$800 'AI' robot for kids bites the dust along with its maker The maker of Moxie, an "AI"-powered educational robot for kids, is going out of business – and the $800 bots will die with it. Embodied Inc. made the Moxie Robot, which is a cloud-connected interactive robot intended to be a friendly educational tool for small children. The snag is that its maker has encountered what it calls …
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"By all means adults may open themselves to such attack vectors as they will, but don't foist that on those with no defences."
I really don't know how to structure my reply correctly. "Won't Someone Think of The Children"?
Well. Obviously not because The Adults are pulling this sort of shit on The Adults all of the time and getting away with it.
Just to be more wrong "Stranger in Paradise" appears to have disappeared off the intertubes.
The fuck is that about beyond the books have already gone?
As I remember it some autistic boy got his own Mercury Robot because the Internet to Mercury was a bit shit and he was the only one that could cope with it and now everything is totally fucked up.
Even worse, these things are now very publicly 'Off'. People will take that as Safe. They'll receive no updates, and if the kid's bonded with it then they're not going to throw it out.
So now there's a direct, child-trusted and adult-approved, unmonitored link straight to your kids' earholes.
> Even worse, these things are now very publicly 'Off'. People will take that as Safe. They'll receive no updates
No. I don't think you read the article closely enough.
They won't be safe. They will be doorstops. No cloud connection == does not turn on. Does not work AT ALL.
Child's friend _dies_.
I'm guessing that there may be more steps required to take these over than grabbing a domain name. Without their backend software, which I doubt they're releasing, you might need to put a lot of effort into reverse engineering their protocol and building your own backend, and that's if they haven't included some burned-in encryption keys which could make it infeasible.
"you might need to put a lot of effort into reverse engineering their protocol and building your own backend, and that's if they haven't included some burned-in encryption keys which could make it infeasible."
I doubt any of that even exists as anything more complicated than ROT-13 and simplistic html, for the simple reason that the toy didn't exist to protect the kids. In fact, it wasn't even aimed at the kids. Nor was it aimed at the parents of those kids. Rather, it was aimed at the investors. As such, I suppose it did rather well.
It's possible. Many times, things like this fall into two groups, with almost nothing in the middle:
1. Everything goes in plaintext to a single server, possibly a Raspberry Pi, which responds back with simple responses with no security anywhere.
2. Everything is encrypted so nobody can repurpose the hardware, because if they repurposed the hardware, that would result in effectively free money because they just bought your hardware, cut themselves off from your recurring costs or you have an excuse to cut them off if you need to, and invalidated their warranty by replacing the software so you don't have to repair it if they break it, and we just can't have that.
Notwithstanding the caveat emptor aspect of buying anthing that relies on constant connectedness there ought to be a law that defines a minimum operational period for stuff like this - say ten years - with companies having to fund a bond to cover supporting the online element for that period for all the products they sell. A bond is a good way to go because the issuing bank will do due diligence to work out the cost of providing the bond, thereby ensuring that dodgy companies would either pay dearly or not be able to get one. It would also mean that the bond value would not be an asset of the company should they go bankrupt.
This is the way. Telling someone “you can't go bankrupt” (which is essentially what a minimum duration of service would mean) is entirely unmaintainable. What are you going to do, take the money they don't have? Jail them? Cover the costs of the obviously failed product for a time? Buy back the merchandise?
Forcing all contributors to sign away their code under escrow as it is produced would make it possible to put it in the hands of the community if a company goes under or can otherwise not support their product with its required infrastructure. And any company would be terrified at the thought that their valuables could be left out to dry if they fail—many such stories of CEOs taking the assets of their failed companies and trying again next year. But now they won't have that cushion to fall back on, and whatever great idea they had is now open for anyone to replicate, and more succinctly, much less marketable.
You're not telling them they can't go bankrupt. You can consider a bond to be like a reverse insurance policy the manufacturer takes out on behalf of its customers which "pays out" if the the manufacturer goes bust.
