My biggest issue with this is that Google wants to inject a piece of hardware into my home that acts as the gateway to my data. A device through which all :
> Incoming data runs through
> Internal data runs through
> Outgoing data runs through
And then wants to be vague about what data they will be pumping to their back-end for analytics/data mining.
I have had a long standing proposal for home automation and I'm curious to know, in this era of insecurity and people vacuuming up all your data, how many of the tech minded people here would be interested in a device which ensures your 'home automation' data stays in your home. This can be quite clearly achieved in hardware and by having an out-of-band oversight controller that literally will not allow certain data to exit the physical domain of your home...
Cloud nonsense? It's called an application and a home automation application doesn't need to run in someone's cloud...
Whose interested? I think it's about time this cloud foolishness for the sake of monetizing someone else's data in an insecure manner come to an end. Everyone loves to rant about 'disruption'... I feel its about time this data monetization cloud bananza be disrupted.
Oh, come on. Just connect your Google router to your Google fiber connection and connect to it with your smartphone or laptop running a Google operating system and Google browser. Visit your Google home page (using Google's DNS servers, of course) to read your Google Mail, or perhaps catch up on the news with Google News, or use Google+ to see what your friends are up to, or get a little work done on Google Docs. Should you do some Google searches and end up on some non-Google sites, don't worry - you're still safe under the watchful eye of Google AdSense and Google Analytics. What have you got to be so paranoid about?
The NSA should stop the charade and just buy Google and Facebook already. They already have us by the balls, lets at least make it official and make the world embrace the heroic and always rightful eye of the US government.
I'm glad that people found this to be a point of significance. I've worked in the commercial networking hardware industry for some years and shelved several consumer ideas due to a lack of interest in security/privacy.
I have watched over many years as this 'cloud' software bonanza has eclipsed the tech industry. It went away from its original intent a long time ago and now is used as the holy-grail method of :
> ensuring (rent) is always paid for service(s) people should OWN
> vacuuming up and selling people's data.
I have several projects on my plate. However, I have a solid one for securing people's data when it comes to the IoT movement (in hardware)... It revolves around the same hardware/technology that the industry uses to scrape and funnel your data except the home user will now have it at their disposal as well.
Users should have 100% control of their data. If someone wants to 'monetize' it or use it to 'improve' their platform, the user should be rightfully paid for the opportunity to do so.
Disruption? Yeah, I think it's time. The foolishness has gotten far too long in the tooth.
.. And the backwards thing about it is: there are simple and straight forward ways to secure data (in hardware). It's only because everyone in the industry wants to ship your data all over the place and data-mine the snot out of it that things are as insecure as they are.
The very (loop-hole) or (door) that is used to funnel/mine/monetize/cloudify data is the very one used as an attack vector. Complicating the crap out of things at that point defeats the whole purpose.... Get rid of the door all together and the home is the least of all places where you should be exposing yourself.
That is why i don't buy into this hype what so ever. Anything that has 'cloud' on it when it doesn't need to I avoid.
I'd rather set up my own router with pf-sense and a industrial WiFi access point.
I really love the concept of complete home automation however the data needs to stay in the home and companies need to ask for permission to mine it.
I have nothing against data mining it can be incredibly helpful but i want full control over weather i choose to share it or charge a small fee for my data.
The whole idea of home automation (and most of IoT) over cloud is absurd. The devices in your home should not communicate by sending packets around the entire globe. The data should never leave your internal network unless explicitly meant to (web interfaces are cool and all, and you want to have remote access).
I'm actually somewhat surprised people don't seem how wrong the current model is, but I suspect it's a mix of cloud being The Hot Sexy Thing and being paid not to understand this (via business models that rely on monetizing users through cloud solution; as some of my hardware startup friends told me once after talking with the investors, hardware won't be making money, the cloud platform will).
So yes, I would be very willing to help reverse this and make local network communication the default for home automation and relevant technologies.
Google's model of how it wants computing to work is fundamentally flawed and now it's infected Microsoft. Really the only shelter is Linux, when will the ignorant masses wake up and realize this?
"Please note that some features may not function with certain privacy settings turned off, and some information (such as the association of your Google Account to your OnHub) is stored by Google even if all privacy controls are turned off"
I am sticking with my Asus AC66U which has more features and is also cheaper than this Google device
http://amzn.com/B008ABOJKS
Hmm, that "pretty clear about exactly what date they're collecting and why" seems a bit too similar to what the proposed Australian data retention laws ask for, which the community usually refers to it as "vague and overreaching". They make a vague note about not collecting the content of network traffic (but you can infer almost everything important from source, destination, time, protocol, etc anyway) and the table on the page is just described as "examples" of what it collects, and is never stated to be the full list. Given that Google is in the data collection business, and has a licence to update the device (and what it collects) automatically, I would assume that within a short timespan it will be collecting everything it can get away with.
Even what they do mention is enough to start inferring things about your personal life:
With "historical data consumption" they can determine who is in the house and when. With the number and make of connected devices, they can take a pretty good estimate of family size, annual income, how many of your household are working, etc.. (Though they probably first care how many Apple devices there are connecting... maybe we need to send you some more Samsung adverts)
And sure it strips the URLs from the logs -- but between Google DNS and Google Analytics being on much of the web, they can piece back together every site you visit anyway and now your router has a Google account they can tie it right back to the router in your home.
