Jibo, the $899 'Social Robot', Tells Owners in Farewell Address That Its VC Overlords Have Remote-Killswitched It (boingboing.net) 121
Reader AmiMoJo writes: Jibo was a "social robot" startup that burned through $76 million in venture capital and crowdfunding before having its assets were sold to SQN Venture Partners late last year. Earlier this week, reporter Dylan J Martin tweeted a video of a $899 Jibo robot bidding its owner farewell, announcing that the new owners of his servers were planning to killswitch it; the robot thanked him "very very much" for having it around, and asked that "someday, when robots are more advanced than today, and everyone has them in their homes, you can tell yours that I said 'hello.'" Then, the Jibo performed a melancholy dance.
What did you expect? (Score:3)
Re:What did you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.
Earlier, makers of appliances had to build their systems to last just long enough to make it through warranty, which is a gamble. The item may fail too early or, worse, too late. Now they can determine when it fails you.
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Ah, the always-connected world we dreamed of. It's a paradise.
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Like that Outer Limits episode [wikipedia.org]?
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It's really pretty simple, don't buy mickey mouse bullshit like a "social robot."
People with more money than sense buy these kinds of things. It's not an item anyone needs, it's a toy that anyone with 2 brain cells to rub together knew was going to be of very little to no utility. Every connected device is going to be shutdown sooner or later. They can't justify the costs of running the servers when it doesn't make a profit. That is business 101 logic. They won't release a patch or software to run your own
Re:What did you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
A little bit of good news though: companies have started offering refunds when they shut down vital online services. Microsoft did it with their band fitness trackers, and Sony is doing it with a game that was supposed to be free to play online "forever".
We need to keep pushing for this to be the norm. Make retiring services that products depend on expensive for the manufacturer. Make them think hard about committing to long term support before making features dependent on cloud services.
Re:What did you expect? (Score:5, Insightful)
I don't think this will accomplish what you think it will. Look at it this way. They are refunding at most the purchase price, probably less in a lot of cases. In the mean time they get to hold your money, and collect the interest / investment revenues. They also get to monetize having you connected however they do that. Maybe is showing ads, maybe its in app purchases that won't be refunded, maybe selling your data whatever..
They are not going to let you disconnect, they are just going to structure the deal financially for them such that it works like whole or most formulations of universal life insurance. They know they are mostly going to have to payout eventually probably even more than they will collect in premiums directly but the deal is structured such that most of the time they will be able generate enough revenue off the capital over time to be profitable.
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> We need to keep pushing for this to be the norm.
Or, crazy thought: maybe we should be demanding instead that a lot of these "smart" service devices don't rely on cloud systems that will one day be retired and render all the devices useless.
Case in point, I just jumped into the smart light tech pool at home. I went with the Philips Hue system instead of any of the many many many competitors out there that are way cheaper. My starter kit with 4 RGB lights and a Zigbee bridge was $200 CDN, compared to 4
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Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.
It amazes me how many people seem used to that already and accept it as normal.
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Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.
It amazes me how many people seem used to that already and accept it as normal.
It might be a really shitty situation but damn is it convenient.
Re: What did you expect? (Score:2)
Re:What did you expect? (Score:4, Insightful)
Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.
It amazes me how many people seem used to that already and accept it as normal.
Because they've been doing it for years.
Look, you and I and plenty of the Slashdot crowd know how to fix our own computers and run our own servers. How many people have depended on you / the IT guy at work / the Geek Squad to keep their computers running? Most of them. To them, 'trusting someone else with their data' is, ultimately, all they've ever done. To top it off, in most cases they end up paying less and getting better services in the process. If they've been burned in one form or another over the years, that effect is even more pronounced.
You and me and the rest of the people who prefer self-hosted solutions are in the extreme minority because we see services come and services go, and we invest our time and our data into them. The Snapchat crowd sees data as transient, and backups too complicated and generally unnecessary. I mean, they'll realize in 20 years that they have no photos of their lives to show their children, but 'long term thinking' is not a favored mindset at this point in time.
With everything disposable and transient, 'everything-as-a-rental' and no concept of the value of ownership, the fact that few consumers insist on self-hosted solutions is completely unsurprising to me.
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Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker. And only work as long as its master (and that's not you) allows them to.
It amazes me how many people seem used to that already and accept it as normal.
