ESR: Cisco provides a lesson
esr.ibiblio.org
esr.ibiblio.org
So yes, don't invite Cisco into your living room, obviously. (Nor Cisco/Scientific Atlanta, but that's another discussion..!)
But you're still powerless and privacyless, sorry. Get a VPN box and tunnel everything (I do), but that's just kicking the can a few years down the road (less if you pick a cheap host).
Also, the bigger message from this fiasco is that Cisco is feeling revenue pressure even in their protective low margin consumer networking business. Cisco has never been a good consumer company, but they've just never cared enough to get "creative" before.
That's a bad bad sign for Cisco. Chambers, like Ballmer, has presided over ten-plus years of sideways, and this move seems desperate.
Run for the exits.
Yep. Even if I bothered to find a replacement for my combination cable modem/router, I don't know if the ISP / cable company would "talk" to the new hardware. Probably not contractually required to do so.
I'm reminded of the liberation of phone handsets from the phone company - up until the 1980s, most everywhere, it used to be that one could only connect to the network a phone leased from the carrier.
The issue of who controls (has root) on all the computers we supposedly own, starting with internet access routers and going on to printers, smart-phones, e-book readers, game consoles, disc players and TVs, is a vexing one.
You plug the vendor provided hardware into your hardware.
I honestly, no-ulterior-motive wonder how often this happens. I mean, isn't ADSL governed by real-world written-down standards? Isn't DOCSIS an actual standard? If so, and given the absolute standardization of things like ARP, RARP, DHCP, and so on, where could the problem possibly come in? Do they scan routers and refuse to talk to ones that don't respond with the right software version numbers?
I've got comcast, and I recently bought my own cable modem because the provider given one was dropping packets.
To get it to connect at all, I needed to call them up and tell them the model number and the the MAC address (or something that seemed analogous) of the router. I had two models to choose from (fewer than usual because I needed DOCSIS 3 I think), and they made it very clear that these were the only models they would allow you to use.
(it almost goes without saying, despite using their business support, it took three or four days, most of which I was without usable internet)
I happened to pick a Motorola SB6150. What surprised me was that there was not a shred of technical information or any management screen. After the cable was installed in my house, my brand new modem was attached to the cable infrastructure and then downloaded Comcast firmware for about twenty minutes. After my modem had completely joined the Borg, only then was it allowed to offer me internet service. Sigh...
1. We do DOCSIS 2.0, be aware. 2. We will not support your third party modem (i.e. if it doesn't work on our network, there's nothing we'll do about it) 3. We do access control, and service level determination based on MAC. Fill out the silly web form with your account number and CM MAC.
http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4386
wherein he described how he's not at all like RMS, because RMS frames his advocacy "as a moral crusade" and because "his rhetoric and his thinking became dominated by terms like 'evil'" and RMS doesn't use "pragmatic argument about engineering practices and outcomes".
I think ESR is really telling us that he wishes we'd all start listening to him tell us about how we should stop doing evil things instead of listening to RMS do the same.
This case shows that "evil", "good", "moral" aren't some vague abstract concepts that only matter to graybeard philosophers. You might think they are somehow detached from "practices and outcomes". Until Cisco bricks your router and holds it hostage until you sign off your privacy rights.
Seriously, if I heard RMS rant about "what if Cisco bricks your router to force you to bend over" I'd wave him off as being unrealistic and exaggerating beyond common sense. Not anymore.
Even if Cisco's firmware blob consisted entirely of compiled open source code, if it was all BSD licensed you'd still be no better off.
And it's not like BSD licenses lack ways of encouraging contribution back either.
I just don't see the choice between these licenses as important as quality of software and pace of development in ensuring customer freedom.
I assume that you mean officially GPL'd, not secretly incorporated by Cisco (although this type of abuse also gets detected.) GPLv3 forbids tivoization, so GP would definitely be better off with a router running GPL'd software. With BSD there is nothing preventing the hardware vendor from locking the software away from users.
Otherwise you could never effectively use any GPL v3 software in embedded devices unless you add additional update paths.
But for encouraging contribution, if a company goes "rogue", the BSD has no real teeth to force them to give anything back.
I largely agree with your last point though. Good old fashioned competition should normally be enough to ensure the user gets a good deal (providing regulators are doing their job and there are no cartels or monopolies).
Consider PostgreSQL for example. Several of the main contributors also release proprietary versions. But they contribute to lower the costs of code maintenance.
We're not talking about what's good for the developer here, we're talking about what's good for the user.
On a consumer linksys router for example, this is a very simple process.