And of course it's a $199 router with a license agreement that says Google can stop it working at any time they like (clause 5c).
Good link, thanks for sharing it. I gotta say, though, when I saw that wall of text my first thought was that this is going to be a tough sell for some of us. Thinking about it for half a second, I have to say that I would gladly prefer my router to be as dumb as possible. Maybe I just don't understand, at a gut level, how a cloud-connected router will actually improve my life?
I personally think the real answer is not to have a central device, but to spread it out into a peer2peer 'fog'.
There's been some movement in industrial applications via stuff like https://twitter.com/FilamentHQ which leverages hardware accelerated ECC and telehash, using blockchain based DNS systems and other decentralized methods of command and control.
I think a similar direction needs to be taken for consumer hardware and data. The cloud needs to become just another peer.
I've been working with a bunch of interesting ideas on trying to get a distributed IoT network setup using programmable blockchains and Eris industries stack as part of an internship with them.
In P2P networks you'll need reliable peers with sufficient capacity. Making a home server into an always connected peer could solve plenty of issues, such as with routing and hosting.
I would be very interested in helping write some code or contributing money towards making improvements to lock down phone home and other unwanted behavior. I think an excellent starting point is to see if you couldn't take a Mikrotik or OpenWRT/Tomato router and bake a lot of this extra filtering and functionality in. For some of the things that Google advertises like speed checks or choosing an optimal channel or whatever, should be do-able in open source firmware, so I think it would be hugely beneficial, at least for me (and probably many others).
This is exactly why I found the Google branding a bit weird. The smart guys over there surely must know that a lot of us would be suspicious of this device. Why didn't they brand it under Nest, or a new Google subsidiary that would take the initial suspicion-edge off? I think it's a good router at a decent price, but no way I'm putting that inside my house!
> The smart guys over there surely must know that a lot of us would be suspicious of this device. Why didn't they brand it under Nest, or a new Google subsidiary that would take the initial suspicion-edge off?
Why? Most consumers aren't in the ultra-suspicious-because-it-says-Google camp, and most of those who are in that camp are likely to take using a different branding for a project from the same ultimate corporate parent as evidence that not only is the project trying to violate privacy, its also trying to be extra sneaky about it.
The ratio of people who think about the implications vs the general public who consume rather than question is weighted in favour of big name companies.
"I feel its about time this data monetization cloud bonanza be disrupted."
Ironically, having users controlling their own routers could be the best chance to do that. That is, toss out the crappy consumer routers and instead embrace the router as a user-controlled computer that sits between the user's devices (including IoT devices) and the ISP connection (e.g., modem). This router could run an open source source OS and be programmed _by the user_ to do all sorts of useful things, such as block ads, block tracking, perhaps even create private overlay networks among family and friends, protected from spam.
In a world where the Internet user can have some respite from radio, TV and other advertising, Google (=slave to advertisers) should not be selling routers. Should they come to dominate the market, the respite will come to an end. Users probably will not even know what happened. No one pays attention to routers as computers. They just want a strong WiFi signal.
I don't think there will be a significant market for your idea. One of the most rapidly adopted technologies of the 20th century is Color Television [1] and it still commands 36% of our attention [2].
Consumers have made it crystal clear that they are willing to trade their time and data for lower prices and more convenience. Watch the commercial on that landing page. It couldn't be targeted less at technical people.
False choice. It's not impossible to make something that tastes good and is also good for you. Some people find that Apple products are desirable, and incidentally, Apple provides a relatively high level of privacy.
But you can never expect Google to provide such a product as long as it makes money off your data. Maybe it needs to be under a different letter of the Alphabet.
Well I don't think there is anything inherently wrong with Google. So suddenly people have started to become suspicious about what data a router is able to collect, while in fact various routers which are well capable of executing malicious applications have been around forever? This is just a trend and Google is not some inherently evil guy that acts outside of the norm. Ditch Google? Fine. The next alternative you find is equally, if not more, likely to perform some data collection. Of course you can go full Stallman and ensure your data are truly guarded by your own in every possible sense. But the heavy price that comes with it, we all have seen.
I started developing a self hosted home automation framework for my senior project last year. Been on a bit of a hiatus, partially because I don't have my own place currently, but its here: https://github.com/terramod. Central web application that can run "apps" on your house, with raspi nodes that connect the hardware around the house.
I too am a bit surprised to hear tech minded people get excited about products that basically exist to collect their data.
From what I can see though, the hardware looks decent... Personally I'm curious for when someone does a teardown, to make sure there are no hardcoded callbacks to Google servers that shouldn't be.
If not, this wouldn't be so bad (for $200) running DDWRT/OpenWRT?
[edit] Also, does anyone know if the base firmware will be open source similar to Chromium? If so, one could theoretically still take advantage of their security updates (which would honestly be leaps and bounds above current consumer-grade hardware) with open source tooling.
I agree with you, but is this specific to only home automation? Shouldn't the same paranoia / concern (depending on who you're talking to) apply to critical company data (documents, source code, etc.) as well as personal health information (biometrics, etc.)?
It isn't just specific to home automation. The same paranoia should apply to all data and will once people understand the gaping holes in existing cloud centric/data funneling architectures. In the meantime, a new approach to the problem is worth looking into. As the speed of technological innovation increases more and more, so will the disruptive paradigm shifts.. and this cloud model is long overdue for one.
