This XKCD joke (you know which one it is without even opening it) only works when *one* corporation pushes a "universal" standard onto other corporations. This standard is specifically spearheaded by every major player in this arena: it's exactly XKCD comic could only dream of happening with other protocols.
Unreated: the comic "A/C charger standards", which thankfully are becoming outdated: more & more devices have adopted USB PD. Obviously, there's a long tail of holdouts, but we're closer today to universal A/C charging than this industry ever come close to in the past 30 years.
Someone's salty they didnt get the XKCD post first. If you honestly think this new standard will become the defacto and not just yet another option, I've got a bridge you'd be interested in. We have great credit deals right now!
Not to mention that Type C, despite making power input universal, has made a right mess of data connections. Whether a device supports video out, thunderbolt, or the right voltages for the charger you are using are entirely left up to random chance. At least in the days of MHL, it was easy to tell if a device supported external connections. Now some do, some dont, some use their own that isnt quite compatible (hello samsung dex).
After working for the last decade in IT security, I would NEVER put any of these things in my home for any reason. You're inviting data mining and very invasive levels of getting to know everything about you which you can never be sure is actually deleted forever at your request (assuming such a system exists to make that sort of request). Do you really think that this information will be securely stored and there will never be an insider at Google that exfiltrates it or that there won't be a successful intrusion? Even if Google or Amazon doesn't massively abuse that degree of access into your daily life, you're putting a lot of trust into the security barriers placed around that collected data all so you don't have to get off your ass to adjust the thermostat or flip a light switch. It seems like a lot of cost for very little benefit.
Which flip phone do you use day-to-day then? I've got one of those invasive data-mining "smartphones" in my pocket all the time, and that thing isn't even plugged in or hooked up to wifi. Thing is probably pushing data over the cellular network while i'm out and about! /s
I get your point, but smartphones all have voice assistants, microphones, and can transmit data out at any time too. The data from the smart speaker isn't nearly as useful to 3rd parties (malicious or not) without that smartphone on your hip.
That's a fallacy. Just because you have a smartphone means you give up on every other aspect of protecting yourself? Seems a bit defeatist. You CAN kill most of the vendor crapware and Google garbage including voice assistant stuff by dumping apps kicking on developer mode and firing up adb. It's a PIA and requires a little research, but it is possible. Also there is AOSP and various 3rd party ROMs that don't contain gapps if you're willing to go that route too (assuming the bootloader on your phone is unlocked AND you're willing to trust the person or group that baked the custom ROM in the first place). Not that I would go that route because, like you suggested, grabbing a cheap burner flip phone is still possible and the prepaid carriers out there are a lot cheaper on a per month basis than picking up the latest overpriced Google spy platform from a major cellular provider like Verizon.
Your smartphone is infinitely easier to hack, much more powerful, and is built by default to enable all the data mining suggested. While yes, IoT devices can be problematic and there are certain categories I would avoid, I can't take anyone seriously who discusses this topic without addressing smartphones first and foremost.
And yes you can reduce the concerns in that space, but even in the best case scenario you are still worse off than the major brand IoT devices, especially on Android, and a typical user simply isn't skilled enough to do the things you suggest, and it would degrade the experience to a point where its not worth it to them.
Then there is the fact that smarthomes themselves are a major advance for significant portions of the population, especially seniors and the disabled. Plus people weigh risk factors differently, a Ring camera could be a privacy violation, but it could also be a way of identifying the person who broke into your home. Depending on your priorities, people are capable of making such decisions in the best way that works for them.
While I agree with your concerns, I think a smartphone is basically an essential part of living modern life. The expectation (in the US at least) is that "everyone" has one. So it is a necessary evil. For IoT devices, they can make some aspects of life easier but to me they feel unnecessary and so it feels like little is gained for the security risks they come with.
A way it could perhaps be said is that smartphones are high risk but high reward whereas IoT might be medium risk with low reward.
And you can lock down your home network to prevent info from leaking like a sieve, and take advantage of home-brewed 3rd party options for connectivity.
Why are you running invasive, data-mining apps on your smartphone?
Literally every feature you listed is optional, and spying on users without permission via, for instance, the microphone (as you strongly imply is a real concern) is *very* illegal in most places. It's disingenuous to draw an equivalency between smartphone use in general, where the OSs themselves are actually pretty well secured and offer a variety of privacy controls, and the vast majority of IoT devices, where security is, for the most part, an afterthought at best (and intentionally compromised at worst).
