UPDATE 2/17/2023: This article has been supplemented with comments from Heat’s spokesperson on the security of its server units and how business customers are using them.
Those eager to sell their soul need not waste another second: the ultimate Faustian opportunity for our modern times has arrived, courtesy of Britain’s “green distributed computing” Heat (opens in a new tab).
The offer (opens in a new tab) (By Tom’s gear (opens in a new tab)) is deceptively simple. You let Heatie install the water heater server next to the existing hot water storage tank, and will provide up to 4.8 kWh of free hot water per day (80% of UK household daily consumption, it seems) all year round.
This is done simply by allowing companies to use the server for cloud computing while the unit collects waste heat.
Questionable server installations
In theory, this sounds like a strong concept, considering that it costs quite a lot to heat your home these days. You might be tempted to let a company that claims to be obligated anyway fighting energy poverty (opens in a new tab)and able to save you”up to £200 a year (opens in a new tab)“, help.
Apart from the fact that the company was founded under and still has investment ties with British Gas, which is now hardly struggling to make ends meet.
As I write in February 2023, British Gas parent company Centrica took note record profits of £3 billion for 2022 (opens in a new tab) amid rising energy costs, so perhaps consider whether this is an entirely selfless act.
But aside from this trivial “critical thinking” business, the server needs to connect to your router. And while “most of the time” it will just be reporting monitoring information and running speed tests, you still take Heat’s word for it and leave an unknown device constantly connected to your network.
Heata says it will reimburse test participants for their electricity costs, but with broadband, they may be out of luck in the short term. His pamphlet (opens in a new tab) claims that eventually the server will be capable of its own connections via 4G, 5G or fiber optic line. But for now, you have to trust them when they say it will only use a “fraction” of bandwidth.
The company also gracefully assures potential trial users that they will not be able to access or connect to the device to, say, mine cryptocurrency on it. That’s all well and good, but as with any server, it’s theoretically not impossible for a persistent threat to gain access for itself.
Also, you don’t know what the companies that use Heat’s servers use them for, so it depends if you really can’t hear, see, say anything wrong.
When asked for comment on the matter, a Heat spokesperson said that while it sells customers space on a remote server, customer workloads are isolated within virtual machinesand they only have access to the VPN tunnel back to Heat’s own servers. It’s still a very strange idea, but it’s clear that the company has taken steps to secure home networks.
The company also said requests to Heat’s management service are made from outside the home Network Address Translation (NAT). Simply put – a public device IP addresses are not exposed.
He maintains that later versions of the Heata server unit will be separated from the home broadband connection by optical fiber, either physically or via the optical equivalent of a virtual local area network (VLAN), thereby reducing network congestion.
Heata also pointed out that the trial version is still in its infancy, starting at 80 units, and that it is careful with the workloads it allows it to run on its servers.
“The last thing we want is for our home network to be compromised or allowed to compromise customer data,” the statement reads. “For this purpose, we will not store any data on the machines other than what is required to perform the current task. The reset machine is almost completely empty. This, together with the VPN that the system runs on, allows these goals to be achieved.”
Going forward, he says he will try to allow customers “any workload that follows the pattern: Get chunk of data; high CPU load; return results; […] 3D rendering, computational fluid dynamics and finite element analysis are good examples.”
“[Function as a service (FaaS)] fits into this paradigm, albeit usually in less time; this has the added benefit of most security measures already well thought out.”
The deal is still not free of catches, but the social and environmental benefits of the idea are theoretically sound: businesses are discouraged from using electricity-guzzling data centers, and you reap the benefits for (not quite) nothing.
Also, times are hard and help is even harder to come by, so if you feel you don’t have the financial support to help with living expenses, this may be an option for you.
But while Heat’s process is supported by the UK government, it is only currently available (per Register (opens in a new tab)) to people in South East England with internet access, leaving most of the country without direct financial support to pay bills, in the midst of a crisis that the government seems to be cheering (opens in a new tab).
And that’s what it is: safe and well-meaning or not, companies left to test their (invariably) “cutting”, “innovative” and – Heata’s – “breakthrough” technology initiatives on the poorest in society, just like that may dare to live, it’s probably Ray Bradbury’s story, and objectively bleak.
Get land to the basket.