7 ms·

We are all used to SaaS randomly getting obsoleted, but when you buy a physical device you kind of expect to own it forever. But no, cloud and IoT means even yo

by zelly 7y ago

We are all used to SaaS randomly getting obsoleted, but when you buy a physical device you kind of expect to own it forever. But no, cloud and IoT means even your physical stuff are SaaS products. Just stop buying the trash.

ansible 7y ago
You might enjoy Cory Doctorow's recent book "Radicalized": https://craphound.com/category/radicalized-full/ https://craphound.com/category/radicalized-full/ The protagonist starts out by jail-breaking her toaster, which was designed on only toast authorized bread. However, the company that produced it went out of business (taken over by a hedge fund), and the authentication servers were shut down, so now the toaster couldn't toast anything.
- simonebrunozzi 7y ago
  That's hilarious, if not sad.
  - ansible 7y ago
    Hilarious and sad describe much of Doctorow's work. Though I'd characterize "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" as superbly creepy.
sixdimensional 7y ago
Ah, the “digital transformation”, where hardware becomes a service, and you lose control of it, and corporations extract an income stream from you ad infinitum. While great advances come from availability of technology at a reduced up-front price, at what cost to the basic principles and advantages of ownership, privacy, cost depreciation, long term use of assets, etc. has our new world come? This is a good reminder that “all magic, comes with a price”!
- Bartweiss 7y ago
  Microsoft used to run Zune ads to the effect that it "cost $30,000" to fill an iPod, while you could get everything you wanted on a Zune for just $15 a month! As many people pointed out, what this actually meant was that a permanent music collection for a Zune cost infinity dollars. Admittedly, at $15/month you could get 166 years of subscription for that $30k. Unless, of course, Microsoft shuttered the program - which they did within a decade. Meanwhile, my decade-old iPod nano still works fine and is still a pretty good music player to take on runs. And really, that was the best case. Microsoft supported their legacy setup long after they stopped selling it, then finally offered refunds and support for importing playlists to Spotify. Newer, post-transformation services have dropped all pretense of guarantees or ownership; the Kindle Store revokes access to titles or whole collections so casually that the words "your library" are essentially a bad joke. Even news has gone the same way. I had a very bad moment the first time I went to link someone to an article and found that the body had been completely rewritten with no editor's note (and not for correctness). News companies aren't profiting on the transition like music sellers did, but basic concepts like newspaper archives and the "paper of record" are thrown into doubt by the loss of ownership and content stability. The story about farmers hacking back ownership of their tractors is surprising only because it's a bit ahead of the curve on hardware. We're still in the early days of this hardware-as-a-service transition, and it's going produce much uglier surprises than the ones we got with software.
nine_k 7y ago
Can't help but quote: «“the "Internet of Things" won't work until the "Local Area Network of Things" works», seen here on HN [1]. There's significantly less money in it, though, and more hassle. It's not going to become popular enough until people get burned enough with vendors going out of business, or just stopping support, and making their convenient $199 gadgets obsolete. In a sense, a large company like Nest pulling his off is a good thing: it sends the signal. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15721911#15726960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15721911#15726960
- derefr 7y ago
  I would say that the Local Area Network of Things has existed for decades, but the intricacies of its deployment means that so far, it’s required a network admin to set up. The most classical example of such “things” are softphones. They need their own vxlan and switch QOS policies and so forth, to function the way people expect phones to work (rather than flaking out when someone is torrenting.) Softphone deployments exist in plenty of enterprises, but have you ever heard of a SOHO deployment of softphones (where the phones are PBX extensions and can call each-other over the LAN; not where the phones are distinct phone-company DIDs sending IP packets through the gateway, out over the internet, and to the the phone company’s PBX terminus, just to talk to one-another)? Until we get SOHO router-gateways smart enough to make such a SOHO softphone deployment “installation-free”, we’ll probably never see LANoT.
  - nine_k 7y ago
    Internet routing in general used to require some solid engineering knowledge. Still, home routers that mostly work out of the box exist, and the learning curve is approachable for people with enough special needs not covered by the default settings. It took some protocols to be designed and widely deployed, from DHCP to mDNS and STUN. But this has been done, and it mostly works. Running a RAID array was once as enterprisey as it gets. Now you can buy a RAID-ready box (something like Synology) and have a reasonable default configuration, or configure to your taste if you have a general knowledge of what you're doing. I suppose that LANoT is going to develop eventually into something easy enough to deploy, too. Re softphones: since US cable providers effectively sell softphones as a part of the cable package, they have every incentive to prevent home routers from allowing to easily set it up for free. OTOH the QoS settings are there in the routers firmwares for that same reason, and desktop / mobile softphones (aka "internet messengers") can use that if they care enough.
Semaphor 7y ago
All my smart home devices (excluding Alexa, one day I'll get around to setting up snips.ai, but for now at least it's only an extra interface and nothing I depend on) will keep working without internet – without a problem. The problem is with the always-on things. It's the same with computer games. But as long as people keep buying singleplayer games that require an internet connection and smart home devices that stop working without one, companies will keep producing them.
- TeMPOraL 7y ago
  > But as long as people keep buying singleplayer games that require an internet connection and smart home devices that stop working without one, companies will keep producing them. Wish it was that simple. With IoT, companies practicing dishonest and abusive business practices, like tying appliances to their SaaS and turning them from products into services, can get VC investment and simply outmarket the honest companies. Meanwhile, society develops antibodies slowly, so regular people are mostly unable to tell they're being taken advantage of (though cases like this help build this awareness). Consumers don't "vote with their wallets" for perfect solutions, they choose from what's on the market - and the market is saturated with bad actors right now. As for games, it ain't easy either. Games are not commodities. The choice isn't between buying single player games requiring Internet connection and single player games not requiring it. The choice is between buying such Internet-tied games and not buying the next installment of your favorite franchise at all; between accepting abusive levels of DRM and the fact you're only renting, or not participating in the gaming culture.
Yhippa 7y ago
Wait, are Nest products no longer functional after this change?
- deadmutex 7y ago
  They still work, there is also Works with Assistant (instead of works with Nest). Though the new API isn't as low level, so if you're doing DIY smart home some functionality isn't there. I actually welcome some of these (one google account, instead of separate nest+google accounts) changes, as it will make things easier to setup for my parents, etc.
- Rebelgecko 7y ago
  Initially Google said that Nest devices would no longer have 3rd party integration, you could only use them as part of the Google Assistant ecosystem. Probably the 2 most common people that got screwed by this are people that use IFTTT and people that control their thermostat with an Alexa. Google is walking back some of their earlier statements and saying they may allow certain "trusted" partners to keep using the old API, so Alexa users may end up being OK. Another less common use case (but one that affects me) is using their developer API to take a bit more control over things. I use it to log temp/humidity data for my place, and to control my thermostat using Home Assistant.

