Like many people may have, my first though was why would you buy a smart oven. He explains in a follow up that it was the only one offered by his home builder. And this is an important and overlooked point.
A lot of garbage that no reasonable person would ever buy ends up being weaseled in to new home sales because of deals the companies cut with the builders, knowing nobody buys a house based on whether they could have a user-scamming smart appliance as the default. This kind of thing is insidious- I have no idea what the solution is.
Though as a afterthought, it reminds me a bit of the microsoft antitrust stuff from 20+ years ago where they bundled IE as part of destroying Netscape (im sure there is more subtlety than that, that's the gist of what I remember)
I think this is a case where legislation is a clear win. It should be illegal for manufacturers to gate core functionality of stationary appliances behind an internet connection. Appliances already have a legal definition in the U.S. so it's not a far fetched idea.
The first comment in this thread is proposing that there is a corrupting force working with builders to install smart ovens. Centralising power in a regulator isn't targeted at the actual problem, and creates a single point of failure that might well end up with smart-ovens becoming mandatory in new builds, where possible.
1. That regulator already has the power, so this in no way increases their ability to do something like that.
2. Yes, manufacturers making deals with builders is one reason people end up with Internet Of Shit devices, but not the only one. Sometimes people buy them because they weren't properly informed, or locks are added in a software update, or it's simply the best all-round product so the person makes a compromise, or the local shops don't even sell anything without these anti-features.
Either way, the existence of such an anti-feature is unacceptable. Why should we have to fix every single situation where people end up with these, when it's far more effective to just outlaw them?
(And please don't mention any freedom of the manufacturer, corporations don't have rights. They should serve the people and people alone.)
I wonder how long it will be before we hear reports of people having their ovens turned off to "conserve power" by their power company during the day. 20 years? 15? Place your bets!
"end up with smart-ovens becoming mandatory in new builds, where possible."
Oh for sure. To fight climate change(and dependence on russian oil and gas), we all have to get a smart oven, to make sure we are all using our energy in the most efficient way. And not too often. Let's say a budget of 1 moderate use per day per adult user. And if the grid gets too unstable, your oven might smartly switches off and on during baking, to help stabilize the grid.
> your oven might smartly switches off and on during baking, to help stabilize the grid
I think you're being needlessly pessimistic. Consider a few points:
1. By the time any "smart" oven is mandated by law technology has probably moved ahead so far of where we are today that all the asinine intricacies people are complaining about have been remedied. Just look at how far wifi has come, only 15 years ago you couldn't imagine an office that could connect to the internet reliably without anything but RJ45 cables.
2. Read the comments on the internet from the 90s or early 2000s about almost anything and see how pessimistic everyone was about the future of new technologies. This is probably even more true of nerds who live on the cutting edge and see things at a closer range but also at a slightly skewed angle.
3. So what? Seatbelt laws induced the same type of reaction initially, but over time people adjusted, and no one even notices the annoying chime every car makes if you start it without putting on your seatbelt first and not to mention giving away your freedom not to wear them because we decided for you it would be in society's best interest to lower the cost of auto insurance. And now not just because it would be illegal not to but also because the societal norms dictate that you wear your seatbelt every single time.
Just look at how far wifi has come, only 15 years ago you couldn't imagine an office that could connect to the internet reliably without anything but RJ45 cables.
I still can't. When I'm at work, I plug in to wired Ethernet whenever possible. Otherwise, I get weird slowdown and dropouts all the time. I've done contract work at a number of business ranging from you've-definitely-heard-of-them Fortune 500 enterprises to local small businesses, and it's always the same. When I want a connection that's going to be reliable and consistent, (for example, when I'm taking a video call) I plug in a physical wire.
Read the comments on the internet from the 90s or early 2000s about almost anything and see how pessimistic everyone was about the future of new technologies. This is probably even more true of nerds who live on the cutting edge and see things at a closer range but also at a slightly skewed angle.
Many of those criticisms were absolutely correct. Stallman's worries about DRM have largely come to pass. We're living in a world where farmers can't repair their own tractors without taking out a service contract with John Deere. We're living in a new dark age where a large proportion of our visual cultural output, be it music, film or video games will be lost, simply because it isn't profitable for the original creating entity to preserve them, and copyright law prevents anyone else from doing so.
So what? Seatbelt laws induced the same type of reaction initially, but over time people adjusted, and no one even notices the annoying chime every car makes if you start it without putting on your seatbelt first
I do notice, and I find it annoying when my car insists that I put on my seatbelt, even when I'm just backing it out into the driveway so that I can wash it. I've noticed that newer cars detect when you've been driving for more than a certain amount of time (I think two hours is the threshold) and "advise" that you stop and take a break, regardless of your actual fatigue level. How long before this "advice" becomes more coercive?
An oven is not a PC, just turn on and cook my food. And any energy savings with some wifi controlled monstrosity (if thats what were getting at) is better met with more sustainable energy sources that produce more power. Cutting energy is never going to be a solution of the future; producing more will be.
Is (s)he, though? electric cars stopping to load because of grid instabilities is a build-in mandatory feature in electric chargers in Europe. Which is a major part of why I got another petrol-powered car last month - it gives me the security that the car will be fuelled sufficiently for operations when I get to it in the morning.
2 - I'd say these comments were overly optimistic - had I told my 30 year younger me about how we were essentially dependant on large megacorps for our integrated mail/calendar/telephone needs, megacorps who can - and often do - kick users out randomly for no apparent reason, making them lose access to their digital identity not only with them, but with potentially hundreds of other organisations, how the idea of ownership would erode into perpetual renting which can be stopped by the media controller at any point with no prior warning, that he would 'buy' a digital book, but would be unable to read it because he happened to be abroad, how state governments were using hacking skills to eavesdrop on everyone and to plant evidence on computers... he would have thought I was reading too many cypherpunk novels.
The last 30 years in tech have made me utterly pessimistic about the sci-fi tech future. The only things that ever become true are the worst ones. A stove dictating me when to cook and for how long sounds like the least problem we will have in our future, even more boring dystopia.
I have begin to understand the folks who start to live off-grid in a cabin somewhere in Montana...
"Read the comments on the internet from the 90s or early 2000s about almost anything and see how pessimistic everyone was about the future of new technologies."
We live in a time, where allways on devices track and spy everything by default about everyone and secret algorithms decide what posts get viral and what gets blocked or banned automatically, with no chance for the ordinary person to contest these decisions.
And all of this gets used, to manipulate peoples attention to sell them shiny crap, or influence them politically, without them noticing.
But yeah, people adopted to that total surveillance and algorithm control and starting the day with tailored advertisement. Why resist the change of the glorious new age?
But apart from that, I absolutely would buy a wifi controlled smart oven, where I can check on food and maybe adjust temperature without going to the kitchen - but only if I control it and not some server in china or wherever.
Good luck trying to convince our anti-government regulation-hating culture to demand sensible laws restricting corporate abuse like this. It's considered "free market" and "job creating" and "freedom" to be maliciously exploited by corporatists.
> God no please stop with getting the government involved, if the last 2 years have not convinced you how much they are all dim wits then I don't know what will.
Haha, tell me you're from the US without telling me from the US. Government regulation in this sector is exactly what it needs. Hell, it's one of the main reasons we managed to standardize on micro-USB for mobile devices; it was a flexible enough standardization that the industry has been able to switch to USB-C as a whole without running foul of it.
Right now there's clearly an incentive for companies to push these shitty features, whereas many consumers would consider that a downside. Regulations don't mean the complete removal of the free market, but rather the incorporation of that kind of externality into the market.
> God no please stop with getting the government involved
God no please stop with the anti-regulation BS.
> The answer is don't buy the damn house it's that simple.
If you're already several months into building, with partial payments having been made, when the builder tells you that this is the only option allowed, they have you over the barrel. They've violated the social contract of providing options, and expect you to pay the cost of it. That cost is either a reduction of your choices, or needing to forgo incremental design altogether while maintaining an antagonistic relationship with your builder.
> Pay more build what you want and be happy.
The parent post already tried to pay more to build what you want. The general contractor did not allow for any other options. The free market does not work with this sort of bundling.
> People want cheap houses and this is that.
First, nowhere did the poster state that they were unwilling to pay a higher price for a functional oven. They stated that there was no other option available. Second, the term you're alluding to is "revealed preference" [0], which is a load of economic bollocks. It implies that you can entirely ignore what people state they want, the circumstances in which choices have been made, or forms of market failure (e.g. [1]).
Overall, the appropriate response to market failure, including anti-competitive deals between builders and appliance manufacturers, is to change the environment in which that market exists. Introducing regulation in order to avoid unfavorable Nash Equilibria is the role of government, in order to fix these market failures.
If your government is broken you should fix that first. Our government is our collective strength designed to protect us from the vampire overlords and blood sucking squids.
First we have to make political donations anonymous and capped. Also, no money from companies, only people.
Then we need to fix the fake news problem. Make sure nobody is living in a bubble and we are all living in the same reality. (The fix is to make news the forth estate officially)
Then we need to fix the size and shape of our electorates. Much smaller. No Gerrymandering.
Also need to ditch the two party system and allow our elected representatives to vote as desired by the electorate they represent.
Also push as much power as we can down to state and city level governments. Allow states and cities to be more different to one another so that we can all learn from the successes and failures of the choices of other states. Move power closer to the people.
I don't think you're wrong in general principle, but...
> The fix is to make news the forth estate officially
It's difficult for me to see how formally establishing the main-stream media as a branch of government would do anything to improve the credibility of the news.
I'm not saying we can't do it, I'm saying I don't see what it improves.
And just to mention, we also have problems in our society with the centralization and expanding powers of law and order in our government. Maybe that isn't the best example of "we centralized that, and now everything is OK!".
I also suggested pushing more power down to the local state and and city councils. Less concentration.
I didn't have it in my list above, but one thing capitalism did get right is that humans are self interested and motivated by competition. We need some of that competition in our public services so that the individuals who run them can be rewarded for doing a god job (whatever that might mean.)
I'm not sure how you arrive at that conclusion. An individual choosing between two products on the shelf is much simpler than an individual changing government.
For instance if I think scrapping the department of energy would make things work better, how can I get that done?
I can't. It's impossible. If HP doesn't make a laptop I like however, I can buy a Dell.
Besides the obviously classist implications of voting with your wallet (i.e. people with bigger wallets get more votes, vimes' boot theory, etc) we also already have evidence that it just doesn't work in this specific type of product. Go ahead and try going to Best Buy and getting a non-smart TV. You can't, because once one manufacturer comes up with a dark pattern, they all copy it. "Consumer choice" is an illusion for almost everything these days.
Searching "Dumb TV" on the best buy site brings up plenty of models. I went into the reviews of the first few to verify they were in fact non smart models.