Well, it's not intrinsically crazy.
My mains power only works as long as it's "maker" allows it to. My magazine subscription only works as long as it's "maker" allows it to. My jam of the month club (OK, not mine, but you get the idea) only works as long as it's "maker" allows it to.
If you rent a TV, it only works as long as it's "maker" allows it to.
Just saying, it's not unheard of. If it works for someone, they do it, if not, they choose something else. If this model succeeds and becomes prevalent, it's
Re: What did you expect? (Score:2)
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Get used to it.
No. I refuse. I will fight back against that cultural momentum of corporations redefining what "ownership" and "sell/purchase" actually mean. I prefer products that are open and free. I try to self-host where possible. I void warranties. (And that bullshit sticker isn't legally binding [vice.com] anyway). I repair. I avoid products I can't repair. I don't own a 1984 wall-screen just so I can scream "play music". (Those things might be a useful product once they no longer need an internet connection. But until then, fu
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> Get used to it. More and more things you consider "yours" are tethered to its maker
So you're saying you're NOT going to be first in line to get the fantastic new disc-less, digital only, always online Xbox One?
Or... (Score:3)
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Yeah, I'd kinda curious what Jibo functionality still works after the servers are shut down. For $900, you would expect this thing to have at least some sort of onboard processing power to do simple tasks.
It would be cool if the new owners of the companies IP gave existing Jibo owners the ability to connect the robot to 3rd party API servers that could restore some of the existing functionality or even add new features. That said, something tells me that they just bought the company for any patents it might
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Yeah, I'd kinda curious what Jibo functionality still works after the servers are shut down. For $900, you would expect this thing to have at least some sort of onboard processing power to do simple tasks.
Doesn't it only do simple tasks anyway? Or, did at least.
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In my severance package. Duh.
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sounds better than some random dude at a company only looking at how much profit curing you would generate
Re: Old robot under single-payer health care? (Score:2)
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Welcome to the world of single-payer health care, where all health care decisions are made by a government-controlled group.
Just don't call it a "Death Panel".
No, you call it the NHS. Despite its current issues it works quite well thankyouverymuch.
WTF (Score:1, Insightful)
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Maybe, maybe gnat.
This is getting out of hand (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:This is getting out of hand (Score:5, Insightful)
...Why would anyone spend close to $1k on something that could stop working at any time?
Because like most other products, the non-cloud version (if available) would cost $15K, making the cloud version seem like a bargain.
That's why.
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You totally miss the point. It's not the consumer's problem that the non-cloud one would cost too much and that the cloud one is "a bargain" by comparison. If consumers don't feel comfortable buying it, then it isn't a bargain in a commercial sense.
Fair point, so let's root-cause this a bit more.
The real reason this problem exists is because people don't give a shit about privacy anymore. They'll comfortably sell their digital soul to get a $5 app for free. Billions of them do it.
If privacy was still important in society, cloud-anything wouldn't exist, and the concept of ownership would still be alive and thriving instead of dying.
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There are two different things, valuing privacy and valuing ownership.
They're becoming far more intertwined with products and services today. If you want to own a product free and clear (so to speak), then you will pay for that freedom by paying for the subsidies that reduce the price. Otherwise, you are the revenue stream that benefits from a reduced price in exchange for your usage data. Or your GPS location. Or your contacts. Or any number of private data points companies often use as revenue streams to justify a "free" offering.
Bottom line is people don't value eithe
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...Why would anyone spend close to $1k on something that could stop working at any time?
Because like most other products, the non-cloud version (if available) would cost $15K, making the cloud version seem like a bargain.
That's why.
That's the best description of cloudthink I've ever seen. Majick bits and bytes that for some reason only run on machines that have the special cloudsprinkles applied to them by a high priestess of cloudiness.
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Lets try switching to touch-tone for the remainder of this call.
"Agent. Agent. AGENT!!!!!!"
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Inference of adequate recognition models is not so impossibly demanding that you need an expensive cluster of machines. In fact a raspberry pi can do inference of a voice recognition model.
An argument can be made about how 'connected' a device is to your data and how easy it is for a vendor to have to worry about a simplistic frontend in the edge device and thus be able to freely update the backend... But saying that you need gigantic clusters to do simple voice recognition is not accurate.
