussierem 11y ago
  (should I tell him, guys?)
- hyperbovine 11y ago
  Uhm, what?
  - jegutman 11y ago
    Sorry, I thought the smiley face would've been enough to give away the sarcasm. For some reason the /s felt like it removed the infinitesimal amount of comedy from my post.

wahsd 11y ago

When you realized that the government was making an all out assault on the most fundamental American rights and the civilian sector did absolutely nothing to assure your privacy and anonymity out of sheer greed and narrow minded foolishness that they would be undermining their own success. I am sure you would not have a problem using these kinds of systems if it were assured that you could not be tracked or monitored because the devices and systems were secured in overlapping ways.