5 ms·

Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion

106 points by adeelarshad82 14y ago

ChuckMcM 14y ago
Wow, pretty amazing. I'm not sure of a better advertisement for open source router software than this sort of bonehead move.
pattern 14y ago
I'm thankful Jeff Atwood posted another article about the commodity router + open source firmware one-two punch [1]. I finally took the plunge and installed Tomato (Toastman [2]) and have been thrilled with the features, but mostly excited about the fact I get to tinker with another device :) It is empowering to know that I can circumvent overarching and onerous policies such as this...innovation...by Cisco. [1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-still-needs-a-router.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-st... [2]: http://toastmanfirmware.yolasite.com/ http://toastmanfirmware.yolasite.com/
- driverdan 14y ago
  The N16 is a good piece of hardware. I've been running one with DD-WRT for a while.
  - pwelch 14y ago
    Same here. The N16 with DD-WRT is an awesome setup. However, I just moved and got FiOS and have a ticket in to avoid using their crappy router/modem you are forced to use. Also, if you are in the market for an upgrade, my friend showed me the new Asus RT-N66u. I likey n16 but the new one has a faster CPU and more RAM.
    - bugmenot 14y ago
      is this possible? I have FIOS and would prefer not using any vendor gear in my network. Trust no one. Verizon needs to get away from needing a coax port on the router.
- j_s 14y ago
  Don't miss the previous discussion of Jeff's post here on Hacker News for more details and alternatives: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4127393 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4127393
  - pattern 14y ago
    I did indeed follow both the discussion here and the comments on his post closely! I wasted/spent a good 6+ hours reading about all kinds of router features that I had didn't know existed, or never even thought possible (VLANs, VPN, NFS, CIFS, Captive Portal, router CPU overclocking, etc). Some versions of Tomato (Shibby's firmware [1] in particular) allow the router to act as a BitTorrent client! I'm sure it's old news to some, but for anyone on the fence about trying new firmware on their routers - take the plunge. [1]: http://tomato.groov.pl/ http://tomato.groov.pl/
    - AYBABTME 14y ago
      I have an ASUS RT-N16 router at home, which I connected to a hard-drive by USB. Then with Tomato installed, you can SSH into the router and install optware. Then you can configure optware[1] to install its packages on the external hard-drive. From there, you can retrieve and install a bunch of packages, like http servers, bittorrent clients and whatever else you feel like running from the CLI. Pretty convenient! I installed Transmission with a web-gui and I can SSH into it from anywhere in the world to my house's router, load a magnet or torrent in the queue and when I get home, the content will be waiting for me on my hard-drive. I don't pretend Tomato firmware are the first to allow to do so, but I just found it was an interesting and usefull thing. [1] http://tomatousb.org/tut:optware-installation http://tomatousb.org/tut:optware-installation
JOnAgain 14y ago
The author seemed to gloss over the part that really stuck out to me: "...we may keep track of certain information ... e.g Internet history ..." So the router is tracking your online activity and they will terminate it if they find you've been using it to watch porn or content not deemed legal. I'm guessing not many people from Hacker News will be able to do much with their routers if they start enforcing this.
- chris_wot 14y ago
  Actually, they did another article that zeroed in on precisely this.
- wmf 14y ago
  Their TOS says you can't use the service for naughty things, but it's not clear whether your router is part of the service or just a client to the service.
Spooky23 14y ago
I suppose that Cisco's experience collaborating with the secret police of various nations has seeped into it's corporate culture.
henrikschroder 14y ago
Wow. I understand that Cisco wants to sell a service to consumers instead of commoditized hardware. But who in their right mind wants to buy that kind of service?
tubbo 14y ago
Who the hell still runs the stock firmware on their router?
- delinka 14y ago
  Every-damn-body that's not technologically inclined. Are you this myopic about everything?
  - adgar 14y ago
    He's not myopic, he's being a snob.
slovette 14y ago
This is really just a view into technological companies losing sight from the customer view. Even though the new design is probably meant to be a much better product, newer isn't always better. No matter how much more valuable the new design might be, sometimes the simple change in UI is too much of a hurdle for people and that enough, is something to consider before forcing updates. 37signal's Jason Fried wrote a good article on the topic: http://www.inc.com/magazine/201205/jason-fried/you-can-lead-a-customer-to-an-upgrade.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/201205/jason-fried/you-can-lead-...
SoftwareMaven 14y ago
If this had been done correctly, it probably would have been a great boon for the average person. It would have allowed Cisco's tech support to more easily address problems users are having and allowed Cisco to keep software up to date. Unfortunately, Cisco decided to see how well they could "monetize" (gads, I hate that word!) it: - Create a "marketplace" for features built into many routers? Check! - Sell people's internet history to the highest bidder? Check! - Force the upgrade and provide no way for people to opt-out? Check! I'm really trying to image the product management meetings that created this travesty. Did the meetings happen after somebody came and said, "You know, we could make administering these routers a lot easier by making it so users don't have to," or were the meetings more like, "We have a lot of users. How could we package things so we can sell all their data"? Did it start benign and turn malignant or was it malignant from the get-go? Regardless, I can't imagine being willing to screw my customers like that.
