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From "Happy Hacking" to "Screw You"
tquid writes "Trying to bridge the digital divide in Canada's poorest postal code, a principled group of hackers adopt "open source"-based technology spun off from an MIT project. Then the terms on the hardware are changed, and changed again, and then firmware to lock out the frustrated group's software is installed, screwing them out of their investment and many hours of development work."
Wasn't this was originally developed as an open source project at MIT? I imagine their original agreement with MIT probably precluded this very thing (locking it down). If not, I would be very disappointed with MIT.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
So why not talk to Meraki and see if you can work something out rather than whining about it on your blog?
thats sort of like trying to put firefox on windows, then getting an update saying that you can't use it
that seem to run many big companies these days .... personally, what I don't understand is why people can't see that's it's not only just bad engineering, but, in essence, inhumane mismanagement.
What did they expect? Seriously. The company is taking a loss on each box at $50. They were probably hoping to make some profit off of the software service side, but these hackers come along and provide the service for free on the same hardware. So Meraki goes and raises HW prices to overcome their losses and the hackers get whiny about the high cost of the new HW. So Meraki then does all it can do at that point, force the HW to only run the special software and try to get back into the market.
The hackers (especially those who put some kind of trust in "openness") are the ones who ruined the municipal network for everyone. They showed a clear lack of political savvy and it ended up turning what could have been a boon for both the city and Meraki into a political morass which ends up with no one at all happy.
I've been following the development of mesh wifi technology for several years now. From the moment I first grokked what was going on with it, it struck me as a great disruptive technology. One of the most successful early projects, and one that I followed with a great deal of interest was MIT's Roofnet project - an implementation of commodity hardware and open source software, built on Linux, which provides wifi coverage for MIT's campus.
In 2006 a spin-off company named Meraki was formed to develop and commercialize the MIT Roofnet technology. At the time I was on the board of the Vancouver Community Network and had been championing more development of wireless technology. We immediately ordered 9 of the first beta units to try out. The technology was cheap ($50/unit) and it worked but what prevented us from going any further with it was the pricing model that they decided to adopt - $5/node/month for access to the "dashboard" - the real-time monitoring software that they were developing for managing the networks. We decided that this cost was prohibitive for our purposes and the Merakis were shelved.
In September of 2007 I heard about a group of Vancouver community wifi enthusiasts who were getting together with the goal of setting up community wifi in Canada's poorest neighbourhood. I came out to a meeting and invited along some people whom I know are interested in any project that is about bridging the digital divide. The technology that was trumpeted at that meeting was Meraki. Since my previous brush with them they had changed their pricing structure and now they would let you run a free network (with free access to their dashboard) or a subscription (paid) network for 10% of your charges. We (the group, which came to call itself " FreeTheNet ") were unanimous that the free option was what we wanted to do and we quickly began building out a public network.
In October Meraki announced that they were changing their pricing model (yet again) and that they would be vastly raising the costs of their hardware (tripling, in fact). I remember going to their website to learn more about what they were doing and their new marketing slogan was something like "Build your business using exciting new technology where the rules of the game keep changing " How ironic; I wish I'd kept a screenshot of that! Under their new system there was no way that we could build out the network we envisioned. At roughly that point, one of our most experienced hackers said "forget Meraki", we're going to write our own firmware and dashboard and promptly started researching that. By late Novermber he was able to demostrate an open routing firmware called B.A.T.M.A.N. running with a mesh helper inside called Robin, that provided the same functionality as the Meraki firmware. This could be installed in the commodity Meraki hardware which greeted you with a friendly and encouraging "happy hacking" when you logged into it via the console.
Over December and January he worked on adding features that we wanted to our network to have (and that we had previously been encouraging Meraki to build to improve their system - things like per node custom splash screen, enhancements to the dashboard to improve scalability, etc.) All of this was being tested on Meraki hardware because this is what we had spent our money on back when they supported and encouraged the kind of work we were doing.
Then in February Meraki announced a change to their EULA (End User Licence Agreement) which precluded anyone from changing any of the software that they install on t
Already. Anyone got a cached link?
Official Heretic from the "Church of Global Warming". Proven right thanks to whistle blowers. AGW = Flat Earth Theory
No good deed goes unpunished.
Blame Canada... blame Canada...
Goatse.
