I liked that you picked a service that has a relatively low barrier to entry. The real asset are local
operators and referrals. Making them more efficient without being controlled by a big company would be a boon for everyone involved.
Consider being a platform coop with regional operators as members. See https://platform.coop/
Yes, the barrier here is the desire to study and pass the exam. If willing, you are up and running relatively quickly - but only as a technician under someone else's operating license. To get the operator license (eg to be a full on pest control company) requires 2+ year documented experience and another set of exams.
The operating license holder is also on the hook for legal action if (when) things go wrong.
"Control" is interesting and I have found in all trades that people value their freedom. The good companies don't monitor employees too tightly, and are rewarded with loyalty and longer tenures generally. Of course you have to run a good recruitment and referral process to find the good people!
I’ve never heard of platform Co-ops. Cool! Lots of people predicted that a beloved local coffee shop was doomed to fail when the workers got a loan and bought it to run as a completely flat cooperative. It’s been a few years and they are absolutely killing it. I’d love to see the tech version of that.
I agree a lightweight franchise would be attractive, though I don't like most franchising options due to the fees and lack of equity build up for the operator.
Some franchising platforms (window cleaning is a good example) don't offer much beyond sales and marketing support and some nicely designed uniforms. There's not much to window cleaning other than basic equipment, so a person's route can easily be disrupted by a new entrant who doesn't have the franchise rake to contend with.
There's a model between employment, ownership and franchising that will probably emerge as sales, marketing, ops gets easier technically.
The business model is simple: Sell nice hardware at a premium, then sponsor and upstream improvements to OpenWRT.
If the software is an important differentiator (arguably, it is for things like Ubiquiti, but clearly it is not for most consumer routers), then release the patches under the Business Source License with a 3-5 year sunset back to BSD / Apache / GPL.
Open to audits doesn't mean free software, it just means visible source. The business model for selling routers with auditable firmware is selling routers.
And the public doesn't have to audit it. The govt already audits/inspects/validates plenty of sensitive physical products, typically through 3rd party industry associations. You don't get to peek inside, but people signing NDAs do.
Even if this wasn't done, at the very least they must publish their software testing procedures, the way UL, ETL, and CSA require to certify devices for the US power grid. (https://www.komaspec.com/about-us/blog/ul-etl-csa-certificat...) They can also do black box testing.
But ideally they would actually inspect the software to ensure its design is correct. Otherwise vibe-coded apps with swiss cheese code will be running critical infrastructure and nobody will know until it's too late.
There's also Turris from cz.nic [1]. Technically they use a fork of OpenWRT with some convenience features like auto-updates, although it looks like you can run OpenWRT on (some of their routers?) if you wanted to [2].
There's a whole interesting physiology behind learned helplessness (of which this is a minor variation).
In its defense, there's some practicality to it; we wouldn't say that a "get out of debt" plan that involved spending all available money on lottery tickets is worthwhile because "its not gonna happen". But defeatism is just a shortcut to say "I don't want to talk/think about it" in many cases.
And in this one, if the US Gov't required that all routers purchased by any agency they could influence had the ability to run open source code it would certainly shake up the market.
Why? You'd need to get someone electorally useful involved. That, unfortunately, elimiates a lot of the nihilistic, holier-than-thou tech types. But that's pretty doable nowadays. You just need an electorally-relevant group of people on your side.
Open firmware for your own devices is commercially viable. That is why hardware vendors create FOSS drivers. not all do, but it is a viable business model.
I'm no fan of imaginary property, but you're going to have to lay out your reasoning here. Firmware security is such crap precisely because most hardware manufacturers see it as nothing but a cost center they wish they could avoid.
The difficulty of installing OpenWRT or Linux in general on hardware comes from that hardware not being documented, or not having straightforward APIs like BIOS/EFI.
Or for some devices, community distributions that dubiously remix manufacturer-supplied binaries are available. But we generally see that as soon as the manufacturer stops their updates, the community versions start lagging behind as well.