There are obviously exceptions, but it's exceptionally hard right now for a non-technical consumer to judge which devices are actually well secured or to take measures to protect themselves from devices which may not be well secured, but on their own don't offer a concerning opportunity for data collection. (For instance, I have a special IoT network in which devices are explicitly blocked from communicating with anything other than the internet — even other devices on the same network. Security cameras go on another network in which they can only communicate with the *local* NVR.)
"Why are you running invasive, data-mining apps on your smartphone?"
If you have an Android phone, you get all that for free and consent to it (knowingly or not) during the initial setup is it is not illegal at all in most places because Google/Alphabet has you by the short hairs from the start.
No internet / cloud connection required to and it works with a ton of existing smarthome protocols and platofrms like zigbee, z-wave, insteon, hue, homekit, nest.... goes on and on https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#hub
You can run on your own commodity hardware on linux, in a docker container, or in their own managed OS image that runs on rasbery pi.
HA is great - but many of the hooks that allow it to work "with everything" is opt-in from big players. Recently Google took away API support for their Nest devices in HA, for example.
It's a common game and it goes like this: "Hey buy our new thing! Look how open it is! Oh cool, look at how the community really cares and has developed all these neat custom ways of using our device.. yeah, cool... Oh by the way, now that we're really popular we're going to cut off any sort of support. Thanks for the memories, suckers!"
Maybe you get a smart thermostat. There are utilities that may give you one for free or lower your bill.
The other stuff is a meh. OMG, an IoT light bulb + speaker. Voice assistants are also surprisingly useless. I'll be ready to deal with the privacy/security implications when I can have a brain-in-a-box strong AI and robots that can cook and clean (everything). And f *** of course. Without any requirement to connect to Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
Nothing beats trying to bang your Roomba only to be discouraged by it giving you the cold shoulder as it returns to its charging dock. That would take rejection to a whole new level.
Song selection, alarms, setting reminders etc. Is all useful to me. I'd probably not want to move back not to having a couple of home's scattered around the house.
"Internet of things" can go get in the sea. "Intranet of Things" has a lot of value, but has the barrier of at the very least requiring a consumer-friendly method of both implementing VLANs on home networking hardware, and of a reliable consumer-friendly method of key sharing between devices that may have no external inputs (e.g. lightbulbs).
You know that all systems require some bullshit connection to cloud, right? I'd advise everyone never to buy a system that is reliant on a server somewhere else to actually function locally. However, systems like Philips Hue don't actually require a connection to anything to function. Some devices are well designed. Some are not. Maybe most are not, in which case they shouldn't be touched.
Without an open standard, supported at least by Amazon, Google, Apple (and also maybe Microsoft) for compatibility with the 3 main voice assistants (Alazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri), I always thought that home automation would not fully take off.
I think it could take at least 5 to 10 years before open standard for home automation to mature that it is fully interoperable and open new opportunities
Smarthome adoption has been steadily rising. Now finally to a whopping 5-6%! Still...After 30 years. X-10 should be proud. Designing a ubiquitous protocol is a challenge because the application diversity is huge and the devices are tiny. Point of diminishing returns approaches quickly. But there are very definite gains to be achieved in the areas of convenience, energy savings, and security. Maybe not from a behemoth protocol like this but it could be implemented in unified gateways to achieve the goals they seek.
Please, PLEASE, whatever you do, make this standard so there is only a single internet gateway. One point of ingress/egress to defend. There is ZERO (hell negative) reason why every freakin' light bulb needs a direct internet connection. There is zero reason every thermostat needs a direct internet connection. Have them all talk locally to a gateway device if there is a need for control via internet, or sending status information. Every 'thing' does not need direct internet.
Sadly, this sounds like the exact *opposite* of what they're trying to do with an IP-based standard (which, if you read their website, seems to be primarily targeting WiFi as the physical link).
Whatever happened to standardized, open, interoperable ZigBee devices? (I mean, Z-Wave is decent if you want a mesh protocol with no possibility of a direct internet connection, but there's a lot that ZigBee does better, at least in theory.)
All these home automation things are an answer in search of a question to me. Until it automatically folds my laundry or puts dishes away, what time am I really saving?
do I really need to be able to adjust my thermostat remotely? what am I gaining with that? With a programmed schedule it already pre-heats my house before I get home from work.
remote light switches? is getting up and walking 10 feet to the switch really that hard?