> if the last 2 years have not convinced you how much they are all dim wits then I don't know what will.
If you have specific problems with my suggestion as proposed I'd be happy to discuss the details, but "I don't like Biden" is not a convincing argument against the concept of regulations.
In my view, an oven that needs wifi to operate correctly crosses a line from creative business strategy into corporate abuse, nobody wants to live in a world where you need to login to a corporate website to cook your meals, but this is a completely plausible reality that we have the power to avoid if we agree that we don't have to live that way. I think regulation works well here too because the undesirable behavior is clear and easy to target legally without much possibility for unintended consequences. Further, this is a new trend that hasn't become widespread (yet), so getting rid of it now won't be disruptive to existing businesses.
For microwaves and toasters this kind of thing isn't a big deal because they're small and cheap, but stationary appliances like stoves and ovens are appliances that can't simply be replaced on a dime, they are investments meant to last many years and in practice they often operate as part of the home itself and can see multiple owners throughout their lifetimes. Not to mention, the rental and housing market is absolutely insane right now and for the foreseeable future, the vast majority of people do not have the luxury to quibble over the type of oven installed in their home assuming it is otherwise functional and sanitary. Or, more likely, they won't have any idea about this detail until its too late.
The past 2 years of GDPR enforcement has looked halfway encouraging. As a libertarian, I still really cannot think of any other way to prevent our individual liberties from being destroyed by the surveillance industry.
Maybe in some alternative universe where the government never mandated social security numbers, driver's license numbers, birth certificates, or laws against "fraud" for using narrowly-scoped nyms. Where the economic treadmill wasn't run so hard, so people had time to practice good digital hygiene like installing Adblock and the advertising industry never developed. But that's not the world we're staring down, and we only get one.
Thank you. Getting the government involved in this with simply create more government jobs, more waste, more pensions, and most importantly, homes that cost more. Politicians love to talk regulation that sounds really good to the average person on the street, but the average person on the street has no idea what that really means on the backend.
Or prosecute a few of these people for treason. Let's not mince words here. When you build a home and include a backdoor for foreign intelligence, you are committing treason.
Yet I could see the chain of events leading to a store requiring a water connection by government mandate. Stove usage increases the likelyhood of fire. Fire is typically controlled with water in residential settings. No water -> no stove by law.
Water's not a good choice for dealing with kitchen fires, and even if it was, you already have water at the kitchen sink. Nobody's going to do a water-based automatic fire suppression system for residential stoves. There are just too many things preventing that idea from being reasonable or even tractable.
Yes, I know what a grease fire is! I'm not saying the the idea is good from a technical perspective, rather, I'm suggesting a line of thinking that would not be atypical of a government regulation.
As part of the technocratic agenda, it is integral that all energy usage, water usage, etc is managed. For this to work, there needs to be 'kill switches'. Like the one's Biden has required new cars to have by 2025.
Technocrats want to (micro) manage everyone's usage of everything. The green agenda is the main sales pitch given for this, but also look out for needing to log on to go online because of ... terrorists, Russian internet attacks, child abuse, etc.
Everyone is so gung ho about all the companies that are throwing kill switches to Russia, and I'm just waiting for those same companies to start doing the same thing to anyone they want, for any reason. It's already happening.
They froze the accounts of people at the protests without due process, and passed legislation to let them to it to anyone who supported them "directly or indirectly". i.e. carte blanche to send anyone into digital/financial exile with no recourse.
they repealed it soon after (I think), but the door is open for them or any other government to do it again.
Seizing funds suspected to be linked to criminal activity during investigations (before any charges) is nothing new. Those who are being targeted today had no complaints 20 years ago when similar clauses where written into anti-terror/anti-terror-funding laws
The only time I've heard investigators seizing specific amounts is when the money is cash. To my knowledge, access to all bank accounts belonging to a suspect is frozen as a matter of routine: feds don't wire out the $92,464.27 suspected to be related to fraud and leave the suspect with the balance.
To be clear, I'm not saying ots not a problem - it absolutely is[1]. However, it is not new.
1. It gives undue leverage for plea deals, and leaves suspect unable to pay for legal representation.
It might not be obviously illegal, but those bank accounts are frozen because the owners of the bank accounts are being investigated just as if they had been sending money to Al-Qaeda.
At least legally it all boils down to how the groups that received these donations are classified. Of course politically things are more complicated, but applying the same rules in different situations is why people where so concerned about this type of legislation in the first place.
Of course that is reason to freeze the account, much like you would seize a gun from a gun owner who is suspected to have committed a crime with that gun.
It's more like seizing every other gun they own too. But also the average person needs their guns to get groceries and pay the electric bill. And they need guns to get a lawyer...
There was due process. My understanding was because of the 1 week state of emergency they were explicitly allowed to do this. There were court orders ahead of time.
If there were court orders (i.e. the judicial system was given the opportunity to say no), what else would you call this?
The power of the state is large. It is reined in by some of its own components, but it is foolish to imagine that in a society that is not explicitly anarchist that it would somehow be limited in the way you seem to imagine.
What company wants to "throw kill switches to Russia" ?
They are being told to do it (or heavily implied that they will be told to do it very soon if they don't do it beforehand).
It's not that I don't see the risk of companies "doing the same thing to anyone they want", it's just that this is not the same as is happening w.r.t the Russian attack on Ukraine.
Even the most reasonable people can't make the argument when the direction is so wildly independent of reality. For example, water usage limits on dishwashers that make people run the cycle twice and end up using more water and more electricity than the old ones.
I find dryers are particularly bad at this. Mine has 5 levels of dry-ness. Even on "ultra dry" the clothes usually come out damp. So I run "ultra dry" twice. Lol.
My less than one year old brand new LG washer dryer has a perfectly functional set of buttons to configure it, but it will not allow me to do so without connecting to their app on my phone over Bluetooth and giving them permission to read my web browsing history.
These machines were over $1000 and they changed the terms on the app a week after we bought it. Not that we'd ever connect it to our phones anyway.
I, for instance, cannot tell it to dry on low heat for a long time until it's actually dry. It is impossible to configure it manually, it beggars belief.
And of course they know full well how much of a nightmare it is to return appliances that heavy and expensive, so it's always a surprise. Why would I even think to look for such a ridiculous anti-feature? I'm not creative enough to think of these regressions since the 90s, what's next, I can't turn it on at all without a face id? The features have barely even changed in that time...
Same with my new television that wanted me to agree to terms and conditions after spending over an hour mounting it on a wall. They seriously weaponize the inconvenience of returning these things... thankfully I had an extra computer to connect to it instead but most people don't.
I think a regulation on appliances saying they must have all features that are standard or advertised available with no extra steps is a good start. Yeah, this person has an issue with builder kickbacks too, but the core issue is hardly limited to new construction or contractors.
We have an LG wall oven that had a binding arbitration sticker on it. Anyone that uses it enters into a binding arbitration agreement with LG according to the sticker.
Of course, there's no notice at time of sale, and by the time you see the sticker, you're looking at redoing brand new kitchen cabinetry if you return the stove.
I suspect it is not a legal contract (post sale, well after returns become infeasible). If it is somehow binding, when companies pull crap like that, I think the "I reject" path should involve them reimbursing you for your time and any sunk cost you incurred before being informed of the contract.
Steve Baer (Zomes, Nightwall, and many other inventions) noted in his book "Sunspots" that:
* if a person replaces a solar powered drying technology like a clothes line or rack with a fuel-powered dryer, the GDP and/or other similar measures of economic health improve
* if a person replaces a fuel-powered dryer with a solar powered dryer like a clothes line or rack, the same measures apparently get worse
His conclusion (in the 1970s/early 1980s) was these measures are clearly fucked.
With a wife and 2 kids waiting 24hrs for strategic placed massive loads of clothes to dry just isn’t an option either lol Phoenix with that dry heat I bet was effective as a high end dryer!
Seattle houses are heated near continiously outside some summer hours, so the house interiors are relatively dry. In a place where you don't have heaters or ACs on a lot and the climate is humid, stuff stays humid.
I had a roommate who used to do this (thus sending our utility bill up along with some other power wasting habits), and I once asked them the question I'm about to ask now:
other than for moments when you plan on wearing something as soon as it comes out of the dryer, what prevents one from using the normal dry cycle, and then letting whatever garments that don't get completely 100% dried-air dry in the closet or up on hangers on a shower pole or something?
Also important: some people live in areas with higher ambient humidity than other areas. If you live in an area where swamp coolers are a viable option in the summer, then of course you'll have trouble understanding why some people don't see hanging up damp clothes to be a reasonable option.
With the premium that house space demand, a cloth track, even a foldable one, can ruin your living space for hours a week. And since there's a strong correlation by laundry and weekends, you'd get your living space stalled the days you need it the most.
Hanging clothes on a rack inside is easy, but hanging sheets inside is not. I use my dryer for sheets when weather or time of day makes the outside line not a solution. I also use the dryer occasionally if I need some particular clothes in a hurry.
I never put things through the dryer and then hang them though; my dryer works, and I don't even use the highest setting.
This is not true. In fact, in the context of this discussion, the opposite is true, that is to say, there are many HOAs (i.e. corporations) that prohibit hanging clothes outside, but there are actually several state laws which ban such prohibitions, so this is actually a case where regulations are protecting people's freedoms, not restricting them, like your comment implies.
The county next to where I live has banned vinyl siding for the entire county. It's not an HOA rule, it's a countywide government rule. Wouldn't be surprised to find out there are counties or towns that have their own clothesline ban.
> Maine, Arizona and Vermont all prohibit hanging clothes outside to dry.
Are you sure you don't have that backwards? From what I can find these are "right to dry" states which have banned clothesline bans (eg your HOA can try to ban it, and the state overrides it)
You have this half-backwards: Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Illinois, Indiana, Louisiana, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Mexico, North Carolina, Oregon, Texas, Vermont, Virginia and Wisconsin - these states all have "right to dry" laws.
> Now, amidst growing concern about wasteful energy use, clothesline proponents argue that the traditional method of drying laundry is not only cheaper but better for the environment. Lawmakers in some 19 states have agreed, enacting “right to dry” laws that prohibit clothesline bans,
> The exact nature of “right to dry” laws varies from state to state—while some prohibit clothesline bans directly, others recognize a right to use solar power that implicitly may preclude those in authority from preventing a homeowner from drying laundry in the sun.
You see this with appliances in general. Appliances are tools. They need to be maintained to some minimal degree and used properly.
I've rescued Dyson hand held vacuums where the only problem is that the previous owner forgot to give the removable filter a rinse. I see people shove plates in a dishwasher with food solids that end up caking on, or placing bowls upright so they rerun the cycle.
For example, water usage limits on dishwashers that make people run the cycle twice and end up using more water and more electricity than the old ones.