It works like this; the manufacturer take out a bond with a bank. If they are a reputable company then the bond will cost a fraction of the value needed to maintain the service forthe ten years. If they are a risky company (in the eyes of the banks) then they might have to pay the full value of the maintenance into the bond. The bank also gets an annual (or monthtly) service fee for promising to pay the value of the bond if the company goes bust. The point is that the bond is held by the bank and the company can 't get its hands on the money. They could take out annual bonds based on sales and after ten years each annual bond would lapse. If the company goes bust then the bond isn't part of its assets so it doesn't get paid out to creditors,. It can be used to maintain the service or pay off customers, or whatever the terms of the bond were when it was set up.
Which will mostly not work because small or startup companies can't pay ten years of maintenance costs in one go. We might prefer that those which cannot just don't operate in the first place, but we don't get to make that choice. Instead, this situation will be resolved in one of three ways:
1. Companies will specify a lower maintenance cost, for instance, just the cost to run the servers on which the code runs, but not updates to keep the code working, get updated data on which the code relies, hardware repair, or paying necessary employees. If they go bankrupt, the group that inherits the bond is going to find that they cannot possibly run with the funds they have. They can use the money to provide full support for a shorter time or to run some basic, partially functional support for the specified time. Either way, the users and the new operators are going to be disappointed.
2. Companies will find a way of not complying, for example acting as a local subsidiary of a different manufacturing company, even if they actually designed the product. If the law doesn't allow that by putting the costs on the local sellers, then they may instead try to have the product sold by something operating internationally. Either way, unless the enforcement is strong, they can find ways to not comply, and by the time that people are checking whether they did or not, it is too late. This happens to some extent for nearly any type of regulation, but one that provides ten years of costs is so expensive that evasion is going to be really popular.
3. Companies will argue that the bond requirement is restricting innovation and get someone to remove that requirement or limit it in a way that is easier to comply with because users aren't getting a lot.
Only if the will to fix it isn't there and legislation's weak. I'm not daft. I know that there's no will to fix but....
Comapnies will specify lower maintenance costs: audit them, make them fund it, fine them if they don't. They do it with banks in terms of specifying capital holdings, risk ratios, chinese walls, and so on. They do it for insurance companies. They do it for loads of industries. Cloud-based products are becoming so embedded in people's lives that they are one the road to becoming a class of utility, if only in the %GDP that people will be spending on them. So regulate them like utilities (OK - bad example if you look at water in the UK, but you get the gist).
Companies won't comply: audit the fuck out of them and make non-compliance more expensive than complying.
Restricting innovation: if you can't get funding to do the job properly then you haven't got a business model, you've got at best a bet and at worst a con-trick little different from walking out of the shop with a box full of rocks instead of the thing you thought you'd bought - a real pig in a poke. This disruptive and innovative bollocks is just that. Steam engines were innovative because they replaced horses and canals with faster transport. Uber isn't innovative. It runs cheap cabs based on huge debts and paying less than minimum wage to its drivers who get no benefits and its business model is to put traditional cabs out of business with low prices, at which point it will hike prices but keep paying its drivers shit.
/end rant
You're right in theory, but every idea has to make it past the ideal stage and the practical stage. My comments are about what I think will happen if someone tries to put that into practice. A lot of small companies start with an idea which they think will be profitable in a couple years, but if they have to pay for ten years of costs before they can sell a single item, they're not going to be able to. I think the first two options I described are how those companies that survive this will deal with that problem and the third one is how those companies that didn't start because of it will kill it.
The idea isn't bad, as it significantly reduces the risk to the purchaser of an item. It comes with the theoretical downside of companies that would be able to stay solvent not forming because they can't afford the bond they're required to have, and we could debate whether it is worth that. I'm afraid that, even if we decide it is, the bigger problem will be in evasion and avoidance to say nothing of getting it passed in the first place.
I agree. Bond is nice in theory, but I too see a much higher risk in implementation.
I still prefer the code escrow idea, because it encourages community support and personal innovation over extended support of a product that, let's face it, probably wasn't that good to begin with if the company went the way of the dodo. Of course, this is showing my own bias, as I personally would much prefer having code to tinker with, over some gizmo to keep whizz-banging for a wee bit longer. But I'm sure the average consumer (in today's culture) would vastly prefer the latter, nor would most of them benefit from the former.
