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Would You Open Your Home To a Hacker – For Free?
coondoggie writes "What do you get when you mix access to Google's ultra-fast fiber network and old fashioned grass roots business ideas? Well, in this case you'd get someone living on your couch for free for three months. This week a group calling itself the 'Kansas City Hacker Homes' launched a program that calls on the good folks of Kansas City to open up their homes to entrepreneurs and developers who would live and work there for a period of three months, rent and utility free. They have to buy their own food."
Someone tell them what the "board" in room & board means, I don't think they know.
This is America, chukco. We know what "Room and Board" is - that's what happens when they lock you up at Gitmo.
Really, please try and keep up.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
While I can admire the idealism behind this concept, from a practical viewpoint it leaves much to be desired.
For example, will Kansas City Hacker Homes bond and insure the hackers, so as to indemnify the homeowners against theft or lawsuits from their "guests"? Very doubtful, which means the burden falls on the homeowner (and his/her insurance policy).
What happens to the homeowner if the hacker decides to skirt the law (e.g. breaking into someone's network, taking drugs, or downloading copyrighted material) while living in the house? What if he runs up hundreds of dollars on your cable bill watching pay-per-view movies? How do you get your money back? Can you even evict him on the spot, or will local laws give him "squatter's rights" for a limited time, as they often do for non-paying renters?
You wouldn't really know anything about this person in your house, besides what he told you. Will Kansas City Hacker Homes provide you with a background check of the hacker's criminal and civil record? Again, highly unlikely.
So basically you're rolling the dice with some total stranger, taking all the risk, and with no promise of getting anything in return. Not a smart move for any homeowner.
Should also have a Bathing Clause.
This program is supposed to get entrepreneurs and developers access to high speed fiber, I understand that; but why do they have to live there? Not that I'd allow anyone onto my network either way, but if the end result is getting some of these awesome startups on the net with a good connection, I'd be a lot more willing to let them put a server in an out-of-the-way place in my house. I don't ask to set up a bed in my data co-location center, why do they need a bed in these houses? They can even have access to their hardware whenever they want, provided it's supervised and at an appropriate time. Also, my electricity isn't free. I'd sure like some small kind of cut from the profits (assuming they make a profit sometime).
"Well kids, you tried your best, and you failed. The lesson is, never try." -Homer Simpson
This post removes moderation effort in this thread.
You can issue a very simple document saying that the person waives their right to sue in the event of injury. Cave owners do it all of the time when cavers wish to enter their property. For example:
http://www.caves.org/grotto/jamesrivergrotto/JRGCaveTripReleaseForm.PDF
Rental property does it:
http://monkeyshines4kids.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Monkey-Shines-4-Kids-LLC-General-Liability-Release.pdf
and you can get a free one from nolo here:
https://www.rocketlawyer.com/secure/interview/new.aspx?id=154&utm_source=103&try=1&v=3&gclid=CPuF3peHg7ICFQmpnQodiCwAcw#q1
Shut up and start helping people.
Note: I have put my money where my mouth is. I live with two foreign PhD students who pay drastically reduced rent. They are also the nicest people people that I have lived with.
for bootstrapping kansas city's high tech industry
How? Just how many startups require ultra-fast fiber at their development site? Wherever the startup hosts their public server(s) may already have such a connection.
I live in Kansas City although not in one of the first phase of fiber hoods. On a local forum we had a discussion about this site already and I brought up the terms of service for residential fiber service.
and hereis the page containing those rules. So without a written agreement you can't run a server. The "providing commercial services" part most likely means no sharing your gigabit connection, not "you can't work from home". I don't think google wants their residential fiber service to be used to start the next facebook.com. They want those entrepreneurs to pay a more for the business service. Whenever google fiber was first announced and what we heard on the local news was something to the effect of it's going to be an experiment by google to see what people will do with a giga-bit connection. At first that sounded like (to me anyway) that they would let us run our own web servers from home, but now it looks more like they just want to offer a web browsing only service for residential customers(like Time Warner).
My question to anyone who has an answer: How could someone use google fiber residential service to get their startup off the ground without breaking the terms of service?
"the fax machine is nothing but a waffle iron with a phone attached to it." - Grandpa Simpson