It's a similar phenomenon to "low flush" toilets that clog and/or have to be flushed multiple times, using roughly the same or even more water than what they replaced.
Get a Niagara. 0.8 gallons per flush. Best flushing toilet I have ever used in my life, at any gallon per flush level. Sustainable/conserving doesn't have to suck.
However, their quality control is kind of terrible (2/2 had defects in the porcelain causing them to run indefinitely out of the box). I patched both up, and now they're OK.
In fairness, Niagara offered to ship replacements for both free of charge.
Also, they cost a tiny fraction of the other (worse specced) water conserving options, and, thanks to covid we bought them from sketchyplumbingoutlet.com or some such site (they could have been returns for all I know).
Anyway, they flush better than any other residential toilet I've encountered (including high flow and low flow ones), and use 0.8 gallons per flush.
That's probably intended to refer to 24220.c, but overlooks that the "advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology" prescribed for new cars 2025 and later is described in terms that are functionally identical to the driver awareness monitoring safety systems that already exist in high-end new cars right now.
>Technocrats want to (micro) manage everyone's usage of everything.
From Collins English dictionary: "A technocrat is a scientist, engineer, or other expert who is one of a group of similar people who have political power as well as technical knowledge."
I think you're conflating 'technocrats' with 'greedy people'.
I'm not saying people with technical knowledge and political power cannot be evil. What I'm saying is it doesn't require any special skill to be really greedy.
Technocrat has a common usage beyond what that particular dictionary has written. For politicians, it often means one who has a strong belief in the benefit of ruling by data (regardless of the accuracy of that data) and making use of technology to achieve their goals. The politician does not need to be an expert in the data nor the technology used to rule in a technocratic manner. They are often advised by those who do meet the dictionary definition, though it is worth pointing out that technocrats are humans and subject to the same biases and ethical and moral failings as everyone else.
I tend to see technocracy as rule by the scientifically trained, by technologists, by career civil servants, by industry, and by institutions. Technocrats gain their credibility as legitimate leaders from the approval of institutions like academia and industry in contrast to leaders whose legitimacy is directly based off of popular approval. Technocrats are often leading from behind the scenes and driving actual government policy despite being unelected.
I don't see technocrats as having the same biases, ethical and moral failings as everybody else, I think they're rather unique on all those points, and this is at the very core of what is good and bad about technocracy. When I think of a classic technocratic decision, I think of Margaret Thatcher closing down coal mines while crushing any union resistance, a technocrat-approved decision, and it significantly aided the economic success of Britain under Thatcher. Yet it exacerbated inequality and divisions within Britain that persist to this day. The severity of this fallout was blindingly obvious to the average northerner but it caught the average technocrat off-guard (decades of political ill-will tends not to be part of models), whom still lack effective solutions to resolve the issue, and the issue will drag down Britain for quite some time.
> When I think of a classic technocratic decision, I think of Margaret Thatcher closing down coal mines while crushing any union resistance, a technocrat-approved decision, and it significantly aided the economic success of Britain under Thatcher.
It is absolutely not a resolved matter that Thatcher's assault on the NUM significantly aided "the economic success of Britain".
Britain under Thatcher was a dismal and glum place. I left in 1989 and it only by revisiting various documentaries that I have come to realize what a shithole she helped make many parts of the country during her tenure. The fact that the City of London (the UK's Wall St.) did very well during this time in no way lets her off the hook for what her leadership did to most of the UK.
Do... they? I follow a lot of people who I think you'd consider supporters of technocracy, and I've never seen anyone argue that it's good or important to have central monitoring of people's oven usage.
But you skipped right past the main part of my question. Who are "they"? Do you have a particular person or group in mind who thinks smart ovens are good because it's important to spy on everyone's oven usage? I ask because I'm worried you've fallen into a common rhetorical trap, conflating everything you don't like into a singular conspiracy and presuming that there must be some group somewhere who's dedicated to promoting it.
You can read all about 'their' plans in many places. I would start at the WEF's web site.
The only thing I would suggest, is that you consider that when they are talking about stakeholders etc, you need to realise that they are not talking about the people - they are talking from the perspective of companies. (You are the steak, they are the steakholders, lol.)
The same companies that pay lobbyists to write legislation etc, for the governments that purport to serve the people.
These companies are owned by someone - who they are, we can't know. Unfortunately for us, a lot of the ownership details are hidden by offshore tax-exempt vehicles, etc.
Smart electricity meters seems very different to smart ovens. The state has a valid reason to be interested in your enter because they run the grid and need to manage load. They have no valid interest in what your running with that electricity.
It's needlessly wordy, that I agree on, but here's the important part: the actual text of the bill is "equipped with advanced drunk and impaired driving prevention technology"
I guess one way you could implement that is a remote kill switch, but at least when I first read the text I thought it would just be something like a built-in breathalyzer you had to pass before the car would let you drive.
People claiming this is evidence of a kill switch are hard extrapolating with (as far as I've seen) no evidence that gets you from the bill's text to a kill switch.
Tools get misused constantly and there's no end to mission creep when "think of the children", "you're helping the terrorists win", "the cartels were involved", etc. cards are played. Also we are in an era of incredibly flexible definitions of words. What you consider to be 'impaired driving' today might not be what the government considers it to be when they don't like you.
The way Snopes presents it sounds like there is enough wiggle room in the requirements for it to be a kill switch:
> Passively monitor the performance of a driver to accurately identify whether they are impaired.
> Prevent or limit operation if impairment is detected.
> “Passively” detect whether the BAC of a driver is equal to or higher than the legal limit. In such cases, the system could “prevent or limit motor vehicle operation if an impairment is detected.”
All the bill does is say now those systems should escalate beyond a warning and be able to stop the vehicle.
These cars already have all the info they need, if you "accidentally" drive like an intoxicated person, it's going to be for a reason you need to be stopped over!
Like a medical episode, dangerous lack of sleep, texting and driving.
It has literally nothing to do with being a remote kill switch.
Saying it's a remote kill switch is like saying the mandatory backup camera system is as a mandatory surveillance tool...
It's such a huge leap you can't possibly make it in good faith...
What if you have to drive like a maniac to get your friend to the ER before he bleeds out?
(Yes, a friend of mine told me how he had to do just that. His friend died anyway, but it wasn't because the car quit.)
There are lots of cases where I might need to get the most out of the car.
Or maybe I just want to practice parallel parking. Erratic back and forth driving and turning.
So the car according to some algorithm decides to shut down the car and strand me. The worst part is, I have no idea what criteria that algorithm is using, so I have no idea what line to not cross.
Not recommending this or proud/bragging/endorsing this, but I drive fast. Too fast. 100 MPH for me is what most people feel doing 5 over.
I have *never* triggered these alerts unless I was genuinely tired.
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You're talking about a system you don't have the faintest clue about, instead of whipping out irrelevant fantasy situations, ask how it works???
It will *not* react to intentional aggressive movement, it reacts to clearly unintentionally movement that are consistently late and low steering torque.
This is not stuff you can replicate "practicing parallel parking", or driving like you're re-enacting fast and furious!
I expect better of HN, you're jumping from a misleading interpretation to FUD without taking a moment to learn.
You know... when most people have no idea what they're talking about they seek clarity instead of writing 4 paragraphs of fantasy.
But you do you.
These systems don't trigger for "potentially bad" behavior like speeding, they trigger when you drive like an intoxicated or impaired driver.
Intentionally acting like an impaired drive is like intentionally walking like you're drunk... gravity doesn't care if you were pretending to stumble, you're still coming down.
So it doesn't matter if you intended to veer in and out if your in your lane with barely any steering torque being applied... that's how you cause an accident.
If you were dodging obstacles you'd be applying sharper input than a drunk person. You can't "fake" drunk without being a danger to yourself and others.
Yeah, well, I've been in software for 45 years. Magical algorithms like that always have both bugs and unintended consequences.
"if it drives like it's impaired, it's impaired"
It's just magic I'm supposed to trust.
No thanks.
P.S. I worked on the 757 stabilizer trim design. While I didn't work on the avionics boxes that fitted to it, I know was designed to never allow the software to have the last word. Because software has bugs in it. It always does.
Yes, I know about the 737MAX. There's a switch to turn physically off the stab trim. All the electronics that drive the trim, including MCAS, are upstream of that switch, and that switch rules. Another switch that overrides all the software is the column trim switch. The 3rd crew that experienced MCAS failure that you never hear about used these switches to override MCAS and land safely.
P.P.S. I let my car drift out of the lane if there's no oncoming traffic to give a crazy cyclist / kid on a skateboard more room, or to give that mom with kids more room, or to avoid an icy patch, or to avoid a pothole, or to get my wheels on a drier stretch of pavement to avoid hydroplaning. Heck, if it's safe to do so, I'll move over a full lane to avoid kids.
I've a very soft driving style, because I'm used to cars with very direct steering, and when I get into rentals these systems trigger like crazy with me, they're super annoying.
"Driving like a maniac" to save one person is essentially one possible answer to the trolley problem.
I'm not saying that I condone that particular answer being applied to this particular case, but it's well without the bounds of moral philosophy to say "you should not be able to make this choice".
If the remote kill switch exists, it's going to be hijacked into government having the power to disable your car. It starts innocuously, something that everyone will agree with, like drunk drivers. Next will be drug dealers, who could disagree with that? Then deadbeat parents who owe child support. Then tax-owing deadbeats. Then who knows what other classes of "undesirables".
Proof? It already happened: driver licenses already went through every one of those steps, getting hijacked way beyond the original purpose of denoting that you had the training to drive a car, into government-imposed threats against all sorts of "bad" behavior.
I don't trust any expansion of government power in good faith.
Again, this is just like saying that a camera existing enables the government to hack it, so rear view cameras are part of forming a surveillance state.
There is literally no reason for automakers to do this, and yes I know now the FUD comes in "well they will cuz reasons! cuz gubbmint!"
But just like the rear view camera... you're imagining that they'll spend significant time and money to do something with no use other than incriminating themselves...
So sure maybe your rear view camera can be rigged to stream to their servers 24/7, some already record and upload incidents anyways right?
But it's a massive jump from the happy path.
This is 100000x easier to do on the car without looping in a remote server and opens them up to 100000000000x more liability if the interface is hacked.
> Again, this is just like saying that a camera existing enables the government to hack it, so rear view cameras are part of forming a surveillance state.
That might be the best example of a straw-man that I've ever seen.
>> Again, this is just like saying that a camera existing enables the government to hack it, so rear view cameras are part of forming a surveillance state.
>That might be the best example of a straw-man that I've ever seen.
I think that was the point.
Replace "rear view cameras" with "onboard tools to detect and deter/prevent impaired driving" and you have the same straw man.
Why do you assume these systems are static? It's not a given that the systems available in 2025 will have any resemblance to the ones available today. And in fact they may have mandatory upgrade abilities, so the car you buy may not be the same as the car you have 5 years later.
