Hacker News Reader

Comment by dwc | Hacker News Reader

Maybe it's going nowhere because nobody really wants to have all their things become agents working for someone else (best case) or be exploited and cause massive grief (worst case).

I'd much rather have an INTRAnet of things, where nothing depends on "the cloud".

View on HN

> I'd much rather have an INTRAnet of things, where nothing depends on "the cloud".

I couldn't agree more. "Cloud" integration is actually a negative selling point for me. Besides the very real problems you mentioned, your expensive IoT devices could just stop working and die[1] because someone decided to shut down the servers.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zeo,_Inc.#Out_of_business

This generally shouldn't be a worry if you pick a large enough hosting company. Amazon isn't going to shut down its cloud service anytime soon.

I see your point - as an individual, I will never use Spotify because I like owning all of my own .mp3 files and I don't want some streaming service to have my by the balls when I want to listen to my own music.

But for the majority of business, it makes much more sense from a cost and complexity standpoint to use cloud services rather than having in-house servers and IT solutions. So I imagine hosted services will only be gaining in popularity in the near future, which should ease your fears of someone deciding to shut down the servers arbitrarily. AWS would find itself out of business pretty quickly if it let that happen to customers.

> This generally shouldn't be a worry if you pick a large enough hosting company.

It doesn't matter who provides the infrastructure. If the business entity that runs the services on that infrastructure closes its doors, the services shut down and any devices that depended on those services are hampered, crippled, or rendered useless.

I mention P2P or "cloudless" connectivity in this article.

Few big players seem to be making use of such a thing. They'd currently rather have their own walled gardens. :)

> Few big players seem to be making use of such a thing. They'd currently rather have their own walled gardens. :)

Even some of the small maker targeted ones. For awhile I was searching for a cheap wifi connected microcontroller for some hobbyist home automation stuff. Both the Electric Imp[1] and Particle/Spark[2] products looked great, but they seem to both have obligatory cloud integration. If I spend weeks building something for my home, It has to be able to work until the hardware dies.

Luckily, I found the ESP8266[3] has pretty much all the capabilities I want, no cloud required.

[1] https://electricimp.com/

[2] https://www.particle.io/

[3] http://www.esp8266.com/

My roommate got an Electric Imp from a meetup or something that the company sponsored. Oh, was it so disappointing.

* Funky, confusing little form factor? Check! :D

* Really cute way to get network credentials into the device? Check! :D

* Only programmable in some Javascript variant? Check! :/

* Application server that lets you remotely change the code running on any activated device? Check! :D

* Complete and utter absence of locally-hostable version of said application server? Check! :(

They won't even give you the option of paying more for the hardware to get a copy of the application server. :/

I really wish you were right but I think few people care about this and the problem is just that the internet of things has no use case.

No compelling use case, anyway. Now that the "Put microcontrollers in ALL THE THINGS!" frenzy is dying down, what's left are a handful of decent applications and a small minority that geeks out to being able to control their living room lights from halfway across the world.

Maybe there's a parallel to the "Do everything on the web!" frenzy. Out of that we got Amazon and Pets.com. Amazon turned out to be worthwhile. A bunch of the others, not so much.

Yes! I'm still excited by the IoT because I've turned both a dumb air conditioner and a dumb body scale into "IoT" items that never send their data outside of my network. I just think it is much more niche then people thought.

Intercloud is probably a more appropriate term, given it requires cloud computing resources that include compute, network and storage.

Three cheers for the coming surveillance economy

Reply on news.ycombinator.com