- Spooky23 14y ago
  I'm sure it started as the latter. Since Apple's success with the App Store, every vendor wants to turn their platform into a walled garden where they control everything. Cisco tried it previously with their attempt to marry a VoIP phone with an Android tablet. From an MBA point of view, Linksys is a problem -- it's a commodity product with low margins that was only acquired to protect Cisco's high-profit small router/switch business. Focusing on improving the user experience makes your $80 router a $150 router (ie. Apple's strategy in this segment), which doesn't help the bottom line -- the world doesn't need another AirPort Extreme. Instead, you can turn your router into a "monetization" machine and extract recurring cash flows without changing the product price-point in a competitive market.
- whatusername 14y ago
  Google trends says demand for "IOS APPS" is through the roof. Lets capitalize on this trend now!
cabalamat 14y ago
> “In some cases, in order to provide an optimal experience on your home network, some updates may still be automatically applied, regardless of the auto-update setting.” I have just added Cisco to my list of hardware companies never to buy from.
delinka 14y ago
Someone could probably come along and eat Cisco's lunch. I imagine a company using a longevity argument like "routers built to last" or something; a nice commitment to sensible autoupdate; maybe a product that does just what it's supposed to do: route packets.
agwa 14y ago
This has been implemented in a totally boneheaded fashion with the forced update and onerous privacy policy, but it's not necessarily a bad concept. Router interfaces are clunky, inconsistent, and not very user-friendly, but they're hard to improve because they're quite constrained by the limited resources on the router and the difficulty of pushing out firmware updates. If the UI were in the cloud it would be easier to provide a really nice experience and start offering new features. For instance, Marshini Chetty, a researcher at Georgia Tech, has been working on a project called Kermit[1] to provide increased visibility into home networks, mainly to provide QoS (e.g. you can determine your teenager is hogging the bandwidth with video streaming and throttle him back). However their system generates a lot of data, too much to process on the router itself, so IIRC they schlep it over to a PC running on the network. If this were coupled with a cloud service, you wouldn't need to keep a PC running all the time. I'm not sure how much of a market there really is for this, though in a presentation she said they had done a study where they put these in average people's homes and received a positive reception. On a different note, I find the outrage about this (both here on HN and elsewhere) somewhat ironic because the privacy policy isn't that different from the privacy policies people put up with everyday with other cloud services they use. I think it's just when it's put in contrast with the status quo of routers (not in the cloud and with good privacy guarantees) that people find it outrageous. This is not a comparison people make with other cloud services; perhaps they should. [1] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~marshini/kermit.html http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~marshini/kermit.html
- wmf 14y ago
  Meraki is an example of how this can be done right; their UI looks far beyond any other router.
- gergles 14y ago
  A router is not a 'cloud service'. I give specific information to a cloud service to do with as it sees fit; I give my router literally everything I do on the Internet. Somewhat of a difference there.
  - agwa 14y ago
ixacto 14y ago
This is hilarious, and exactly what you get when there is no forethought to product longevity. What if in 10 years the economy is still shit, the cloud is unfeasible, and the WRT54g from 2002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series is still working? Just about as bad as Diablo 3. Cisco is scared, because for most people there is not a need to upgrade your router every 2-4 years. Router oses generally suck less than windows. Internet is not even >25mbit/sec in most places in the USA.
- LogicHoleFlaw 14y ago
  My WRT54G is still going strong. I run the `tomato` firmware on it, and haven't had to mess with the configuration in years. If only the rest of my hardware could be as reliable.
unimpressive 14y ago
>"The Terms and Conditions of using the Cisco Connect Cloud state that Cisco may unilaterally shut down your account if finds that you have used the service for “obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes, to infringe another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights, or… to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.”" So let me get this straight, Cisco feels that they have the right to shut off your Internet connectivity IF: 1) They don't like what you say. 2) You watch porn. (Or anything they consider pornographic, which may not agree with your definition of pornographic; see corporate Internet filters.) Well, that just proves to me that they have no idea what the hell they're doing, and have just permanently lost me as a customer.
- te_chris 14y ago
  I'd hate to see what would happen if you torrented porn.
- wmf 14y ago
  It's not clear that the router itself is considered part of the service, so maybe they would only brick your router if you transmit porn through their servers. And I think those terms have been removed anyway.
modarts 14y ago
Looks like Apple really opened Pandora's box with the advent of their closed app ecosystem. I think we're going to find "App Stores" popping up at every level of the network stack at this pace (as to why you'd need one over your wifi router firmware is anyone's guess though)