Worried about Security then look @ this wolflink routers. They are far better than this onhub and it can be controlled directly from mobile and the highlight of this router is that it comes with parental control https://www.wolflinks.com/
(Disclaimer: I work for the same former-division-of-Google-and-now-Alphabet-subsidiary that built this, though I don't work on OnHub.)
I think you need an account for cloud-based configuration, credential sharing, etc. Maybe it's not for everyone, but I think it makes sense as a product. I highly doubt they added a Google account requirement to improve ad targeting.
"I highly doubt they added a Google account requirement to improve ad targeting."
I find that a highly optimistic statement given advertising is pretty much Google's only significantly profitable product and is supporting the entire conglomerate.
If you're able to tell, which division is that? Is this really inner-Google product development, or mostly/partial/somewhat outsourced via a prod-dev consultancy?
Not directly, but they would certainly have included it as an entry point to bring users into Google's account-driven services, and to make a Google account "stickier".
That indirectly does increase ad revenue and targeting, and you can be sure that over time different people in the company will keep having the "bright idea" that if they correlate OnHub data with data from Analytics, DNS, and location services, they can improve ad-targeting by 0.x%, leading to $Y million in additional revenue, and within a few years it will be.
Their privacy policy seems open ended enough to indicate otherwise. Using this router allows Google to collect a HECK of a lot of data about your Internet usage.
> I highly doubt they added a Google account requirement to improve ad targeting.
Ad delivery networks, and google is one of the biggest, have one core business: delivering ads. Everything is setup to make that as big and as solid as possible. Whatever it takes (and we all know how far ad delivery networks will go: almost infinitely far).
Now they ship a piece of hardware, require signing up with an account, and it's not for prolonging / helping their core business? If you believe that, I have a piece of land I want to sell to you, special price.
I used to work there, and one eternal subject of lunch-table conversation was how interesting it would be to make consumer routers with the same ease of management... but how the consumer market is such a hellhole to work in because margins are so low and consumers are more sensitive to price than to management complexity in their purchasing decisions.
A good brand like Google's can get around that, though.
Very interesting. From looking at the specs, it looks like they're packaging a server and marketing it as a router. The configuration app is a very nice touch, routers have always a pain to configure. I'd love to stick this in my apartment (even though I can only receive a maximum of 10mb/s).
As a side note, I'm surprised this isn't marketed alongside the Nest branch. It really has the look and feel of Nest products with the LEDs and the speaker aesthetic. Also surprised this isn't an "Alphabet" product.
"As a side note, I'm surprised this isn't marketed alongside the Nest branch. It really has the look and feel of Nest products with the LEDs and the speaker aesthetic. Also surprised this isn't an "Alphabet" product."
It pretty much is... it's their way of sneaking the 'home automation' core/aggregation box into people's homes masked as a wireless router (for now).
I'm sure the capability you mention will come heading into the future. The only question will be : execution/security and will a competitor come up w/ a more secure/well executed product which won't serve as a data vacuum hose to google.
This kind of product launch on the heels of their massive alphabet re-org with no understanding where it came from (division wise) or what its goal is leads me to question whether the re-org is really going to move google beyond its former execution flaws ...
Deeper than that, even. It seems like this is intended as a local-network cloudlet[1] substrate.
Launch an app on your phone that needs a companion frontend server instance to talk to? One gets launched "in the cloud"—specifically, in a virtual cloud owned by the app author. But where is that instance, physically? Usually a provider like AWS... but with a cloudlet peering arrangement, that instance could instead end up running on your router. (Not as crazy as it sounds if your app has an N:M frontend-backend server topology.)
There are decent solutions to this already. INSTEON works great. It's got dual-band connectivity (wired and wireless) and you can either use a cloud hub if you want, or control it locally with a computer.
> The configuration app is a very nice touch, routers have always a pain to configure.
Basically this boils down to:
The average home router which has basic to no settings (many even lack channel selection) but usage is poor to suboptimal. I had a Netgear router which had broken internal static routing - and netgear's response was to buy a different router (even though you could set it inside the router...).
vs
Buying a higher power router or installing DD-WRT, Tomato or any of the other firmwares - now you have 1000 configuration items but you don't know which ones to tweak to give you good performance.
I believe most people fall into the middle - they want something that's easy to use with good performance but with the ability to adjust the 1000 configuration items if they wanted to.
> I believe most people fall into the middle - they want something that's easy to use with good performance but with the ability to adjust the 1000 configuration items if they wanted to.
I think most people want something that just works. (Most HN readers might want something where they can adjust 1000 configuration settings, but most people I think would never want to.)
> I'm surprised this isn't marketed alongside the Nest branch.
I'm surprised that it isn't a Nest branded product that the Nest division ultimately controls. Looking at Google's history, I wouldn't be surprised if the Nest division came out with their own wifi router as well.
I'm hoping that this doesn't turn into another Google TV release where the product is barely beta.
There's a specs link at the top of the page, but I'm also not sure what parent poster means. Just confused, I think.
The specifications are on a par with low-end consumer-grade NAS products, and it has a USB 3 port, but nothing on the site says anything about providing storage or other services, except for router-type and supporting configuration services (I suppose "keep an eye on your network" is a bit of an extra).
