Cisco Update

[bicknell at ufp.org (Leo Bicknell)]

In a message written on Thu, Jul 05, 2012 at 03:51:40PM +0000, Mario Eirea wrote:
> Has anyone seen this yet? Looks like Cisco was forcing people to join its Cloud service through an update for it's consumer level routers.

Perhaps going right to the source would be educational:

http://home.cisco.com/en-us/cloud

The short version appears to be Cisco wanted to move to a model
where you could manage your home gateway remotely, and also store
settings that may (in the future) be able to be reused if you
replaced your device.  All in all it sounds a lot to me like Meraki's
solution (caveta, I've not used Meraki, just gotten the presentation).
There's probably even a market for this sort of service.

Where they appear to have gone horribly wrong is that several models
of Linksys routers with "auto-update" enabled downloaded this update and
moved to this new management model with no user intervention, notice,
or method of being down graded.  Thus folks who didn't want these
features and may not have upgraded to them were caught by surprise, and
have been effectively forced to take the new features due to a lack of
downgrade path.

Technology wise it's pretty non-interesting.  Others have been doing
similar things.