

Cisco’s cloud vision: Mandatory, monetized, and killed at their discretion - adeelarshad82
http://www.extremetech.com/computing/132142-ciscos-cloud-vision-mandatory-monetized-and-killed-at-their-discretion

======
SoftwareMaven
_If_ this had been done correctly, it probably would have been a great boon
for the average person. It would have allowed Cisco's tech support to more
easily address problems users are having and allowed Cisco to keep software up
to date.

Unfortunately, Cisco decided to see how well they could "monetize" (gads, I
hate that word!) it:

\- Create a "marketplace" for features built into many routers? Check!

\- Sell people's internet history to the highest bidder? Check!

\- Force the upgrade and provide no way for people to opt-out? Check!

I'm really trying to image the product management meetings that created this
travesty. Did the meetings happen after somebody came and said, "You know, we
could make administering these routers a lot easier by making it so users
don't have to," or were the meetings more like, "We have a lot of users. How
could we package things so we can sell all their data"? Did it start benign
and turn malignant or was it malignant from the get-go?

Regardless, I can't imagine being willing to screw my customers like that.

~~~
Spooky23
I'm sure it started as the latter. Since Apple's success with the App Store,
every vendor wants to turn their platform into a walled garden where they
control everything.

Cisco tried it previously with their attempt to marry a VoIP phone with an
Android tablet.

From an MBA point of view, Linksys is a problem -- it's a commodity product
with low margins that was only acquired to protect Cisco's high-profit small
router/switch business. Focusing on improving the user experience makes your
$80 router a $150 router (ie. Apple's strategy in this segment), which doesn't
help the bottom line -- the world doesn't need another AirPort Extreme.

Instead, you can turn your router into a "monetization" machine and extract
recurring cash flows without changing the product price-point in a competitive
market.

------
unimpressive
>"The Terms and Conditions of using the Cisco Connect Cloud state that Cisco
may unilaterally shut down your account if finds that you have used the
service for “obscene, pornographic, or offensive purposes, to infringe
another’s rights, including but not limited to any intellectual property
rights, or… to violate, or encourage any conduct that would violate any
applicable law or regulation or give rise to civil or criminal liability.”"

So let me get this straight, Cisco feels that they have the right to shut off
your Internet connectivity IF:

1) They don't like what you say.

2) You watch porn. (Or anything they consider pornographic, which may not
agree with your definition of pornographic; see corporate Internet filters.)

Well, that just proves to me that they have no idea what the hell they're
doing, and have just permanently lost me as a customer.

~~~
wmf
It's not clear that the router itself is considered part of the service, so
maybe they would only brick your router if you transmit porn _through their
servers_.

And I think those terms have been removed anyway.

------
pattern
I'm thankful Jeff Atwood posted another article about the commodity router +
open source firmware one-two punch [1]. I finally took the plunge and
installed Tomato (Toastman [2]) and have been thrilled with the features, but
mostly excited about the fact I get to tinker with another device :) It is
empowering to know that I can circumvent overarching and onerous policies such
as this...innovation...by Cisco.

[1]: [http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-
st...](http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2012/06/because-everyone-still-needs-
a-router.html)

[2]: <http://toastmanfirmware.yolasite.com/>

~~~
j_s
Don't miss the previous discussion of Jeff's post here on Hacker News for more
details and alternatives:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4127393>

~~~
pattern
I did indeed follow both the discussion here and the comments on his post
closely! I wasted/spent a good 6+ hours reading about all kinds of router
features that I had didn't know existed, or never even thought possible
(VLANs, VPN, NFS, CIFS, Captive Portal, router CPU overclocking, etc). Some
versions of Tomato (Shibby's firmware [1] in particular) allow the router to
act as a BitTorrent client! I'm sure it's old news to some, but for anyone on
the fence about trying new firmware on their routers - take the plunge.

