I'm excited to see Mozilla's experiments in the IoT space, but I'm a bit unclear on the exact nature of the projects being undertaken here. For example, is the software here intended to act as a proxy between connected devices and your access point, possibly via flashing your router?
I'm also curious if Mozilla is building in automatic updates in all of this software from the ground-up, seeing as how that appears to be the fundamental weakness of everything related to the IoT.
Good questions. At this point, we're trying to identify user value with prototypes. We're a long way away from defining things like the software update model on as-yet-unspecified devices.
Note that we are still at a very early stage of exploration, so anything I write might change a dozen times before there is a first official prototype.
The current prototypes of Project Link are developed in Rust and tested on a RPi. However, we have not decided of a specific hardware platform and there are even chances that this will remain cross-platform – I'm currently running prototypes on my laptop.
In the current state of things, yes, the software is designed to act as a proxy between connected devices and connected devices and your access point.
I can't speak for other projects, but we definitely intend to have an update mechanism. This is very much not finalized yet, so any suggestion you have (currently, as a detailed blog post – once we are better organized, as a RFC) would be useful.
I'm also curious if Mozilla is building in automatic updates in all of this software from the ground-up, seeing as how that appears to be the fundamental weakness of everything related to the IoT.