WIRED Investigations
8 HN recommenders · recommended in 18 months, 2016–2022
1:07:51 · 16M views · Jul 5, 2016
A WIRED Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen, covering its hardware-prototyping culture and shanzhai copycat manufacturing. It looks at how the city's ecosystem evolved and what the rest of the world can learn.
Strongly recommended in Shenzhen and hardware threads for its view of fast cycles, loose IP and the maker ecosystem.
20 comments from Hacker News
I cannot wait for some type of top-down pressure to force IoT developers to take security seriously. The movement has been pushed into overdrive thanks to insane levels of competition where you either crush your R&D into the smallest breakneck period or you live to see your creation being sold for half of what your budget can allow by other firms lifting your efforts while you're still at the workbench.[1] I've been getting cozy with Shenzhen-based hardware accelerators for the past year as part of a personal side-venture and I have not seen a group so pressured to deliver a product as fast as possible with security being a casual afterthought. To get a decent taste of what it's like, I wholeheartedly recommend WIRED's Future Cities documentary on Shenzhen and the companies that dwell there.[2] Their struggles for ephemeral market-share are endemic of the entire community that's taken over embedded hardware for the past few years. The saddest aspect of it all is that this market competition isn't benefiting the consumer. IoT devices are coming out of the factories poorly engineered, badly maintained for far too short of a time, and as we've learned from this attack, being used as vectors for network intrusion and distributed censorship. Even arduino founder Massimo Banzi's widely-lauded IoT Manifesto[3] fails to approach any comprehensive statement regarding a dev's responsibility to build in some level of security to their devices. It just isn't part of the fast-and-loose cu
For a companion piece I highly recommend this hour long vid by Wired about Shenzhen. It's worth your time: this video Things that stood out to me was the maker mindset was so prevalent and competitve that it had filtered down to the buyers. So someone cobbles together some new widget for their phone and starts to sell it. Other people see it selling a nd copy it, but they make modifications. Shoppers see it for the first time and decide they want one with a purple strap, so they shop around until they find it or find someone who will make it that way. This is where the hoverboard fad bubbled up but also how and why it "flamed" out. I think it's a fascinating testbed for technology and creativity and economics.
There's an excellent documentary on the hardware/hacking ecosystem in Shenzhen on YouTube: this video . A lot of people there seem to embrace the ethos of moving fast and ignoring IP laws (both original creator and spoofer) because by the time you get a lawsuit or patent filed, the tech will have moved far beyond what you were trying to protect, and it will no longer be worth your time. Basically, move fast and try to keep up. It's crazy how fast the tech cycles are there.
WIRED UK did a great job going into more detail on Shenzhen, highly recommend watching the documentary. this video
If interested about Shenzhen, I'd highly recommend watching this mesmerizing feature on Wired UK: this video