It's all about unfounded accusations, but even if the accusations are founded, if the person living there is the worst fucking racist who deserves to be shunned; that may be a valid reason for Amazon to stop delivering stuff to his home, and refuse to sell anything to him, but not to disable his entire home and disable the devices that he has already paid for.
Once you've sold it, it shouldn't be yours anymore. Inviting this kind of surveillance into your home, where we're being policed by profit-driven corporations, is the biggest condemnation of this sort of IoT crap. Imagine if my car stops working if Toyota disapproves of something I say. Imagine I can't pay for food because of something I said.
Pulling this sort of crap should be punished with heavy fines.
And if companies are at the same time held responsible for the stuff that goes through their servers and that creates an impossible situation for them, then maybe they shouldn't be creating these sort of dependencies at all.
Totally agree. Moreover, there could be people living in the same house who are not involved in the racism incident in any way but are still affected by Amazon's decision.
Wouldn’t it be even more wrong to send drivers to someone who might racially abuse them? Of course that doesn’t excuse the smart home part and they should have done a better investigation
Amazon thought that the person had already shouted a slur at the driver. They were wrong, but if they had been right blocking further deliveries to protect the drivers would have been reasonable (if it was just that)
So Amazon should continue sending people to someone who will racially abuse them just because the police didn’t catch it yet? (again, assuming that they had done the investigation properly which they didn’t in this case, which would involve collecting more evidence to back it up)
Agreed, but note that "abuse" is the operative word here. It's possible to be racist and not be outwardly hateful, and it's also possible to be non-racist and horribly abusive to staff.
These terms (gay, black, racist) are arbitrary classifications that are just broad enough to be useful, but are often attributed due to narrow characteristics or specific behaviors. eg "acting <label>"
This discussion ostensibly is focused on labeling that may be inaccurate, so I am not considering self identification.
Racist behavior is a judgement call to determine state of mind (behavioral patterns). Gay is a term that describes attraction to a similar gender, despite the overlap with other classifications (eg bi), which again is a judgement call about state of mind (behavioral patterns). Black is a label that also occurs due to behavior. Black is also a label based on a visual cue, which is arbitrary based on a pattern from personal experience. These terms are alike as labels, in these ways.
> This discussion ostensibly is focused on labeling that may be inaccurate, so I am not considering self identification.
You can't accurately talk about these topics without considering self identification.
> Racist behavior is a judgement call to determine state of mind (behavioral patterns).
That is one option, but it can also be a description of the results of someone's actions, without considering their state of mind.
> Gay is a term that describes attraction to a similar gender, despite the overlap with other classifications (eg bi), which again is a judgement call about state of mind (behavioral patterns).
Gay describes attraction only to the same gender, so the overlap with bi is only there if you ignore this. Since it's fundamentally self-identification I don't see how it's a judgement of state of mind.
> Black is a label that also occurs due to behavior. Black is also a label based on a visual cue, which is arbitrary based on a pattern from personal experience.
Black is a self-identification label which has overlap with visual cues, but isn't predicated upon them. It's a fundamentally different label from "racist".
To be fair, I'm talking about labeling, not the larger social structures groups inhabit.
> That is one option, but it can also be a description of the results of someone's actions
I don't believe pure actions are how humans derive intent. Actions are often used as an implication toward the state of mind. A child hitting another child is an action that does not connotate racist behavior under most conditions. Per your own statement:
"even if you think you're not being racist, you might be racist from the PoV of someone you were racist towards" - the classification is arbitrary based on observation.
> Since it's fundamentally self-identification
That's an opinion. Given the existence of homosexual behavior in animals, I think there is a biological component that is separate from conscious decisioning.
> it isn't predicated upon them
I do not subscribe to the idea that "black" is a specific differentiation in humans. It's an arbitrary label based on observation.
> To be fair, I'm talking about labeling, not the larger social structures groups inhabit.
I am also talking about labelling. But we as a society don't go around and say "you're gay, and you're gay , and you're gay" - we listen to what people identify as. This is fundamentally different from racism, which is rooted in behaviour, which we don't have to listen to self-identity for. That's my whole point.
> I don't believe pure actions are how humans derive intent. Actions are often used as an implication toward the state of mind. A child hitting another child is an action that does not connotate racist behavior under most conditions. Per your own statement: "even if you think you're not being racist, you might be racist from the PoV of someone you were racist towards" - the classification is arbitrary based on observation.
How are the classifications arbitrary if they are based on observation?
