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I dislike how companies are not only pushing proprietary mesh networks, but also making them automatically enabled for their users and opt-out. It feels like th

I dislike how companies are not only pushing proprietary mesh networks, but also making them automatically enabled for their users and opt-out. It feels like the companies are piggybacking on my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free to literally power their closed network. I don't get paid a penny for it, but their shareholders sure do. Open mesh networks could be really cool, but instead of open networks, we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home, while excluding you, me and everyone else except Amazon and their partners from doing amazing things with the meshnets.

z3ncyberpunk 5y ago
> it feels like they are using my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free That's exactly what they're doing
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
walrus01 5y ago
The day that I install any amazon sidewalk enabled device in my home is the day I hang up my hat and resign in shame, as a network engineer who's been building internet infrastructure since 1999. It's so gross and wrong. amazon doesn't get a free ride on my residential internet service or arbitrary use of radio spectrum in my home. note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, internet enabled lightbulbs, etc. They're nothing but riddled with bugs, incompatibilities, security holes, disgusting configuration options, obsolescence in less than a few years, etc. just you wait until manufacturers of "internet of shit" things go really evil, and integrate low cost LTE radios into them with their own billing/centralized management/VPN system. it's already been proven that giving your smart tv the wifi password is a bad idea, because it'll just retrieve and display ads, and/or submit all your usage history to its manufacturer for resale to unknown 3rd parties. Now what if random items of electrical consumer technology phone home whether you want them to or not...
- implements 5y ago
  > note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, ... If you want a CCTV camera you can still get 'old school' commercial grade IP cameras from eBay. Mercifully free of cloud attachment, but with ftp, email and http notification. Probably will have dynamic DNS, but that can be useful.
- samatman 5y ago
  It's a reasonable way to live your life, but it's worth noting that most WiFi smart bulbs and switches can be liberated with a not-unreasonable amount of effort: https://blog.fosketts.net/2020/05/29/liberate-wi-fi-smart-bulbs-and-switches-with-tasmota/ https://blog.fosketts.net/2020/05/29/liberate-wi-fi-smart-bu... Personally I benefit from being able to control the type of light and change it over the course of the day, and I've found a couple of uses for automatic switches which improve my life as well. Point being, these things at least can be liberated from the IoT, where we all know what the S stands for.
  - neop1x 5y ago
    Zigbee devices can be used in a closed mesh network, without an internet connection or any proprietary cloud or subscription. One needs a USB coordinator dongle [1], a small computer like raspberry pi, zigbee2mqtt [2] & Home Assistant [3]. It works perfectly. Devices implement various standardized "profiles" documented in an open standard ZCL/dotdot and a lot of devices from different manufacturers work right out of the box. [1] https://sonoff.tech/product/diy-smart-switch/sonoff-dongle-plus/ https://sonoff.tech/product/diy-smart-switch/sonoff-dongle-p... [2] https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ [3] https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/
- AviationAtom 5y ago
  I think the cable companies really ushered it in, with their dual SSID setup. I refused to use their gear for a host of reasons, this being one of them.
  - jaywalk 5y ago
least 5y ago
> I dislike how companies are not only pushing proprietary mesh networks, but also making them automatically enabled for their users and opt-out. I actually quite like that this particular feature is opt out because the goal is to make the mesh network actually useful and not just a white paper theoretical application with zero adoption. Requiring labor of any kind will exclude much of the population from the start, which, for this particular utility, is not tenable. > It feels like the companies are piggybacking on my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free to literally power their closed network. I don't get paid a penny for it, but their shareholders sure do. You get access to the benefits of this particular mesh network, which lets you locate your Apple devices more reliably than without it. > Open mesh networks could be really cool, but instead of open networks, we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home, while excluding you, me and everyone else except Amazon and their partners from doing amazing things with the meshnets. I agree that what mesh networking is being utilized for right now is not really very close to its potential, but there's also not much reason why Amazon or Apple should open their platforms up to third parties at this time. If you want to create something useful with mesh networking you have to sell the idea to the general population. Massive corporations like Apple, Google, or Meta are at a big advantage by having a huge network of users already from which they can push their ideas to the public, but it's a significantly greater challenge for anyone without that resource. Still, I think it could be done.
- FireBeyond 5y ago
  > I actually quite like that this particular feature is opt out because the goal is to make the mesh network actually useful and not just a white paper theoretical application with zero adoption. Requiring labor of any kind will exclude much of the population from the start, which, for this particular utility, is not tenable. And people nearby you? Apple is draining your battery for their benefit, using your cellular data for their benefit.