"Plenty of room, OnHub has 4GB of storage space, so there’s plenty of room for auto-updates and the latest software features" is hardly selling a server. All it claims to be is a fancy router.
Compared to the rest of the market, paying $200 for a router isn't competitive. It just is not worth it given Google's "eh-we-will-do-it-and-stop-if-people-complain/sue" mindset.
> OnHub Wireless Router from Google and TP-LINK
> by TP-LINK
1) You complain about the quality of TP-LINK products and think the solution is....another TP-LINK product, likely measured in the same way.
2) Honestly, I cannot think of a consumer AP that would actually perform to your expectations [apartment complex with 30+ competitors, saturating all the channels] that would be priced at $300, let alone $200. I can tell you right now, this Google AP won't do it either. Its "up to 1900mbps" for a reason. Trust me. Buying this won't be a magical solution to your problems if you real world gigabit speeds.
----
To the folks complaining about "magical routers":
A) Buy something from Ubiquiti Networks.
B) Buy something you can flash with WRT firmware.
In both cases, as long as you understand the hardware specs, you'll get something better than the norm. In Ubiquiti's case, I'm 99% sure it will outperform a Google branded TP-Link AP unless Google is heavily subsidizing and QAing everything.
I have a 1 Gbps fiber connection at my apartment. I spent a good hour doing research and finally bought this http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00BUSDVBQ. It had 4.5 stars at the time and was the highest rated router that Amazon carried. I bought it, plugged it in and ran speedtest on it. Max speed I could get was 250mb/s. Not bad but not the gb/s that was getting advertised. Additional, over time, it would always slow down to 10-50mb/s. I called TP-Link and they said this was likely the best it'll do and the advertised speeds are in an interference free lab environment.
If OnHub fixes that second problem as they claim to, that would be more than enough reason for me to spend the $200. If they can get higher than 250mb/s speed by optimizing around the congestion, $200 will be well worth the spend.
So what's your magical router? Does it have options actually make sense? And a help that is, like, helpful?
I'm talking about things such as "Enable XPRESS whatever". Help: "Turns XPRESS whatever on or off". And then you find out that no matter what the feature was supposed to do, theoretically, in practice it makes the router slow and unstable. Or, at worst, crashes it. No brand is immune. Many (non-enterprise) routers will advertise QoS features, but you find that you are better off without them.
That goes for almost all brands that are not classed as "Enterprise" - and even some that are.
I've never had problems with my Router. I do however have problems with Google ChromeCast vanishing from other devices -- which according to Google is a problem with the router (although for me the problem mostly occurs when the ChromeCast decides to use the same WiFi channel for its internal WLAN as the WiFi it's registered on).
I also have occasional problems with Linux devices being picky and flaky -- sometimes not connecting at all (repeating the "connecting..." phase ad nauseam) and sometimes just dropping the connection until I restart the device.
I find it dubious that these problems would be fixed by a Google branded router.
I have a Ubiquiti AC access point at home and the only thing I could see the OnHub doing better is the auto-sensing other networks and working around them. I'm not sure how that would work yet since changing channels would kick everyone off wifi for a second but the Ubiquiti "auto" channel is only changed/detected at boot (probably for the reason I just mentioned).
I think the best way to judge this product is as a hub for a smart home. The fact that it is an easy to wifi router is incidental (in spite of the fact that is all the marketing is talking about). It seems pretty clear, "onHub" is suppose to be a hub for a bunch of "on" branded smart home devices.
To understand why certain products, which are seemingly unrelated to Google's core competency, have stayed with Google and haven't moved on to Alphabet, or why Google created a product such as OnHub and not Nest, you have to realize why all of these product are under Google - to track all the data that goes through them under the same generic/unified "privacy" policy, and then feed it into its advertising system.
I hate to burst your bubble, but it's actually just a branding thing, and has been in the works for much longer than anyone involved knew that Alphabet was going to happen.
The team that built this is part of the same company as Google Fiber (disclaimer: for which I work), which is in fact no longer part of Google Inc.
So what does this device primarily do that I need right now? Just throttling internet for certain devices and prioritizing others? I'm not even entirely sure what 'uses smart software to find the best WiFi connection' means. What's the value prop here given the device costs $200? It's not like it can better your internet somehow.
It has a 3rd radio that monitors the channels you aren't currently using to see if any of them are better. The first two radios in the device can't switch without dropping connections, so they can't go hunting for new channels once the AP is turned on.
My Airport Extreme chooses channels automatically at boot time, then never again. This is fine for my house though, because my neighbors are reasonably far away.
At work, our Meraki AP has this kind of 3rd radio, and we get very good performance in a terrible RF environment, where lots of other equipment (from Apple and Ubiquiti) has failed.
Doesn't this only really buy you time until everyone around you has the same router? If everyone is constantly changing channels to compensate for neighbours I can't imagine the performance to be great, but perhaps I'm missing something.
The only way I can interpret that quote is, "it can automatically switch wifi radio channels when the one its using gets congested". I don't know, maybe there's more to it than that.
With six 2.4 and 5 GHz antennas each, that's two antennas times three (non-overlapping) channels simultaneously in each band. Assuming it can somehow get device A to communicate on channel A and device B to communicate on channel C, etc., you could avoid some congestion while still allowing all those devices to maximize the available bandwidth.
No $40 routers that I know of do anything like that.