by zelly 7y ago

ansible 7y ago

You might enjoy Cory Doctorow's recent book "Radicalized": https://craphound.com/category/radicalized-full/ https://craphound.com/category/radicalized-full/ The protagonist starts out by jail-breaking her toaster, which was designed on only toast authorized bread. However, the company that produced it went out of business (taken over by a hedge fund), and the authentication servers were shut down, so now the toaster couldn't toast anything.

simonebrunozzi 7y ago
That's hilarious, if not sad.
- ansible 7y ago
  Hilarious and sad describe much of Doctorow's work. Though I'd characterize "Someone Comes to Town, Someone Leaves Town" as superbly creepy.

sixdimensional 7y ago

Ah, the “digital transformation”, where hardware becomes a service, and you lose control of it, and corporations extract an income stream from you ad infinitum. While great advances come from availability of technology at a reduced up-front price, at what cost to the basic principles and advantages of ownership, privacy, cost depreciation, long term use of assets, etc. has our new world come? This is a good reminder that “all magic, comes with a price”!

Bartweiss 7y ago
Microsoft used to run Zune ads to the effect that it "cost $30,000" to fill an iPod, while you could get everything you wanted on a Zune for just $15 a month! As many people pointed out, what this actually meant was that a permanent music collection for a Zune cost infinity dollars. Admittedly, at $15/month you could get 166 years of subscription for that $30k. Unless, of course, Microsoft shuttered the program - which they did within a decade. Meanwhile, my decade-old iPod nano still works fine and is still a pretty good music player to take on runs. And really, that was the best case. Microsoft supported their legacy setup long after they stopped selling it, then finally offered refunds and support for importing playlists to Spotify. Newer, post-transformation services have dropped all pretense of guarantees or ownership; the Kindle Store revokes access to titles or whole collections so casually that the words "your library" are essentially a bad joke. Even news has gone the same way. I had a very bad moment the first time I went to link someone to an article and found that the body had been completely rewritten with no editor's note (and not for correctness). News companies aren't profiting on the transition like music sellers did, but basic concepts like newspaper archives and the "paper of record" are thrown into doubt by the loss of ownership and content stability. The story about farmers hacking back ownership of their tractors is surprising only because it's a bit ahead of the curve on hardware. We're still in the early days of this hardware-as-a-service transition, and it's going produce much uglier surprises than the ones we got with software.