"a control agenda" is one (landmine) label meant to represent a set of complex interactions; this kind of drastic oversimplification is daily fodder for politics, but literally destructive to actual fact-based inquiry leading to effective policy. Similar arguments have been made regarding product safety and hygiene requirements by "government" !
Except that such all-or-nothing logic is completely appropriate when talking about security of computational domains. Taking a device that is supposedly mine and configuring it to work against my interests repudiates the idea that I am the owner of it. Rather than representing my interests, it is now an agent of someone else's top-down policy. And if enough people modify "their" devices to remove such restrictions, then there's a good chance that even more systems of control get deployed to prevent them from doing so.
>Except that such all-or-nothing logic is completely appropriate when talking about security of computational domains. Taking a device that is supposedly mine and configuring it to work against my interests repudiates the idea that I am the owner of it.
You mean like smartphones, proprietary operating systems, streaming devices, many (most?) IOT devices, digital books/music/movies and a host of other things?
Sorry, until there's some law/regulation (e.g., broadly confirming the First Sale doctrine[0] and/or similar stuff) that ship has sailed, my friend.
Mass adoption of centrally controlled devices doesn't change the paradigm of reasoning about computing freedom, though. This trend just means that the majority of computing devices aren't under the control of their owners, not that the idea of computational freedom is irrelevant.
In fact I would say barring some very strong laws that make de facto locked down devices outright illegal, there will always be more proprietary devices than libre ones. One of the chief goals of locking down computers is decommodification, meaning taking what could be a general purpose device and restricting it to one specific purpose. Even caring heavily about software freedom - I've got two librebooted desktops, two me_cleaned laptops, one microG phone, but still countless purpose-tailored devices that perform some proprietary function. If those proprietary functions (eg Google Voice SIP integration) could be straightforwardly done with libre software, then I could just consolidate those functions into the libre infrastructure.
> Technocrats want to (micro) manage everyone's usage of everything.
You've spelt "Totalitarians" wrong. This is totalitarianism.
This isn't just micromanagement. This is about total control. There's signs of totalitarianism all over the place, including US-culture itself. How kids are being raised. What they're being taught in school. How people behave towards each other.
I got new boilers (furnaces for radiator heating) installed recently, and halfway through one of the crew asked where they should install the boxes that connect the thermostats to the internet. Luckily they were completely separate, so I said I never agreed with that and they left them boxed up, because they had never thought to mention it. (They listened to my explanation that I would not have something that literally starts a fire in my house connected to the internet without at least being able to control the software it runs, but I think they were just being polite.)
I went to use the app for my hot tub and put in the 6 digit pin, except the last number I put in was a 4 instead of a 3. It logged me in, but the temperature looked off, then I realized I wasn’t connected to my hot tub, it was someone else. Turns out the 6-digit pins are sequential. And this is from a billion dollar pool company.
My neighbor has never properly setup the internet connection on his hot tub. It's still in access point mode, waiting for anyone to connect and take control of it. Going to guess that it at least has manual controls on the hot tub itself. If he wasn't such a difficult curmudgeon to talk to, I'd warn him about it, but he'll probably just think I'm trying to sell him something.
This is true across a frighteningly large swath of “quasi industrial home control” stuff - all the vulnerabilities of industrial controls with zero of the attention paid to it.
All the commercial stuff from before the Apple Home craze. Automated sprinklers, lighting, controls. It’s been out there since the 70s and got rudimentary internet access early on - and lots of it is very slapdash (underlying assumptions that everything is local wire or low range radio from before internet was slapped on).
A year or two ago, my newish car was at the shop, recovering from a fender bender, and I got a call from the police asking where it was. I told them and they said that matched with the coordinates they had. It turned out that the SOS system had malfunctioned, and the GPS and integrated 4g (which I didn't even know I had, because the car doesn't have a built in navigation system or voice phone) had been phoning home and telling the car company I was in trouble. I called the manufacturer and asked if I had a subscription to this service, and I was informed that the car had a subscription, and I couldn't cancel it. Luckily I appealed to the dealership and after a couple of days the sent me a "confidential" pdf with instructions on how to unplug the spy module...which of course threw up all kinds of scary warnings starting the car after that... until it suddenly didn't anymore. So now I have a dumb car, and I love it more than ever.
I lived in Sonoma County for a while and there they followed up everything, even noise complaints. Same for the post office. It’s nice to live in a wealthy area.
Good. Every car needs to be tracked at all times. They are death machines, responsible for over s million deaths worldwide every year. It is insane we allow this.
They were being polite, as all service workers have to be. Tell me you've never worked s service industry job without telling me you've never worked a service industry job....
There are numerous safety interlocks in gas furnaces ranging from flame presence sensors to (usually) several heat limit switches, often which are wired directly in line between the gas solenoid and the furnace controller. The controller's logic has a lot of "expect this condition by this amount of time" rules, too.
The furnace's controller is usually separate from the system controller (the box that talks to thermostats, valves/dampers, pumps, etc.)
On forced hot air systems that are new enough, the furnace and system controller monitor outlet air temperature and shut down if it's too hot.
Gas furnaces are incredibly safe.
Also, the quote to install the system specified what thermostats they were going to install. It's on you to read the quote, not to get uppity at service personnel and lecture them people haxx0ring your furnace.
We had a water heater installed a few years ago, that along with a heat exchanger heats the house, so it comes with a thermostat. Salesman tells me in glowing terms about the WiFi-enabled thermostat they're "giving" me, to which I reply "ABSOLUTELY NOT"... turns out they have an old-style one that's $300 cheaper, and... has worked fine for the entire time, without poking a severe security hole in my WiFi network.
I mean you do realize a Wi-Fi connected thermostat just closes a pair of contacts that tell the boiler "heat on" or "heat off" and it's not "literally starting a fire" in your house. Assuming someone took over and had full control of your thermostat the worst they could do is turn the heat on and make you uncomfortable. All boilers/furnaces/etc have protection mechanisms built in and in no circumstance is the 'fire' controlled by the thermostat whatsoever. A thermostat simply sends a signal that 'calls' for heat or cooling. The only exception would be a mains-voltage thermostat that controls an electric wall heater but I've never seen those connected to Wi-Fi.
>Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman recounts that he was approached by young rabbis in a seminary who asked him "is electricity fire?". He replied, "no", but asked why they wanted to know, and was shocked that they weren't interested in science at all, but just wanted to interpret the Talmud. Feynman said that electricity was not a chemical process, as fire is, and pointed out that there is electricity in atoms and thus every phenomenon that occurs in the world. Feynman proposed a simple way to eliminate the spark: '"If that's what's bothering you, you can put a condenser across the switch, so the electricity will go on and off without any spark whatsoever—anywhere.' But for some reason, they didn't like that idea either".
Feynman was SHOCKED I say SHOCKED they weren't interested in science at all! ;)
Thermostats generally have an "off" setting, and it's historically not uncommon for homeowners to use this setting when the home is unoccupied as it clearly carries less risk in terms of both fire and unexpected energy costs than ones that may run the furnace.
Not only is your comment pedantic, it's not even correct.
The 'off' setting on a thermostat is no different than when it is not calling for heat and it does not make any other failure mode any less likely nor does it reduce the risk of fire. In fact, leaving a home without heat in some climates like the northeast leaves your home susceptible to pipes freezing which carries a much higher risk of damage to your home than a well-maintained boiler or furnace spontaneously burning your house down which happens almost never.
Homeowners typically use this setting because the overwhelming majority do not understand the mechanical systems in their homes.
The typical configuration for a steam boiler or hydronic heating is a single pair of wires. They are either closed (heat on) or open (heat off). That's it.
I worked in the HVAC industry. My comment is pedantic because it is correct.
> The 'off' setting on a thermostat is no different than when it is not calling for heat and it does not make any other failure mode any less likely nor does it reduce the risk of fire.
You're completely ignoring the difference between an unattended vs. attended fire. The former has a much higher risk of being destructive and spreading to the structure.
The "off" setting explicitly won't trigger in response to temperature change unattended, which is a similar concern to internet-connected thermostats; unattended operation. For those living in freezing climates they obviously must weigh the relative risks. That first use of the furnace in winter was always a monitored event back when I lived with parents in the midwest, and it was often accompanied by a burning smell we'd investigate and verify was just some dust and nothing serious.
Even if you refuse to acknowledge there's a difference in unattended vs. attended fire risks WRT the furnace, unexpected energy costs from continuously heating an unoccupied home can break the bank for some.
Even my Harman/Kardon amplifier's manual advises unplugging it when going on vacation because of the risk of it spuriously turning on wasting electricity and being a noise problem. Its capacity to waste energy (~1kw) is nowhere near that of a gas furnace, and it clearly doesn't utilize combustion as part of its normal operation.
Fortunately I no longer live anywhere burst pipes are a concern, and I'd never leave a heater setup to automatically run in my absence. It makes zero sense for my situation.
I find it amusing that you're qualifying statements with "well-maintained", which amounts to a tacit recognition of the risks. Well-maintained isn't the default, ignored and neglected is, especially for systems out of sight and out of mind.
You should not turn your furnace off in a cold climate, especially if the home is unoccupied. If the temperature drops below too low, the water in your pipes may freeze and expand, breaking the pipes and causing flooding. Without anyone home to notice the problem, the flooding can easily cause tens of thousands of dollars of damage.
Correct, this is totally different than having a smart gas oven or stove. I too would never have plumbing or gas appliances hooked up to the internet. But my Nest thermostat is totally safe.
Whirlpool figured this out and deserves some praise here. All their new appliances that support Wi-Fi connectivity have a physical "Remote Enable" button that you must manually push every cycle to enable remote control of the device through the app. You cannot start the oven/washer/etc remotely unless someone has manually acknowledged it at the appliance and I believe it resets after 24 hours or when the cycle is complete.
Of course, and it's remotely upgradable, too. That way, the manufacturer can install spyware anytime they want, and any hacker can use it to mine bitcoins.
I'd give it maximum 3 years until this is a reality. The way this shift works in effect is that all the higher end appliances stocked by retailers are quickly swapped for IoT ones. When a consumer goes microwave shopping the only choices they are given are super budget crap or "premium" WiFi connected offerings. These transitions are very well coordinated between Big-Box retailers and manufacturers.
It is not "totally safe" for your furnace to start in an unoccupied home, particularly after it's been off for an extended period. It's not impossible for critters to have setup shop in the warm space near a pilot light, and in an unoccupied home there's nobody to even smell what would be an obvious problem before it becomes a crisis.
Thermocouple-based gas valves immediately extinguish the flow of gas when a pilot goes out in e.g. a pilot fed hot water heater. This has been standard for decades.