What are you referring to? Would you not say there is a difference between OpenWRT having to make a list of supported whole systems, whereas an amd64 Linux distribution making a list of chipsets? I can go buy an off the shelf laptop, stick a generic "Linux install" USB in it, and be reasonably certain most things are going to work. Whereas OpenWrt I have to look at their list of supported machines, and buy exactly that one, even down to the hardware rev. Some of this is due to embedded constraints, but a good chunk is also due to the lack of hardware discoverability.
>> community distributions that dubiously remix manufacturer-supplied binaries are available
> The reason OpenWrt abandoned most routers was
I didn't mean things like OpenWrt, which I'd say is a general Linux distribution that does contortions to fit on specific devices. Rather I was talking about things like Valetudo which are closer to rooting the stock distribution with some tweaks, or the countless "custom ROMs" you see (saw?) in the phone world which are effectively remixing the manufacturer images. I thought DD-WRT was in that camp, especially for many devices (eg where do these "older kernels" come from?), but I'm hazy on that.
(personally I gave on up OpenWrt some 10 years back, and just use generic Linux (NixOS) on amd64. A VM on my server for the router, and lower-power amd64 boards for the additional APs (most of which double as Kodi terminals))
The referenced policy says "We will unleash the private sector by creating incentives to identify and disrupt adversary networks and scale our national capabilities."
It can. Go to the code tab, choose your repo, and have it write an image file to disk. If you tell it to read it, it should show in the chat. It works on the web version so hopefully it works on ios.
We shouldn’t have to surrender our privacy for simple conveniences. Is there a market here?
Can someone make an open source, privacy-focused doorbell? Perhaps like the Software Conversancy’s OpenWRT One wifi router. With an open specification, addons like a flashing light or entry buzzer could be integrated. A simple iPhone/Android intercom app usable only on my LAN would be lovely. Yes, one can get a ReoLink and muck with VLan settings but that is not consumer accessible, moreover you have to use their central service or forgo remote answering
Bell wire is really thin and you can run a low voltage line around your house that is nearly invisible. That's the old school, physical option and is not to be sniffed at if it does the job.
If you want to get something safe and smart (IoT) then you have to think like an engineer. You also need to decide if you are going to do one thing - a doorbell, or if you want disco lights by the pool and the rest.
For a doorbell, you need a button at the door and a chime or whatever inside the house to indicate the button has been pushed. Already you have to potentially deal with delivering power at a place that might be hard, door frames/walls, wires, batteries, weather, positioning and lots more. Then you need to get the signal to a chime.
My previous doorbell was a chime that I wired into a switched and fused spur (I ran a 5A rated twin and earth out of a light socket into a back box with a switched socket faceplate and it has its own fuse) into the nearest lighting socket and a bell wire that ran out to the button. That was fine and simple but not too smart!
I have PoE switches and my IT gear is mostly in the attic. I put a backbox with an ethernet socket in the attic and ran solid core down through the roof/wall etc to near to where the door bell is on the inside of my house and put another backbox with ethernet face plate on it. I then run a short (3m) patchlead inside some trunking and through the front door frame and into the back of a Reolink PoE powered doorbell. I also have Home Assistant running as a VM on a Proxmox box.
Somewhere between those two setups sounds like where you want to go. I went for PoE because I also have UPS for my switches and other infra but wifi may be fine for you for comms but you still have to do power and I'm not a fan of battery powered door buttons but that might be a design decision for you.
You mention VLANs and I really recommend that you look into them. They are a core building block of networking. However, I also get that becoming a network expert is not on everyone's score card. Then again, you are hanging around on HN and probably tending towards ... nerd!
Even a simple doorbell can become pretty sodding complicated and that is why we have some people wondering what on earth all the fuss is about and others advocating to smash the looms ... sorry, doorbells.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I ended up hiring a contractor to run PoE but that was not cheap. Setting up the VLan was time consuming and I failed to do it right the first time. The intercom feature is invaluable but an entry buzzer would be even better. I don’t need the camera and it made some guests uncomfortable … electric tape worked.
Wait, are you saying that American homes did not have the regular camera doorbells before Ring happened? Those things predate LCDs. Earliest implementations date back to at least mid 1980s.