I mean, I like cool new hobbyist tech (this is Anandtech, after all) but I just don't see the "there" there yet on smart homes.
in the home, i don't think there has been a real time saving device invented since the microwave. (maybe some would say the DVR was a good breakthrough, as it lets you watch programming on your own schedule)
just don't think anything has had the impact of the water pump, gas range, washer, dryer, dishwasher, plug in iron, vacuum cleaner, microwave, and sewing machine... we've developed sufficient tools to help us with the truly labor intensive stuff (starting a fire in a woodstove to heat up your clothe iron for example).
so much of IoT/home automation are solutions looking for problems.
with everything else, the configuration, the maintenance, the security implications... all for little gain.
"in the home, i don't think there has been a real time saving device invented since the microwave."
There is at least one in the kitchen: the electric/programmable pressure cooker ("Instant Pot" and many other brands). That thing can turn dry beans into a meal quickly without hours of presoaking, cook a lot of dishes in half the time, turn some dishes into "set it and forget it" even if they take a little longer (e.g. pasta), make a gallon of yogurt, etc.
But your point stands. I think Amazon has managed to put the largely useless Alexa into more devices (tablets, Echo, Echo Show, Echo Loop, Fire TV remote, the AmazonBasics microwave) than there are types of "useful" home automation IoT devices (smart thermostats, light bulbs w/ color changing or Bluetooth speakers, security cameras...???).
Bipedal home robots that can interact with a human designed environment (e.g. walking instead of Roomba-ing) and cook, clean, etc. would be a real advance. It would be like having a live-in maid, except accessible to the middle class and eventually poor people. The trick is making sure it doesn't crush pets and babies or systematically ruin your stuff.
Cooking for ourselves and cleaning our homes should be something we want to do for ourselves. Why do we think so many other activities are so important that we can manage these tasks (I say simple pleasures) for ourselves. Why are we wanting to out source this to tech?
I don't want to live in a world where no one is cooking and cleaning for themselves. The simple pride of putting things in order and making my surroundings sanitary... why would I want to deny myself that? Cooking... choosing the best fruits, vegetables, and meats.... carefully cleaning them, slicing them, pealing them, seasoning them to taste, etc.... It's so fundamental to being human, why turn that over to a robot. Aren't prepared foods and microwaves enough abdication for us?
I like cooking, but there are people who are decades older than me who are not so great at it. They voted with their time and simply do not care about that "simple pleasure" in the same way we do. So there is likely to be a market for such robots.
It can also be a huge time sink. It could require upwards of 2 hours of my time to cook certain meals. Maybe I don't care to do so some days. I don't see the abdication in receiving restaurant quality meals with no effort spent. In fact, this could be a good way to remove relatively unhealthy processed + fast foods from your diet. You can get great quality meals 5-6 days a week, and cook for yourself 1-2 days a week. Or 1 meal a day, etc. You can program your robot to use less salt, gluten, etc. than restaurants would use, while saving money.
Maybe you can even use this in the post-apocalypse! Solar power for your energy needs, robots free up time for you to go hunt some deer or something. And they can butcher them for you and check for parasites. Or you can spend most of your time growing vegetables, mushrooms, etc. and have a robot process/can or cook them for you. The usefulness of robots has no bounds.
Cleaning? That's an even more dubious pleasure. I'm certainly not cleaning the house every day, which is something a robot would "happily" do. Yes, there are some truly disgusting layers of dust in some parts of my home.
I am ready to see some abdication. Robots in the household will save me time and money.
Your argument can be used for essentially everything and which point, you yourself couldn't follow along with it. Do you do your own car maintenance/repair work? Build your own computers? Fix the electrical wiring? Fix your plumbing? Of course you don't, at some point, you are going to pay someone to do it. You're going to do it cause you don't have the time, don't have the knowledge, don't have the skills, etc. Why there are available options out there for people to choose.
A robot would be just another option. It existing, doesn't stop you from doing whatever it is you want to do. Really, the only downside I'd see to all of it, it'd probably start killing the restaurant/fast food market, if a robot could go do your grocery shopping and then prepare your meals. Hell, have it deliver your meal to you at work.