When I upgraded from a generic $50 linksys router to a $200 Apple Extreme it vastly increased the range and speed of the wireless. Before it my TV's netflix connection would drop all the time or switch to low-res mode.
So it's conceivable that it would better your Internet.
Most of this is because of the terrible Linksys software. I've had routers that acted terribly, and seen them perform much better with DDWRT installed.
That's interesting. The largest apt I've lived in was a 850 sq ft 2br so I've never had any issue with the range or lag from my router. Thanks for sharing.
I'm not 100% this is true, but with multiple antennas, you can do beam-forming. The basic idea is that you can use interference to point the wifi signal at devices that are using it heavily at the moment, boosting their signal and thus their speed.
OK, I'm trying really hard to figure out the $199 price tag. My cheap as dirt N+ router works pretty darn well connecting 12-15 devices at my home. I almost never had problems in years with it.
All the smart services Google offers, work through cloud, like Cloud Print. Not through a router like Airport express. Even Android Wear now supports Wifi so having BLE isn't that attractive to me. All the smart features that can happen with BLE and Wifi combined are always better offered with phone. So I don't see home automation/IoT benefit here either. Phone is a better hub. So what's exactly the point here? The only thing I can think of is security patches from Google. But $199 is very steep for that.
I know it has a bunch of smart engineering and more antennas. But I don't know anyone having connectivity problems that are related to their routers.
It's the equivalent of Amazon's Fire phone. It's richly priced, and does very little feature wise to justify its high price. It'll flop accordingly.
$49 or $99 (max) was the correct price point. They have to beat or match routers on price (high quality routers having become dirt cheap), or otherwise provide astounding new capabilities (which this doesn't).
I've been dogfooding the device for about 4 months now. Before, I was using the previous generation Airport Extreme. It is far better - the app makes it super simple to set up, the signal seems to be stronger throughout my apartment, and I love having a convenient way to monitor / admin it remotely (via the app). Well worth the price imo.
Could you elaborate on what you believe to be far better than the extreme. AExtreme was super simple to set up and has an app too. Did you position your OnHub differently than your extreme?
I have had an Extreme for years but recently moved and found some issues with connectivity in the new location so I've been weighing options.
Just as simple to set up as the Extreme if you're on iOS, and even simpler on Android.
I placed it in the same spot where the Extreme was formerly located; my signal strength at the other end of the apartment and outside is noticeably stronger, perhaps due to the multi-directional antenna.
The biggest positive about a company like google releasing a router is the security updates. Most consumer routers out there are left to rot and you're forced to buy a one when its exploited.
And don't they have Brillo? Having this without Brillo duplicates (particularly security related) effort and signals that Google doesn't consider Brillo to be acceptable for use in its own products.
I imagine going w/ Brillo would have set back the release schedule, but Brillo, if their vision for both products were to come to pass, is by far the more consequential product. Also... The wireless router market isn't exactly teaming with competitive one-upsmanship. They could have waited 0.5-2+ years without losing significant ground.
Note: Brillo is the stripped down variant of Android aimed at IoT (internet of things) devices that Google announced at the last Google I/O. This is an ideal early device for Brillo, since it's relatively powerful and isn't battery powered, so constraints aren't quite as high as they are in many IoT devices, yet it shares much of the problem space.
Fair point, but the carriers deserve a lot of the blame for old versions of Android on those phones. Google is likely to keep software on their own routers up to date. At least until they lose interest in the product line entirely.
Smartphones have a very different upgrade cycle than a SOHO router. Customers have been trained to upgrade their phone every two years by the cell phone carriers.
The only privacy link I could find on the page was Google's generic privacy policy. Is there more information somewhere?
With its "advanced and always-evolving security features", I'm wondering whether and what information Google would be gathering about my local network and my network traffic.
"You agree that Google may collect and use technical and related information, including but not limited to information about your computer and/or mobile device, operating system, peripherals, applications, connected devices, network traffic, and data use to facilitate the provision of the Software and Services, including support and other related services."
It goes on to state "The OnHub Privacy FAQ describes the categories of data collected and how you can use privacy settings to change what data is collected by the Services."
Unclear why they refer to it as "The OnHub Privacy FAQ" (implying proper noun) but then the page is called "OnHub, the Google On app and your privacy" and it's not structured as an FAQ. I can't find anything else it could refer to, though.
Is it weird that I assume that both Google and NSA are recording all of my digital actions? Does no one else assume this? Which group is more delusional?
Readit News
> Incoming data runs through
> Internal data runs through
> Outgoing data runs through
And then wants to be vague about what data they will be pumping to their back-end for analytics/data mining.
I have had a long standing proposal for home automation and I'm curious to know, in this era of insecurity and people vacuuming up all your data, how many of the tech minded people here would be interested in a device which ensures your 'home automation' data stays in your home. This can be quite clearly achieved in hardware and by having an out-of-band oversight controller that literally will not allow certain data to exit the physical domain of your home...
Cloud nonsense? It's called an application and a home automation application doesn't need to run in someone's cloud...
Whose interested? I think it's about time this cloud foolishness for the sake of monetizing someone else's data in an insecure manner come to an end. Everyone loves to rant about 'disruption'... I feel its about time this data monetization cloud bananza be disrupted.
I don't get it. It's become so obvious and people still seem to categorically refuse to admit the elephant in the room and to act upon it.