Pilot lights have not been used in gas furnaces in decades. Everything has been electronic ignition since the 80s at the latest. In fact they have been outlawed in some locales for close to 40 years.
> Thermocouple-based gas valves immediately extinguish the flow of gas when a pilot goes out in e.g. a pilot fed hot water heater. This has been standard for decades.
Who said the pilot light was out?
> Pilot lights have not been used in gas furnaces in decades. Everything has been electronic ignition since the 80s at the latest. In fact they have been outlawed in some locales for close to 40 years.
And the baby-boom produced how many homes with pilot lights? Thermostats are often upgraded on existing homes without touching anything else, and every single home I've lived in was built decades ago still having original HVAC.
My grandmother's house has a stove with at least 5 pilot lights on it (one for each burner); I'm not sure about her water heater, gas dryer, HVAC, etc. Just because pilot lights aren't commonly used in the past half century doesn't mean they don't exist.
It’s even worse now in Canada — not smart devices, but water heater rentals. These companies charge astronomical rates per month for a rental, or a large “contract buy out fee”. They give kick backs to developers so almost all new builds in Ontario will have them.
I live in a city that has a centralised heating infrastructure (every building gets a hot water connection), and my apartment came equipped with a heat exchanger that connects to said heating system. I have to _lease_ this heat exchanger from the energy company, and I cannot opt out. The lease is like 50 euros per month, though the MSRP on the unit is only 400 euros or so. Then I still need to pay for actual heat consumption, which is also 3 times more expensive than a gas powered heater that is commonly found in my country.
Here the district heating is substantially cheaper than a gas furnace, at least in operation.
I believe you have to buy the infrastructure and pay for the pipe that goes from the nearest joint to your building, though.
We don't do per-apartment heat exchangers, but rather one per building, typically with shared hot water radiators across all units in the building.
Heat consumption is either estimated by a air/radiator temperature difference integrator on the radiator, or an electronic flow meter+temperature differential sensors on the unit's connection to the central hot water loop.
I suppose their lawyers figured out that people would just recycle them and stop paying.
If so, I suggest installing a water softener with an anti-backflow device but not installing a bladder pressure relief tank between it and the water heater. Also buy a whole house leak detector / shutoff valve.
If the resulting water heater tank rupture doesn't lead them to breach the maintenance side of the contract, look into over-softening the water so the sacrificial anode fails every 6-12 months.
(Edit: In case it wasn't clear, this is a great way to do unbounded amounts of damage to your house, so don't actually do this.)
Tell the builder not install a stove, just the build the location and socket. They say no, then go with a different builder.
My house had a glass top stove (it was a foreclosure with certain things done to it by the bank). I sold it on Craigslist. Since it was basically new, it covered the replacement.
So wait.. you get your oven when you buy your (new?) house?
Everywhere i've been, you're happy if you get a kitchen, and the oven is just like a washing machine... a standard-sized piece of equipment that fits in a standard-sized hole in your kitchen, that you buy in an electronics store.
But those are standardized too, and definitely not something a builder would demand you buy.
Usually you buy a house/apartment here, and then you buy a kitchen separately, and they ask you if you want a standard oven or a built-in one, and they leave a hole for either... I guess you can buy an oven with them too, and they install it, but you can definitely buy any standard sized one, and just screw it in, eg:
Same. Need a double convection oven to replace our failing one. Shocking how few are available without wifi.
As has been said in other threads about connected TVs, if a few companies would just make dependable, serviceable, not-effing-internet-connected appliances, i for one, would buy all their products.
They want to turn the internet into a giant perosanl computer only corporations own and control and they are doing that by putting a secret processor inside our cpu's we don't have access to that polices and enforces copyright law.
AKA you got a digital dictator in side your phone and PC.
The last 23+ years theres been a war on general computing devices so that they obey hardware and software companies and not their users.
So the best thing you can do is call the FTC and we sick anti-trust on intel, amd, and the trusted computing group, they are behind all this internet of things bs.
In my experience the builder will very happily install whatever you want. But they will charge you full price for the appliance you select, and give you no credit for the one you are not having installed.
Sounds like a bad deal, because it is. But... what are you going to do? Let them install the one they planned to, then rip it out and install the one you want later? Okay, maybe you can get enough for the original one to come out ahead financially, but mostly you won't, once labor is factored in. It's a wonderful racket for builders, they know exactly how to price it so you pay far more than the difference for every upgrade.
Could do that, I guess, but it'd still end up the same way. They probably wouldn't give you a credit. And if they did, it would be a pittance. In the end, having the big box store install it, you end up spending the same as just paying the builder their price.
Like I said, it's a really great strategy for the builder. I was quite impressed with how my builder played the game, even though it was infuriating. I couldn't find a way to get around it and be financially ahead.
This seems like needless defeatism. Why settle for a worse out come for the same amount of money?
Even if it's slightly more, in every remodel that you're actually going to live in it makes sense to pony up an extra grand where it matters, like your appliances. "Builder grade" is only acceptable for people who don't have to live in it, and if you're hiring the builders then you need to make that clear...
> Why settle for a worse out come for the same amount of money?
I did not mean to imply that you should settle, or that I did. I paid for lots of upgrades. But they were expensive, a wash for me financially, and very lucrative for the builder. But short of being my own general contractor and building the house myself, I had no leverage to change that.
If I were building the house, I could say "I want dishwasher B instead of dishwasher A" and the price difference would be B-A. A typical homebuilder, on the other hand, can say "we include A with the build, and if you want B, it will cost $B". So maybe the better dishwasher is $600 instead of $500, but instead of paying $100 extra for my upgraded dishwasher, I pay more like $600 extra.
The only way to "win" financially is take the builder grade stuff, use it until it dies a natural death, and replace with better things as you go. Any other path to dishwasher B costs just as much as paying the price the builder demands for it.
Dishwashers aren't the best example, I agree, because they're easy to remove and install for any DIYer. But we ran into it on lots of things. Toto toilets instead of build grade? Full price. Better garage door opener? Full price. Etc. Things that are not nearly as easy for a DIYer to do (or, even if they are, like toilets, they have zero resale value).
The whole experience made me want to become a homebuilder :). Partly because I love houses, partly because it's such a lucrative business.
Depending on the local rules you may not be able to get a certificate of occupancy without a functional kitchen. That would be a reason the builder must install a stove. Wouldn’t have to be THIS stove but there may need to be A stove in order for the local government to approve you to finalize the deal with the builder.
The way it typically works is that you agree to a price for the house, and it will come with a standard set of appliances, usually appropriate to the neighborhood. In our case, the appliances were generally pretty decent, it wasn't really "builder grade" garbage.
During the build process you can elect to upgrade things if you want. That's where the gouging happens.
You could theoretically pre-negotiate the whole thing in advance with exactly the appliances you want, and then try to get the price to be reasonable. But remember that you're negotiating for a house in a hot market with other buyers ready to pull the trigger too. Good luck, if you want to play games, buyers do not have the position of power in negotiations right now.
Or you can just be your own general contractor. Or you could get a piece of land and hire a homebuilder to build to your specs exactly. What I'm talking about is more the typical neighborhood of homes built by one builder, where if you get in early enough in the process you can make customizations for surfaces, colors, flooring materials, windows, roofing, stuff like that. The basic architecture has already been decided (you can sometimes change the house plan to a different one, as long as it's one they already build, it fits the property footprint, and isn't a copy of another house nearby). Maybe you can adjust some walls or doors, but not much structural changes beyond that. You're paying for convenience, and 6 month build times instead of 2 years.
Also reminds me of laptops being bundled with tons of crapware no one would ever use. A lot easier to just delete that stuff than to remove an appliance from your home though.
The thing is lots of people actually actively pursuing such so called smart devices, I personally know a few. They feels so good that they can control things from remote on their phones. For those people, they would happily connect their oven to WIFI for sure. And some self-claimed smart product managers will of course take a step further by making WIFI connection mandatory: you are going to need to connect them to network anyway!
We need to have laws in place to prevent such trend going further. It's super easy for vendors to put BS in but extremely hard if not totally impossible for ordinary users to disable or circumvent.
20 years ago our builder let us have any appliances from any source we wanted. My wife's company was doing a cross-promotion with GE at the time, and we got a decent discount on GE appliances so we loaded up. That turned out to be a mistake in hindsight.
I know there are builders that place a lot more restrictions on your choices so that they're always dealing with something familiar. I don't know how prevalent this is compared to my own experience, nor do I know how it has changed over the years.
> Like many people may have, my first though was why would you buy a smart oven. He explains in a follow up that it was the only one offered by his home builder. And this is an important and overlooked point.
Also you often don't get to choose features from an a la carte menu. "Smart" features are often bundled with the other features you actually want, so there's no easy choice as a consumer.
I would think that the solution would be the same as with any time you buy a house and are not happy with some small part of it: rip that shit out, sell it if you can and put the proceeds towards buying one you like.
People seem very defeatist towards smart devices, and I know they are becoming more prevalent (especially TVs) but I think we still have options
Most new houses in the USA are factory affairs, built in large identical batches by a small number of giant builders who buy the appliances by the thousands at once.
Individually, pushing back on such terms and having a strong alternative. "subtract the cost of the oven and leave the spot empty".
Collectively, through market leveling regulation. "Selling" a device where the manufacturer retains control after the transaction is straightforwardly in the category of fraud. But unfortunately we seem to need new laws rather than relying on straightforward torts.
Furthermore, reigning in the surveillance industry with a US GDPR would go a long way towards removing the incentives for this bullshit.
> He explains in a follow up that it was the only one offered by his home builder
That doesn't explain why he doesn't sell this (likely very expensive) oven at cost, and then use the proceeds to buy a (likely much cheaper) regular oven.
> That doesn't explain why he doesn't sell this (likely very expensive) oven at cost, and then use the proceeds to buy a (likely much cheaper) regular oven.
Maybe because that sounds like a lot of trouble that might actually lead to a worse result from his perspective?
I had my home built. I used a local builder and had complete control over everything that went into the build, from the type of foundation to the make and model of the oven. If you're paying the money you have the control.
True.. but in todays supply chain issues, you might not get that house done for a long long time.
I purchased a built house, six months after my neighbour. I was in 2 days after close. I took the stove and dishwasher the builder picked.
My neighbour has been waiting for 2 years now. Still not able to move in. Many of the places near me broke ground a year ago, and some still have no walls.
It's likely they bought the house from the home builder e.g. something like Toll Brothers. So the alternative is to take their hundreds of thousands of dollars and buy another house.
Once again, this isn't a pack of oreos you're buying from the supermarket and asking to swap a vanilla in the pack.
Negotiating details is perfectly reasonable at this price point. Swap out the oven or I don't buy the house. This is a case of accepting no and then paying for the privilege.
>Once again, this isn't a pack of oreos you're buying from the supermarket and asking to swap a vanilla in the pack.