You nerds love it.
In other news, Zeus still sucks cock.
Community and city-wide wifi projects everywhere are failing. In general they turned out to be more expensive, more cumbersome, and difficult to manage than originally promised. The county-wide wifi program where I lived stopped development last year because the vendor's pricing model proved unworkable (give away low-speed, sell high speed). Other communities are having similar problems.
To think that's *not* going to affect the cost of the remaining projects is just silly. Without the volume, the costs are going to go up for the projects that are still out there left undone.
The rules of the game are *ALWAYS* changing. That's life. We can tell you're upset, but quit your whining.
Get off my lawn.
Their wiki article has no Controversy section. It needs one. I strongly suggest that someone who was abused by them edit the wiki article setting out the case. Given their hippie like idealistic looking web site, I would have to accuse them of hypocrisy at least.
I talked to Meraki about using their mesh network fro a resort I wanted to equip, but when I asked what would happen to our investment if they went belly up, they told me it the network hardware would be unusable if that happened. I said thanks but that's not acceptable.
Who would walk a client into that sort of scenario? How many bright hopeful startups have we seen disappear without a mention? It's not like they would ever be honest and tell you they are running low on cash.
I wouldn't mind if their service was value added, billing or accounting or something, but the network could still be used in the event they vanished. If the hardware was open and I could install a Open Source version later, I might have done it.
Maybe Meraki needs to revisit their model and look at it from a customer's viewpoint.
CM www.cometenergysystems.com Blog: http://caribbeanrenewable.blogspot.com/
Hmmm, interesting. Does "everything must be open" have limits? Idealism vs realism.
IANAL, but it sounds like time for them to find a nice CDN lawyer who would do some pro-bono work to see if they have grounds for legal action. It would seem to me tha a "Tortuous interference" claim might be valid; given the actions appear to interfere with the owners of the hardware's ability to provide services as a result of the update.
I'm a consultant - I convert gibberish into cash-flow.
How does a EULA apply to hardware? Unless they're leasing the hardware there's no license involved.
I have trouble seeing why the parent is a Troll unless the article to which it is posted is also a Troll.
I found the contrast between most of Vancouver, which is otherwise one of Canada's most prosperous cities, and the Downtown Eastside so stark as to be completely overwhelming. There was a time when I had been one of the urban unfortunates myself, as I have a mental illness that was at one time quite severe.
I became determined to help those that I could, often buying meals for those who asked me for spare change. But it got to be more than I could bear; the stress of it put me back in the mental hospital - I was brought to St. Paul's hospital on Burrard by an ambulance, where I stayed for three weeks in their Two-South Mental Health ward.
I discuss Vancouver, and many of those who I met there, in my weblog The Vancouver Diaries. That is, the entries before June 30th, 2007, when I moved back to the US. I kept blogging at the site, as I intend to go back someday, but for now I live in Silicon Valley.
I have to say, that the company that remotely installed this firmware, breaking their project, why they have to be worse than The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. I don't think I have in my entire life met so many people who are so unfortunate as the residents of the Downtown Eastside. I hope they have a change of heart.
Request your free CD of my piano music.
until I read this article. My building is going condo and I am considering bringing up the concept of a building wide wireless network at our first board meeting. I am even toying with the idea of sharing with the neighboring buildings. The only commercial product I have been able to find is Meraki. Does anybody have any other suggestions?
Please forgive my English, it's Monday.
One of our competitors trademarked the term "hypothesis". From now on, we will call them "boneheaded ideas".
So, what's the problem exactly? I think they are complaining that sponsored ads appear even when you used site: and the ad points to another site. If I remember correctly this is not new. IT is not aggressive either since google makes it very clear about what is an sponsored result and what isn't
It is just an easier interface to site:, I guess, perhaps they thought it was a new, aggressive feature because they previously didn't know about site:'s behavior with sponsored sites and this new feature made them notice about that?
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
I think maybe they could have done something for the poor that the poor needed, instead of a high-tech solution in search of a problem.
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
This decline was something people have foreseen for a while. There is a rapidly maturing collection of open source projects to create a real open source Meraki replacement (disclaimer: I am helping develop one of these).
ROBIN is an open source mesh firmware that can run on reflashed Meraki nodes (well, I don't think it's "allowed" by Meraki anymore, since they've changed their license agreement to forbid 3rd party firmware and have made it really difficult to access the bootloader).