For those of modest means there is also the "fail first" insurance process where you need to use less expensive therapies before a more appropriate therapy is approved. Each failure can be costly to a patient's health, often exacting irreversible comorbidities, not even considering lost work, family wellbeing, and pain/suffering.
For those with rare diseases, insurance also doesn't help with "N of 1" efforts. A case report to consolidate critical details would be invaluable. Yet there's no administrative path to fund this personally let alone with insurance help. Without summary case report it's harder to see the big picture, get a care team on the same page, and dial in on the underlying disease mechanism.
Pharma is also not enthusiastic about "off label" use of their medications. They are happy to lower costs when insurance denies coverage for an indicated diagnosis, to demonstrate benefit so it then becomes covered. However, "off label" use is often full cash fare, making it impossible for common folk to perform low-risk physician-guided experiments when standard therapies are ineffective.
We have something similar in Brazil. Our public system, SUS, has treatment protocols where you sometimes need to try drug A before you can get access to drug B. BUT the protocol is written by a medical committee - CONITEC -, not by an insurance company desperately trying to save money. When I need to skip a step, I write a lenghthy clinical justification and send it up. And it can take time, sometimes months. It's super frustrating, yes, but at the very least I know the person reviewing it is not incentivized to deny it. They are checking if my reasoning makes sense, not calculating how much it will cost their employer. That's the part that's hard to explain to Americans, that the bureaucracy here is slow and annoying but it's not adversarial. Nobody's profiting from telling me my patient doesn't need a medication. In the US model someone literally is. That changes everything about the practice.
I can see why some things landed here. Medicine is expensive. Desperate people are more susceptible to fraud. Yet things are improving: someone like me would be long dead a generation ago.
We should look at these challenges holistically and think about better fiscal/social engineering of our marketplaces. Alvin Roth's book, "Who Gets What and Why", is a good introduction to identifying market failures and thinking about how to address them.
Step therapy is required in countries with universal healthcare, too.
It can actually be harder to get access to new therapies in countries with universal healthcare because they’re more uniform and strict in what they allow.
For a relatable example: The UK just raised the age of eligibility for COVID vaccines all the way up to 75 years old: https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/health/covid-russian-roulette-... Contrast this with the US where COVID vaccine coverage is a basic expectation of health insurance for all ages. And that’s for a simple, cheap medicine without step therapy! It doesn’t matter if your doctor thinks you need it, the rules are set from the top.
Worth noting that "eligibility for COVID vaccines" is for "free at the point of delivery" NHS treatment - you can still get it elsewhere at any age. Boots (a major chain of pharmacies) do it for £98:
It can be harder, but it's specific to the country/system. Here it Taiwan you can walk into any clinic with stock and get a (NHI covered) vaccine any time.
There are other things to complain about of course, but the rules for what's covered ate generally logical. Non-covered medication is affordable to, which helps.
THe most appropriate treatment is required, not "step therapy". For antibiotics this makes sense, as last mile, powerful antibiotics need to be used sparingly.
The same with cancer, it'll be treated according to the requirements of the cancer, with guidance from nice about the most effective therapy.
Is it perfect? no.
Does it lead to mistakes? yes.
It is better than american style insurance denying care based entirely on price? 100%
We do let them do that if you are willing to pay them for it. The fact is that if you "let doctors do medicine" without any cost benefit analysis, then you really aren't going to like the cost.
You mean we do let them do that unless you aren't able to pay them for it. If you're the minority that has very large sums of money your doctors can decide what treatment works best, but for everyone else their healthcare is dictated by some company whose only concern is increasing the amount of profit they rake in and they'd happily see you dead if it would improve their bottom line.
In the US the allocation process itself is very expensive. Something like a third of the cost goes towards paying the administrative costs of navigating the byzantine insurance rules.
If not for the government enforced artificial scarcity then many of those medicines wouldn't exist in the first place. Bringing a new drug to market costs >$1B now, largely due to clinical trials. No one is going to do that without patent protection.
Medical patents should come with compulsory licensing requirements. Nobody's saying that research houses shouldn't get paid, just that the monopoly needs to end.
Consider being a platform coop with regional operators as members. See https://platform.coop/
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