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ItÃ(TM)s like how in order to fly though the literal clouds you donÃ(TM)t need to own your own airplane, you just buy a seat for a single trip.
Yes, but the plane doesn't just fall out of the sky because someone 5000 miles away decides to turn off the servers.
So if you have space and money for a server rack next to your social robot that would totally work but really no-one wants that.
That should be a choice for the consumer. If they want to kill a product that was purchased, then give the consumer the code to set up a server if that's what they want to do. I have an Escient FireBall connected to 3 DVD changers. Since the company went under years ago, I can't change anything. At least they had the decency to not brick the damn thing. But there are a lot of owners out there
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ItÃ(TM)s like how in order to fly though the literal clouds you donÃ(TM)t need to own your own airplane, you just buy a seat for a single trip.
Yes, but the plane doesn't just fall out of the sky because someone 5000 miles away decides to turn off the servers.
As well, does word processing or the like require a person to have racks of servers? This argument he gives that we need a server farm to do fairly simple work is funny, sort of. We don't, and the whole cloud concet was never about that anyway. Cloud was about 2 things. Getting people to move to the subscription model, and getting rid of as many local IT staff as possible.
Individuals losing data or money is of no consequence when people believe that there is no other way to do work other than replicate
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BS. You can run a TensorFlow voice recognition model on a Raspberry Pi. Google just announced an $80 USB stick (or $160 RPi-like system) with a dedicated ASIC that's even more capable.
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Itâ(TM)s not magic bit and bytes. In this case it is the high end voice recognition ML. You need a cluster of machines to run these ML models in real-time. Because the robot is not interacting most of the time you can share the expensive cluster of machines with other people and save a ton of money. Itâ(TM)s like how in order to fly though the literal clouds you donâ(TM)t need to own your own airplane, you just buy a seat for a single trip. So if you have space and money for a server rack next to your social robot that would totally work but really no-one wants that.
Tell me the standard applicatinos that will not work unless they are in the cloud. Office 365? Adobe Creative Cloud?
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To be fair this thing is an ARM SoC, similar to a phone, so actually a lot of what it does relies on fast servers with hardware accelerated speech recognition and huge databases of knowledge to answer questions.
It's kind of interesting how back in the mainframe age science fiction assumed that there would be one massive all-knowing computer that everyone in the world could ask questions of via a terminal, and then when microcomputers came along it switched to everyone having a robot with the entirety of hum
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To be fair this thing is an ARM SoC, similar to a phone, so actually a lot of what it does relies on fast servers with hardware accelerated speech recognition and huge databases of knowledge to answer questions.
Good Gawd, those people deserved to go out of business. Crippling the power of the device in order to require the cloud doesn't strike me as a good way to go.
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That's the best description of cloudthink I've ever seen. Majick bits and bytes that for some reason only run on machines that have the special cloudsprinkles applied to them by a high priestess of cloudiness.
I'm saving that. That is hilarious (and accurate).
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One cloud advantage is when the client demand is occasional but intense. Rather than each client needing their own server resources to handle a peak capacity that is only required occasionally and transiently a pool of shared resources can handle things like voice processing.
It isn't just magic pixie cloud dust, there are use cases where a shared pool of resources is vastly more efficient and less expensive than having every client need expensive resources that sit idle 99+% of the time.
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Why would it cost $15k for the manufacturer to provide the server software for a user to run locally, and add a way to point the device to a different server? The server software doesn't have to run on the robot itself.
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Why would it cost $15k for the manufacturer to provide the server software for a user to run locally
A license for the server software would cost $15,000 ostensibly to pay the pensions of the developers.
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...Why would anyone spend close to $1k on something that could stop working at any time?
Because like most other products, the non-cloud version (if available) would cost $15K, making the cloud version seem like a bargain.
That's why.
It would be nice if that was an option. Some of us would rather spend $15K for some things now and keep them until we decide to replace them, or not. Rather than spend $1K now and again and again every couple of years because a company decides they're sick of keeping a server running, or the CEO blew all of the money on cocaine and hookers.
Obviously I'm in the minority these days, but a lot of stuff I buy I pay quite a bit more for with the expectation of keeping of for a long time. 30 or 40 years ago, I
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...Why would anyone spend close to $1k on something that could stop working at any time?
Because like most other products, the non-cloud version (if available) would cost $15K, making the cloud version seem like a bargain.
That's why.