> That's an opinion. Given the existence of homosexual behavior in animals, I think there is a biological component that is separate from conscious decisioning.
No, it's not an opinion. You can't look at someone and accurately judge their sexual preferences. You can't even necessarily look at their actions - how many gay people had to live straight lives in the past?
The only way to properly arrive at someone's sexual preferences is to ask them.
> I do not subscribe to the idea that "black" is a specific differentiation in humans. It's an arbitrary label based on observation.
I don't understand how you're arriving at "black" being arbitrary based on observation, since it's an identification. Someone isn't black because they "act black".
In some places, it's "gay" if two guys hold hands. On the racist bit: it can be hard to disambiguate why someone treats you in an unfavorable way -- it could be because they're actually racist or they could just be a pissy person who hates their job.
Just because a person or group of people classifies you a certain way doesn't make it universally true.
> In some places, it's "gay" if two guys hold hands.
Sure, but that doesn't mean those two guys are gay.
> On the racist bit: it can be hard to disambiguate why someone treats you in an unfavorable way -- it could be because they're actually racist or they could just be a pissy person who hates their job.
Just because a person or group of people classifies you a certain way doesn't make it universally true.
It might not be universally true, but it is subjectively true. That's the difference: even if you think you're not being racist, you might be racist from the PoV of someone you were racist towards.
Just a counter example, if a Comcast customer unloads a racist tirade against a customer support rep on the phone, it's reasonable for Comcast to cut-off their internet services, right? Even if they bought their router and modem from Comcast - is there a meaningful difference?
No. Internet connectivity is now on the same level of utility as phone service was 30 years ago. As far as I know ma bell couldn’t disconect your phone just because you yelled at them. Utilities are held to higher standards (often because they’re sanctioned monopolies) and companies cannot just decide to not do business with you because you’re a bad person.
Something like a smart home starts to be a gray area I think, due to the indirect nature of it. Does shutting off some MQTT service count simply because it serves traffic? But if it becomes more common I guarantee it’ll become more regulated, so things like this can’t happen as easily.
Personally I think it’s foolish not to control the backbone your smart devices run on, home assistant gets better every year, but I also know that most people aren’t going to add that to their already busy lives.
I can't believe anyone would buy cloud encumbered IoT or many of the things people do today in modern society where they pick convenience and/or instant gratification over all else
Amazon and other Tech companies are Huge because they provide people what they desire instantly with no friction.
Why setup a HA instance and learn to manage things yourself when you can just outsource it
It's because most people don't consider it to be "trading freedom." If the thing breaks you replace it.
But people actually do want the kinds of features enabled by IoT devices on top of cloud infrastructure and they're reasonably priced. It's not idiocy, it's utility.
And you're free not to buy into it. It's no skin off your back.
I consider it idiocy because you can have the same utility without putting control of your home into someone else's hands.
> And you're free not to buy into it. It's no skin off your back.
Of course. It's absolutely no skin off my back. I'm just expressing that I don't understand why people choose to do this. It's also true that I don't need to understand! But I am curious.
the answer to all of those are yes. it's the reason why you should not put all your eggs in on basket.
especially the case for google. ex, with their anti adblock movement in youtube, there's a small chance you might find yourself locked from your emails, GCP, Drive and every other service if they decide to be more aggressive about it.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36747367
although it is unethical for Amazon to do this etc. and obviously I am the last person to argue for people needing to be smart about things but probably it would make sense not to have business services associated with personal services, also for tax purposes etc.
Same reaction, only I thought of Amazon not learning. Gotta be a non-zero chance this person is loving going back to the publicity well.
But yeah all of it is speculation really, right? There's no facts here you'd bet large sums on being as described - yet it's entirely possible some are too. Who knows?
And that's why we have laws and courts to deal with bad behavior.
It's absurd that in 2023 the operation of your home appliances depends on your relationship with your mailman. Large tech companies like Amazon have their fingers in way too many pies. It may not technically be a monopoly, but it seems very detrimental to consumers.
I haven't said it does. Frankly, that's my main gripe with all the XaaS. You're always risking that the service provider switched you off. That's my main fear with all these autonomous car businesses. Anyway... But the consumer has the choice.
These cloud providers should be regulated like utilities.
I used to think that way too until I learned from Louis Rossmann that it's basically just blaming the victim (who might not actually have a real choice). For example it might be a rented place, or maybe he's just saying there temporarily.
It doesn't help things if we blame others for their poor consumer choices.
It's also unusual because this is Amazon instead of Google.