That's actually the perfect analogy.
>Negotiating details is perfectly reasonable at this price point.
There is no negotiation possible. It's take it or leave it. Toll Brothers don't care if you walk away; they'll turn around and sell it to someone else.
>Swap out the oven or I don't buy the house.
Right, exactly. Except if you insist on this then the result is you don't buy the house 100% of the time. There's no negotiation.
Appliances are not that expensive, and you are free to sell whatever is in your home and buy what you'd like. If you're getting a good deal on the home you can break even, if not ahead on that.
> it was the only one offered by his home builder.
pointless excuses.
it was a stupid purchase just the same.
before someone say blaming victims: buying an extremely overpriced appliance just so you can have it included in your expensive custom home is not a even slightly difficult thing to avoid in life. cmon. just say no and buy it later on, for cheaper no less!
this is even more sily than being forced to buy a phone with data plan just to have access to public services or apply to a job. those things should be talked about. not freaking overpriced appliances sold for custom homes because your architect didn't have other options.
Not disagreeing with the sentiment here, but I was recently surprised to find my LG smart TV allowed me to reject their terms of service and privacy policy.
If you reject them, it cuts off access to all of the smart tv stuff (including the App Store, apps, etc). Seems like telemetry also stops.
Never buy anything Samsung branded. No phones, no consumer SSDs, no TVs, no monitors, no laptops, no phones and tablets, no fridges and wash machines and driers. Nothing. The entire brand is toxic.
Hell, don't even do business with their fab, ask Nvidia about how that turned out for them.
I did the same with my Sony Bravia, although I still have access to apps I want to use. I don't even know what the features are that I rejected cause I don't care about them.
Does it not periodically bug you if you do that? That's what happened with mine until I eventually relented and started getting bugged by their "notification" advertising instead
Affirmation: I got a Spectre non-smart piece-of-shit TV before they sold out at Walmart. It's such a piece of shit it only lets you play mp3s from a directory on flash drive.
Trust me, there's a piece of shit out there somewhere with your name on it. It's just a matter of whether you're going to put in the effort required to find it.
"It's the question that drives us, Neo." -The Matrix
> It's such a piece of shit it only lets you play mp3s from a directory on flash drive.
That's doesn't seem a big problem if you use an external Kodi box. I'll be relocating in months and will likely buy a signage display if I can't find a new bigger enough non smart TV. I only use my current non smart TV for RF channels while everything else comes through a unlocked chromebox with Kodi. It plays everything and doesn't contain spyware or ads.
IDK, my TV went out 3 days before the Super Bowl and I bought a perfectly fine Sceptre (not Spectre) TV from Amazon and got it the morning of the game. As a dumb TV it does exactly what it's supposed to.
side note: I've previously stated that I refuse to buy from Amazon but in this case I had to bite the bullet and take them up on their free month of Prime so that I'd get it by the Super Bowl. They also had other brands with various levels of dumbness.
If you’re happy with 55” or less of 1080p, used LCD TVs are dirt cheap.
Like, I bought a 42” for the cabin for $40, and got a replacement remote for $8 off Aliexpress. I could sell the stand and power supply for about $100 because they’re shared with more “modern”/bigger units.
Everyone is buying the latest 4K smart junk. And losing the stand when they wall-mount it.
(Cabin doesn’t have internet, so I was actually worried about a smart tv disabling itself)
My TV gets a single HDMI in, from my receiver; no wifi. Everything else gets plugged into the receiver. Everything internet related gets played from an external devices, to the receiver, to the TV.
My LCD TV doesn't even have a digital tuner built in. I have a separate (also not internet connected) box to receive OTA digital TV. It's "HD" in the sense of 1366x768, I think. It's probably around 15 years old, barely used.
Yep, but then there is the labor to uninstall, reinstall, and the effort to sell the original. The builder will actually install whatever you want, and the price is just low enough that you would not come out ahead doing the Craigslist swap later. They'll just make you pay the full price of whatever appliance you choose, no credit for the appliance you did not have installed.
We recently had our first child. I finally opened a thermometer we were gifted from a shower and low and behold, the thing can not take a temperature without downloading an app. It has a digital screen and everything, but you when you first power it on you are greeted with it displaying "APP" and you HAVE to download the app & set it up before it will work.
When we finally took the temperature, the damn thing still didn't even display it on the screen, it sent the reading to the app. I don't even know what the point of the screen is.
This thing also wants to "anonymously" share your temp readings and location with the community stating it will help and let you know if there are diseases spreading locally.
It went against my dignity to download it and use the thing, but it was 10:00PM and checking our baby's temp at the time was more important.
Still it was the most asinine smart-device experience I have had to date.
Every time I see a story like this I'm reminded how close we are to unauthorized bread [0] and it saddens me each time.
Humanity was given the greatest communication tool we could imagine and we use it to spy on people and steal their data, so companies can sell more shit. What a waste.
On a side note, I'm convinced Doctorow is the greatest cyberpunk writer there is, but I'm also sure the reason for this is because earlier writers had to imagine a dystopian future. Doctorow, like the rest of us, is living that future (which is much more boring that fiction made out) and he's simply documenting what he sees.
Every time I read about the latest smart-appliance fad, the Amish look a little bit more prudent, and I get one day closer to buying something good and low-tech from Lehman's or the like https://www.lehmans.com/
At a former job, I worked on the low-level OS support for GE devices. With that perspective, I would never buy one of their products that contains any software, and I actively warn others not to buy them.
I worked on medical devices. Imagine how much worse the software will be on devices that do not have that level of regulatory scrutiny.
I have a GE Profile Induction Range. I both love and hate it. Idiots that designed it used capacitive touch sensors to adjust everything, including temperature of the burners.
Think of using your phone with wet hands. Now imagine pan frying something on the range and it splatters adjusting the temperature to max. Need to have presence of mind to either dry the sensor and turn off, or remove pan from range so it auto turns off.
Many manufacturers are doing the same thing and not just GE. Someone is going to have their house burn down because of this design decision.
I think that’s actually common for induction cooktops of many brands. I believe the reason is so to keep the surface a single flat sheet of glass. They’re incredibly easy to clean compared to any other kind of cooktop.
But I agree, not so great to use. On my last one if any water spilled on the capacitive area (eg because of boil over) it would “panic” and completely switch off.
I still love induction and I would rather have it with capacitive buttons than any other kind of cooktop, and I have a high-end gas one.
The problem with anecdotic insights like this is they don't give any information about the competitors, sure you have direct experience with GE (in a completely different dept) but how does that provide any information about any other manufacturer you didn't work at? they could be far worse, they could be far better. Also different divisions within GE could be managed in a vastly different way from your experience.
I have worked with many large businesses in my long career. I would say that most are bad at software, to an extent that I am amazed that any of these gargantuan companies can remain in business. As someone that cares about quality, the experiences have helped to make me extremely bitter and cynical about a career that I once loved. The entire software industry is a house of cards, from what I have seen. No exceptions.
I understand the bitterness and I believe many of us here can definitely relate. My comment was more about the general tendency to extrapolate from specific experiences to general considerations.
When I was younger, I was riding my bicycle and hit by a car. The driver had a GE Electric polo shirt on. He got out, said "are you ok?" (I was concussed and my bicycle was very damaged) and then left.
A few days later I contacted the local GE office (only one anywhere around) and described the car, the man and what happened. They got back to me the next day and advised they had no information for me.
Since then I've been actively hostile to GE and in various business activities found ways to cost them hundreds of thousands of dollars. I'm aware this is a rounding error for them, but fuck those guys.
After you grind in the kitchen on 100 hot chocolates and 50 bags of popcorn, you have enough XP to level up. The software developers just forgot to lock out that feature. Personally I’d rather morph into an air fryer.
I recently wanted to buy a Bluetooth speaker for my mom. From experience I was looking for a small Bose speaker. It wasn't available. They recommended a Sonos alternative.
I looked at the packaging. The price was only slightly below the Bose "equivalent".
At home I wanted to quickly connect the speaker to the computer and was dumbstruck with the requirement to connect it to her wireless and install the App to configure it.
Also I had to agree to Sonos transmitting every app I used to stream music, every song I heard, inclusive of the account names.
This being sold without disclaimer or information that the device is unusable without such a data striptease, app install and wlan was quite irritating. I put the device back into the packaging, brought it back to the store and ordered a Bose for her.
The talk is about how the Smart Speaker 500 cloud infrastructure works. Every button press gets sent to the cloud over websocket, and the device's state is shadowed in a Cassandra cluster. Even the current volume setting.
I just checked the manual and it says you can disable Wifi or Bluetooth, but that if you disable both networks the device goes into standby. Maybe if someone owns one of these they can chime in if there's some way to use the app without it phoning home?
Even if there's a workaround for now, the way they're architecting makes clear the direction they're headed.
Because it is internet connected, and possibly only works when internet connected, you are dependent on the manufacturer after purchase. Does it have a built in web-server that can device-independent access all functions through a local net. If not then it sounds to me like after-sales.
What are the after-sales terms? Is there a contract? Are you going to pay for an after-sales subscription? If not, how is their business model to finance it? How is your privacy or personal identification involved? How long will the product be supported (Planned obsolescence)? Can you block automatic-updates? Can you downgrade the firmware? What are your legal options if they close down the service before product end-of-lifetime? Or liability if the product gets hacked and destroys/damages property? Will refusing after-sales influence warranty? What are their terms & conditions to ban your access to the device? What are the non-automated options in case of disputes? What are the options/rights when escalating complaints?
Sounds like these questions should be answered on the box before you (or the person installing it) should open it. Or in the first section of EULA in layman's terms.
Companies will keep shoveling this kind of garbage out there door as long as people like him are passive enough to deal with it. This may be the limited range of options offered by his builder but if you get an appliance and that appliance does not work contact your builder or contact the manufacturer of the appliance for warranty repair.
Make them send out a technician to manually update the firmware if that's what they require but tell them you have no Wi-Fi and they can take this garbage back and give you your money back and then you can sue your builder to put an appliance that works but until people begin to hit these places in the pocketbook and vote with their dollars this kind of trash will not change.
I don't want to have to buy an "internet of shit appliance" that needs to be on the internet because they shipped it with broken firmware. They can either take it back or they can send a technician to conduct a warranty repair. The only exception would be something that's bold and bright on the front of the box that says internet connection required to function. Most of these things don't say that they just say Wi-Fi enabled. Which is a fine benefit for those people who want that kind of interconnected appliance and spyware lifestyle. For those who do not the correct action is hit the company's in their pocketbook.
The loss of dollars is the only message that companies understand loud and clear. A Twitter complaint is just wasting your time.
What happened to SSL3/TLS1.0/TLS1.1 end-of-life will also happen to Wifi protocols: WEP-only devices are already out, WPA1-only devices will be next to lose access to a properly secured wifi network.
