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Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

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Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#551

Post by esafak »

cyp0633 wrote: post #550
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…

US-designed iPhones have at least 2 cameras, some microphones, and biometric sensors. From this point, everyone outside the US should stop using iPhones to prevent surveillance from the American empire. From another angle, the iPhones are primarily made in China AND India via third-party factories, so no one should ever use iPhones any more. You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.

It is, because Apple's privacy stance and record are known. What do we know about this Chinese company, besides the fact that it is beholden to a government that does not care for privacy?

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#552

Post by Longlius »

lenerdenator wrote: post #543
hylaride wrote: post #301

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's ultimately what you get when you have a system that 1) has most of its money held by the retirement/pension funds of a generation that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth and 2) has incentivized returns to those institutional investors at the board and c-suite levels of most companies.

I mean if we're talking about generations that didn't have enough children to sustain organic domestic economic growth, then China is actually ahead of us there. Their birth rate plummeted below replacement well before the US's did.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#553

Post by kqr »

BigTTYGothGF wrote: post #424
kqr wrote: post #289

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Our household (and I suspect many with us) bought a Roomba specifically to not give the Chinese government a roving camera in our home. Ouch!

Why do you think they want to see the inside of your house, and what do you think they'd be able to do with the information?

Let's just say a family member has a very important and somewhat secretive job. The most classified meetings don't happen in our home, of course, but for a state adversary even small clues can be what's needed.

(So why get a roving camera in the first place? We judged that one from a historically and currently aligned state would be safe enough, even though it's not ideal.)

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#554

Post by Longlius »

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.

If China doesn't want or need anything from the West, then why do they kvetch so loudly when the US implements trade barriers?

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#555

Post by Mouvelie »

cyp0633 wrote: post #550
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…

US-designed iPhones have at least 2 cameras, some microphones, and biometric sensors. From this point, everyone outside the US should stop using iPhones to prevent surveillance from the American empire. From another angle, the iPhones are primarily made in China AND India via third-party factories, so no one should ever use iPhones any more. You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.

How does it work then ? Explain us how the US, China, and India don't abuse of surveillance on whoever they can, please.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#557

Post by standardUser »

esafak wrote: post #551
cyp0633 wrote: post #550

Earlier quoted context omitted.

US-designed iPhones have at least 2 cameras, some microphones, and biometric sensors. From this point, everyone outside the US should stop using iPhones to prevent surveillance from the American empire. From another angle, the iPhones are primarily made in China AND India via third-party factories, so no one should ever use iPhones any more. You have the right to concern about privacy, but that's not how it works.

It is, because Apple's privacy stance and record are known. What do we know about this Chinese company, besides the fact that it is beholden to a government that does not care for privacy?

Apple's policy is to submit to nearly all requests made by the federal government, though they get substantial credit for resisting some requests. This of course depends on the decisions made by current leadership, which can and will change (while the phone in your pocket remains the same).

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#558

Post by kobieps »

aschobel wrote: post #84
sudosysgen wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Binocular vision ought to be good enough for a vacuum. It could be, but it just is not. VSLAM robots were practically significant worse. There are a lot of limitations to multi-ocular vision for a robot vacuum, for example the relatively featureless walls and few features across the horizontal binocular axis. Neato was never as big as iRobot. They didn't fail from commanding heights, they never were that successful…

Didn't Matic solve this (non-Lidar robot vacuum)? People seem to rave about them.

Yeah matic is vision only

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#559

Post by nullc »

whywhywhywhy wrote: post #175
ageitgey wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, but a simple address database seems like a lot easier way to get there than robots roving around houses with LIDAR?

Did Roomba ever use lidar? I thought their mapping feature was a camera pointing to the celling which is bringing in much richer data than lidar. Robot vacuums with lidar don't even need internet connections to work.

The roombas with cameras don't need an internet connection to work-- they need it if you want the app control features like scheduling. The imagery based navigation is still local.

When I got one in ~2019, I covered the camera and connected it long enough for it to get firmware updates (which annoyingly you can't trigger and it takes a few days)... then I firewalled it off to get no internet access.

I later figured out that if you let it connect and firewall it off it just sits in a tight loop trying to connect again hundreds of times per second which meaningfully depletes the battery faster.

Changing the SSID name so it couldn't connect to the wifi solved the problem.

I'd like to get a new one-- the old one still runs well (with some maintenance, of course) but the latest robot vacuums are obviously better. Unfortunately at least some are more cloud dependent and I can't tell which are and to what degree.

Re: Roomba maker goes bankrupt, Chinese owner emerges

#560

Post by Cpoll »

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…

> More than 40 million is a lot. For comparison, the US has ~132 million households.

Does comparing sales to households make any sense though? You'd need to figure out (40MM - Roombas in landfills) / average Roombas per household.

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