[HN Gopher] Internet of Shit
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Internet of Shit
Author : dTal
Score : 104 points
Date : 2021-06-13 20:15 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (twitter.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (twitter.com)
| orf wrote:
| Firmware updates for your shoes. Mother of god.
| throwawaaarrgh wrote:
| IoT is the 21st century version of bloodletting
| voqv wrote:
| That account always brings me to chuckle. But the biggest joke
| actually comes from myself, being a person who owns 10 smart
| bulbs at home. This smart home thing has just stalled: * At least
| several times a week my hue bridge is not found and I lie for 10
| seconds in bed repeatedly tapping the "off button" like a dummy.
| * Sync to music is still increadibly limited and just doesn't
| work well. Arguably it was better 7 years ago when streaming was
| less popular and apps could analyse the track waveform, instead
| of relying on microphones. * Sync to games and movies is also
| still fairly poor. If you're viewing a scene during broad
| daylight and in front of you a red van appears, the whole room
| goes red instead of maintaining the white daylight. * Dynamic
| light scenes are very cool but are also just a pain to use. It
| shouldn't take me 30 seconds to set the room to a certain mood. I
| sometimes feel like the developers of the dynamic scenes apps
| don't use their own products.
|
| All just my experience.
| 3princip wrote:
| These stories used to be funny when it was about crap that just
| didn't work. They are becoming terrifying to be frank. Counting
| people in rooms for on-demand tickets, in-car purchasing of
| additional features, mandatory bio-metric monitoring of delivery
| driver behavior...
| [deleted]
| midasuni wrote:
| See, there is an S in IoT. Still doesn't stand for security
| though.
| rektide wrote:
| Such a great great account. IoT devices feel completely out of
| control. They've long been a stealthied tip of the spear in the
| War Against General General Purpose Computing: complex
| computerized systems & devices, spread out all over our
| environment, but possessing secret programming, sending all their
| gathered data to big data centers. All of it done invisibly,
| unobservably. Consumers see & hear nothing except a highly
| synthetic output, mediated through a narrow window of the
| provided application. I continue to think push back should start,
| that it's in everyone's interest- consumers, & a market which is
| seeing adoption but also struggling to maintain the image of
| legitemacy while suffering endless hits- to change things around,
| & try to do better, try to be more open & up front & honest.
|
| I mentioned Webinos[1] the other day, which was a really good
| attempt to create personal data systems for their network of
| devices. This particular mention was in the context of the car,
| but Webinos was a pro-user general IoT system for all manners of
| devices. I think it had a long way to go to be viable, but it's
| still the most interesting data-point I have seen, and one that I
| should probably try to write up better in long-form sometime.
|
| Right now, the Connectivity Standards Alliance & their new Matter
| standard, built around the Threads standards, atop IPv6 and
| 802.15.4 low power wireless, seems very promising. It seems like
| there is finally some well known industrial knowledge we are able
| to deploy to make reasonably good devices, although like, Matter
| is only a month old. Not a lot of activity on HN around this
| work, but I really enjoyed the Gigastacey write up on this[2].
|
| There are two core failures though. First, neither Thread nor the
| CSA's Matter are open standards. There are open source
| implementations, and supposedly Thread isn't that hard to get the
| standards to, but these are not open, advertised pieces of
| knowledge. These are still anti-general-purpose-computing
| devices, still not radiant, visible systems to users. Not
| everyone needs to engage at that level, but right now these
| systems all being opaque, industrial machinations that we have no
| window into: that's extremely hostile. Computing ought espouse
| better principles of foundational knowledge, ought try to be a
| clear, knowable thing. The other problem, and I'm less sure about
| this (because in part the specs aren't readily available/it's not
| publicly knowable!), but I'm not sure if Thread devices are
| actually inherently end-user interactable. There might well be a
| bunch of good IoT standards, but all interaction might still be
| channeled through overlay networks back to big data centers.
| There might be good standards for hardware, but no actual pro-
| user power derivable from that: this might be another example of
| the "internet" being used as a way to expand the control of
| closed, isolated, corporate servers into the home, with no real
| capability for those within the home to use their own systems &
| devices directly.
|
| I'd like to see IoT become something other than this vanguard
| force in The War Against General Purpose Computing. It's
| disspiriting that there seems to be so little basis, so few
| positive signs out there. But I also think sea change could
| happen quickly. Pieces seem to be in place, or close, but we're
| still, right now, inviting alien data-centers into our home, and
| they frankly have a lot of f-ups & problems beyond that that make
| this a sad sad tale. Here's to hoping we can all eventually find
| a more equitable relationship to work with our devices from.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27463898
|
| [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27121525
| https://9to5mac.com/2021/05/11/smart-home-alliance-from-appl...
| throwawayay02 wrote:
| I avoid smart crap as much as possible, but now my parents were
| hit: they've had the same TV and cable box thing for many years,
| and this month it started showing ads on everything: the menus,
| paused movies, past recordings. Unskippable ads as well.
|
| It's just so tiring, I dread the day I will need to buy a new car
| and they will all have touchscreen internet connected gimmicks
| and ads.
| pmoriarty wrote:
| I wish we'd just ban all unsolicited ads already.
|
| The world would be so much better.
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