And I also think the requirements to properly implement would be significantly easier on companies, investors, banks, and regulators. No reliance on a bank willing to fund a bond (which they all may deny). No possibility for funny business in shorting the maintenance costs. Very very easy to audit, since all you need to check for is that contributors have signed their rights away.
Simply add this standard clause to your CLA, super straightforward, no fuss. If and when your company goes under, and if no one buys it, your code, schematics, and other intellectual property must be released to the public. Fail to do so, figureheads get fined or go to jail. Yes, products will stop working compared to extended maintenance on bond, but if the products are good enough and popular enough, someone will step up and get them working again. We already see this with products that aren't open, through the sheer power of hard work via reverse engineering.
You would also surely see new companies spun up simply to continue the maintenance of products, since the code is now open and people can do whatever they want with it. Now, you won't be able to guarantee your market, since someone else could step up and do the same thing, but you would surely be able to make some money through a bit of extended support, and consumers would get a working product for your effort.
If they can’t pay for the maintenance in one go, then they are already bankrupt.
If I bought a Rover car for £20,000 just before they went out of business then I got about £18,000 worth of car and only lost the £2,000 worth of warranty. For this product, the product is worth £200 and say six years of service are worth £100 each, making it £800.
It seems the machine cost £800 to design, build and sell, and there was never money put away for the service. So they lied to their customers.
That's a bit of an oversimplification. Many maintenance costs are not linear per device. For example, if they were going to have some developers write a new feature that runs on the device, then the cost to develop that feature is the same whether they run it on one device or a million. There are some costs that scale per device, like support for the new feature, but the highest one is constant. That means that maintenance cost is very different depending on how many of those you sold.
A company like this, though they probably did operate in an environment where they knew they wouldn't be able to continue, does not have fixed maintenance costs that they know about when they sell the product. They have estimates, but those can be wrong in several ways. I have a feeling their estimates didn't indicate that they would go bankrupt this quickly. Either they did and someone took all the money and ran with it, or more likely they thought they would be able to continue this for longer than they actually could.
No, I think Headly_Grange has it right. The bond would be legally-required before a company could begin (legally) selling such a device/service.
The company would be allowed to go bankrupt the same way they can, now, BUT, the bond would NOT be considered an asset which could be apportioned among the company's creditors and/or stockowners.
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“If there's anything more important than my ego around, I want it caught and shot now.” Zaphod Beeblebrox.
Unfortunately a certain orange baboon in Florida, shares a lot of Beeblebroxian traits (& convictions), but at least Zaphod`s likeable & did seem to be a bit shocked at discovering he signed off on the Earths demolition.
"orange baboon in Florida, shares a lot of Beeblebroxian traits (& convictions)"
Well spotted! I believe Beeblebrox was President of the Universe when he stole the Heart of Gold - a lot of similarity but not even the sum total of brain cells of the entire Trump circus would come within cooee of Trillion (Trish McMillan) or the talking lift hardware from the SCC.
"We wonder how many finance directors or chief technology officers will need to be reduced to tears, like the unfortunate Moxie owners,"
Given the price of this brick it may well be that the parents will be well up the manglement food chain so it might be a useful lesson for them to learn.
Hey Tesla.... Leon Skum... are you listening? Nah, I thought not.
My EV-6 has an app that allows me to see how much battery is left and a few other things that are not that important.
IT connects to Kia for the SatNav but as the car supports CarPlay and Android Auto, I can use the maps on my phone.
Others are not so lucky especially with FSD somewhere on the horizon most of the compute power will be on the Tesla Servers (AFAIK)
"The Local First software movement is an effort to work out how to build apps that allow you to collaborate over the internet, while always storing and controlling your own data."
We worked out how to do that many, many years ago.
We called it "the Internet".
It's a shame that marketing and management managed to wrest it from Engineering and completely bollocks it up.
