We've been hearing a lot lately about the aptly-named "Internet of Shit", so I figured it would be fun to have a thread on this stuff so that we can all get together and point and laugh at what a steaming pile the Internet of Things is turning out to be.
Mods - I'm posting under the assumption that since most stuff posted here will be newly-released or newly-found, the category should be Tech Policy & News, but if it needs to be changed to Off Topic or something else, that's totally fine.
I'll go first:
Pebble's acquisition by Fitbit has been announced. It means that two product lines have been canceled, and that the cloud-dependent watches already in the market will partially lose functionality. They're just going to turn the servers off. Hardware and software development will cease, and the warranties associated with existing watches are now null and void. Link: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/597507018/pebble-2-time-2-and-core-an-entirely-new-3g-ultra/posts/1752929
The issue I have with most "internet of things" devices is that they HAVE to connect to the cloud and if the cloud goes offline they instantly change from "smart" devices to dumb devices. If I ever get IoT devices they will be non-internet of properly firewalled off devices of things.
That is why I stay away from stuff that needs to connect to a vendor provided server as much as possible. I mean, even if google would disappear I could use my phone still, even if Lenovo would go bancrupt the Laptop would still run, .... and so on and so on. As long as I can not run the backend myself even if I want, its not for me.
It strikes me as odd that the person into he Google screen shot of that tweet is telling people to tell an all ready informed company (Epson) about a problem that canndo nothing about over a problem that is nothing to do with them.
They should be hurling wheelbarrows of shit at google support over this not Epson.
Vinci Headphone kickstarter, a smart "AI" headphone. You can talk to it and it does not even need to be connected to your phone because it is clouds powered... Yeah nope don't want my headphones not working after they go bust.
“A lot of people in the past have said it’s not really a serious issue,” he added, “but if you come back to the fact that we’re talking about people, unwanted activation of a vibrator is potentially sexual assault.”
Potentially worse still, the pair discovered that the app itself was phoning home, letting the manufacturer discover some very intimate information about users.
The app sends the temperature of the device back to Standard Innovation every minute, and every time the intensity of the vibration changes, that gets sent back too.
Can we for once have a smart device that doesn't send sensitive data back to their servers. This device doesn't even need internet access at all to work, could just use Bluetooth for the data transfer from the phone to the device.
With only bluetooth it still doesn't make it much safer from hacking but at least the company doesn't have your data.
Seems to be the "in thing" at the moment, we are the product. At least people like us with technical know how can take steps to make our own shit more secure with firewalling/blocking server IPs, etc but it still doesn't make it right for 99% of consumers.
Well where would be the fun (data mining) for the manufacturer?
The only smart devices - if they ever exist - that likely won't betray you will be FOS(S) ones. Where you yourself will have to run the server - which than again will have a market of virtually none - and thus will not be successful. tl;dr - as long as our official representatives do not force companies world wide to abide to the rule of as little data as possible - only as much as realy realy realy needed for business - this will go a bad way down the rabbit hole
Not necessarily, a fully open source IoT project for both the hardware/software components could be a thing. Just make the blueprints open source and people can make/3D print their own IoT devices based on the blueprints.