Amazon is suddenly going to suspend someone because a random employee made a report?! With neither verification nor advance notice? Excuse me?
That seems like it could very well stand under racketeering laws--"Nice delivery service you got there--shame if something were to happen to it." I hope there is an ambulance chaser salivating over this.
The whole situation here seems bad because people being cut off from their existing prepurchased smart devices is bad (and going to happen when servers get shut down). Can we separate that from the entirely correct action from Amazon of "if you are going to insult our deliverypeople with racist language, we no longer will send them to your house". Leaving aside any moral judgements of doing business at all with such a person, Amazon would probably face some legal liability for constantly asking their employees to put up with that.
Also, while the US certainly has racism, I don't think it's fair to call that "US-centric". A lot of countries have a lot of racists.
No we can not, mainly because there was no due process on that at all. No Corroboration, no investigation before taking action.
One driver, made one accusation, and bam instant termination of the account. I can not support that as being the "correct action". Far too much room for abuse in such a system
in this case the person had to submit evidence of their innocence to amazon by way of other Camera's. what if no evidence had existed to refute the drivers claim? I will never a support a "Guilty until proven innocent" standard for anything
Due process does not apply to corporations and the supreme Court has made it very clear that anyone can discriminate against anyone they want, for any reason, real or imagined and opt to not do business with them. Amazon doesn't need to deliver things to you if they think you're a jerk.
> in this case the person had to submit evidence of their innocence to amazon by way of other Camera's. what if no evidence had existed to refute the drivers claim?
Amazon is not a right. If they couldn't prove it wasn't true, Amazon doesn't owe them anything except possibly a refund on the smart devices (I could see that).
I see you have consused what it legal with what is moral or ethical
Is Amazon legally mandated to give their customers Due process? no and I never claimed they were.
The Comment I was responding to also did not make a legal claim or statement, they did not say "Amazon had the legal right to terminate their account" they claimed "Amazon made the entirely correct action" Which I disagree with, as I believe all companies even if they are not legally required to do so should apply common sense principles in their business dealings one of those being due process, and evidence based approaches before they choose to terminate business relationships
It is sad to live in a society where every action, every interaction, is guided by what is "legal" it is even sadder when people look to legislative bodies for their moral and ethical guidance
>Can we separate that from the entirely correct action from Amazon of "if you are going to insult our deliverypeople with racist language, we no longer will send them to your house".
What!?!? The description of the incident says " Amazon completely shut down the customer's account, locking him out of his smart home devices."
How is that "we will no longer send them to your house"?
If in order to not send a delivery person to a customer's house Amazon needs to shut down the customer's account it would seem that the one having difficulty separating these things that should be separate is Amazon and not anyone else?
I totally agree that Amazon would have been entirely within their rights to refuse to do business with anyone who abuses their delivery people in any way. But that's not what this issue is about. This is about how we make our homes and other essential parts of our lives dependent on these giant corporations that can't seem to be held accountable for anything they do.
Yeah, but he would have survived without Amazon for a week. Or forever. If not, then that's a monopoly that definitely needs to be taken down.
The fact that it was a misunderstanding isn't relevant in my opinion. Had it been a real insult, Amazon might be justified in refusing to deliver there, but that's still not a justification to turn of all their devices.
But most importantly: we should stop making ourselves so dependent on these giant corporations that care nothing about us, only about profit.
At what point is this malicious? What is the actual consumer use case for this being built - a word that is deemed offensive by the amazon product people magically bricks you out of your own home?
I don't know about you but to me that point was reached and exceeded when it became clear the person making the claim was wearing ear pods and couldn't even claim an unobstructed listening experience to the event they complained about...
No. He did not say a forbidden word. The delivery driver claimed he said a forbidden word. The video evidence showed they delivery driver did not correctly retell what happened.
The thing that bugs me is that there is no penalty for the delivery driver.
I should have added a sarcasm tag. The thing that bugs me is that you could say a word other people don't like hearing on their own porch and be locked out of their home.
Don't forget 4: Bold assertions that this couldn't possibly happen in our corporate 'topia followed by silence after the non-apology by the company that did it.
I'm usually an early adopter for tech stuff, but I'm not interested in this smart home crap at all. The idea that vendors could remotely mess with it is back of mind, but the main thing is that it ~all just seems worse than the stuff it replaces.
My door locks, light switches, and thermostats have simply never bothered me enough to consider the hassle of automating them, even assuming the automation works perfectly (it won't) and the "smart" devices are just as reliable as the things they replace (they aren't).
