This is a quick follow-up to the post from last Thursday in which I compared the behaviour of the non-profit water utility Welsh Water to the for-profit telecoms utility Openreach.
Due to the bad weather we had last week in Wales, Welsh Water had a shortage of engineers. They still arranged for a contractor to come the same day to look at the damaged manhole cover on our property. Due to the high workload, the contractor only arrived at nine o' clock in the evening, but was very friendly and performed his inspection quickly and efficiently. He left a card with a reference number and said that Welsh Water would be in touch.
Based on my previous experience with utility companies like Openreach, I didn't expect them to get back to me quickly. Low and behold, they called as promised this morning to arrange for someone to come out and replace the manhole cover.
Is it possible that non-profits are able to provide better service because they're not just thinking about their bottom line, and don't have to cut corners just to increase shareholder profit?
The article “Whatever happened to the Semantic Web?” is a pretty good summary of the history of the Semantic Web. A lot of the work I did for my PhD was based on Semantic Web technologies, and the article did a good job to explain how some of these technologies completely failed, while others flourished in a specific niche or use case. While the dream in the original 2001 Scientific American article didn't happen exactly as described, these kind of visions rarely do.
I feel like one area that should have found more use cases, specifically in the Internet of Things, is ontologies and inferencing. Maybe it will still happen, but I'd love to know why it hasn't happened yet.
It's Friday night, so this will be short. After the IPCC report was released this week, I have been thinking about climate breakdown a lot. If we only have 12 years before it's irreversible, we should all start doing something now. We can't just wait and hope that governments or big business will act. It feels like the only way to not fall into despair is to really be the change we want to see in the world. Maybe a good start is reducing our meat consumption by 90%?
In the UK, the physical telecoms network is managed by Openreach, a wholly owned subsidiary of BT Group plc. Basically, if you don't have cable internet access (which is in turn owned by Virgin Media) you'll have to use the Openreach network. It doesn't matter who your internet service provider is. You also can't contact Openreach directly, so if you have any internet issues you have to play Chinese Whispers (also called the Telephone Game) to get anything done. It's not strange to wait months for your internet access to be restored if it goes down due to a physical fault.
The telecoms regulator, Ofcom, has attempted to separate Openreach from BT in order to provide equal access to the network and hopefully improve service, but BT itself still owns all the network infrastructure, and they're still owned by the same parent company, BT Group plc.
I've had horrible experiences in the past trying to get internet installed to my house, to the extent that I even called my local Welsh Assembly minister to try and get things sorted. It went all the way to the Minister for Skills and Technology, but at the end of the day it was still months before anything happened.
Compare this with Welsh Water, the non-profit tasked with providing drinking water and wastewater services to most of Wales. I discovered a damaged manhole cover in my backyard, and went to their website to see whose responsibility it is to fix it. I found a live chat option, and they quickly arranged to have engineers visit the same day to check it out. This was followed up by a phone call to arrange a suitable time.
Please, tell me again how profits (more than £1 billion operating income in the case of Openreach) are necessary to provide good customer service and a working system.
It's been 6 years to the day since I received my PhD in Industrial Design from TU Eindhoven. What has happened since then?
It's a little bit funny that I've neen ranting about smart homes this past week, as that is exactly what I was working on at the time: Designing and building systems for smart home interoperability. Based on my recent experiences with setting up Hive Home, smart home interoperability is still an unsolved problem. I feel like the work described in my PhD thesis does solve a small part of the puzzle, but unfortunately the company who had the best chance of implementing the system we developed was Nokia, which you may recall was driven into the ground by Microsoft and their trojan horse takeover. What I can definitely tell you is that APIs are not the answer.
I haven't really looked much at smart home systems in the six years since, as I've been focusing my energy on medical devices. The first three years as a postdoc at Swansea University, looking at device safety in terms of their user interfaces. The most recent three years I've been working with Tidepool on liberating the data stored on medical devices, specifically those used for treating diabetes.
Reduce-reuse-recycle: Why is it that we usually focus more on the recycle part than on the reduce and reuse parts? Did you know that recycling wasn't even invented to reduce waste, but to avoid regulation and banning of plastic products? The only real solution to waste is to either use less or use what you already have.
Previously I wrote about how I had no free storage on my phone, and was considering possible options for buying a new one. I looked at initiatives like Fairphone, but when Apple's Lisa Jackson said “keeping using them is the best thing for the planet” during the last iPhone event, I decided to just factory reset my phone and reinstalling everything. And it worked just great – I still have enough free space on my iPhone 6S, and it's fast enough to run all the apps. iOS 12 and WatchOS 5 provides enough novelty that I don't feel like I need something like the XS. Paying more than £1000 for a phone is truly XSive.