Very true, so much of this is of absolutely no use. Oh great, I can install a smart thermostat that will kill the AC in the summer and start it up just before I get home so I save energy yet still come home to a cool house? Oh, and dead dogs, my dogs are not very heat tolerant so I can;t just let the house get to 100 degrees on a hot sunny day because I'm not home. Plus the really basic programmable ones I already have could do that if I wanted. One thing I did do with some of the HA gear I already have (I was using this stuff back when X10 was the big thing - where it made sense) was to set up a too hot and too cold alert so I get an alert on my phone if the indoor temperature gets too hot or too cold, so I will know about a heating or AC issue before it becomes an issue. Given that if I am working in the office I am only about 5 minutes from home, I can quickly run home to check. So far it hasn't been necessary, the only alerts I get are when the batteries run down on the sensors.
I got a light bulb from xiaomi. yes this is connected with the xiaomi us server... its really lags to work. but in my case i have broken the leg... can't move to press the switch... its really helpfull. from tv or smartphone can have light... i dont care a sh... about data collection. here in brazil the people sold your data... maybe google/xiaomi have acess to my porn collection...
You can soon income benefit of new ways to attach your plans to Alexa, counting using Bluetooth Mesh normal and Amazon Pavement. You can use native smart home skills to attach your plans nearby to Echo plans and enable clienteles to regulator them at low dormancy and when plans are off. Website: https://www.amzsharks.com/services/product-photogr...
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torndar - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
https://xkcd.com/927/ikjadoon - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
This XKCD joke (you know which one it is without even opening it) only works when *one* corporation pushes a "universal" standard onto other corporations. This standard is specifically spearheaded by every major player in this arena: it's exactly XKCD comic could only dream of happening with other protocols.Unreated: the comic "A/C charger standards", which thankfully are becoming outdated: more & more devices have adopted USB PD. Obviously, there's a long tail of holdouts, but we're closer today to universal A/C charging than this industry ever come close to in the past 30 years.
ikjadoon - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
*Unrelated.Sigh...
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Someone's salty they didnt get the XKCD post first. If you honestly think this new standard will become the defacto and not just yet another option, I've got a bridge you'd be interested in. We have great credit deals right now!Not to mention that Type C, despite making power input universal, has made a right mess of data connections. Whether a device supports video out, thunderbolt, or the right voltages for the charger you are using are entirely left up to random chance. At least in the days of MHL, it was easy to tell if a device supported external connections. Now some do, some dont, some use their own that isnt quite compatible (hello samsung dex).
The XKCD is quite relevant today.
mooninite - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Oh... you mean Z-Wave?Ugh.
webdoctors - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
As long as they don't mess with z-wave I'm a happy camper. I'm invested too far into z-wave devices to change now.PeachNCream - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
After working for the last decade in IT security, I would NEVER put any of these things in my home for any reason. You're inviting data mining and very invasive levels of getting to know everything about you which you can never be sure is actually deleted forever at your request (assuming such a system exists to make that sort of request). Do you really think that this information will be securely stored and there will never be an insider at Google that exfiltrates it or that there won't be a successful intrusion? Even if Google or Amazon doesn't massively abuse that degree of access into your daily life, you're putting a lot of trust into the security barriers placed around that collected data all so you don't have to get off your ass to adjust the thermostat or flip a light switch. It seems like a lot of cost for very little benefit.DanNeely - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
As always remember the 'S' in IoT stands for security.Hul8 - Friday, December 20, 2019 - link
Also, in "Internet of Things", the "s" for security comes last.reuthermonkey1 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
So.Which flip phone do you use day-to-day then? I've got one of those invasive data-mining "smartphones" in my pocket all the time, and that thing isn't even plugged in or hooked up to wifi. Thing is probably pushing data over the cellular network while i'm out and about!
/s
I get your point, but smartphones all have voice assistants, microphones, and can transmit data out at any time too. The data from the smart speaker isn't nearly as useful to 3rd parties (malicious or not) without that smartphone on your hip.