The longevity of the dumb parts in kitchen appliances exceeds that of the smart boxes in them. The manufacturer cannot slap a 20-years maintenance-budget onto the sticker price and I also don't see customers paying for a yearly maintenance subscription for 20 years (for each connected appliance). It will take a decade until people have learned that the shiny new iOT features are a burden in the long run. Maybe iOT maintenance longevity will get sorted out sometimes. Until then I refuse to buy such crap.
I wish I was so positive about that. Disposable electronics have been part of cars (which cost 10s of thousands of dollars) for far longer and people still buy them. We’re doomed. Doomed I say.
I understand what you are saying but this is where citizens can obviously lobby their representatives to ban this practice and allow a category of goods to work without internet connections.
The harm here isn't that there is no non-WiFi oven available, it's the underlying reason why the oven wants Wi-Fi and an app: "growth and engagement" aka data collection, advertising, etc. The primary purpose of this oven isn't to be an oven, it's to build a "platform" which you can then use to "engage" its users with more ads, DRM-encumbered consumables, etc. Their intended end-game is the "Unauthorized Bread" story: https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2020/01/unauthorized-bread-a-...
Regulation should address non-consensual data collection and the rest will follow. Non-WiFi ovens will be back on the market once the connected ones stop being profitable (since you can no longer stalk... I mean "engage" their users).
> I understand what you are saying but this is where citizens can obviously lobby their representatives to ban this practice and allow a category of goods to work without internet connections.
I think that the burden of proof should be the other way: it shouldn't be that certain special devices are exempt from internet connections, but rather that all devices should offer a mode whereby they perform all functionality that does not directly require an internet connection. Then, of course, we'll have debates about what directly requires an internet connection … but at least it'll bring the discussion into the open.
The danger is that we'll end up with the same situation as we have with TVs - good luck finding a consumer-grade TV with modern specs that doesn't spy on you, ask you to create an account, show ads, etc.
Some people will say that there are still budget models (Sceptre is a common brand that comes up in these discussions) that doesn't have any of that, but they're not selling these products out of goodwill - they just have a lot of dead stock (panels, etc) that they can shift profitably. This stock will run out (and it does - do these TVs have any modern features such as HDR, a quality panel, etc?) if it turns out to be more profitable to produce spy devices that happen to display TV content rather than produce devices intended to display TV content with no interest (nor capability) to spy.
The proper solution is to heavily restrict advertising and data collection so that in the end the advertising-based business model isn't profitable and it becomes more profitable to just go back to the old model of selling good, purposeful devices at a profit.
For now at least there are ovens that don't require it. But since it's remarkably hard to find a robotic vacuum that doesn't require wifi connectivity it may just be a matter of time before all ovens are asking their owners to create an account.
Honestly, people can be weirdly difficult about some things. I've had a few cases in business where a vendor will say "this is the only way, nothing else is possible" for an obviously silly solution, only to reveal an alternative after the third or fourth push back.
It's only a matter of time until these internet connected appliances don't need access to your wifi. They will either have a cell modem or the appliance company will pay Amazon for access to their mesh network.
> Make them send out a technician to manually update the firmware if that's what they require but tell them you have no Wi-Fi and they can take this garbage back and give you your money back and then you can sue your builder to put an appliance that works
The oven is specifically marketed as not having some features without connecting to the internet. I'm not sure what you think complaining would accomplish, but I can assure you it will not lead to any firmware updates or refunds. And it definitely won't lead to a winning law suit.
Oh man, this reminds me of a story - GE Profile oven in a ski condo, last day or second to last day we were there.
Broke in a way that you couldn't open the door - and we couldn't get the bacon out. Wound up reading the repair manual and a forum while the GF cooked eggs, trying to figure it out.
The Solenoid that is used to lock the door when it goes through a clean cycle has to be powered on 100% of the time, and keeps its spring compressed. Power turns off to lock it. If the insulator/bushing for it breaks, it will jam open & lock the door.
Family will never buy GE appliances after this happened. Mom just bought a new Kitchenaid that's got exactly 0 smart features.
Staying in an AirBnB, desperate for a cup of tea, no kettle and only an induction hob. Somehow manage to bork the hob trying to switch it on such that it is just showing an error code (E06 or some such). Much futile googling for said error code, and still no tea at the end of it. Utter madness.
Sure it wasn't detecting that the pot on top wasn't magnetic and wouldn't heat up? My little portable induction burner is smart enough to detect if the pot won't work and warns you/fails to start.
The worst part of this stuff is you never find out about it until long after the purchase is over. Unless you happen to know a brand that’s good (say Speed Queen for now) you are stuck trying to guess what issues may occur someday.
The only vendor who still sells a washer without lid lock... I'm looking at getting their TC5 to replace this piece of shit maytag that doesnt fill up properly.
That's hilarious. It was an engineer trying to be fake safe. Losing control over your device is going to be less safe than just letting the user open the door during a clean cycle if the power drops.
Why does an oven need this? Is the idea that everything will be connect to the internet and need the manufacturers permission to use? Will I need American Standard's permission to flush my toilet one day? Where does this end?
After reading this, I'd be pissed off: "Smart ovens require a WiFi connection for the best experience."
After reading this, I'd be absolutely besides myself: "Please connect to unlock the latest features and receive important software updates."
Of course all of this is just to collect data on you. Sooner or later, all these devices will have cameras and voice recorders to better "serve"/observe you with voice/face recognition/etc. "Smart" devices, "smart" homes, "smart" cars, etc. When will we get "smart" clothes. That'll be nice. Your zipper won't work unless it has a wifi connection to Gap.
After a year of having to continuously adjust my oven's block because it would drift 10 minutes faster over the course of a month, I finally decided to connect it to the wifi with the remote hope that it would connect to an NTP server. Looks like I got lucky, and it's finally keeping proper time. I _did_ go the extra step of completely blocking all other network connectivity to and from that thing.
The door refused to open. It said, "Five cents, please."
He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. "I'll pay you tomorrow," he told the door. Again it remained locked tight. "What I pay you," he informed it, "is in the nature of a gratuity; I don't have to pay you."
"I think otherwise," the door said. "Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt."
...he found the contract. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip.
"You discover I'm right," the door said. It sounded smug.
I really dislike this trend... My parents own a robotic vacuume cleaner, which also requires you to login to companies servers before you can unlock all the functionality.
I'm of the opinion that a device should be as independent as possible.
Maybe to achieve special functionality you can implement a remote but that too should work as independently as possible.
Anything more then this is just a sin, anti-consumer behaviour.
There is absolutely no reason why must login to a server that's on the other side of the planet just to tell the vacuume cleaner to clean only a part of my room...
The problem is that the majority of people don't care and they'll just buy a new device/robot cleaner once the company turns their servers off, because let's face it we're still very fast away from a law that would force companies to open source their stuff before they shutdown everything for good.
This kind of behaviour is just making the e-waste problem worse...
It clearly says that the WiFi gives you the better experience ;)
Btw you know what is also garbage? Scrolling through a twitter thread in your browser and then halfway through reading some sentence the whole screen goes black and it tells you to log in. I literally had all I wanted to read on the screen already but I couldn’t finish it.
I recently had to install a new Netgear switch (GS724TPP) for a customer. It won't let you use "advanced" features like VLAN without registering it to a Cloud account first! (It was on a construction side with unfinished internet.) I told my boss to never buy Netgear again.
I had a similar issue with Ubiquiti Unifi gear... trying to set it up on a site about a week before Internet connection would be available.
The funny thing it was before it started to require cloud accounts (UDM et al). Just without being able to connect to the Internet, I could not complete the setup.
One of the replies mentions Samsung's similar requirement frustrating his elderly relative. According to a 2015 OECD computer skills study, <6% of Americans are level 3 (highest) while half have only basic skills and 20% can't use computers. https://www.oecd-ilibrary.org/education/skills-matter_978926...
Only ~5% of folks in the US are able to navigate through webpages and apps when doing so is required so solve a particular problem. And it's not like this is just a US problem, the highest percentage across the measured countries is a measly 10%.
And the example task they used - using webpages and apps to find a job - is more and more based solely online these days.
I think I need to go make another donation to our local library for their work in helping folks navigate these tasks...
Many places that hire employees that don't have their own computers have like a little computer lab. I remember Target being like that around 2005, and a hospital in 2017 or so.
The employees, or volunteers, help people that have trouble.
I remember someone being very angry that she was required to provide proof of graduating high school or something when it was like 30 years ago and the school didn't even exist anymore.
The problem with this trend is what happens in 2-3 years when the manufacturer decides they don’t want to update the app anymore? I have ovens that are twenty years old, my washing machine was made in the 1950s (and has so much steel I think it can be used as a tank in times of war). I’m pretty sure appliances today aren’t built to the same standard but seems foolish to have to throw everything away every few years because the app isn’t being updated for the latest iOS or it’s not compatible with wifi7 or similar. At least with my AC I can fall back to the remote or front panel. In this case you don’t even get that option.
All this “smart” stuff kills me for basic appliances that no Wi-Fi should ever be needed for.
Example: I am in the process of building a custom home with the ability to purchase whatever we want - when looking at ovens I told the salesperson that I didn’t want anything that has to connect to the internet and the response was that I would need to pick out something lower end because everything “high end” has the connectivity now. Even dishwashers.
I went through something similar. I just made sure all the high end appliances I got didn’t need WiFi to work. Having the capability (but not connected) hasn’t limited anything at all so far.
What’s funny is my oven claims it’s owned by someone else and says I have to contact Whirlpool with proof of ID to change it. Not sure how I feel about my oven gaslighting me.
Haven't bought appliances in a long time but we recently replaced most of the appliances with LG Thinq units, incl. a Wifi enabled refrigerator, oven, washer and dryer.
I have to say the Wifi enabled refrigerator is next to useless, I guess it tells me the temp and when the water filter needs changing ... not things I need. (and it only works on 2Ghz, so you need a separate 2Ghz only WLAN for it).
The Wifi oven is actually useful, because when you have that "did I leave the oven on" moment after you have left the house, not only can you check, but you can remotely turn it off. It's also useful for starting the oven preheat as you're buying that frozen pizza at the store so you can come home to a hot oven ready to go. The periodic "your oven needs cleaning" notifications are annoying though.
By far the Wifi enabled washer and dryer are the most useful! You get a notification when the wash/dry is done! and the washer will keep reminding you until you open the door on the unit so you don't end up forgetting and then having to rewash to avoid smelly clothes.
(weirdly, only the fridge had the 2Ghz only problem, must use different hardware)
Woo, your house now has a internet accessible & hackable remote fire starter where someone could leave your oven / stove on at max for hours until something ignites and burns the entire house down!
Yeah, you could imagine nation state hackers activating thousands of ovens, washers/dryers etc all at the same moment to try to overload the power grid.