Some things work really easily with that model. Unfortunately, there are many businesses that take software that can run just fine on the computers their users already have and insist on running it elsewhere anyway for extra lock-in potential and data to mine. However, some things work not as well and some things hardly work at all. For example, I don't know what this AI bot did, but I'm guessing it was running some large bit of software, maybe even an LLM. Building a robot with an LLM running locally in it is possible if you don't mind the robot needing to be tethered to a wall and coming with some fans, effectively a desktop computer in a fancier case. If you want something small or mobile, you will probably not have enough processing power to run something that big locally, which is why you would connect it over a network to something running the software. Most buyers aren't willing to have that something else be a separate machine they have to store and keep online. This type of preference tends to make a lot of companies with hardware like this run that software on their servers. This is in the "not as well" category, since it is certainly possible but it is unpopular.
Other services work even less well on a local computer. Generally, these are ones which rely on a lot of public access to something where self-hosted solutions work fine if you have the resources, primarily fast and unlimited home internet and the ability and willingness to be your own system admin. If you don't have those things, they become security holes, maintenance nightmares, or undeployable because public access also cuts off your ability to use your connection. This is where the challenge becomes harder and where new techniques are tried to try to make it easier for people to deploy. Not everything falls into the first category.
> We worked out how to do that many, many years ago.
No, not even slightly.
This is not "sending files to each other".
This is:
3 people editing _the same file_ SIMULTANEOUSLY while each retaining a local copy, so they can keep working if the link goes down... and when it comes back up, the software can reconcile the changes.
This is self-hosted _truly_ serverless Google Docs.
It's a big deal.
Somebody's apparently working on an alternative https://www.reddit.com/r/MoxieRobot/comments/1ha2b7s/currently_working_on_a_replacement_ai_for_when/ although I don't know his "geek cred" rating.
I obviously throw what little weight I have behind the argument that any "cloud-based" device should have its support software sources held in escrow somewhere. However the real issue in the current case is the accrued "personality" that an instance of one of these things develops talking to a "neuroatypical" child, and whether there are any circumstances in which the custodian of the servers should be allowed to pass this on to a successor: no matter how (apparently) well-intentioned.
Their webpage https://moxierobot.com/ is still active, although the purchases page does have the grace to say "Sold out".
There's an interesting review of how widely the accumulated data has been shared at https://foundation.mozilla.org/en/privacynotincluded/moxie-robot/ . Suffice to say that it includes Google and OpenAI among others, and by now those have so much experience on geolocation etc. that I don't think assurances that queries are de-identified and the originals deleted are worth very much.
I had to evaluate a category of apps this month, and one of the requirements was "must not need yet another god damned login"
We don't want to get burned as per the article.
I was free to bitch about that in the Play store if it failed that criteria.
Of course all the developer responses were "but we need to provide a personalized experience!!!111oneone" to which I said "Bollocks. Android provides all the tools to keep a 'personalized experience' right on the phone"
God. I haven't heard so many whines since the last time I visited a kindergarten.
Online games going offline face the exact same problem.
Even games where the producer -that didn't go bankrupt - promised they would keep working offline, they don't. Ubisoft for example killed off The Crew, a racing game. It took some effort from fans to recover this one, but many more others are irrecoverable without the original servers. (This particular example has more twists and turns, but the gist is the same, the game was innacessible without intervention).
People forget that always online devices can't be guaranteed to work forever, even when the original designers cease to exist. There is no resilience.
In the case of games, Steam promises to keep a copy of most games on their servers, at the same time that GOG promises to keep the original installers for download, and it is up to you to safeguard a copy and maybe the original media the game ran on, like compact discs. None of this ensures the continued existence of any of them.
I think the concept goes past games, but it became evident with games exactly because they are completely based on digital and online premises, which are extremely... ephemeral is the word?
To broaden the scope of the problem with a far more exotic example, a McLaren F1 relies on a Compaq laptop running a 3.5" floppy drive with the code of its firmware to run the fuel injection system. Failing those, the car becomes a 20 million dollar paperweight, unless somebody updates the access to it via any means, like OBD ports and whatnot.
The same can be said about the Saturn V rocket. Even though NASA has the blueprints, building details cannot be reproduced without the original vendors that made the rocket parts. It took 30 years for a private company to be able to create a rocket with better specs than the Saturn V. Again, if SpaceX ceases to exist, their rockets are equally useless.
Nobody is looking at the bigger broader picture.
