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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#311

Post by rjsw »

Sl1mb0 wrote: post #127
nine_k wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anybody who played Doom, or Quake, or Counterstrike knows: if you are not moving, you are dead. And if you try to show a counterexample, and say: "Look, I'm not moving, and I'm alive all right", it's an illusion, because the rockets, grenades, nails, and plasma charges that will slay you are already in flight, you are just failing to see them.

> sits for hours playing a video game > if you are not moving, you are dead. I understand the point you're trying to make, but there is some irony here.

Rats don't sit down to play.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#312

Post by Zigurd »

cs702 wrote: post #254

According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a] Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too. The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobil…

Take that with a grain of salt (typhoon).

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#313

Post by mindslight »

avianlyric wrote: post #291
zdragnar wrote: post #274

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Western politicians did it to us. China was allowed into the WTO but never held to any of the rules. It is still treated with kid gloves by governments as if it were a developing country despite the fact that it hasn't needed such treatment for decades.

That’s an over simplified view of the world that completely ignores all the benefits of outsourcing our manufacturing to China brought. It may have been short sighted of us, and we may have over valued those short term benefits, over the long term costs, but it wasn’t a decision made by some shadowy group of “politicians”. It was a collective societal decision, to choose easy consumerism, cheap products, and rapid gr…

Those benefits were chiefly lower prices for the manufactured goods. But the Federal Reserve interpreted this as a problem per their mandate to keep CPI going upwards, and created a bunch of new money that went into asset bubbles. So the "benefits" to the average person also included housing unaffordability and the general financialization of everything. Viewed through this lens, it does not seem like any sort of collective societal decision.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#315

Post by mystraline »

sandworm101 wrote: post #309
newswangerd wrote: post #308

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious about this too. I’d worry about a local burglar having this information, but what can a Chinese tech company do with this data that I should be concerned about?

An employee of that company sells footage of you to a scam center. They then blackmail you.

[flagged]

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#316

Post by coldpie »

hylaride wrote: post #301
aurareturn wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is complacency or is China just accelerating? It's not surprising that China wins in these things. Just go to Shenzhen. Hardware designers, parts, machines that make the parts, factories, etc. are all within driving distance. You can't compete unless you also have offices there, hire Chinese workers, compete in China. American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China. Ford themselves said…

IMO, the US business industry has become over-financialised to the point of self-sabotage. R&D and capital expenditure are seen as "bad" things to have on accounting statements. Combine this with Jack Welsh type CEOs who do everything they can to cut out "costs" on financial statements and you get organizations like GE turned into (badly run) banks. Cisco is now essentially a publicly traded PE firm that buys up othe…

Well the good news is we just destroyed our education and research sectors, too, so we'll catch up to China, uh... any day now...

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#317

Post by aqme28 »

simonjgreen wrote: post #81

This is the cost of complacency. They were ahead for so long then the likes of Roborock just left them in the dirt. I remember the first time I tried one of the Roborock devices, and until then I have been a long time Roomba user (like, 20 years). I just couldn’t believe how much better it was. And iRobot just stubbornly refused to iterate on their fundamental products.

And if you look at e.g. https://vacuumwars.com/vacuum-wars-best-robot-vacuums/ you can see companies like Dreame and Eufy coming up in the space. It's a really competitive market and these things are getting better at a very fast pace.

I'd argue that iRobot's demise is sad, but the whole thing has been very good for consumers.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#318

Post by horsawlarway »

bhouston wrote: post #273
cs702 wrote: post #254

According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a] Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too. The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobil…

Definitely not all live and functioning. In fact I suspect less than 10m are actively used. It is a company that has been around for years and it has run into sales issues that last few years with competition and their products have tech product lifespans of around 3 years I suspect.

Personally, I have a Roomba I bought in Jan 2019 that's still doing just fine (So 7 years now).

Most of the parts are pretty easily replaced (genuinely pleasant surprise, as an aside) and the company stocked most replacement parts for a long time - I just checked again and I can still get parts for my model (I-series) incl batteries, wheels, brushes, filters, etc. Which is less than it used to be, but still enough to keep mine rolling around for another 3ish years without any likely problems.

And that's outside of the whole "unofficial" replacement parts ecosystem that popped up online.

3 years doesn't track with my experience on this one. I'd bet it's 5 to 10.

---

For context, Amazon tried to buy them for exactly the same purpose ~2 years back (home/house data) and failed to get EU regulatory approval, so scrapped the deal.

I'm not thrilled to have ownership transferred to another company (I was also very unhappy to hear the Amazon rumors back then) and I think this is a pretty clear risk.

Even if a user is no longer using the device, Roomba still likely has plenty of data about their home floating around.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#319

Post by bell-cot »

expedition32 wrote: post #225
aurareturn wrote: post #142

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It is complacency or is China just accelerating? It's not surprising that China wins in these things. Just go to Shenzhen. Hardware designers, parts, machines that make the parts, factories, etc. are all within driving distance. You can't compete unless you also have offices there, hire Chinese workers, compete in China. American companies need to start designing in China, not just made in China. Ford themselves said…

It's funny that we are running into the same problem that the British had with China in the 19th century: China doesn't need or want anything from the West, they do not trust the West and they certainly do not want to rely on the West. The last time the British came up with the ingenuous opium plan. But that backfired into the communist takeover in 1949.

Not to disclaim Britain's & France's atrocities in China - but blaming Mao's victory on those is simplistic at best. China is not a cardboard NPC village, where nothing happens unless the PC's visit and start pulling strings. And while various Chinese people may find it convenient to say "because $western_country did $thing", 99% of actual Chinese decisions are made from their own motives, for their own benefit, with minimal-at-best regard for Westerners.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#320

Post by snapcaster »

georgeecollins wrote: post #304
cs702 wrote: post #254

According to the Financial Times, Roomba has sold more than 40 million robotic devices, most of them robotic vacuum cleaners.[a] Many of those vacuum cleaners have cameras, can move around on their own, and are connected to the Internet. If they're taken offline, they stop working. Many have microphones too. The new Chinese owner will get control of a network of tens of millions Internet-connected, autonomously mobil…

I worry a lot about privacy in general but its hard for me to figure out the danger posed by my roborock. I suppose it has the floor plans of my house and knows we vacuum on Saturdays. It doesn't seem to know if the object passing by is me or my cat. Yes its on my wifi but so are half a dozen other foreign made gadgets. What is the concern?

I think this is the wrong mental model (attempt to articulate threats from a specific information leakage). The problem I have with this approach is that it ignores "sensor fusion" by treating each leak as independent and defining threats as "things i can picture happening".

I think the correct mental model for this is "leaking bits". Leaking bits is bad, it doesn't take many bits to uniquely identify you and you're also not able to anticipate how those bits might be used in future or correlated with other bits.

Just stop leaking bits when you can avoid it. Then you don't have to mentally model every threat you come across

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