I work in IoT and I don’t install anything on my home that isn’t local first and doesn’t require internet access. As you can imagine, the list of these products is very small, most of them are things I custom made.
The problem with IoT is that most of the products lose their shit and very ungracefully handle poor or intermittent internet connectivity, all so they can potentially route my button taps and commands through a random server outside my house and back to the internet connected device. When this company discontinued the product, goes bust, or they just change their servers without an update to “older devices”, your $xxx item becomes a paperweight. Some of this is likely data mining, but I would reckon most of this is simply poor or incompetent engineering and management with a slash of vendor lock-in. The company selling you cloud service does not care that it stops working when the go under, and we need to not buy this hot garbage either.
I am heavily into smart home; I have over 100 devices in my home.
My main requirement for my home is that everything had to “fail normal”. My non-geek family would not tolerate the lights not working if the internet connection failed. To that end, although everything is connected to a cloud service eventually (HomeKit), loss of internet or excommunication by a cloud service provider would simply disable app- and voice control, but stuff would still work normally otherwise. If a device manufacturer bricked a device intentionally then I am fortunate enough to be financially able to hire an attorney.
I am currently working with an electrical engineering firm to build my own line of smart home devices, that will be fully open (HW and SW) and will be based on Raspberry Pi (there’s an actual Pi Zero 2W in the light switches).
I’ll post here when I’m at the point where I have something to share.
I have a few smart power plugs outside that I like being on the cloud so I can control the string lights connected to them from bed without having to go outside and actually hit the physical switch.
It's also super frustrating that they all need their own servers and app and infrastructure. You'd think there'd be a standard by now. Last time when the power went out for several hours I had to resync the switch.
I wonder if home automation is one of those things that eventually gets figured out and we look back at today thinking, “we tolerated that?” or if it never gets solved at a standards level and we just have egregiously subpar experiences delivered by vendors all naively attempting to dominate the market with a crippled product.
Also, I think the spying has the potential for being more insidious and more passive. Im thinking of sound beacons, at human-imperceptible frequencies, sent by a TV or smart speaker that lets some data aggregator determine what is being played in a home or who is at home.
> potential for being more insidious and more passive. Im thinking of sound beacons
I have some bad news for you - what you describe as a dystopian future hellscape was up and running by 2015. If you want to so much as slow it down, stick to F-Droid or ditch your smartphone.
I think this is tinfoil hat energy. The power adapter can't provide any meaningful information. I leave it on for days sometimes when I'm not even in the yard. Does that mean I was home or not home? Totally irrelevant. It doesn't have its own screen and once it's synced to my Google home I don't even have to think about it. Google home even lets you setup automations based on sunset and sunrise. How does that figure into this data?
> being on the cloud so I can control the string lights connected to them from bed
> You'd think there'd be a standard by now.
I don’t understand, isn’t there a standard? All my smart stuff is on ZigBee, I can control everything locally (app via LAN to the machine running the automation, machine via Zigbee to switches and sensors) and I don’t need any cloud functionality at all. If the power goes out, everything reconnects in two minutes.
There are standards, but every major smart home tech company wants to be the controller, not a slave. Generally you find that, for each brand of device, you have an in-home controller that controls that brand of device over a proprietary protocol, and a proprietary cloud that the controller talks to for app control. Most clouds allow integration with Alexa and Google assistant for voice control, and many clouds will also allow you to control devices of other brands that might have integrated with them.
ZWave and Zigbee devices are currently the most vendor neutral but you have to really love smart home to stand up HomeAssistant or whatever and maintain it. And zwave in particular has lots of small but annoying compatibility issues and is difficult to troubleshoot and to keep a complex setup running.
I thought threads/matter was going to be great but it looks like latter just took a whole pile of standards and mashed them together and rebranded them. I dunno for sure; I tried to install the matter SDK on a raspberry pi and it was north of a gig download and difficult to figure out.
> There are standards, but every major smart home tech company wants to be the controller, not a slave.
This is really the crux of the issue. First, from a business perspective, it makes sense: why sell a one-time hardware device when you can charge rent for its continued usage? From a consumer perspective, how can you justify buying a device that can’t operate without an ecosystem you have no knowledge about?
This is why we need free and open standards of interoperability. It would benefit hardware businesses that now feel compelled to create an ecosystem when they’re only good at making hardware and consumers can buy devices and only need to check if it works with some standard like we do with WiFi now when selecting personal wireless devices. Maybe a bad example, considering the backwards compatibility of WiFi and the fact that there is only one practical set of wireless network connectivity transports.
