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Comment by EdSharkey | Hacker News Reader

Utopias require a slave class. Having autonomous robots doing most/all manual labor sounds pretty good - AS LONG AS they aren't all phoning home to their corporate overlords every 30msec.

When are we going to start demanding devices that are untethered from a mothership and run from home computers?

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> When are we going to start demanding devices that are untethered from a mothership and run from home computers?

When "we" understand the value of Free and Open Source Software.

Some do, some don't, some don't yet, some never will.

Not intended in any way as a rebuttal of your point, but considering both sides of an issue is generally worthwhile:

There's the potential for DIY open source misuse, with negative consequences:

Here, a poster's bad experience with a properly-installed OEM product prompts a "warning", directed at the open-source DIY community...

https://community.particle.io/t/spark-powered-thermostats-bu...

The poster referenced this DIY...

http://blog.particle.io/2014/01/17/open-source-thermostat/?r...

I'm an open source fan, but realize it's not a panacea, in and of itself...great care and a full understanding of potential negative consequences is only prudent...

Personally, I'm content with nursing along older appliances that were made well...but, I'm a bit of a handyman, and hate to give up on any machine until I'm convinced it's totally worn out, so IoT is unlikely to invade my home on a large scale any time soon...

"One such story was from a couple who were out of town when their furnace went nuts and raised the temperature in the house high enough that it melted every piece of plastic in the entire home."

There's just no way that a home furnace can generate enough heat to do that. Sounds like scaremongering to me.

Indeed.

I'm inclined to agree that a home thermostat is probably not the best place to be hacking around--especially, but not only, in cold climates--although this is really a comment on DIY generally rather than open source. Heck, I'm not even inclined to trust a Nest over a more traditional thermostat.

There are plenty of opportunities to fiddle around with sensors and other "smart home" gadgetry. But there are some areas where it makes sense to be very cautious.

> Utopias require a slave class

That's not true. If you look at what most people consider necessary for utopia (food, shelter, medicine, architecture for fun activities) and do a first principles analysis of the labor inputs required, it comes in far lower than the comfortable output of the people being supported. Even if you use 100% manual labor and only use computers for information tech.

The only reason we seem so overworked is because ~70% of our labor goes into moat maintenance for our employer, profits for the capital class, and production of harmful products.

People used to sustain themselves quite comfortably all over the world. And they didn't even have the internet or electric motors.

All the classic examples of utopian thinking expressed in literature include a slave class which forms the majority of the populace.

I am hopeful that robots and the IoT could be that permanent slave underclass for us. But, for it to work, we must be the masters of our robot slaves and not some megacorporation. If we have robots not fully under our control/leased to us, or that are constantly watching and reporting on us, then we are the indentured servants/slaves rather than the robots.

The phoning home and rental model for IoT has intractable ethical and freedom problems IMHO.

We (https://flair.co) have an intranet solution but we 100% need to have a phone home to connect to others that don't have an intranet solution. Unfortunately its hard to take the internet out of the internet of things.

Also note that truly smart IoT devices need to operate on a data feed from devices in the home, devices outside of the home, and third party services (utility rates fluctuate over time for instance). They need to take raw data from these sources, 'debounce' or filter them into actionable events and then go ahead and move an actuator or make an adjustment to something. This is really hard to do all within a local network unless you have an onsite server farm and even then, you need for this onsite server farm to be able to fetch the code to run each device's task.

On the surface, an intranet of things sounds great, but every company is going to be making every device connect to the internet - there will not just be one that makes everything and everybody is not going to converge on a distributed cluster that runs in the home. The only practical way for large numbers of devices to integrate, in particular, integrate with deeper intelligence, is through the cloud.

When an untethered machine can provide all of the functionality of a machine that phones home.

(never)

If by "functionality" you mean "stuff that makes money for the manufacturer and is at best marginally useful to the customer", then I agree.

Otherwise, the whole experience of the 20th century demonstrate that it's possible to build stand alone appliances that provide useful services to the paying customer while meeting the manufacturer's financial goals.

Which is 20 years ago. Seriously, in most IoT / smart appliances, the "phone home" capability gives pretty much nothing for the user that couldn't be done without it. Including voice recognition, which worked off-line pretty decently for the last 10 years, and didn't have the network-induced latency. Phoning home is only there because companies are lazy and/or trying to monetize user's data.

I'd imagine phoning home heavily subsidizes some of the products through the data produced in aggregate and at the level of the individual through which research can be performed and which may also be monetized in other ways.

For instance, Google paid 10x revenue for NEST [0]. Profit is obviously much lower which means that's a very long term investment for the acquirer. But maybe not if the NEST product integrates with other Google products bringing more people into the Google ecosystem, incentivizing people to stay in the Google ecosystem, and providing data for Google to both improve it's ecosystem even for non Nest Users and to monetize with third parties.

Now if NEST stayed on it's own, it could integrate with other ecosystems or create it's own or just exist as a standalone product but NEST wouldn't have too much data to sell to increase profits, and wouldn't be able to draw as many conclusions as a company which could integrate their data with other data sources. It could create it's own ecosystem but comfortably living within another established ecosystem will probably bring more users to NEST as ecosystem creation is obviously very much outside the purview of a smart Thermostat.

So it sort of makes sense that these products "phone home" even if it's not exactly what we as computer software engineers and privacy advocates might look for in a product.

[0] - http://www.businessinsider.com/nest-revenue-2014-1

> bringing more people into the Google ecosystem

But literally everyone that could use a NEST product already uses google.

"AS LONG AS they aren't all phoning home to their corporate overlords every 30msec."

We're working on that.

On making it every 20msec? ;).

Seriously though, what are you working on? Would you mind sharing?

The creator of ZeroTier, a super easy way to set up virtual networks. Connects all your devices and encrypts the traffic by default. Pretty slick stuff. We use it in our backend to keep our microservices topology simple.

Happened to be working on this post when I posted the above, so it was on my mind: https://www.zerotier.com/blog/?p=612

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