It's as if everybody was in some kind of unbreakable state of permanent cognitive paralysis.
I have watched over many years as this 'cloud' software bonanza has eclipsed the tech industry. It went away from its original intent a long time ago and now is used as the holy-grail method of :
> ensuring (rent) is always paid for service(s) people should OWN
> vacuuming up and selling people's data.
I have several projects on my plate. However, I have a solid one for securing people's data when it comes to the IoT movement (in hardware)... It revolves around the same hardware/technology that the industry uses to scrape and funnel your data except the home user will now have it at their disposal as well.
Users should have 100% control of their data. If someone wants to 'monetize' it or use it to 'improve' their platform, the user should be rightfully paid for the opportunity to do so.
Disruption? Yeah, I think it's time. The foolishness has gotten far too long in the tooth.
.. And the backwards thing about it is: there are simple and straight forward ways to secure data (in hardware). It's only because everyone in the industry wants to ship your data all over the place and data-mine the snot out of it that things are as insecure as they are.
The very (loop-hole) or (door) that is used to funnel/mine/monetize/cloudify data is the very one used as an attack vector. Complicating the crap out of things at that point defeats the whole purpose.... Get rid of the door all together and the home is the least of all places where you should be exposing yourself.
My concern is how to make the benefits of this huge amount of data (medical information, travel etc) possible while charging the other use.
It's just - how - does one attach the metadata and enforce the lolicensing?
I'd rather set up my own router with pf-sense and a industrial WiFi access point.
I really love the concept of complete home automation however the data needs to stay in the home and companies need to ask for permission to mine it.
I have nothing against data mining it can be incredibly helpful but i want full control over weather i choose to share it or charge a small fee for my data.
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The whole idea of home automation (and most of IoT) over cloud is absurd. The devices in your home should not communicate by sending packets around the entire globe. The data should never leave your internal network unless explicitly meant to (web interfaces are cool and all, and you want to have remote access).
I'm actually somewhat surprised people don't seem how wrong the current model is, but I suspect it's a mix of cloud being The Hot Sexy Thing and being paid not to understand this (via business models that rely on monetizing users through cloud solution; as some of my hardware startup friends told me once after talking with the investors, hardware won't be making money, the cloud platform will).
So yes, I would be very willing to help reverse this and make local network communication the default for home automation and relevant technologies.
I am sticking with my Asus AC66U which has more features and is also cheaper than this Google device http://amzn.com/B008ABOJKS
Even what they do mention is enough to start inferring things about your personal life:
With "historical data consumption" they can determine who is in the house and when. With the number and make of connected devices, they can take a pretty good estimate of family size, annual income, how many of your household are working, etc.. (Though they probably first care how many Apple devices there are connecting... maybe we need to send you some more Samsung adverts)
And sure it strips the URLs from the logs -- but between Google DNS and Google Analytics being on much of the web, they can piece back together every site you visit anyway and now your router has a Google account they can tie it right back to the router in your home.
And of course it's a $199 router with a license agreement that says Google can stop it working at any time they like (clause 5c).
There's been some movement in industrial applications via stuff like https://twitter.com/FilamentHQ which leverages hardware accelerated ECC and telehash, using blockchain based DNS systems and other decentralized methods of command and control.
I think a similar direction needs to be taken for consumer hardware and data. The cloud needs to become just another peer.
I've been working with a bunch of interesting ideas on trying to get a distributed IoT network setup using programmable blockchains and Eris industries stack as part of an internship with them.
In P2P networks you'll need reliable peers with sufficient capacity. Making a home server into an always connected peer could solve plenty of issues, such as with routing and hosting.
Why? Most consumers aren't in the ultra-suspicious-because-it-says-Google camp, and most of those who are in that camp are likely to take using a different branding for a project from the same ultimate corporate parent as evidence that not only is the project trying to violate privacy, its also trying to be extra sneaky about it.
I have one of those, it's a Linksys router with OpenWRT acting as a firewall.
But if you can make it more user friendly and sparkle some hype all over... sure, go for it.
Ironically, having users controlling their own routers could be the best chance to do that. That is, toss out the crappy consumer routers and instead embrace the router as a user-controlled computer that sits between the user's devices (including IoT devices) and the ISP connection (e.g., modem). This router could run an open source source OS and be programmed _by the user_ to do all sorts of useful things, such as block ads, block tracking, perhaps even create private overlay networks among family and friends, protected from spam.
In a world where the Internet user can have some respite from radio, TV and other advertising, Google (=slave to advertisers) should not be selling routers. Should they come to dominate the market, the respite will come to an end. Users probably will not even know what happened. No one pays attention to routers as computers. They just want a strong WiFi signal.
Consumers have made it crystal clear that they are willing to trade their time and data for lower prices and more convenience. Watch the commercial on that landing page. It couldn't be targeted less at technical people.
[1]: http://cdn.theatlantic.com/static/mt/assets/business/technol...
[2]: http://www.emarketer.com/Article/Mobile-Continues-Steal-Shar...
But you can never expect Google to provide such a product as long as it makes money off your data. Maybe it needs to be under a different letter of the Alphabet.
I too am a bit surprised to hear tech minded people get excited about products that basically exist to collect their data.
If not, this wouldn't be so bad (for $200) running DDWRT/OpenWRT?