  - least 5y ago
    Yes, everyone who has the feature turned on is pooling their resources together to create a common utility that everyone with the feature benefits from. I fail to see how this is an issue. This is not like Apple exfiltrating data from your phone back to them that can incriminate you like the CSAM debacle that's still unresolved, this is a tool that has a quite easy to understand benefit for those that are using it. I pool the resources of using some of my battery and data and in return I get access to a giant mesh network that helps in locating my devices. If I don't want to participate in this network, I can turn it off. I get that a lot of people seem to have the issue with it being opt-out rather than opt-in. I think that this sort of feature needs to be opt-out because it better aligns with human behavior.
seanmcdirmid 5y ago
> we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home I didn't realize Apple AirTags were enabling ads for Amazon, or apple was using AirTags to pump ads for Apple, or is this just an exaggeration? Surely we got more mesh network than ones that push ads? I like the ones that help you find lost/stolen things.
- waste_monk 5y ago
  I believe they mean things like Amazon Sidewalk, where it co-opts your home internet connection to serve Amazon devices.
  - seanmcdirmid 5y ago
    I read the comment that this was all we were were getting (mesh networks run by private companies that weren’t helping us), while Apple is pushing something that many find useful and they aren’t using it for other nefarious purposes (that we know of).
hackernewds 5y ago
An egregious way internet providers do this now is to not only use your electricity, but also your internet bandwidth and router (!!) to create their so-called hotspot network. Obviously this is opt-out, poorly notified and hidden behind a bunch of dark patterns to disable. Looking at your Xfinity, coverage across all of SF..
- southerntofu 5y ago
  > An egregious way internet providers do this now is to not only use your electricity, but also your internet bandwidth and router (!!) to create their so-called hotspot network. To be fair, it's not a bad idea... if it was open for everyone (helping out one another) and not just benefiting their customers (helping the company extend its reach). As much as i hate Free ISP here in france, for some time when it was impossible for me to get connected to xDSL (but my neighbor was!) FreeWifi really helped me stay connected to the Internet. Still, fuck them for calling it FreeWifi (wtf, a corporation is like the exact opposite of freedom). If you're looking for truly free wifi communities, i strongly recommend to check out Freifunk they've been doing that for a long time building OpenWRT images for popular consumer modem/routers in Germany.
- mschuster91 5y ago
  > but also your internet bandwidth Usually, not. You get the full bandwidth of your DSL line when you need it, the hotspot either only gets what remains (aka is in idle) or has its own PPPoE session that lives outside of your contractual bandwidth limit (obviously that one only works when the line bandwidth is greater than the bandwidth you're paying for).
  - smcl 5y ago
    Does anyone know how much use these get? When I'm travelling I see them all over the place, but I haven't personally ever used them (or met anyone who did) and never had any idea how to get credentials for them
    - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago
nonrandomstring 5y ago
IIRC the first ever successful prosecution for "hacking" rested on the idea of "stealing electricity" (see [1]). This is the prototype of all hacking laws from which 'compute misuse' laws derive because it was an indisputable example of loss/harm. How does this foundational principle not apply to Apple 40 years later? [1] The Hacker Crackdown Book - by Bruce Sterling
teekert 5y ago
I am pro open-source, decentralization, etc, all the things. Still, the value of a network of iDevices with "default on airtag tracking" is just so huge, and if they convince me (and they did) that they handle my data properly (or rather they don't handle it at all), I'm fine with it. Issues like this battery drain are of course unacceptable but I trust that that will be fixed by Apple.
- fsflover 5y ago
  So you are pro open-source, but you are supporting a company which actively fights it.
  - oofbey 5y ago
    How does building closed source products fight open source? They’re not at odds with each other.
    - southerntofu 5y ago
      Because either you're struggling for human progress doing research and building tech that empowers people, or you're struggling for profit building harmful tech for the common people. Apple is in the latter category (to be fair, most if not all hardware/software manufacturers are) and has shown time and time again that they were strongly opposed to consumer rights: - pushing updates to slow down older iOS to "encourage" users to buy a new phone - starting with the iPhone they didn't even sell official spare parts, and did all they could to make it hard to crack the phones open (proprietary screw, fuck that) to repair them - lying to consumers about warranty laws, implying their products would be covered only 1y despite european regulations mandating 2y minimum - getting into cushy mafia-like agreements with phone providers which inundated the market with "cheap" iPhones subsided by non-iPhone subscribers - using proprietary connectors wherever they can (no ethernet? no jack? FUCK) - by making it harder to use non-Apple-approved applications on MacOS and making it so applications can't even start when their "approval" server is down?! - and so much more, just like with every other company We need tech that empowers people. Private companies and Nation States are building a dystopian nightmare that's the exact opposite of that (we're in a cross-over fanfiction mixing Orwell and Huxley). Apple is certainly part of that.