I know I have a long way to go in terms of not creating unnecessary waste, especially when it comes to food packaging. I hope that I can get started with growing some more of my own food soon, and will keep you posted on my progress.
OK, one last part of the saga in Hive Home forcing me to buy a new hub, and hiding behind data privacy as a reason for not allowing me to use the perfectly functional one I have already. I sent them this e-mail last week:
Hi there,
I was told by a member of your technical support team today that I would not be able to use the Hive hub installed in the house I recently bought. Apparently this is because Hive does not allow a hub to be resold or passed on, but effectively locks it to one consumer for life, requiring me to buy a whole new hub. How would I go about recycling or having you reuse (and potentially resell) the existing locked hub? I'm hopeful that you have a better solution than taking it to a household recycling site, as I noticed on the Hive website that the Hub conforms to the WEEE Directive: https://www.hivehome.com/img/attachments/Declaration_of_Conformity_Hive_Nanohub_2.pdf
Today I got this response:
I hope this finds you well and my sincerest apologies for the length of time it has taken us to get back in touch.
I am really sorry but the adviser you spoke with on the phone was correct. We wouldn't be able to remove this from the current owners account as it holds their personal data. They should take this with them when they leave the property and they are the only people who would be able to get use out of the hub.
If the previous owners have not contacted you to look for this hub, then I would advise you take this to a household recycling site. My apologies that I could not be of any further assistance
Many thanks.
Sigh. If I'm reading the WEEE Directive correctly, it's Hive's responsibility to provide a free recycling service and not pass the burden on to the local council. Even better would be to wipe the data from the hub and re-use/re-sell it, given the environmental cost of the device. And let's be honest: Who would design and sell a hub that cannot be factory reset?
OK, I promise I've stopped ranting about how Hive is forcing me to buy a hub that I already have. I now bought a new hub and two light bulbs for less than list price on Amazon. Trying to then have the existing Hive devices in the house recognise the new hub was another exercise in patience.
First you have to plug in the hub and wait five minutes. Then you have to switch the boiler off and on. Then you have to hold a button on the Hive receiver for 10 seconds. Then you have to release it and hold it again for 10 seconds. Then you have to hold two buttons on the thermostat for twenty seconds to reset it. Then you try to re-pair everything and wonder why it's not working. Then it suddenly starts working without you changing anything.
Of course Hive doesn't work with Apple's HomeKit, which I already use with an Eve plug. And there's no way I'm buying an Alexa. Open-source to the rescue: There's a project called homebridge which allows you to link other smart home systems, like Hive, to HomeKit. I set it up on a CHIP, the now discontinued $9 single board computer I had lying around in a drawer, and it works pretty well. At least I can now use HomeKit's automation functions, for example turning off the heating automatically when we all leave the house.
Which part is the most fun? Using Siri or my watch to turn the lights on and off of course!
After my blog post from two days ago, I left a one-star review of Hive on TrustPilot, just to finish venting my frustration at their bone-headed decision to not allow hubs to be re-used. I was a bit surprised to discover today that they left a response to my review, basically confirming what I said and adding another lie on their part:
Which part are they lying about? The part where they say the previous owner's details and history are all contained within their hub. Anyone with a little knowledge of how IoT systems works knows that everything is stored on their servers, and that it's just the serial number that links the hub to the owner's account. I checked: The hub does have a factory reset button. Unfortunately (or is it fortunately) Trustpilot does not allow you to respond to replies from the company.
I do find it amusing that they say “the previous owner should have taken the Hub with them”, confirming what I said about how people just “forget” to take their hubs with them, and then tell me it's a deal to buy the hub I already have. Sigh.
If you haven't yet read the Bloomberg article on how Chinese spies managed to infiltrate US companies by installing their own chips on server motherboards, go read it now. It's a lengthy read, but has all the elements of a spy thriller, and will probably be made into a movie one day.
It does make me wonder if the only way to build truly safe and secure systems is to have everything open-source from the ground up? This could mean using open-source microprocessors like the ones based on the RISC-V instruction set. It may also mean building the hardware yourself. This is not as hard to do for assembling circuit boards as it used to be, but is fabricating your own chips a step too far? Turns out you can fabricate chips in your garage.
