Thanks for breaking our connected homes, Amazon

https://medium.com/snips-ai/thanks-for-breaking-our-connected-homes-amazon-c820a8849021#.2ob5n68ej

by donmatito • 9 years ago

11 4 9 years ago

URSpider94• 9 years ago

If your connected home requires a round trip to the cloud to turn a light bulb on, that's a major fail.

Yes, you may lose the ability to control your home via Alexa, but the core functions should all be managed locally. Even a phone app should be able to talk to items on your home network via WiFi, or directly via Bluetooth.

This is also the place to make the obligatory point that any cloud service that isn't running in multiple AWS regions is not serious about being highly available.

EDIT: FWIW, my home is wired with a fair amount of Insteon gear, which continues to work just fine if I unplug my router.

mtgx• 9 years ago

Having a connected home that runs on a cloud server is akin to having a lock on your door and being forced by a corporation to hand over the key.

No, it's worse than that. Law enforcement can completely bypass you in this case and just ask Amazon for the hypothetical "key."

Your IoT should be Private by design, running without needing the cloud.

Completely agree. That's why I've been saying how stupid it is that Google's routers (you know the ones you're using in your own home) have to be configured over the Internet. Google is one of the main "bad actors" in this scenario, as it's trying to push more stuff like this with their "Physical Web" initiative, as well as the web Bluetooth and WebUSB HTML APIs.

They are also part of the Thread Group, through Nest. Thread is primarily a P2P protocol that can also enable devices to connect directly to the Internet. I don't think I've heard of Google using the P2P function yet. They prefer to use only the direct Internet connection, because that's how they can also gather your data in real-time.

This is also why I support the idea of using client-side embedded "machine learning accelerators" in IoT devices as soon as possible. Otherwise, Google and Amazon and Microsoft will tell us how you need to send your data to their clouds so they can give you "AI features".

No you don't. IoT machine learning accelerators will make cloud connections for this purpose almost unnecessary. Most of the "AI features" you'll probably want on IoT devices (like say your surveillance camera identifying cats, or even strangers) should be quite basic and the embedded accelerators should be enough for such tasks (or will be soon).

As a bonus, devices using local AI capabilities should work much better, too, because they analyze the data locally and they don't have to send it back to Google/Amazon or use your (probably capped) data allowance.

eveningcoffee2• 9 years ago

> Your IoT should be Private by design, running without needing the cloud.

The correct term you want to use is home automation.

eveningcoffee2• 9 years ago

Use products that have been tested for such application. Your damn light bulb really does not have to have an Internet connection. No, really.

IoT is not needed for for home automation. You use your local network for this - WiFi, cabled Ethernet or even serial (there are various protocols for this like KNX standard).

Thanks for breaking our connected homes, Amazon

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