z3ncyberpunk 5y ago

> it feels like they are using my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free That's exactly what they're doing

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

walrus01 5y ago

The day that I install any amazon sidewalk enabled device in my home is the day I hang up my hat and resign in shame, as a network engineer who's been building internet infrastructure since 1999. It's so gross and wrong. amazon doesn't get a free ride on my residential internet service or arbitrary use of radio spectrum in my home. note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, internet enabled lightbulbs, etc. They're nothing but riddled with bugs, incompatibilities, security holes, disgusting configuration options, obsolescence in less than a few years, etc. just you wait until manufacturers of "internet of shit" things go really evil, and integrate low cost LTE radios into them with their own billing/centralized management/VPN system. it's already been proven that giving your smart tv the wifi password is a bad idea, because it'll just retrieve and display ads, and/or submit all your usage history to its manufacturer for resale to unknown 3rd parties. Now what if random items of electrical consumer technology phone home whether you want them to or not...

implements 5y ago
> note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, ... If you want a CCTV camera you can still get 'old school' commercial grade IP cameras from eBay. Mercifully free of cloud attachment, but with ftp, email and http notification. Probably will have dynamic DNS, but that can be useful.
samatman 5y ago
It's a reasonable way to live your life, but it's worth noting that most WiFi smart bulbs and switches can be liberated with a not-unreasonable amount of effort: https://blog.fosketts.net/2020/05/29/liberate-wi-fi-smart-bulbs-and-switches-with-tasmota/ https://blog.fosketts.net/2020/05/29/liberate-wi-fi-smart-bu... Personally I benefit from being able to control the type of light and change it over the course of the day, and I've found a couple of uses for automatic switches which improve my life as well. Point being, these things at least can be liberated from the IoT, where we all know what the S stands for.
- neop1x 5y ago
  Zigbee devices can be used in a closed mesh network, without an internet connection or any proprietary cloud or subscription. One needs a USB coordinator dongle [1], a small computer like raspberry pi, zigbee2mqtt [2] & Home Assistant [3]. It works perfectly. Devices implement various standardized "profiles" documented in an open standard ZCL/dotdot and a lot of devices from different manufacturers work right out of the box. [1] https://sonoff.tech/product/diy-smart-switch/sonoff-dongle-plus/ https://sonoff.tech/product/diy-smart-switch/sonoff-dongle-p... [2] https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ [3] https://www.home-assistant.io/ https://www.home-assistant.io/
AviationAtom 5y ago
I think the cable companies really ushered it in, with their dual SSID setup. I refused to use their gear for a host of reasons, this being one of them.
- jaywalk 5y ago

least 5y ago

> I dislike how companies are not only pushing proprietary mesh networks, but also making them automatically enabled for their users and opt-out. I actually quite like that this particular feature is opt out because the goal is to make the mesh network actually useful and not just a white paper theoretical application with zero adoption. Requiring labor of any kind will exclude much of the population from the start, which, for this particular utility, is not tenable. > It feels like the companies are piggybacking on my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free to literally power their closed network. I don't get paid a penny for it, but their shareholders sure do. You get access to the benefits of this particular mesh network, which lets you locate your Apple devices more reliably than without it. > Open mesh networks could be really cool, but instead of open networks, we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home, while excluding you, me and everyone else except Amazon and their partners from doing amazing things with the meshnets. I agree that what mesh networking is being utilized for right now is not really very close to its potential, but there's also not much reason why Amazon or Apple should open their platforms up to third parties at this time. If you want to create something useful with mesh networking you have to sell the idea to the general population. Massive corporations like Apple, Google, or Meta are at a big advantage by having a huge network of users already from which they can push their ideas to the public, but it's a significantly greater challenge for anyone without that resource. Still, I think it could be done.