PeachNCream - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
That's a fallacy. Just because you have a smartphone means you give up on every other aspect of protecting yourself? Seems a bit defeatist. You CAN kill most of the vendor crapware and Google garbage including voice assistant stuff by dumping apps kicking on developer mode and firing up adb. It's a PIA and requires a little research, but it is possible. Also there is AOSP and various 3rd party ROMs that don't contain gapps if you're willing to go that route too (assuming the bootloader on your phone is unlocked AND you're willing to trust the person or group that baked the custom ROM in the first place). Not that I would go that route because, like you suggested, grabbing a cheap burner flip phone is still possible and the prepaid carriers out there are a lot cheaper on a per month basis than picking up the latest overpriced Google spy platform from a major cellular provider like Verizon.Reflex - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Your smartphone is infinitely easier to hack, much more powerful, and is built by default to enable all the data mining suggested. While yes, IoT devices can be problematic and there are certain categories I would avoid, I can't take anyone seriously who discusses this topic without addressing smartphones first and foremost.And yes you can reduce the concerns in that space, but even in the best case scenario you are still worse off than the major brand IoT devices, especially on Android, and a typical user simply isn't skilled enough to do the things you suggest, and it would degrade the experience to a point where its not worth it to them.
Then there is the fact that smarthomes themselves are a major advance for significant portions of the population, especially seniors and the disabled. Plus people weigh risk factors differently, a Ring camera could be a privacy violation, but it could also be a way of identifying the person who broke into your home. Depending on your priorities, people are capable of making such decisions in the best way that works for them.
ingwe - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
While I agree with your concerns, I think a smartphone is basically an essential part of living modern life. The expectation (in the US at least) is that "everyone" has one. So it is a necessary evil. For IoT devices, they can make some aspects of life easier but to me they feel unnecessary and so it feels like little is gained for the security risks they come with.A way it could perhaps be said is that smartphones are high risk but high reward whereas IoT might be medium risk with low reward.
TheinsanegamerN - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
And you can lock down your home network to prevent info from leaking like a sieve, and take advantage of home-brewed 3rd party options for connectivity.What's your point?
chaos215bar2 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Why are you running invasive, data-mining apps on your smartphone?Literally every feature you listed is optional, and spying on users without permission via, for instance, the microphone (as you strongly imply is a real concern) is *very* illegal in most places. It's disingenuous to draw an equivalency between smartphone use in general, where the OSs themselves are actually pretty well secured and offer a variety of privacy controls, and the vast majority of IoT devices, where security is, for the most part, an afterthought at best (and intentionally compromised at worst).
There are obviously exceptions, but it's exceptionally hard right now for a non-technical consumer to judge which devices are actually well secured or to take measures to protect themselves from devices which may not be well secured, but on their own don't offer a concerning opportunity for data collection. (For instance, I have a special IoT network in which devices are explicitly blocked from communicating with anything other than the internet — even other devices on the same network. Security cameras go on another network in which they can only communicate with the *local* NVR.)
Reflex - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Android does all those things by default.PeachNCream - Saturday, December 21, 2019 - link
"Why are you running invasive, data-mining apps on your smartphone?"If you have an Android phone, you get all that for free and consent to it (knowingly or not) during the initial setup is it is not illegal at all in most places because Google/Alphabet has you by the short hairs from the start.
yetanotherhuman - Monday, December 23, 2019 - link
Funny thing is, I have friends that still use old flip phones, and not ironically or as a joke.pattymcfly - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Check out https://www.home-assistant.io/No internet / cloud connection required to and it works with a ton of existing smarthome protocols and platofrms like zigbee, z-wave, insteon, hue, homekit, nest.... goes on and on https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/#hub
You can run on your own commodity hardware on linux, in a docker container, or in their own managed OS image that runs on rasbery pi.
nathanddrews - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
HA is great - but many of the hooks that allow it to work "with everything" is opt-in from big players. Recently Google took away API support for their Nest devices in HA, for example.It's a common game and it goes like this: "Hey buy our new thing! Look how open it is! Oh cool, look at how the community really cares and has developed all these neat custom ways of using our device.. yeah, cool... Oh by the way, now that we're really popular we're going to cut off any sort of support. Thanks for the memories, suckers!"
HardwareDufus - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
i could not have stated it any better. truer words have not been spoken.*steps down from virtual soapbox, gets up from comfy chair and turns on the light switch himself
nandnandnand - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
"Little benefit" is so true.Maybe you get a smart thermostat. There are utilities that may give you one for free or lower your bill.