106 points by adeelarshad82 14y ago

Wow, pretty amazing. I'm not sure of a better advertisement for open source router software than this sort of bonehead move.

pattern 14y ago

I'm thankful Jeff Atwood posted another article about the commodity router + open source firmware one-two punch [1]. I finally took the plunge and installed Tomato (Toastman [2]) and have been thrilled with the features, but mostly excited about the fact I get to tinker with another device :) It is empowering to know that I can circumvent overarching and onerous policies such as this...innovation...by Cisco. [1]: http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-still-needs-a-router.html http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-st... [2]: http://toastmanfirmware.yolasite.com/ http://toastmanfirmware.yolasite.com/

driverdan 14y ago
The N16 is a good piece of hardware. I've been running one with DD-WRT for a while.
- pwelch 14y ago
  Same here. The N16 with DD-WRT is an awesome setup. However, I just moved and got FiOS and have a ticket in to avoid using their crappy router/modem you are forced to use. Also, if you are in the market for an upgrade, my friend showed me the new Asus RT-N66u. I likey n16 but the new one has a faster CPU and more RAM.
  - bugmenot 14y ago
    is this possible? I have FIOS and would prefer not using any vendor gear in my network. Trust no one. Verizon needs to get away from needing a coax port on the router.
j_s 14y ago
Don't miss the previous discussion of Jeff's post here on Hacker News for more details and alternatives: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4127393 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4127393
- pattern 14y ago
  I did indeed follow both the discussion here and the comments on his post closely! I wasted/spent a good 6+ hours reading about all kinds of router features that I had didn't know existed, or never even thought possible (VLANs, VPN, NFS, CIFS, Captive Portal, router CPU overclocking, etc). Some versions of Tomato (Shibby's firmware [1] in particular) allow the router to act as a BitTorrent client! I'm sure it's old news to some, but for anyone on the fence about trying new firmware on their routers - take the plunge. [1]: http://tomato.groov.pl/ http://tomato.groov.pl/
  - AYBABTME 14y ago
    I have an ASUS RT-N16 router at home, which I connected to a hard-drive by USB. Then with Tomato installed, you can SSH into the router and install optware. Then you can configure optware[1] to install its packages on the external hard-drive. From there, you can retrieve and install a bunch of packages, like http servers, bittorrent clients and whatever else you feel like running from the CLI. Pretty convenient! I installed Transmission with a web-gui and I can SSH into it from anywhere in the world to my house's router, load a magnet or torrent in the queue and when I get home, the content will be waiting for me on my hard-drive. I don't pretend Tomato firmware are the first to allow to do so, but I just found it was an interesting and usefull thing. [1] http://tomatousb.org/tut:optware-installation http://tomatousb.org/tut:optware-installation

JOnAgain 14y ago

The author seemed to gloss over the part that really stuck out to me: "...we may keep track of certain information ... e.g Internet history ..." So the router is tracking your online activity and they will terminate it if they find you've been using it to watch porn or content not deemed legal. I'm guessing not many people from Hacker News will be able to do much with their routers if they start enforcing this.

chris_wot 14y ago
Actually, they did another article that zeroed in on precisely this.
wmf 14y ago
Their TOS says you can't use the service for naughty things, but it's not clear whether your router is part of the service or just a client to the service.

Spooky23 14y ago

I suppose that Cisco's experience collaborating with the secret police of various nations has seeped into it's corporate culture.

henrikschroder 14y ago

Wow. I understand that Cisco wants to sell a service to consumers instead of commoditized hardware. But who in their right mind wants to buy that kind of service?

tubbo 14y ago

Who the hell still runs the stock firmware on their router?

delinka 14y ago
Every-damn-body that's not technologically inclined. Are you this myopic about everything?
- adgar 14y ago
  He's not myopic, he's being a snob.

slovette 14y ago

This is really just a view into technological companies losing sight from the customer view. Even though the new design is probably meant to be a much better product, newer isn't always better. No matter how much more valuable the new design might be, sometimes the simple change in UI is too much of a hurdle for people and that enough, is something to consider before forcing updates. 37signal's Jason Fried wrote a good article on the topic: http://www.inc.com/magazine/201205/jason-fried/you-can-lead-a-customer-to-an-upgrade.html http://www.inc.com/magazine/201205/jason-fried/you-can-lead-...

SoftwareMaven 14y ago

If this had been done correctly, it probably would have been a great boon for the average person. It would have allowed Cisco's tech support to more easily address problems users are having and allowed Cisco to keep software up to date. Unfortunately, Cisco decided to see how well they could "monetize" (gads, I hate that word!) it: - Create a "marketplace" for features built into many routers? Check! - Sell people's internet history to the highest bidder? Check! - Force the upgrade and provide no way for people to opt-out? Check! I'm really trying to image the product management meetings that created this travesty. Did the meetings happen after somebody came and said, "You know, we could make administering these routers a lot easier by making it so users don't have to," or were the meetings more like, "We have a lot of users. How could we package things so we can sell all their data"? Did it start benign and turn malignant or was it malignant from the get-go? Regardless, I can't imagine being willing to screw my customers like that.