nine_k 7y ago

Can't help but quote: «“the "Internet of Things" won't work until the "Local Area Network of Things" works», seen here on HN [1]. There's significantly less money in it, though, and more hassle. It's not going to become popular enough until people get burned enough with vendors going out of business, or just stopping support, and making their convenient $199 gadgets obsolete. In a sense, a large company like Nest pulling his off is a good thing: it sends the signal. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15721911#15726960 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15721911#15726960

derefr 7y ago
I would say that the Local Area Network of Things has existed for decades, but the intricacies of its deployment means that so far, it’s required a network admin to set up. The most classical example of such “things” are softphones. They need their own vxlan and switch QOS policies and so forth, to function the way people expect phones to work (rather than flaking out when someone is torrenting.) Softphone deployments exist in plenty of enterprises, but have you ever heard of a SOHO deployment of softphones (where the phones are PBX extensions and can call each-other over the LAN; not where the phones are distinct phone-company DIDs sending IP packets through the gateway, out over the internet, and to the the phone company’s PBX terminus, just to talk to one-another)? Until we get SOHO router-gateways smart enough to make such a SOHO softphone deployment “installation-free”, we’ll probably never see LANoT.
- nine_k 7y ago
  Internet routing in general used to require some solid engineering knowledge. Still, home routers that mostly work out of the box exist, and the learning curve is approachable for people with enough special needs not covered by the default settings. It took some protocols to be designed and widely deployed, from DHCP to mDNS and STUN. But this has been done, and it mostly works. Running a RAID array was once as enterprisey as it gets. Now you can buy a RAID-ready box (something like Synology) and have a reasonable default configuration, or configure to your taste if you have a general knowledge of what you're doing. I suppose that LANoT is going to develop eventually into something easy enough to deploy, too. Re softphones: since US cable providers effectively sell softphones as a part of the cable package, they have every incentive to prevent home routers from allowing to easily set it up for free. OTOH the QoS settings are there in the routers firmwares for that same reason, and desktop / mobile softphones (aka "internet messengers") can use that if they care enough.

Semaphor 7y ago

All my smart home devices (excluding Alexa, one day I'll get around to setting up snips.ai, but for now at least it's only an extra interface and nothing I depend on) will keep working without internet – without a problem. The problem is with the always-on things. It's the same with computer games. But as long as people keep buying singleplayer games that require an internet connection and smart home devices that stop working without one, companies will keep producing them.

TeMPOraL 7y ago
> But as long as people keep buying singleplayer games that require an internet connection and smart home devices that stop working without one, companies will keep producing them. Wish it was that simple. With IoT, companies practicing dishonest and abusive business practices, like tying appliances to their SaaS and turning them from products into services, can get VC investment and simply outmarket the honest companies. Meanwhile, society develops antibodies slowly, so regular people are mostly unable to tell they're being taken advantage of (though cases like this help build this awareness). Consumers don't "vote with their wallets" for perfect solutions, they choose from what's on the market - and the market is saturated with bad actors right now. As for games, it ain't easy either. Games are not commodities. The choice isn't between buying single player games requiring Internet connection and single player games not requiring it. The choice is between buying such Internet-tied games and not buying the next installment of your favorite franchise at all; between accepting abusive levels of DRM and the fact you're only renting, or not participating in the gaming culture.

Yhippa 7y ago

Wait, are Nest products no longer functional after this change?

deadmutex 7y ago
They still work, there is also Works with Assistant (instead of works with Nest). Though the new API isn't as low level, so if you're doing DIY smart home some functionality isn't there. I actually welcome some of these (one google account, instead of separate nest+google accounts) changes, as it will make things easier to setup for my parents, etc.
Rebelgecko 7y ago
Initially Google said that Nest devices would no longer have 3rd party integration, you could only use them as part of the Google Assistant ecosystem. Probably the 2 most common people that got screwed by this are people that use IFTTT and people that control their thermostat with an Alexa. Google is walking back some of their earlier statements and saying they may allow certain "trusted" partners to keep using the old API, so Alexa users may end up being OK. Another less common use case (but one that affects me) is using their developer API to take a bit more control over things. I use it to log temp/humidity data for my place, and to control my thermostat using Home Assistant.