NASA has the master blueprints, what's been lost in time are the working drawings that show all the myriad little changes made as they built the things. One hopes that, since SpaceX want to build dozens of the them, that Starship and Super Heavy Booster are better documented in the modern age of ubiquitous computing power. I don't think I'd bet my coat on that though...
Their engineers are pretty smart. I'd hope they're following something like BIM practices, or some kind of federated design repo, so everyone always works from the same plans and sees the changes anyone else makes.
I would recommend Tim Harford's 'Cautionary Tales' episode 'Laser v Parchment'
It's about the BBCs Domesday Project to build a digital version of William's 900 yo original. Suffice to say the original is still accessible, where the modern Laserdisc version is not
Yes, that was rather good. Thank you for the recommendation, PB.
Cautionary Tales – Laser Versus Parchment: Doomsday for the Disc
>Even games where the producer -that didn't go bankrupt - promised they would keep working offline, they don't. Ubisoft for example killed off The Crew, a racing game. It took some effort from fans to recover this one (...)
(...)In the case of games, Steam promises to keep a copy of most games on their servers, at the same time that GOG promises to keep the original installers for download, and it is up to you to safeguard a copy and maybe the original media the game ran on, like compact discs. None of this ensures the continued existence of any of them.
Funny you should mention this, because shortly after Ubisoft shut down The Crew they had it removed entirely from Steam and deleted from people's accounts with no prior warning. This obviously caused a furor from not only owners of the game but from people in general, and when their stock began cratering Ubi had to make promises that The Crew 2 and Motorfest would both recieve offline patches when they were EOL'd just to keep more players from abandoning them.
Still, it's a clear cut example that if it's on someone else's server, it's not safe from disappearing without warning.
And this is why PIRACY is our only hope. For every kind of "content" be it an ebook, a movie, music, or a game.
Copy and crack the software (if you can, that is "if it can be made to run locally") and you'll have it forever (or at least as long as you have a compatible hardware or emulator).
Is this morally wrong? Yes, it is, but only if there is a morally right way to have your software run as long as you like, like my old, pre-internet era games do (Quake, Doom, Diablo 1, Diablo 2), or having your content available FOREVER (like for example if you can pay for an ebook and download a LOCAL and without DRM version of it)
Otherwise it's morally right. Very right.
And if some software is completely cloud based, think about this fact before deciding if it's good for you or not. Maybe it can be good anyway, but just think of the implications of cloud-based software before making a decision.
Re. the F1, I know the person who designed the engine management, you didn't need a laptop for it any more than you do for any other car, just for the usual diagnostic type stuff and there isn't too much of that.
And it's not like the thing was abandoned or that tied to the hardware, it was just very advanced while predating the later standards.
In reality apart from the rarity the situation now is the same as for any other car of that era when it comes to obsolescence of the diagnostic kit.
Now when it comes to laptops and starting actual F1 cars of that or later era that's where you hit the pain, it's not like anyone cared at all about the stuff apart from getting it going, and after 12 months it was abandoned old scrap. With the later standardisation you maybe started to have a chance.
With such an expensive toy, the kid is likely to be from quite a comfortable background, and on reaching adulthood more likely to find themselves moving into a senior job in a company. Once there, if anybody suggests using anything cloud-based or whatever the big tech hype-of-the-day is, it will trigger a deeply negative childhood trauma about a dead robot and a business disaster may be averted.
Moving things on apace, in order to not burst any number of bubbles and create a dire depression and great global financial crash and Big Bang ...... once you accept and can realise politics to be just a another great robotic game, with similar dependencies and limitations reliant on fickle and self-servering third party support and foreign intel impacting the length of laudable deliverable content before their past good use and viable expiry dates, is the perverse simpatico control of news and presentation of mind-numbing programs by manipulative media moguls and their acolytes easily recognised as that which renders you as puppets listening to their followers as they lead you down the slippery slopes awash with ignorant tropes to nowhere novel and great.
Switch off and turn off to that very parasitic meme, and the worlds revealed to you are a completely different set of places in space in which one can lead states in Work, REST* and Play to totally engaging and extremely rewarding and even quite alien fields of JOINT** Noble Endeavour.