[edit] Also, does anyone know if the base firmware will be open source similar to Chromium? If so, one could theoretically still take advantage of their security updates (which would honestly be leaps and bounds above current consumer-grade hardware) with open source tooling.
Need we say more?
> Whose interested?
shouldn't that be "who's"?
[1] https://on.google.com/hub/support/#get-started
I think you need an account for cloud-based configuration, credential sharing, etc. Maybe it's not for everyone, but I think it makes sense as a product. I highly doubt they added a Google account requirement to improve ad targeting.
I find that a highly optimistic statement given advertising is pretty much Google's only significantly profitable product and is supporting the entire conglomerate.
That indirectly does increase ad revenue and targeting, and you can be sure that over time different people in the company will keep having the "bright idea" that if they correlate OnHub data with data from Analytics, DNS, and location services, they can improve ad-targeting by 0.x%, leading to $Y million in additional revenue, and within a few years it will be.
Ad delivery networks, and google is one of the biggest, have one core business: delivering ads. Everything is setup to make that as big and as solid as possible. Whatever it takes (and we all know how far ad delivery networks will go: almost infinitely far).
Now they ship a piece of hardware, require signing up with an account, and it's not for prolonging / helping their core business? If you believe that, I have a piece of land I want to sell to you, special price.
I suspect 95% of people do not change the default credentials, which are stickered or engraved on their routers.
I used to work there, and one eternal subject of lunch-table conversation was how interesting it would be to make consumer routers with the same ease of management... but how the consumer market is such a hellhole to work in because margins are so low and consumers are more sensitive to price than to management complexity in their purchasing decisions.
A good brand like Google's can get around that, though.
Could be worse - a G+ account.
http://www.businessinsider.com/google-collecting-wi-fi-passw...
Dead Comment
As a side note, I'm surprised this isn't marketed alongside the Nest branch. It really has the look and feel of Nest products with the LEDs and the speaker aesthetic. Also surprised this isn't an "Alphabet" product.
It pretty much is... it's their way of sneaking the 'home automation' core/aggregation box into people's homes masked as a wireless router (for now).
I'm sure the capability you mention will come heading into the future. The only question will be : execution/security and will a competitor come up w/ a more secure/well executed product which won't serve as a data vacuum hose to google.
This kind of product launch on the heels of their massive alphabet re-org with no understanding where it came from (division wise) or what its goal is leads me to question whether the re-org is really going to move google beyond its former execution flaws ...
Deeper than that, even. It seems like this is intended as a local-network cloudlet[1] substrate.
Launch an app on your phone that needs a companion frontend server instance to talk to? One gets launched "in the cloud"—specifically, in a virtual cloud owned by the app author. But where is that instance, physically? Usually a provider like AWS... but with a cloudlet peering arrangement, that instance could instead end up running on your router. (Not as crazy as it sounds if your app has an N:M frontend-backend server topology.)
[1] https://github.com/cmusatyalab/elijah-cloudlet
Revolv Hub supported devices:
http://support.revolv.com/knowledgebase/articles/329116
Basically this boils down to:
The average home router which has basic to no settings (many even lack channel selection) but usage is poor to suboptimal. I had a Netgear router which had broken internal static routing - and netgear's response was to buy a different router (even though you could set it inside the router...).
vs
Buying a higher power router or installing DD-WRT, Tomato or any of the other firmwares - now you have 1000 configuration items but you don't know which ones to tweak to give you good performance.
I believe most people fall into the middle - they want something that's easy to use with good performance but with the ability to adjust the 1000 configuration items if they wanted to.
I think most people want something that just works. (Most HN readers might want something where they can adjust 1000 configuration settings, but most people I think would never want to.)
Alphabet has been announced, but AFAIK the actual corporate transition hasn't yet occurred.
I'm surprised that it isn't a Nest branded product that the Nest division ultimately controls. Looking at Google's history, I wouldn't be surprised if the Nest division came out with their own wifi router as well.
I'm hoping that this doesn't turn into another Google TV release where the product is barely beta.
The specifications are on a par with low-end consumer-grade NAS products, and it has a USB 3 port, but nothing on the site says anything about providing storage or other services, except for router-type and supporting configuration services (I suppose "keep an eye on your network" is a bit of an extra).
"Plenty of room, OnHub has 4GB of storage space, so there’s plenty of room for auto-updates and the latest software features" is hardly selling a server. All it claims to be is a fancy router.
The detailed specs page shows a 1.4 GHz Dual Core processor and a 1GB of DDR3 RAM. Thats a little ridiculous for a router
Eh? You must buy some shitty routers, no offense.
Compared to the rest of the market, paying $200 for a router isn't competitive. It just is not worth it given Google's "eh-we-will-do-it-and-stop-if-people-complain/sue" mindset.
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To Melvin, since I'm submitting to fast:
http://www.amazon.com/dp/B013ALA9LA?ref=spks_0_0_2170510902&...
> OnHub Wireless Router from Google and TP-LINK > by TP-LINK
1) You complain about the quality of TP-LINK products and think the solution is....another TP-LINK product, likely measured in the same way.
2) Honestly, I cannot think of a consumer AP that would actually perform to your expectations [apartment complex with 30+ competitors, saturating all the channels] that would be priced at $300, let alone $200. I can tell you right now, this Google AP won't do it either. Its "up to 1900mbps" for a reason. Trust me. Buying this won't be a magical solution to your problems if you real world gigabit speeds.