[1]: <http://tomato.groov.pl/>

~~~
AYBABTME
I have an ASUS RT-N16 router at home, which I connected to a hard-drive by
USB. Then with Tomato installed, you can SSH into the router and install
optware. Then you can configure optware[1] to install its packages on the
external hard-drive. From there, you can retrieve and install a bunch of
packages, like http servers, bittorrent clients and whatever else you feel
like running from the CLI. Pretty convenient! I installed Transmission with a
web-gui and I can SSH into it from anywhere in the world to my house's router,
load a magnet or torrent in the queue and when I get home, the content will be
waiting for me on my hard-drive.

I don't pretend Tomato firmware are the first to allow to do so, but I just
found it was an interesting and usefull thing.

[1] <http://tomatousb.org/tut:optware-installation>

------
JOnAgain
The author seemed to gloss over the part that really stuck out to me: "...we
may keep track of certain information ... e.g Internet history ..."

So the router is tracking your online activity and they will terminate it if
they find you've been using it to watch porn or content not deemed legal. I'm
guessing not many people from Hacker News will be able to do much with their
routers if they start enforcing this.

~~~
wmf
Their TOS says you can't use the service for naughty things, but it's not
clear whether your router is part of the service or just a client to the
service.

------
Spooky23
I suppose that Cisco's experience collaborating with the secret police of
various nations has seeped into it's corporate culture.

------
ChuckMcM
Wow, pretty amazing. I'm not sure of a better advertisement for open source
router software than this sort of bonehead move.

------
ixacto
This is hilarious, and exactly what you get when there is no forethought to
product longevity. What if in 10 years the economy is still shit, the cloud is
unfeasible, and the WRT54g from 2002
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linksys_WRT54G_series> is still working? Just
about as bad as Diablo 3.

Cisco is scared, because for most people there is not a need to upgrade your
router every 2-4 years. Router oses generally suck less than windows. Internet
is not even >25mbit/sec in most places in the USA.

~~~
LogicHoleFlaw
My WRT54G is still going strong. I run the `tomato` firmware on it, and
haven't had to mess with the configuration in years. If only the rest of my
hardware could be as reliable.

------
modarts
Looks like Apple really opened Pandora's box with the advent of their closed
app ecosystem. I think we're going to find "App Stores" popping up at every
level of the network stack at this pace (as to why you'd need one over your
wifi router firmware is anyone's guess though)

------
cabalamat
> “In some cases, in order to provide an optimal experience on your home
> network, some updates may still be automatically applied, regardless of the
> auto-update setting.”

I have just added Cisco to my list of hardware companies never to buy from.

------
henrikschroder
Wow. I understand that Cisco wants to sell a service to consumers instead of
commoditized hardware. But who in their right mind wants to _buy_ that kind of
service?

------
delinka
Someone could probably come along and eat Cisco's lunch. I imagine a company
using a longevity argument like "routers built to last" or something; a nice
commitment to sensible autoupdate; maybe a product that does just what it's
supposed to do: route packets.

------
slovette
This is really just a view into technological companies losing sight from the
customer view. Even though the new design is probably meant to be a much
better product, newer isn't always better. No matter how much more valuable
the new design might be, sometimes the simple change in UI is too much of a
hurdle for people and that enough, is something to consider before forcing
updates. 37signal's Jason Fried wrote a good article on the topic:
[http://www.inc.com/magazine/201205/jason-fried/you-can-
lead-...](http://www.inc.com/magazine/201205/jason-fried/you-can-lead-a-
customer-to-an-upgrade.html)

------
tubbo
Who the hell still runs the stock firmware on their router?

~~~
delinka
Every-damn-body that's not technologically inclined. Are you this myopic about
everything?

~~~
adgar
He's not myopic, he's being a snob.

------
agwa
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>

~~~
gergles
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.

~~~
agwa
Gmail is a very popular cloud service, and email contains almost everything
you do.

~~~
eswangren
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.

~~~
agwa
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.