Do OpenWRT and the like even use GNU userspace tools? I would assume they use Busybox.
Let's pretend that we can clone the universe and run an A/B test. Universe A receives the new rule treatment and Universe B does not. In both universes, we inject happiness meters into every living person's head. These meters also inject clones of themselves into fetuses for the next 100 years. So, we can compute the average happiness levels of all people on earth over the next century. Is a net positive change in happiness levels the definition of "better for consumers"? Must we also consider changes in the distribution of happiness among individuals? Is happiness even the right metric to consider? When the word 'consumers' is used, does it imply that everyone's happiness should be considered?
So, back to some reality. It's certainly possible that an Apple-like walled-garden approach might, for some particular technology/situation/problem/whatever set-off a chain of economic events which has a positive net effect on overall human happiness. However, I have no idea if I'm making a meaningful argument to those using the "better for consumers" phrase as no one seems too interested in attaching a strong definition to the term.
W.r.t. anti-trust litigation, the phrase is oft thrown about. What has bothered me is that the "obvious" answer is provided by a static, short-term analysis of current economic conditions. In the short-term, it's better for consumers to regulate the price of electricity. After all, it costs "too much", you know. However, the disincentive to build new power generation facilities likely leads to an outcome very negative for consumers -- shortages, rationing, etc.
tl;dr; Stop using the phrase 'better for consumers' unless you bother to attach to it a testable definition.
I wonder if the much-hyped US-UK extradition treaty cuts both ways in such a flagrant case of unauthorised access...
Would open-source prevent this kind of thing? Probably. In this case, someone has to make the hardware, supply and maintain the infrastructure, so the problem is probably a little more complex than the simple contrast between closed and open source. There really aren't a lot of large open-source-everything projects out there (hardware + software + mechanical + whatever else) to know how this would play out.
Hardware, as a business, is really capital intensive. Software isn't. A college student in a dorm can sit down and write software that gets distributed to millions and reaches every corner of the world. And the cost of doing so is virtually nothing.
To replicate this in hardware is almost impossible (yet). There's a lot more to it than just designing and building it. There's support, warranties, regulatory requirements, etc.
Here's a dumb example: Who wants to be responsible for the lawsuit when an ill-designed piece of hardware kills someone because it does not deal with high-voltages in a safe manner?
Or another one: Who wants to be responsible for a recall of thousands or even millions of devices if they are found to be defective in some way?
Again, regardless of the contrast between hardware and software I don't think that this issue can be used to champion the FOSS flag.
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> Would open-source prevent this kind of thing? Probably.
I don't think I could have made the argument better than you have.
The point isn't that all closed source software does this, or even that most does it. The point is that when you cannot control the software, the abuse can happen. Anyone who has power can abuse it, which means that if you cede control over software in your router to Cisco, you have to trust Cisco not to abuse it. If you don't, then you don't have to worry.
You might be breaching the terms & conditions of their cloud stuff, but you could simply choose not to use it.
Open source protects the technical literate people, but it's not the silver bullet that solves this issue. Raising awareness and pushing back is at least as important and that's possible with closed source as well.
Yes, pushing back is possible with closed source as well.
The real question becomes, which is harder? and for who? To push back at closed source, you'd have to be a big consumer of them or atleast big enough to be able to sue the vendor. If you're an individual, you're in real trouble. Of course, there are people who play both roles.
And I see Open-source as the best enabler for technical individuals. As far as i can see, of course.
Again, the problem --Cisco wanting access to your data-- does not have a direct causation link to the fact that their software is closed. No such connection exists.
I have an open source Buffalo router that shipped with DD-WRT. it has a service onboard where I can run an alternate SSID as a free wifi hotspot, and software on the router will inject a frame into clients web browsers to serve ads.
evil? yep. on by default? no. implemented entirely with open source software? yes.
what would happen if this feature shipped in an open-source router on-by-default and without the software button to click to change it? are you seriously advocating to consumers that they download the source code to their router, change some #defines to remove the code that injects ads, recompile it, and reload it onto their router?
To the second point, if you had a world with mostly open source software then people would start to assume that things like that could be done.
It's like arguing that you should design cars to be only serviceable by the manufacturer simply because not everyone is a mechanic.
I don't know. I'm always amazed at what a few good blog posts can do if enough people see them.
(I laughed when I saw how _much_ CSCO I own -- I bought it in high school, also total it's worth about $250, and that is apparently about the same as it was worth when I bought it.)
But he asserts that open is absolutely never better, and he backs up that assertion with... a single example. That's not much of a syllogism.
It did no such thing, even for very liberal uses of the term "brick."