Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs.
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@stefano Sure does seem like all this technology going wrong in unprecedented ways is because this seems to be the first time where we expanded technology this aggressively and just chucked the old system that could easily have been an emergency backup into a landfill.
they don't want you to have an emergency backup, they want to put you in a position that you'll have to pay any price to continue access
when i had my new HVAC system installed, they tried to sell me a system that went back to the cloud, that was a scam to make sure in 5 years that my five figure whole house system would be unusable unless i paid them a subscription or maybe another install/upgrade, & that fancy cloud install was $5K more!!!
the scam is real
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Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs. While acknowledging the quality of my current one, he said, "It uses a SIM card and calls you. The new ones are 4G or Wi-Fi and use the cloud, so notifications go straight to your smartphone, it's not calling anymore."
I asked him, "And what if the cloud stops working? Why should I have to depend on the company’s cloud to receive alerts from my alarm? My alarm is 10 years old and works perfectly. Can you say with certainty that the company’s cloud will still be effective 10 years from now?"
He looked puzzled for a moment, then admitted he had never thought about it.
The real problem is that people do not realize what this means until things actually happen.
"I get paid to install the replacement"
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@stefano @TimWardCam Which model is that ?
Asking for a lot of friends
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@stefano
The problem is that people don't realise that that cloud being owned by a private company is a problem.
We need our digital infrastructure to be a common (just like our physical infrastructure, education and journalism, healthcare, and security guard). We need our society to be social.@elfburgerman @stefano right there. This is crux of it.
Make the foundational services a public good. Like police, fire, emergency and in most civilized nations, water, medical and social safety net.
Cloud services are now a foundational good.
If companies want to sell you a subscription service using cloud they must escrow the source, which becomes open if they discontinue the thing they sold you. Plenty of precedent for that.
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@Frischling there should be regulation which enforces that if you can’t replace some tech, you’re eligible for the full source code when you buy it.
And if the company no longer provides support, the license of the source code automatically changes to a Free Software license, so you can contract any company to take up the maintenance.
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@Frischling there should be regulation which enforces that if you can’t replace some tech, you’re eligible for the full source code when you buy it.
And if the company no longer provides support, the license of the source code automatically changes to a Free Software license, so you can contract any company to take up the maintenance.
@ArneBab @Frischling @stefano neat idea l, but very hard to enforce.
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Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs. While acknowledging the quality of my current one, he said, "It uses a SIM card and calls you. The new ones are 4G or Wi-Fi and use the cloud, so notifications go straight to your smartphone, it's not calling anymore."
I asked him, "And what if the cloud stops working? Why should I have to depend on the company’s cloud to receive alerts from my alarm? My alarm is 10 years old and works perfectly. Can you say with certainty that the company’s cloud will still be effective 10 years from now?"
He looked puzzled for a moment, then admitted he had never thought about it.
The real problem is that people do not realize what this means until things actually happen.
@stefano and i was still worrying what the increasing paucity of landlines is doing for our infrastructural resilience🥴
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@ArneBab @Frischling @stefano neat idea l, but very hard to enforce.
@mu enforcement of far stranger ideas works
The license is just a legal title, so the idea comes down to: you must provide the source code.
To enforce: accept complaints and have canary buyers and if a buyer doesn’t receive the code, warn the company, and if it doesn’t oblige, fine it into oblivion until all get the source.
If need be, send a marshal and confiscate the source code, similar to actions against regular people who are late on some payment.
@Frischling @stefano -
@stefano I buy white goods—household appliances like freezers, washing machines, central heating—with an expectation that they will work without upgrades for 20 years. I have yet to buy a piece of computing hardware with an expectation that it will work for more than 7 years. (And this is why I refuse to have "smart" gas or electricity meters installed.)
@cstross @stefano Yeah, hardware I buy today probably won't last 7 years (unless I'm lucky). But at work I still have a working 20-years-old server (one of these, EOL-ed in 2008: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun_Fire#/media/File:SunFire-X4200.jpg – no parts have been replaced) and a couple of even older 3Com switches. Not that we expected them to work that long.
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Yesterday, one of the younger electricians was telling me about the beauty of the new alarm systems he installs. While acknowledging the quality of my current one, he said, "It uses a SIM card and calls you. The new ones are 4G or Wi-Fi and use the cloud, so notifications go straight to your smartphone, it's not calling anymore."
I asked him, "And what if the cloud stops working? Why should I have to depend on the company’s cloud to receive alerts from my alarm? My alarm is 10 years old and works perfectly. Can you say with certainty that the company’s cloud will still be effective 10 years from now?"
He looked puzzled for a moment, then admitted he had never thought about it.
The real problem is that people do not realize what this means until things actually happen.
Planned obsolescence is the core problem. It prevents high quality hardware from having high quality software.
Most of the IoT devices use the mqtt protocol. A mqtt server runs on every potatoe pc you can find in the the world. In theory it's easy and cheap for a different company to continue providing services to device-owners in an aftermarket style.
Or have users run a mqtt server at home, or at a IaaS service. MQTT servers even exist for devices like the esp32. One could build a 20€ device, which your phone connects to and sits right at your home* and will never need a subscription to work.
We should be able to configure or have someone configure your IoT devices to work without the company's cloud.
The problem is not, that we cannot do it any better.
We have to force companies to open interfaces to their soft- and hardware.
*depending on your security needs
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@stefano The most recent alarm and camera system I dealt with required a static IP for the client system to authenticate to their cloud. They owned the hardware on both sides of the connection but still needed a static IP. ;<(
@danielcberman @stefano They'd be out of luck with my ISP, who I think only offers static IPs to business customers.
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@TimWardCam @maccruiskeen @stefano buy yourself commercial metal kitchen stuff. It's designed to take a beating and be repairable yet is usually no more expensive all in as it's all modular and moveable so doesn't need a day of kitchen fitters just an oven hooking up and a bit of basic plumbing
@etchedpixels @TimWardCam @stefano The Wolf range I have is just about the closest thing you could get to a commercial oven that was legal for residential use. You rally don't want a restaurant oven in your home kitchen. But I do use 'commercial grade' small appliances.
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@stefano I buy white goods—household appliances like freezers, washing machines, central heating—with an expectation that they will work without upgrades for 20 years. I have yet to buy a piece of computing hardware with an expectation that it will work for more than 7 years. (And this is why I refuse to have "smart" gas or electricity meters installed.)
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