The other stuff is a meh. OMG, an IoT light bulb + speaker. Voice assistants are also surprisingly useless. I'll be ready to deal with the privacy/security implications when I can have a brain-in-a-box strong AI and robots that can cook and clean (everything). And f *** of course. Without any requirement to connect to Google, Amazon, Facebook, etc.
drexnx - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
100% same sentiment.PeachNCream - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Nothing beats trying to bang your Roomba only to be discouraged by it giving you the cold shoulder as it returns to its charging dock. That would take rejection to a whole new level.nandnandnand - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
That's my fetish.™RSAUser - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Song selection, alarms, setting reminders etc. Is all useful to me. I'd probably not want to move back not to having a couple of home's scattered around the house.edzieba - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
"Internet of things" can go get in the sea."Intranet of Things" has a lot of value, but has the barrier of at the very least requiring a consumer-friendly method of both implementing VLANs on home networking hardware, and of a reliable consumer-friendly method of key sharing between devices that may have no external inputs (e.g. lightbulbs).
yetanotherhuman - Friday, December 20, 2019 - link
You know that all systems require some bullshit connection to cloud, right? I'd advise everyone never to buy a system that is reliant on a server somewhere else to actually function locally. However, systems like Philips Hue don't actually require a connection to anything to function. Some devices are well designed. Some are not. Maybe most are not, in which case they shouldn't be touched.Diogene7 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Without an open standard, supported at least by Amazon, Google, Apple (and also maybe Microsoft) for compatibility with the 3 main voice assistants (Alazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Apple Siri), I always thought that home automation would not fully take off.I think it could take at least 5 to 10 years before open standard for home automation to mature that it is fully interoperable and open new opportunities
LumenCache - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Smarthome adoption has been steadily rising. Now finally to a whopping 5-6%! Still...After 30 years. X-10 should be proud. Designing a ubiquitous protocol is a challenge because the application diversity is huge and the devices are tiny. Point of diminishing returns approaches quickly. But there are very definite gains to be achieved in the areas of convenience, energy savings, and security. Maybe not from a behemoth protocol like this but it could be implemented in unified gateways to achieve the goals they seek.rrinker - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Please, PLEASE, whatever you do, make this standard so there is only a single internet gateway. One point of ingress/egress to defend. There is ZERO (hell negative) reason why every freakin' light bulb needs a direct internet connection. There is zero reason every thermostat needs a direct internet connection. Have them all talk locally to a gateway device if there is a need for control via internet, or sending status information. Every 'thing' does not need direct internet.chaos215bar2 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
Sadly, this sounds like the exact *opposite* of what they're trying to do with an IP-based standard (which, if you read their website, seems to be primarily targeting WiFi as the physical link).Whatever happened to standardized, open, interoperable ZigBee devices? (I mean, Z-Wave is decent if you want a mesh protocol with no possibility of a direct internet connection, but there's a lot that ZigBee does better, at least in theory.)
LumenCache - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Totally agree. That's our goal. Limit the attack points to a device that can contain solid threat protection both from external and internal sources.drexnx - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
All these home automation things are an answer in search of a question to me. Until it automatically folds my laundry or puts dishes away, what time am I really saving?do I really need to be able to adjust my thermostat remotely? what am I gaining with that? With a programmed schedule it already pre-heats my house before I get home from work.
remote light switches? is getting up and walking 10 feet to the switch really that hard?
I mean, I like cool new hobbyist tech (this is Anandtech, after all) but I just don't see the "there" there yet on smart homes.
HardwareDufus - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
in the home, i don't think there has been a real time saving device invented since the microwave. (maybe some would say the DVR was a good breakthrough, as it lets you watch programming on your own schedule)just don't think anything has had the impact of the water pump, gas range, washer, dryer, dishwasher, plug in iron, vacuum cleaner, microwave, and sewing machine... we've developed sufficient tools to help us with the truly labor intensive stuff (starting a fire in a woodstove to heat up your clothe iron for example).
so much of IoT/home automation are solutions looking for problems.
with everything else, the configuration, the maintenance, the security implications... all for little gain.
nandnandnand - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
"in the home, i don't think there has been a real time saving device invented since the microwave."There is at least one in the kitchen: the electric/programmable pressure cooker ("Instant Pot" and many other brands). That thing can turn dry beans into a meal quickly without hours of presoaking, cook a lot of dishes in half the time, turn some dishes into "set it and forget it" even if they take a little longer (e.g. pasta), make a gallon of yogurt, etc.
But your point stands. I think Amazon has managed to put the largely useless Alexa into more devices (tablets, Echo, Echo Show, Echo Loop, Fire TV remote, the AmazonBasics microwave) than there are types of "useful" home automation IoT devices (smart thermostats, light bulbs w/ color changing or Bluetooth speakers, security cameras...???).