Open-Mesh is the dashboard management service that ROBIN nodes are configured to use. The guy who develops this actually started working on this dashboard when Meraki was still Roofnet - compare the Open-Mesh dashboard to the Meraki dashboard, the similarity is obvious. Also, you can buy pre-flashed, fully featured ROBIN nodes from Open-Mesh.com for $50 each, the same price that Meraki sells their crippled "standard version" of their nodes.
OrangeMesh, is an open-source version of the dashboard being developed that will allow you to host your own dashboard server, completely freeing you from reliance on any third party. You can check out it's progress here.
'Every story, if continued long enough, ends in death.' --Ernest Hemingway
What's so hard about typing "poorest neighborhood" instead? That phrase seriously threw me when i read it.
Couldn't just get a bunch of Linksys WRT 54GLs, load OpenWRT, and setup that way?
Meraki holds all the cards. They control the firmware, and they've acted in a fairly predatory manner here.
They'll ask "why should we let you?" And they'll be (from their POV) right. Why SHOULD they let them. They're not making money off it. They don't give a shit.
If you want to use their hardware at all, you have to give (and keep giving) them money. Either directly in payments, or indirectly by serving adds on their free tier.
Fuck that noise.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
summary I have seen on /. to date!"
"Trying to bridge the digital divide in Canada's poorest postal code, a principled group of hackers adopt "open source"-based technology spun off from an MIT project. Then the terms on the hardware are changed, and changed again, and then firmware to lock out the frustrated group's software is installed, screwing them out of their investment and many hours of development work."I guess our beloved Cmd Taco has bever heard of the basic Who, What, Where, When of writing an article.
Hey KID! Yeah you, get the fuck off my lawn!
Community Wireless Communications is working on its second city-wide wifi project, the first being a major success in Lawrence, Kansas.
Did anyone read TFA?
Meraki patched a not-for-profit group's hardware from remote without permission so that it would no longer run the firmware same not-for-profit developed in-house. They did this to hardware that was BSD licensed when purchased. They either employed a backdoor or abused known customer access credentials (likely the former) to do it.
This is probably illegal and certainly wrong.
(TFA doesn't say if a contract was in play between Meraki and the client that would have authorized them to apply the patches, but its clear that the customer had put an end to the agreement so a complaint against Meraki would be legit.)
At the very least, this is a malicious hack against a customer. But I think its more than that.
If the peeps in Vancouver were left to continue their work, they certainly would have had a "competitive" solution which they would likely have offered up online for all to use. This would effectively make them a competitor, and a dangerous one because unhappy Meraki customers would be the most likely to check it out. I would go so far to say that this was a pre-emptive sabotage (with poor Vancouverites in the crossfire).
I have no problem with Meraki adapting their business model to find something that works. But their actions way overstepped the boundaries of the law. They would have been wiser to handle the whole affair in a more benevolent fashion in the first place. They could have, for example, cut a partnership deal with the non-profit to allow them to participate in feature development under NDA and enjoy a subsidized service. Both parties would have come out winners.
Whenever financiers get involved, they always want to lock up the tech because it is the only tangible asset they can claim ownership of. Meanwhile, they miss the essence of business value, which is in the people and the partnerships and the innovation.
I think that the only way community wifi is going to work is if it is community-run, not-for-profit, and vendor independent. There is no question that we will have this soon enough and it will be running on top of WRTs and other similar APs which are abundant and cheap and have loads of after-market conversion options for outdoor use. I'm disappointed to read all these comments bashing the Vancouver hackers, who deserve kudos for their inventiveness, determination, and good will.
Hey that's my alma mater!
Request your free CD of my piano music.
Corollary to Tiller's Rule:
Never use a word that you've heard in speech but have never seen in print, because you'll look like a fool when you spell it wrong.
Examples I've seen in real life: "Here, Here!", "gold dablooms", "prejudice" (meaning 'prejudiced', I see this a lot), "per say", "mideval" (meaning 'medieval'), "pnumonic" (meaning 'mnemonic')
OK, I've gotten it out of my blood for now... carry on.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Technological problems are solved by technological solutions. Societal problems sadly are not. The age old problems of poverty and unequal income distribution can hardly be addressed by the computer gadget of the moment.
