
Thanks for breaking our connected homes, Amazon - donmatito
https://medium.com/snips-ai/thanks-for-breaking-our-connected-homes-amazon-c820a8849021#.2ob5n68ej
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URSpider94
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.

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mtgx
> 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.

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

The correct term you want to use is home automation.

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eveningcoffee
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).