Bipedal home robots that can interact with a human designed environment (e.g. walking instead of Roomba-ing) and cook, clean, etc. would be a real advance. It would be like having a live-in maid, except accessible to the middle class and eventually poor people. The trick is making sure it doesn't crush pets and babies or systematically ruin your stuff.
HardwareDufus - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Cooking for ourselves and cleaning our homes should be something we want to do for ourselves. Why do we think so many other activities are so important that we can manage these tasks (I say simple pleasures) for ourselves. Why are we wanting to out source this to tech?I don't want to live in a world where no one is cooking and cleaning for themselves. The simple pride of putting things in order and making my surroundings sanitary... why would I want to deny myself that? Cooking... choosing the best fruits, vegetables, and meats.... carefully cleaning them, slicing them, pealing them, seasoning them to taste, etc.... It's so fundamental to being human, why turn that over to a robot. Aren't prepared foods and microwaves enough abdication for us?
nandnandnand - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
I like cooking, but there are people who are decades older than me who are not so great at it. They voted with their time and simply do not care about that "simple pleasure" in the same way we do. So there is likely to be a market for such robots.It can also be a huge time sink. It could require upwards of 2 hours of my time to cook certain meals. Maybe I don't care to do so some days. I don't see the abdication in receiving restaurant quality meals with no effort spent. In fact, this could be a good way to remove relatively unhealthy processed + fast foods from your diet. You can get great quality meals 5-6 days a week, and cook for yourself 1-2 days a week. Or 1 meal a day, etc. You can program your robot to use less salt, gluten, etc. than restaurants would use, while saving money.
Maybe you can even use this in the post-apocalypse! Solar power for your energy needs, robots free up time for you to go hunt some deer or something. And they can butcher them for you and check for parasites. Or you can spend most of your time growing vegetables, mushrooms, etc. and have a robot process/can or cook them for you. The usefulness of robots has no bounds.
Cleaning? That's an even more dubious pleasure. I'm certainly not cleaning the house every day, which is something a robot would "happily" do. Yes, there are some truly disgusting layers of dust in some parts of my home.
I am ready to see some abdication. Robots in the household will save me time and money.
khanikun - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
Your argument can be used for essentially everything and which point, you yourself couldn't follow along with it. Do you do your own car maintenance/repair work? Build your own computers? Fix the electrical wiring? Fix your plumbing? Of course you don't, at some point, you are going to pay someone to do it. You're going to do it cause you don't have the time, don't have the knowledge, don't have the skills, etc. Why there are available options out there for people to choose.A robot would be just another option. It existing, doesn't stop you from doing whatever it is you want to do. Really, the only downside I'd see to all of it, it'd probably start killing the restaurant/fast food market, if a robot could go do your grocery shopping and then prepare your meals. Hell, have it deliver your meal to you at work.
rrinker - Saturday, December 21, 2019 - link
Very true, so much of this is of absolutely no use. Oh great, I can install a smart thermostat that will kill the AC in the summer and start it up just before I get home so I save energy yet still come home to a cool house? Oh, and dead dogs, my dogs are not very heat tolerant so I can;t just let the house get to 100 degrees on a hot sunny day because I'm not home. Plus the really basic programmable ones I already have could do that if I wanted.One thing I did do with some of the HA gear I already have (I was using this stuff back when X10 was the big thing - where it made sense) was to set up a too hot and too cold alert so I get an alert on my phone if the indoor temperature gets too hot or too cold, so I will know about a heating or AC issue before it becomes an issue. Given that if I am working in the office I am only about 5 minutes from home, I can quickly run home to check. So far it hasn't been necessary, the only alerts I get are when the batteries run down on the sensors.
vidal6x6 - Wednesday, December 18, 2019 - link
I got a light bulb from xiaomi. yes this is connected with the xiaomi us server... its really lags to work. but in my case i have broken the leg... can't move to press the switch... its really helpfull. from tv or smartphone can have light... i dont care a sh... about data collection. here in brazil the people sold your data... maybe google/xiaomi have acess to my porn collection...imaheadcase - Thursday, December 19, 2019 - link
It doesn't matter if they agree on a standard, the problem is the software not the standards.harryjordan - Saturday, November 13, 2021 - link
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