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To the folks complaining about "magical routers":
A) Buy something from Ubiquiti Networks.
B) Buy something you can flash with WRT firmware.
In both cases, as long as you understand the hardware specs, you'll get something better than the norm. In Ubiquiti's case, I'm 99% sure it will outperform a Google branded TP-Link AP unless Google is heavily subsidizing and QAing everything.
If OnHub fixes that second problem as they claim to, that would be more than enough reason for me to spend the $200. If they can get higher than 250mb/s speed by optimizing around the congestion, $200 will be well worth the spend.
I'm talking about things such as "Enable XPRESS whatever". Help: "Turns XPRESS whatever on or off". And then you find out that no matter what the feature was supposed to do, theoretically, in practice it makes the router slow and unstable. Or, at worst, crashes it. No brand is immune. Many (non-enterprise) routers will advertise QoS features, but you find that you are better off without them.
That goes for almost all brands that are not classed as "Enterprise" - and even some that are.
Now I'm on fibre I'm using the Draytek purely as an access point, and BT's modem to connect. The Draytek'll need replacing soon.
I don't trust people who say "Trust me." :)
I also have occasional problems with Linux devices being picky and flaky -- sometimes not connecting at all (repeating the "connecting..." phase ad nauseam) and sometimes just dropping the connection until I restart the device.
I find it dubious that these problems would be fixed by a Google branded router.
That's why OnHub is a Google product.
Here is the help page on the topic of data collection and privacy: https://support.google.com/onhub/answer/6246642?hl=en&ref_to.... And see also, how to set a whole bunch of privacy settings: https://support.google.com/onhub/answer/6279845?vid=1-635755.... Disclaimer: I work on the project. I am not a spokesperson or legal or marketing, or anything like that.
The team that built this is part of the same company as Google Fiber (disclaimer: for which I work), which is in fact no longer part of Google Inc.
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My Airport Extreme chooses channels automatically at boot time, then never again. This is fine for my house though, because my neighbors are reasonably far away.
At work, our Meraki AP has this kind of 3rd radio, and we get very good performance in a terrible RF environment, where lots of other equipment (from Apple and Ubiquiti) has failed.
Google is doing nothing special here.
Because $40 routers can do that.
No $40 routers that I know of do anything like that.
So it's conceivable that it would better your Internet.
All the smart services Google offers, work through cloud, like Cloud Print. Not through a router like Airport express. Even Android Wear now supports Wifi so having BLE isn't that attractive to me. All the smart features that can happen with BLE and Wifi combined are always better offered with phone. So I don't see home automation/IoT benefit here either. Phone is a better hub. So what's exactly the point here? The only thing I can think of is security patches from Google. But $199 is very steep for that.
I know it has a bunch of smart engineering and more antennas. But I don't know anyone having connectivity problems that are related to their routers.
It's the equivalent of Amazon's Fire phone. It's richly priced, and does very little feature wise to justify its high price. It'll flop accordingly.
$49 or $99 (max) was the correct price point. They have to beat or match routers on price (high quality routers having become dirt cheap), or otherwise provide astounding new capabilities (which this doesn't).
>inb4 shill :)
Could you elaborate on what you believe to be far better than the extreme. AExtreme was super simple to set up and has an app too. Did you position your OnHub differently than your extreme?
I have had an Extreme for years but recently moved and found some issues with connectivity in the new location so I've been weighing options.
I placed it in the same spot where the Extreme was formerly located; my signal strength at the other end of the apartment and outside is noticeably stronger, perhaps due to the multi-directional antenna.
E.g. my network looks like this:
If I replace the AP with one of these, is it going to work? Server 1 does NAT for the wifi network.https://support.google.com/onhub/answer/6240987?hl=en&ref_to...
I imagine going w/ Brillo would have set back the release schedule, but Brillo, if their vision for both products were to come to pass, is by far the more consequential product. Also... The wireless router market isn't exactly teaming with competitive one-upsmanship. They could have waited 0.5-2+ years without losing significant ground.
Note: Brillo is the stripped down variant of Android aimed at IoT (internet of things) devices that Google announced at the last Google I/O. This is an ideal early device for Brillo, since it's relatively powerful and isn't battery powered, so constraints aren't quite as high as they are in many IoT devices, yet it shares much of the problem space.
https://developers.google.com/brillo/?hl=en
[edited 6:39PM UTC to add the Note]
With its "advanced and always-evolving security features", I'm wondering whether and what information Google would be gathering about my local network and my network traffic.
"You agree that Google may collect and use technical and related information, including but not limited to information about your computer and/or mobile device, operating system, peripherals, applications, connected devices, network traffic, and data use to facilitate the provision of the Software and Services, including support and other related services."
It goes on to state "The OnHub Privacy FAQ describes the categories of data collected and how you can use privacy settings to change what data is collected by the Services."
But I couldn't find the OnHub Privacy FAQ and https://support.google.com/onhub/search?q=privacy oddly says "Your search - privacy - did not match any answers in OnHub Help".
Unclear why they refer to it as "The OnHub Privacy FAQ" (implying proper noun) but then the page is called "OnHub, the Google On app and your privacy" and it's not structured as an FAQ. I can't find anything else it could refer to, though.