It's only cheaper because they cover it in ads.
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...Why would anyone spend close to $1k on something that could stop working at any time?
Because like most other products, the non-cloud version (if available) would cost $15K, making the cloud version seem like a bargain.
That's why.
Would it? Why? Voice recognition? I don't think in this day and age we need a warehouse of computing to do that. And if we did, then what was the business plan for success? A warehouse for every robot sold?
If your product needs to be connected to the magic cloud to work, it's not a real product unless you have a way of transferring the magic to the buyer.
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I could buy a whole rack of servers for $15K and build my own dam cloud, this is a glorified smart speaker, you could build it out of a raspberry pi and some off the shelf bits.
You mean you could "build it."
The other 99.999% of society is too lazy to even attempt to try, and they're too cheap to care about privacy anymore. They'll vote for the bargain every time.
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Minitel [minitel.org] was the retro thing most similar to these assistants. When
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I embrace cloud-based devices. I can (and do) store data in my home, but that's a single point of failure. When a device bricks, I can recover (from home or cloud), but if my home suffers catastrophic failure, I'm fucked.
I live in Southeast Texas and hurricanes are apex predators. The power poles go down and I'm on evac. I want access to my data, both the shit that makes life easier and the stuff, like insurance papers, that I need.
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That's nothing you cant do yourself with just getting offsite hosting .
You mean like a cloud?
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Planned obsolescence (Score:3)
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eMutton.
What's Inside It? (Score:2)
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Do you have JTAG cables or a even hardware programmer?
You are aware of the Slashdot demographic? For a good number of people here, the answer to those questions may very well be 'Yes'.
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You've got a UID under a million, so your post is understandable. Unfortunately, I have some bad news for you....
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It's true, but a sadder trend seems to be the growing anti-intellectualism of that hostility. In the 90s you could be pretty sure that a random Slashdotter probably knew how to use a screwdriver, and might very well have a JTAG programmer on their desk. Today Slashdot is more of a political arguing forum, and technical contributions are mocked as pedantic or irrelevant.
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IIRC, it was BSD Unix that was put on a toaster. I saw it at a West Coast Computer Faire. I thought it an impressive example of total worthlessness...of course, that was long before the IOT.
It doesn't looked that hot. (Score:2)
The mechanics were cute but apparently the assistant part were lacking.
TERRIBLE $900 Party Trick – Jibo Review : https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
Everybody's gotta get burned a few times (Score:5, Insightful)
Everyone eventually has their own proprietary-software-abandoned/fucked-me experience. Some peoples' experiences are delayed, some people have it quick. Some people lose $20, some lose $200, some lose $2000. Some people get attached and then angry at the loss; some people shrug and let it go. Some people need simply a larger quantity of lessons than others.
It took me a couple decades, from about 1980 to somewhere around 1999-2002, before I finally had enough, so I'm not going to mock the people who threw away $900, I guess. But I would ask 'em, "Is that enough yet? Or do you wanna go for another round of abuse?" Whatever floats your boat, man.
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No way man. My Apple II is still chugging away just fine. If it ever does break, I've got the circuit diagram for the motherboard.
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Personally, I had enough When I was an early adopter of a smart tv that 80% of it's smart features stopped working in about 3 years... I still have the TV, but it is no longer connected to anything but a RPi and previously a Roku... I'm so very very tired of being a product.
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Three years? You got double the expected life if the smart TV had some kind of Android in it. Android seems to require new hardware every one and a half to two years. If you're fortunate, you get updates within the first year, and security fixes for the next 1/2, then you are SOL.
Even if it was one of those Roku TVs, you could still have trouble. I heard one (one of the first) had an issue where it could not steam more than one show consecutively without the Roku requiring a reboot. Oh, and it would al
"I've seen things you people wouldn't believe" (Score:1)
Robocide
Idea... (Score:2)
First, sniff the robot's wifi traffic using Mallory transparent MITM proxy ( https://github.com/intrepidusg... [github.com] ). Note that there might be better intercepting wifi proxies available now... possibly, based upon other platforms like ESP32, ESP8266, or RasPi. I really haven't kept up with it. I just remember that at the time I did it, using Mallory with a desktop PC and PCIe wifi card seemed like the obvious choice.
The last time I used Mallory (~5 years ago), it was somewhat straightforward to set up (with sli
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