Throwing in arguments about serving the poor into software license squabbles is plain silly and a sign of desperation.
The article suggests that a Meraki software upgrade has made it impossible to reflash them.
/storage/config.local file with whatever you want; in my case: /storage/config.local"
Actually, you can still easily make them revert to an earlier version which can be reflashed.
As described here:
http://robin.forumup.it/about99-15-robin.html
"you can ssh into the Meraki and create edit the
Code:
echo "firmware.mips.version 6-9163" >
And they'll update themselves to an earlier version.
The founders of Meraki have made huge contributions to open source software and it is good to see that others are taking advantage of their great work and making further improvements.
Couldn't just get a bunch of Linksys WRT 54GLs, load OpenWRT, and setup that way?
This is what I thought. Although the author of the article mentioned that they couldn't find an alternative, I would certainly be curious to see if anyone can provide a working alternative, commercial or otherwise. I am sure while 'Meraki' might be larger arse-holes than g**tse.cx, I am sure they would change their approach if there was good competition.
Jumpstart the tartan drive.
A little one-sided there, methinks. After all, the money you would have given them would still work just fine. This business deserves to fail in the marketplace.
Breakfast served all day!
It's not necessarily stupid; it depends on whether selling the unit at below costs makes it attractive for your customers to do other, more profitable business.
Consider the proverbial "razor/razor blade" business. You sell the razors at a loss, but you make it up by selling your customers a pack of blades every few months for years. Now if those blades, tear bloody furrows in your customers' faces, then having a bad product is what makes your business plan bad, not having a bad strategy.
Nobody in his right mind would buy network equipment where the vendor has demonstrated willingness to push a firmware update without customer permission -- period. Much less if they claim that this allows them to unilaterally change the license and lock the customer out of his own equipment. Granted, in the razor blade model, you have a kind of proprietary feeling about all those razors you lost money in, but you can't go fishing through people's medicine cabinets without people concluding you're dangerously off your rocker.
I can understand how it happens. There are two reasons that businesses fail. They either run out of cash, or somebody with a note or something steps in and pulls the plug (which seldom happens if the cash situation is healthy and on track). I've seen plenty of companies that had a reasonably good product with a plausible strategy, but they just had a fatal cash hiccup; either outgo that was a bit faster than anticipated, or incoming that was a little of schedule.
It's like somebody who ingests poison in a murder mystery; after a while, your recognize that tic as the first of what will eventually become agonizing death throes. The problem with a start up even trying to reposition its products that all their existing customers who bought the old story, and now are unlikely to buy from you ever again. Anybody with any sense knows its easier to sell to an existing customer than a new one, so it probably means one of two things: either they suddenly tripped over a pile of cash that's going to allow them to bootstrap a new business plan, or they've run out of cash to make the old one work. Everybody knows you don't make much money off of early adopters, but you can't use your privileged position with them to mess with their systems, but it doesn't mean you can afford to alienate them unless your original business plan is a total write-off.
Mind you I'm just talking about drastic repositioning of the products that leave customer's future plans messed up. I'm not talking about trying to extort new business out of your customers by exploiting your access to their property. That's either extremely desperate, or extremely, sleazily stupid. I don't know anything about this company, but desperate is much more common than utterly sleazy, although sometimes they go hand in hand.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
This is why I never feel comfortable with 'updates', unless I've vetted them first.
FTA and the linked blog, it appears the firmware update was pushed by the manufacturer, therefore didn't have to happen. I'm not blaming the people affected here as in principle, you may want to receive security updates etc. as a matter of course.
But personally I'm finding more and more that 'updates' often regress the performance of a product due to unnecessary flash new features and political modifications you'd never want or benefit from (such as this).
If the affected users had automatic updates turned off would they be able to legally continue as they were? Would reversing the upgrade somehow implicate them? Is there a legal issue at all?
So yeah, I like to avoid updates whenever I can. That's why I'm still running Win 98 First Edition.
(j/k about Windows 98)
One of the reasons the Downtown Eastside is the poorest neighbourhood in Canada and has tens of thousands of junkies is climate: one can survive most weather most of the year. Another is its status as Terminal City (no pun, really), since if you keep going west (or south) you wind up there. It's a regional sink, for British Columbia (and the prairies too), a vast vast area.
