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.
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.
It does? Last I checked my gmail was full of letters to/from my mom and spam. Hardly "everything I do" on the Internet. I also willingly signed up for gmail because, you know, it offers a service that is useful for me. Hard to make that argument here.
I tried to make the argument that a cloud router (though not this one) could provide a useful service. I guess people don't agree, hence the downvotes.
They've obviously already solved that problem... this article is about an update that was automatically installed. It wasn't part of a "cloud service" when they bought it.
Comments
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
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.
Gmail is a very popular cloud service, and email contains almost everything you do.
It does? Last I checked my gmail was full of letters to/from my mom and spam. Hardly "everything I do" on the Internet. I also willingly signed up for gmail because, you know, it offers a service that is useful for me. Hard to make that argument here.
I tried to make the argument that a cloud router (though not this one) could provide a useful service. I guess people don't agree, hence the downvotes.
> difficulty of pushing out firmware updates
They've obviously already solved that problem... this article is about an update that was automatically installed. It wasn't part of a "cloud service" when they bought it.
Meraki is an example of how this can be done right; their UI looks far beyond any other router.