* ..... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/REST
** ...... JOINT Operations Internetworking Novel Technologies/NEUKlearer HyperRadioProActive Processes in AI Research and Development Fields Biting the hand that feeds IT Creating Advantage through Research and Technology ..... and something you were told about here on El Reg in posts presented at least 26 months ago ....... https://forums.theregister.com/forum/all/2022/09/30/iarpa_radiation_monitoring_research/
And the mainframe died.
Big f**king surprise.
Not the first child's toy to have an internet connection.
And every bit as irresponsible as the last one with its s**t security.
All these Aholes who insist the product must be internet connected to the point it will be bricked if it goes off line and the customers who think (magically) "It must be good. It's connected to the cloud*"
*"Cloud" server-farm-in-unknown-jurisdiction funded by financially unstable startup soon to go TITSUP
I guess cloud is a quick way to make stuff work without too much embedded brains but it feels like a commercial millstone unless you want to tie people into a never-ending subscription.
Otherwise you've sold them the thing and then you're stuck with a permanent overhead running and maintaining all those services.
I guess people are all about the quick start, then the data collection, neglect to think about generating income and get brought down by open ended running costs?
I have the same thought with so much cloud connected stuff as from the supplier side it feels like endlessly incinerating money unless you really have a great model behind it to pay for running the cloud part, and I'm not sure anyone (Amazon, Google etc included) has really got that nailed yet.
To me, feels much better to tie them into hardware upgrades and upselling software features without relying on cloud behind it. Push that hardware & running cost straight into the customer's pocket on day 1.
Quite frequently, the price of the servers isn't high enough to concern them about this, because they can afford to run the servers quite a long time from a high purchase price. What they can't afford to do for as long is continuing to run the rest of the company. At the end, they don't have the money to run the servers either, but it wasn't the servers that did it. That's often how the calculations arise. When the server costs are high enough that it's appearing as a primary concern in the financial plan, they tend to make the subscription part of the product by default, which doesn't guarantee that they'll stay solvent either.
They won't. They've existed for as long as ongoing costs have, and they will continue to. The important thing to me is that companies be required to be explicit about the existence of subscriptions. If they tell you about a subscription up front, you can decide whether to have the thing or not. The problem comes when they don't bother to tell you, but they impose the restrictions on you anyway.
There is also the problem that Moxie without subscription has zero value, and there is no guarantee that I can get a subscription.
If the price was $50 for Moxie and $150 a year each for five years of subscription, either Moxie wouldnt exist or the problem wouldnt exist.
Hello. In case you're unaware the year is 2024 and that is exactly what all of this Internet-of-Tat s**t is about.
From "Loyalty" cards onward the goal has been shifting from "Offer the customer a product they want" to "Get the customer to hand over as much personal data as possible, (and in the case of the kiddies personal access as well) so we can resell it to as many people as we like as often as we like.
Surveillance capitalism really is quite despicable.
Worst case scenario. Company sells one of these creepy doll things to Mr-and-Mrs-Dumbass-un-interested-parents (with subscription, camera and soothing voice simulator) and on the dark web access to them (but only the pretty ones of course). No bulk buying. First come, first served.
Not an accident. A part of the business plan. Your kiddies. Their profit.
I appreciate this might have had some people diving for the bin, if not the loo. Hope you got there on time. There should be a law against it, but AFAIK this is not illegal.
Perhaps it's time it was.
Like the death of any pet it's a learning opportunity.*
I can envisage a demand for Moxie sized cardboard boxes with an optional small spade to inter the defunct robot in the backyard beside the budgie and moggy. Even personalized headstones.
The children can shed tears over the passing of their little plastic chum and the parents over the £639(GBP) or USD799.00 although I am not sure too many Australian parents would have paid over AUD1000.00 for the toy.
Thanatophobia and necrophobia apparently being endemic in western societies with fewer children keeping animal pets there is probably a need for a surrogate plastic pal that is b(r)ought into existence, develops, reaches maturity followed by a slow decline into senility and decease.
* echoing Ecclesiastes "Everything has its time and everything dies."
Where you have to enter a serial number to unlock it but unbeknownst to you the program goes to a licence checking server to verify it - and does this periodically to check you are still valid.
Until the day the licencing server no longer exists.
The the program becomes unlicensed again until you find the hack that fixes it....
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