The sudden surge in crystal meth use (speed, to you old timers) across the country contributes hugely to the problem. Recently I was travelling through a small town called Cache Creek, and chatting with a young clerk about life there. She complained "it's ruined... all my friends are getting into meth and crack or other stuff like "K" and they're whacked out all the time and lying, they just aren't friends anymore, it's just in the last five years, the place sucks now." I checked in other small towns and it's happening there, too. Many of these partiers go too far, fall too low, run off and they wind up junkies in Vancouver.
But I have to say I didn't used to feel any threat there when it was mainly a heroin-and-rice-wine kind of mess. Now with speed and crack all over the place it's much more aggressive, the desperation's dangerous.
It was always the case that parking your car down there was just a question of when, not if, you got a broken window for your loose change.
Damn those pesky terrorists
I was thinking the same thing. Perhaps the Dashboard software is the critical element and OpenWRT does not have a multi-node administration feature.
It sounds like the group in the article has an open source alternative already. Perhaps they just need to adapt to it the linksys hardware? I'd think having the code in hand for a project like OpenWRT would make that massively easier. All the hooks are nicely exposed in OpenWRT. It is one of the most impressive firmware replacement projects out there.
Is it the hackers fault that Meraki instituted a poor business model? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki ...? Is it the hackers fault that Meraki ...?
These are all the possessive plural ("the fault of the hackers"), so they need a trailing apostrophe. Is it the hackers' fault that Meraki instituted a poor business model? Is it this hacker's fault that he or she finds grammar has rules hard? It's tough that English is complicated, but its contraction and possessive rules aren't so hard, they just overload the apostrophe and 's'. Try this guide, cheers.=S
There is nothing in the GPL or any open source license I know of that says you get access to the hardware. The GPL says nothing about the hardware. If they weren't strictly following the GPL they can get sued. If they didn't provide a written offer to provide the source code they are in violation. I didn't read about any violations in the article. Keep in mind that just because the system uses GPL binaries doesn't mean they can't run proprietary stuff on the system. You can run proprietary code on your Linux box at home can't you?
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-violation.html
You may have a 7-digit UID, but you know how not to read the article like someone with a much, much shorter one
This platform is based on el-cheapo 802.11 b/g which is a highly competitive, low margin market.
Basically, all the HW is in the ASICs, and the ASICs and reference SW are not open. In your example, a couple of grad students will do the work of an experienced PCB designer, which in this case will probably be OK since they will just be copying the reference design layout and handing it off to the PCB fab house.
Unfortunately, the only way to get the chips is to deal directly with the manufacturer. If you ever want to get any chips, you will need to convince the chip company that you are worth their bother. They would rather push all their chips to their top 10 customers, which are companies like Cisco, Sony, Apple, Microsoft, etc. At low volume, all you represent is one more company that they have to spend money supporting.
If they decide to deal with you, you will get fed their standard reference drivers. Since this project is something special, you may need register maps, the API to customize the reference drivers, and more support to get up to speed. You are now acting like a key customer instead of yet another OEM slapping some plastic around a reference design.
I think that it would be tough to do a better job making cheap HW than some overseas OEM, and that's not the real problem anyway. The real trick is getting the Chips and SW you will need from the chip manufacturer when you are attempting to take control of things that they prefer to control. Basically, you are at odds with their sales and marketing strategy, and you do not offer large volume.
Because they've altered computer equipment that they didn't own, which could be a felony in some places.
"We returned the General to El Salvador, or maybe Guatemala, it's difficult to tell from 10,000 feet"
i sold a light bulb to u
and somehow i like to update the EULA of the light bulb
then i have ways to get into ur home
then i pull the plug
and ur home is under my control
or no lighting at all
hahahahaha
when u get crackers
u get the manufacturer
up
Neither can definitions.
FalconShould there be a Law?
The cycle of gentrification is underway, with artists/creative types moving there (and doing things like rolling out a wimax network), and people renovating properties.
If you think gentrification in Vancouver is bad wait until the 2010 Olympics. I've heard there are groups in Vancouver who are trying to get the city to do what the government in Greece did, once the Olympics there ended a lottery for the housing was held for the low income.
FalconShould there be a Law?
They, Meraki, changed the hardware's firmware without permission.
FalconShould there be a Law?