FireBeyond 5y ago
> I actually quite like that this particular feature is opt out because the goal is to make the mesh network actually useful and not just a white paper theoretical application with zero adoption. Requiring labor of any kind will exclude much of the population from the start, which, for this particular utility, is not tenable. And people nearby you? Apple is draining your battery for their benefit, using your cellular data for their benefit.
- least 5y ago
  Yes, everyone who has the feature turned on is pooling their resources together to create a common utility that everyone with the feature benefits from. I fail to see how this is an issue. This is not like Apple exfiltrating data from your phone back to them that can incriminate you like the CSAM debacle that's still unresolved, this is a tool that has a quite easy to understand benefit for those that are using it. I pool the resources of using some of my battery and data and in return I get access to a giant mesh network that helps in locating my devices. If I don't want to participate in this network, I can turn it off. I get that a lot of people seem to have the issue with it being opt-out rather than opt-in. I think that this sort of feature needs to be opt-out because it better aligns with human behavior.

seanmcdirmid 5y ago

> we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home I didn't realize Apple AirTags were enabling ads for Amazon, or apple was using AirTags to pump ads for Apple, or is this just an exaggeration? Surely we got more mesh network than ones that push ads? I like the ones that help you find lost/stolen things.

waste_monk 5y ago
I believe they mean things like Amazon Sidewalk, where it co-opts your home internet connection to serve Amazon devices.
- seanmcdirmid 5y ago
  I read the comment that this was all we were were getting (mesh networks run by private companies that weren’t helping us), while Apple is pushing something that many find useful and they aren’t using it for other nefarious purposes (that we know of).

hackernewds 5y ago

An egregious way internet providers do this now is to not only use your electricity, but also your internet bandwidth and router (!!) to create their so-called hotspot network. Obviously this is opt-out, poorly notified and hidden behind a bunch of dark patterns to disable. Looking at your Xfinity, coverage across all of SF..

southerntofu 5y ago
> An egregious way internet providers do this now is to not only use your electricity, but also your internet bandwidth and router (!!) to create their so-called hotspot network. To be fair, it's not a bad idea... if it was open for everyone (helping out one another) and not just benefiting their customers (helping the company extend its reach). As much as i hate Free ISP here in france, for some time when it was impossible for me to get connected to xDSL (but my neighbor was!) FreeWifi really helped me stay connected to the Internet. Still, fuck them for calling it FreeWifi (wtf, a corporation is like the exact opposite of freedom). If you're looking for truly free wifi communities, i strongly recommend to check out Freifunk they've been doing that for a long time building OpenWRT images for popular consumer modem/routers in Germany.
mschuster91 5y ago
> but also your internet bandwidth Usually, not. You get the full bandwidth of your DSL line when you need it, the hotspot either only gets what remains (aka is in idle) or has its own PPPoE session that lives outside of your contractual bandwidth limit (obviously that one only works when the line bandwidth is greater than the bandwidth you're paying for).
- smcl 5y ago
  Does anyone know how much use these get? When I'm travelling I see them all over the place, but I haven't personally ever used them (or met anyone who did) and never had any idea how to get credentials for them
  - ChrisMarshallNY 5y ago

nonrandomstring 5y ago

IIRC the first ever successful prosecution for "hacking" rested on the idea of "stealing electricity" (see [1]). This is the prototype of all hacking laws from which 'compute misuse' laws derive because it was an indisputable example of loss/harm. How does this foundational principle not apply to Apple 40 years later? [1] The Hacker Crackdown Book - by Bruce Sterling

teekert 5y ago

I am pro open-source, decentralization, etc, all the things. Still, the value of a network of iDevices with "default on airtag tracking" is just so huge, and if they convince me (and they did) that they handle my data properly (or rather they don't handle it at all), I'm fine with it. Issues like this battery drain are of course unacceptable but I trust that that will be fixed by Apple.

fsflover 5y ago
So you are pro open-source, but you are supporting a company which actively fights it.
- oofbey 5y ago
  How does building closed source products fight open source? They’re not at odds with each other.
  - southerntofu 5y ago
    Because either you're struggling for human progress doing research and building tech that empowers people, or you're struggling for profit building harmful tech for the common people. Apple is in the latter category (to be fair, most if not all hardware/software manufacturers are) and has shown time and time again that they were strongly opposed to consumer rights: - pushing updates to slow down older iOS to "encourage" users to buy a new phone - starting with the iPhone they didn't even sell official spare parts, and did all they could to make it hard to crack the phones open (proprietary screw, fuck that) to repair them - lying to consumers about warranty laws, implying their products would be covered only 1y despite european regulations mandating 2y minimum - getting into cushy mafia-like agreements with phone providers which inundated the market with "cheap" iPhones subsided by non-iPhone subscribers - using proprietary connectors wherever they can (no ethernet? no jack? FUCK) - by making it harder to use non-Apple-approved applications on MacOS and making it so applications can't even start when their "approval" server is down?! - and so much more, just like with every other company We need tech that empowers people. Private companies and Nation States are building a dystopian nightmare that's the exact opposite of that (we're in a cross-over fanfiction mixing Orwell and Huxley). Apple is certainly part of that.