Apple's AI Acquisition of Xnor.ai Leaves Some Wyze Cameras Without People Detection (theverge.com) 32
Apple's recent purchase of Seattle-based AI company Xnor.ai is leaving Wyze's affordable cameras without the people detection feature. The Verge reports: Cameras from fellow Seattle-based company Wyze, including the Wyze Cam V2 and Wyze Cam Pan, have utilized Xnor.ai's on-device people detection since last summer. But now that Apple owns the company, it's no longer available. Some people on Wyze's forum are noting that the beta firmware removing the people detection has already started to roll out. Oddly enough, word of this lapse in service isn't anything new. Wyze issued a statement in November 2019 saying that Xnor.ai had terminated their contract (though its reason for doing so wasn't as clear then as it is today), and that a firmware update slated for mid-January 2020 would remove the feature from those cameras.
There's a bright side to this loss, though, even if Apple snapping up Xnor.ai makes Wyze's affordable cameras less appealing in the interim. Wyze says that it's working on its own in-house version of people detection for launch at some point this year. And whether it operates on-device via "edge AI" computing like Xnor.ai's does, or by authenticating through the cloud, it will be free for users when it launches. That's good and all, but the year just started, and it's a little worrying Wyze hasn't followed up with a specific time frame for its replacement of the feature. Two days ago, Wyze's social media community manager stated that the company was "making great progress" on its forums, but they didn't offer up when it would be available.
There's a bright side to this loss, though, even if Apple snapping up Xnor.ai makes Wyze's affordable cameras less appealing in the interim. Wyze says that it's working on its own in-house version of people detection for launch at some point this year. And whether it operates on-device via "edge AI" computing like Xnor.ai's does, or by authenticating through the cloud, it will be free for users when it launches. That's good and all, but the year just started, and it's a little worrying Wyze hasn't followed up with a specific time frame for its replacement of the feature. Two days ago, Wyze's social media community manager stated that the company was "making great progress" on its forums, but they didn't offer up when it would be available.
*On-device*, not even cloud (Score:3)
The relevant bits:
In short: it's not even cloud.
It's a proprietary blob provided by a third-party.
They lost the license to the proprietary blob (because the third-party got bought out by Apple, and thus there's no third-par
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This is legally absurd. A camera was bought with a particular feature, and the feature gets removed after the purchase for no sane reason. Were customers warned clearly and unambiguously that their device may change after purchase and features removed? This is a physical device, what customer would realize that a physical device would change without any interaction with it? Yes, I've worked on devices where features were licensed, but the end customers were required to pay for the feature and they knew
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This part also does not make sense. Why get a license that is so weak that it is nullified at a moment's notice and the licensee is under obligation to scrub the apps? If a license has a term under which it applies, then the full term must be honored. Under any decent license, Wyze was entitled to use the feature even if Xnor.ai goes out of business or is acquired or even just changes their mine. If the feature requires some sort of constant connection to a server (ie, DRM) then that could explain thing
welcome to rental society (Score:3)
Welcome to rental society where ownership by peasants is obsolete and everything is owned by feudal corporate companies.
Even things you purchased and you thought you owned can be bricked at any moment. The only way to guarantee that
something continues to work indefinitely is to pay a monthly subscription.
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Welcome to rental society where ownership by peasants is obsolete and everything is owned by feudal corporate companies. Even things you purchased and you thought you owned can be bricked at any moment. The only way to guarantee that something continues to work indefinitely is to pay a monthly subscription.
The private ownership of everything from movies & music, to even the property you live in, is subject to these conditional rental payments... whether the periodic payment is called a subscription or taxes.
In light of this reality, it's probably more accurate to refer to your possessions as conditional leases.
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Peasants worked for free. You are making a voluntary transaction. Big difference. If you don't want to have your service go away after the agreed upon period, you should investigate into hardware/software that is open source and/or you do not rent from someone else.
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I agree on the open source, but sometimes your choice to opt out of stuff with proprietary software means opting out of entire classes of things, like televisions or automobiles.
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You can build an open source automobile. Kit car, megasquirt. Use a classic engine and transmission for which you can get blueprints. Dunno how it works elsewhere in the world, but this is legal in all 50 US states.
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Sure. That sounds like a practical solution -- build your own car.
The thing is, I actually have the mechanical skills to do that. It would consume all my free time for a year or two, but when I was done I'd have exactly *one* problem sorted.
It's not that hard (Score:4, Informative)
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TFA is seriously misleading in terms how it actually works - xnor.ai partly to blame, their sales copy is horrible buzzword obscurantism.
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So basically it's a very efficient way to do image recognition that will run on low end SoCs with little memory and slow CPUs. Replacing it will require a similarly efficient one because the hardware was likely only sized for the xnor.ai system.
I wouldn't take their word for it that they are working on their own version or close to completing it. They could well be stringing people along. Get your returns and refunds in now.
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FFS. This is for lay people.
Yes, just download and compile OpenCV, figure out how to get shell access on your new device (Older Hikvisions had a checkbox for SSH, not so much anymore).
Hell just getting OpenCV4.2 up on a recent platform is sometimes not trivial depending on the combination of build settings you need.
Non sequitur (Score:4, Informative)
Edge computing is not on-device, and doing the processing in the cloud would involve streaming the video to the cloud, not simply authenticating.
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That's the exact opposite of the definition from Google -- it operates on the device i.e. at the edge of the cloud (presumably.)
In other words, the way software has always been done before the invention of offloaded computations on some server somewhere.
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Cloud is a remote datacenter. Edge is compute that sits closer to devices, like ISP networks. The device is the device.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
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Indeed, it sounds like you would need a dedicated box taking those feeds and doing the detection if they implement edge computing. Presumably they will be sending everyone a free box then.
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The first thing it says on xnor.ai’s website is “on-device” - the article is just wrong.
Without the Internet? (Score:2)
Are Wyze cameras usable without a connection to the Internet? Through an WiFi connection to an air-gapped local LAN perhaps? Apple will have a hard time breaking the cameras if they can't push new firmware out to them.
Wrong subject (Score:2)
Apple purchase removes ai from cameras that was already going to be removed before the purchase.
Come on guys...
Reason #492 (Score:1)
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Good luck with that argument though with most devices these days.
Most consumer electronics start up with "Please sign into your free account", and many will have limited features if or nothing at all if you don't sign in, which is at the heart, "the cloud"
And this is why I spent more on Philips Hue lights (Score:2)
Every smart light system on the planet except the Hue ones seem to call back to the nebulous mothership somewhere in the cloud, and if that stops working, so do the lights. Hue runs off a local hardware bridge that even if Philips went out of business somehow, you can still use local devices to control. Same if your internet connection goes down, all the local devices talk to the hub and it works just fine.
It wasn't very good (Score:2)
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https://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/opinion/sunday/dogs-are-people-too.html [nytimes.com]
And Nothing of value was lost (Score:3)
As a Wyze Camera owner I can assure you nothing of value was lost in the implementation Wyze has of this. I have my camera pointed outside in a busy apartment complex with tons of people coming and going and it picks up, at most, five people a day. It doesn't even pick me up walking in and out of the front door.