Spooky23 14y ago
I'm sure it started as the latter. Since Apple's success with the App Store, every vendor wants to turn their platform into a walled garden where they control everything. Cisco tried it previously with their attempt to marry a VoIP phone with an Android tablet. From an MBA point of view, Linksys is a problem -- it's a commodity product with low margins that was only acquired to protect Cisco's high-profit small router/switch business. Focusing on improving the user experience makes your $80 router a $150 router (ie. Apple's strategy in this segment), which doesn't help the bottom line -- the world doesn't need another AirPort Extreme. Instead, you can turn your router into a "monetization" machine and extract recurring cash flows without changing the product price-point in a competitive market.
whatusername 14y ago
Google trends says demand for "IOS APPS" is through the roof. Lets capitalize on this trend now!

cabalamat 14y ago

> “In some cases, in order to provide an optimal experience on your home network, some updates may still be automatically applied, regardless of the auto-update setting.” I have just added Cisco to my list of hardware companies never to buy from.

delinka 14y ago

Someone could probably come along and eat Cisco's lunch. I imagine a company using a longevity argument like "routers built to last" or something; a nice commitment to sensible autoupdate; maybe a product that does just what it's supposed to do: route packets.

agwa 14y ago

This has been implemented in a totally boneheaded fashion with the forced update and onerous privacy policy, but it's not necessarily a bad concept. Router interfaces are clunky, inconsistent, and not very user-friendly, but they're hard to improve because they're quite constrained by the limited resources on the router and the difficulty of pushing out firmware updates. If the UI were in the cloud it would be easier to provide a really nice experience and start offering new features. For instance, Marshini Chetty, a researcher at Georgia Tech, has been working on a project called Kermit[1] to provide increased visibility into home networks, mainly to provide QoS (e.g. you can determine your teenager is hogging the bandwidth with video streaming and throttle him back). However their system generates a lot of data, too much to process on the router itself, so IIRC they schlep it over to a PC running on the network. If this were coupled with a cloud service, you wouldn't need to keep a PC running all the time. I'm not sure how much of a market there really is for this, though in a presentation she said they had done a study where they put these in average people's homes and received a positive reception. On a different note, I find the outrage about this (both here on HN and elsewhere) somewhat ironic because the privacy policy isn't that different from the privacy policies people put up with everyday with other cloud services they use. I think it's just when it's put in contrast with the status quo of routers (not in the cloud and with good privacy guarantees) that people find it outrageous. This is not a comparison people make with other cloud services; perhaps they should. [1] http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~marshini/kermit.html http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~marshini/kermit.html

wmf 14y ago
Meraki is an example of how this can be done right; their UI looks far beyond any other router.
gergles 14y ago
A router is not a 'cloud service'. I give specific information to a cloud service to do with as it sees fit; I give my router literally everything I do on the Internet. Somewhat of a difference there.
- agwa 14y ago

ixacto 14y ago

This is hilarious, and exactly what you get when there is no forethought to product longevity. What if in 10 years the economy is still shit, the cloud is unfeasible, and the WRT54g from 2002 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series is still working? Just about as bad as Diablo 3. Cisco is scared, because for most people there is not a need to upgrade your router every 2-4 years. Router oses generally suck less than windows. Internet is not even >25mbit/sec in most places in the USA.

LogicHoleFlaw 14y ago
My WRT54G is still going strong. I run the `tomato` firmware on it, and haven't had to mess with the configuration in years. If only the rest of my hardware could be as reliable.

unimpressive 14y ago

>"The Terms and Conditions of using the Cisco Connect Cloud state that Cisco may unilaterally shut down your account if finds that you have used the service for “obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes, to infringe another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property rights, or… to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.”" So let me get this straight, Cisco feels that they have the right to shut off your Internet connectivity IF: 1) They don't like what you say. 2) You watch porn. (Or anything they consider pornographic, which may not agree with your definition of pornographic; see corporate Internet filters.) Well, that just proves to me that they have no idea what the hell they're doing, and have just permanently lost me as a customer.

te_chris 14y ago
I'd hate to see what would happen if you torrented porn.
wmf 14y ago
It's not clear that the router itself is considered part of the service, so maybe they would only brick your router if you transmit porn through their servers. And I think those terms have been removed anyway.

modarts 14y ago

Looks like Apple really opened Pandora's box with the advent of their closed app ecosystem. I think we're going to find "App Stores" popping up at every level of the network stack at this pace (as to why you'd need one over your wifi router firmware is anyone's guess though)