Cisco from the start should of made this an opt-in and not an opt-out (which in this case took customer pressure to even get opt-out). Whether they meant to do this on purpose or just misinformed management, they should of known from the start this was going to be a PR nightmare forcing updates which then require you to sign up for their cloud and their new TOS.
The part no one mentions is that Cisco advertised these routers as cloudy all along, so the firmware update just delivered the already-promised features. People who bought these routers probably didn't quite realize what a cloud router means, though.
People don't buy products after reading disclaimers or EULAs. But they carry some expectations as what to get from it and what not. If they later find a too wide difference between their expectations and how that EULA had been acted upon, they know what brand NOT to buy next. And friends warn friends, if only to save them from reading 10 EULAs daily.
Totally agree. Also worth a mention is the JOBS act. Though controversial, the crowdsourcing part would help Merrill's ISP start-up grow much quicker and would be, IMO, more effective than Kickstarter, since your average Joe would be investing into something that could potentially be big.
I, for one, will be keeping my eye out for this guy and will definitely invest into his idea for customer privacy.
A good book to read is Tim Wu's "The Master Switch", which predicts this as something called The Cycle. Reading the book gives you a sense how history repeats itself with new and open technology and how these open systems eventually get molded into closed systems that only a few companies control. It's been done with telephones, the radio and television. It seems the internet is in the early stages of this transistion.
What Comcast is doing is testing the waters. I personally find it just the beginning, as if this is allowed, other companies will follow suit.
I don't get it, Pinterest is an enabler for photographers and artist. I never go to Flickr, could care less, but if I see something of interest on Pinterest (or any other sharing site), I would actually make the effort to go to Flickr and check it out. If I really like what I see from said artist/photographer, I would perhaps consider purchasing some of their work to display in my home. If not, by sharing what I saw, I potentially gave that artist a ton more eyeballs on their work, thus increasing their chances of people buying their artwork. The benefits far outweigh the disadvantages of sharing IMHO
The benefits of share most likely do outweigh disadvantages for most people, most of the time. The whole point of putting photos on Flickr is that you can share them with other people. However, Flickr also gives its users the opportunity to specify access controls on their photos as well. Being able to control who sees, and who shares photos is another reason to use Flickr. As both an engineer and a photographer, I greatly prefer a system that puts its users in control, rather than forcing everyone into a single path that the designers believe is in their best interest.
