Those eager to sell their souls need waste no more: the ultimate Faustian trinket for our modern age has arrived, thanks to Britain's Heata 'green distributed computing network' (opens in a new tab).
The (opens in a new tab) (through Tom's Hardware (opens in a new tab)) offer is deceptively simple. Let Heata install a hot water heater server next to your existing hot water tank, and it will deliver up to four.XNUMX kWh of free hot water per day (eighty percent of a British household's daily usage, supposedly) over the course of the day. of a whole year.
This is done simply by letting companies use the server for cloud computing while the unit recovers waste heat.
Questionable server installations
In teoría, eso suena como un término fuerte, puesto que hoy en día cuesta un centavo calentar una casa. And so you might be tempted to let a company that claims to be committed to ending fuel poverty (opens in a new tab) and able to save you "up to doscientos € a year (opens in a new tab)", helpers.
Except the company started at British Gas and still has investment links with it, which is currently struggling to make ends meet.
As I write in February XNUMX, British Gas parent company Centrica reported record profits of €XNUMX billion for XNUMX (opens in new tab) amid rising energy costs, so maybe I'll reconsider if it's a totally selfless act.
But beyond this inconsequential “critical thinking”, the server must connect to your router. And while "most of the time" it's just reporting monitoring information and running speed tests, you're still taking Heata's word for it and leaving an unknown device continually connected to your network.
Heata claims it will reimburse trial participants for electricity, but for broadband they may be out of luck any time soon. His brochure (opens in a new tab) states that occasionally the server will be able to make its connections through 4G, 5G or a fiber line. But for now, you'll have to trust them when they claim it will only use a "fraction" of your bandwidth.
The company also politely assures potential test users that they will not be able to access or log into the device to, for example, mine cryptocurrency on . That's really nice, but like any server, it's not theoretically impossible for a persistent threat actor to access it on their own.
You also don't know what the companies using Heata's servers are for, so it depends if you're the one to hear/see/talk without harm, really.
However, we have reached out to Heata for clarification on these points and will update this article if we contact .
Nothing will change the fact that the offer comes with multiple caveats that you should be aware of and what you could do with the product, but the idea's social and environmental advantages are theoretically valid: companies are discouraged from using hungry data centers of energy and reap the benefits for (not entirely) nothing.
Also, times are tough enough and help is even harder to come by, so if you feel you don't have options for cost of living financial support, this could be an alternative for you.
And while the Heata trial is supported by the UK government, it is currently only free (according to The Register (opens in a new tab)) to those in the south-east of England with an internet connection, leaving the majority of the country without direct financial support to pay the bills, in the midst of a crisis, the government seems to be inciting (opens in a new tab).
And that's it: let companies test their (without variation) "new", "innovative" and - this last one is from Heata - "revolutionary" technological ideas on the poorest in society, just so they can dare to live, is surely a Ray Bradbury story. , and objectively obscure.
Get the lumped land mass.