I've seen the Battlestar Galactica reboot, I should know better than to network my house!
I connected my wifi to the oven just to get NTP after dealing with clock drift on the order of 10 minutes per month. I went ahead and blocked all other traffic to and from it from the router.
My Bosch dishwasher does it the right way. The app is optional, and WiFi can be disabled via the front panel settings so it doesn't scan for networks every time it powers on. Well done Bosch.
Not so well done is my "Beddi" alarm clock by Witti Design. Every time the snooze button is pressed, bluetooth is activated in an attempt to connect with the app. This happens even when bluetooth was deactivated before the alarm goes off, and even when only the internal buzzer is used as the alarm choice, with no smart features used. I asked them about this and they replied saying most people want the smart features of the clock, so they just decided to make bluetooth scanning non-optional. Interesting how they "know" what most people want.
Imagine being usage-tracked from literally the moment you wake up and perform your first action for the day - hitting the snooze button. I understand some people choose to have the clock connect with the app on pressing snooze, but the option to disable that and have it remain disabled should be available.
I find it hard to call this a good argument for why this is. If an appliance does not work out of the box, it is not finished and not ready to ship to customers.
The game industry does this, which is crap, but appliances are people use to cook their meals and should not be unfinished.
No, it's fantastic. If they did what you think you want you'd get the same games perhaps a year later.
So because they're doing it you can get what you'd have gotten anyway and more, because if you just buy games after they've been out for a while you'll likely get a large discount.
And people who are big fans of the franchise can get the game earlier if they want, and essentially pay for being beta testers.
In a world of investors demanding large percentage returns on their investments, investing money in a programmer and then not being able to sell a product to the public for a year isn't financially viable. The time between doing the work and getting paid must be minimized to get decent returns.
That's why they develop the firmware while the hardware is on the boat.
With games and games consoles it's really noticeable - there is no games console you can buy and use without a day-1 update to make it functional.
One possible solution is to buy the cheapest, low-power wifi hub you can find. Plug it in and DO NOT connect it to the internet. Then make this wifi network the target for all your "I wish they were dumb" appliances.
EDIT: assuming that the appliance only insists on wifi connection and not internet connection.
You could also do this with an iPhone hotspot- although the connected device _will_ have Internet access. Not sure if that's a problem for an oven or not.
In my social and work bubble nobody I've spoken to about it watches live TV anymore, myself included. News is consumed online (primarily Economist, Guardian and BBC, but not exclusively). TV does XBox, DVDs (I've amassed over 1000¹) and streaming (via Xbox and an old laptop). So of course any dumb disaplay with an HDMI connector will do the job. Sports events often also stream live, or can be watched in the pub. So beyond that, does live TV offer that much value that it merits a Smart TV?
¹ Of course most won't have such a library - but it offers nothing more or less than streaming does.
> [A DVD] offers nothing more or less than streaming does
No way! DVDs have all sorts of extra features you can’t get via streaming services, like director commentaries or even feature documentaries. Plus alternate language tracks.
I'm curious about this from a U.S. legal perspective.
Suppose I advertise (and sell) a product without clearly informing the buyer of additional requirements they'll face in order to use the product as advertised.
E.g., access functionality via WiFi, accept an EULA, etc.
At what point does that become fraud or illegally deceptive advertising?
I'm assuming that there's some allowance for assuming common knowledge, e.g. that an electric oven will require a 220-240V connection. But if there's a legal line to be crossed, where is it?
He literally shows a screenshot in the article with the line highlighted telling you that you have to connect an app to unlock some features. You'd have a hard time arguing that's deceptive advertising.
Sometimes in 2016 we were working on a kitchen renovation and decided on a built-in double oven, and went with GE's offering. I seriously considered $ 300 more for the top-shelf offering that included convection on both ovens and Wi-Fi connectivity.
Back then Haier just bought GE Appliances and that made me waver. Also I knew their fridges with Wi-Fi were running Windows CE, what I didn't think it would have a long future, and integration through a now chinese/american company didn't quite appeal me.
In the end bought the version without Wi-Fi and only one convection oven, which has proven more than enough.
The advantage of Wi-Fi we though would be to be able to set the oven to cook the food left on it by the time we arrived from work.
But then again food had to be left at room temperature most of the day, so we figured it wouldn't be something we would use too often.
Now after two years of working from home, this became more irrelevant.
Now my house is as automated as I can possibly make it, but running local mesh networks (Z-Wave and Zigbee), and the few Wi-Fi devices are HomeKit enabled, which means it should not depend on 3rd party cloud offerings for standard functionality, and has been mostly limited to decorative lighting developed in North American or European companies.
I quite like the idea of being able to remote control the oven and maybe have a camera view inside but these smart appliances always do something batshit that scares me off
I know a fair number of people who have internet connected fridges, thermostats, cars, air quality monitors, and so on.
Most of them don't work in tech. Those that do have very few and seek out 'dumb' versions. I count myself in that group.
Next time I need a new TV it will not be a smart one. My current on has Roku but not its showing ads... so now I use TV exclusively through my Apple TV. Sigh
It is at least nice to hear that the touchscreen experience was nice. Recently I had 2 experiences where I longed back to older tech. A Siemens oven/microwave in a rented cabin that had an awful menu filled with options and took 4 steps to get to the function I needed, whereas my 10 y/o AEG I hit the function I want (key with icon immediately accessible) and then start. And, my own 2006 Ford has a BT module (aftermarket) which just starts when I start the car and it connects and works. My parents Dacia has a fancy system that takes 2 min to boot and then I need to try a couple of times and then it connects, really annoying, yeah it has a large touchscreen but I much prefer my ancient 1 line LCD display.
Now that I think about it, my oven has a one line old glowy numbers display. Maybe the limited displays force much more thought into how to make funtions accessible.
Games won't install or run without connecting to blocked or decommissioned servers, printers won't accept "foreign" cartridges, scanners won't scan, DVDs/BDs won't play without auth, TPM, DRM... What a time to be alive! (
Buy used, pre-"smart" appliances that are 100% under your control. There's a huge aftermarket of parts availability and repair information for them, and they tend to be reliable and simple to fix if they do break. Every time I read about something like this I'm happy that all of mine are roughly from mid-century and dumb.
Countless dumb appliances are scrapped all the time; it's not hard to find one for cheap or even free, and that only needs a minor repair and cleaning to continue working for many more decades.
My Toyota Venza's rear camera (2009) won't work, if the Map DVD can't be loaded :(in my case it was just the DVD reader got busted or something), but such critical part as rear camera should not fail the Map Navigator it's not working (at least nowadays there are alternatives you can swap easily - e.g. your phone, not so easy with rear camera).
That will work for all of two years before we get the same shit but with "gesture" controls (waving your arms in the air).
Legislate against what you actually want to prevent. Here that's locking features behind privacy violations and connections to third party hardware. In cars it is also controls that you have to look away from the road to use.
The gdpr is on the right track on this issue, for an example.
The Smart Home 2.0 revolution will address the accessibility gap of voice enabled devices by including cameras in home appliances too, so that speakers of sign language aren't left behind.
Think past the end of privacy and imagine the democratization of access to privacy. A brave new world where everyone gets the opportunity to be a big brother. As for me, I'm pretty happy spending most of my time working with a teletypewriter, cooking my food on unsmart appliances, and not using a mobile phone.
Or merely restrict non-consensual data collection like the GDPR does - this kills the underlying reason why every appliance has to be "smart" and internet-connected.
I'm not aware of other manufacturers, although Samsung also makes signage displays but it's not clear if they employ any "smart" features. Some also use Tizen which is Linux based and should be open enough to allow rooting.
Imagine pan frying something on your range, the food splatters, and it changes the temperature on you. Now you need to adjust the burner back down (or off), but you can't adjust the temperature because the controls are now wet with grease. Better be quick to dry off controls and turn off heat before you start a grease fire. Or failing that, moving the pan off from the heat source...
“Smart” appliances are so idiotic this has stopped being funny many moons ago and it saddens me that it’s such a sad state of affairs. Even the best consumer electronics companies generate such frustrating software that I’m losing faith in the profession itself.
Why is software so difficult and when will it stop?
This is why licensing your brand is such a double edged sword. GE has had nothing to do with engineering appliances for many years, yet you can still take the reputational hit when things like this come to light.
I can see where this could spur a market for replacement firmware or entire electronics packages for home appliances. Appliance repair technicians would be paid to install or "upgrade".
This is why I love living in Europe. We do not require an app for stuff. If I let someone remodel my kitchen I can tell the person what kind op appliances I like and they have to obey that.
What's the need for this on GE's side? What was the product manager thinking? Is the idea to collect and monetize usage data, or something else? There must be a reason (?).
Clearly, they had to ship the oven before they could write the convection roasting software. With a quick 240 GB download your oven will be fully working until patch v1.1 next month.
Would be funny if the convection oven code slipped to a day 1 patch instead of this being nefarious user metric scraping. I'm not sure which explanation is worse.
Paying $3800 for an oven is the first mistake. I build high end custom kitchens and have never had a client pay that much for an oven/stove unless it's a commercial type (Viking etc.). Some people have to much money and not enough brains.
The right time to complain about this would have been before you bought the oven. Companies are only going to stop these practices if shoppers vote with their wallets.
I’m starting to think people buy this stuff on purpose to get attention on the internet by complaining about it. Why on earth would i buy an oven with Wi-Fi and NOT think the manufacturer would enforce the use of it…
I think it is a legitimate complaint, even if they did post a disclaimer in the ad that said you had to connect to WiFi for full features. The market is having a tough time adjusting to this tactic, which seems to work primarily by preying on consumers that mostly do not know better. It's how we ended up with all good quality large televisions being Smart TVs, with no viable alternative. So people should complain, publicly, loudly, and demonstrate that a market exists for dumb devices.
There's no reason in principle that a Chromecast device couldn't include some local storage to support an offline viewing mode, although I do think they have a much stronger case that it would be annoying and inconvenient to build than for a GE oven.
I don't mean streaming the sound output via the home app (it fails too, more than 50%), but streaming over bluetooth, with A2DP. It is supposedly supported, except that I cannot enable pairing mode (also in the home app) in order for pairing with bt sources.
The difference is, that it doesn't have to go via access point, both ways, but directly. Especially handy if both of the devices are near each other and the access point is not.
A lot of garbage that no reasonable person would ever buy ends up being weaseled in to new home sales because of deals the companies cut with the builders, knowing nobody buys a house based on whether they could have a user-scamming smart appliance as the default. This kind of thing is insidious- I have no idea what the solution is.
Though as a afterthought, it reminds me a bit of the microsoft antitrust stuff from 20+ years ago where they bundled IE as part of destroying Netscape (im sure there is more subtlety than that, that's the gist of what I remember)