For something like light switches and outlets, it would be nice to have the option to say whether they fail on or fail off, and perhaps even if it loses internet, keep on or off for X time then flip the state (or keep whatever schedule it's on, which is saved locally).
I try to go that route, but for some items there isn't a good alternative. I have a Roborock vacuum which requires the app and an internet connection to use the smart features, but it can still be controlled by the physical buttons if the internet is down.
I'm hoping that Thread/Matter will change that, but most likely it'll still be the same walled garden - there are already some devices that use ZigBee but only work properly with their own hub.
I have a Roborock too. It has an app that shows you the map, collected by the vacuum's lidar, so that you can point the vacuum to a specific area on this map and stuff like that. I absolutely hate that I don't have control over what's actually being sent to the cloud. Though at the time of purchase there were no models with lidar that didn't require the Internet connection. Not sure if that's still the case. I would be happy to replace the damn thing with something that doesn't call home.
My thinking was the same for years, but then I learned about Home Assistant. It's a wonderful open source package that integrates with everything. And there's a lot of options for local wired or wireless transports that keeps smart home usable without third party servers or even an internet connection.
In my setup I have some Wi-Fi connected outlets running Tasmota and some light bulbs and thermostats on Zigbee.
I can appreciate that. I have Phillips Hue setup with some lights and schedule. Having the porch and a few exterior lights come on/off makes the house feel more comfortable and is really nice when arriving at a late hour.
That is a perfectly reasonable position. Personally I consider it a hobby to tweak these things. During high volatility periods of energy price home automation can be somewhat profitable too, as it enables scheduling of the load periods to coincide with cheaper power.
Would love to see a writeup make it's way to the top 60. It sounds like a fun hobby.. I had some of the early 90s/2000s devices that could do a few things but wouldn't know where to start today.
Home automation stuff particularly seems... problematic for the current market.
Houses and stuff installed in them regularly out-live these product lines, and many of them are proprietary and only work with their brand, possibly that one product line. If you're willing to consider them disposable and are alright with that, that might be reasonable and they do some neat stuff, but they're certainly not systems that last :\
All of my ZigBee lighting. My house has been entirely ZigBee for over a decade. If by third party service you mean cloud then I'd suggest Hue, but I actually run mine locally.
ZigBee seems like one of the few long-term-reasonable options, yeah. Self-hosting (as an option! it's insane for most, but it guarantees replacements can be made) and a reasonable standard is critical for longevity.
Given how convenient a light switch is, I can't see a world where it's _more_ convenient to talk to a microphone, and occasionally need to repeat yourself. Perhaps it represents a benefit for someone with limited mobility? But, for everyone else it represents increased complexity without actually adding real convenience.
Depends on your use case. In my house we don’t turn on the big light, we use 3 lamps that make a nicer light. I can turn them on all at once from my sofa when it starts to get dark.
Getting up from your couch would have taken 15 seconds or less. This didn't save you any time, nor any real effort. What it did was erode your impulse control.
I used to be in the same boat with the lights, but then I bought some cheap-o local brand of smart lights I could automate and control remotely and it was simply amazing.
I have since upgraded to Philips Hues since there was some connectivity issues (plus no Apple Home support) with the cheap-o ones.
I am real tempted with smart lock since I dismissed it as useless as well, but I simply don't trust that it will be secure.
As for thermostat, I live in a old building so I have no central AC/Heating, but if I had you bet I would have it remotely controlled. I am running one of those "tube out the window" style ACs and I have that hooked to Hue socket and it is pretty fucking lit.
I like tools and I like them to be simple and reliable. When it comes to tools in use by others (such as heating, lights), I also want them to be easily serviceable without me. This rules out any home automation I've seen. The cloud-shite, well, an obvious no-go. Roll your-own server and integrations: complicated and looking around user groups, pretty fragile. Simpler off-the shelf stuff: barely does more than what I already can accomplishment with non-automated tools.
Anyone I talk to doing this, seems to be using it as a toy first and last. Which is fine, but to me, not ready for anything other than wasting my time. I'm not wasting time of others in my house with it.
I have a room with several ceiling lights, one of which was made "smart" by the previous owner.
That light has its own switch. Unlike a normal light switch, there is no difference between the off position and the on position.
I do not ever intentionally turn that light on.† But it commonly turns itself on, at which point I have to turn it off, using its dedicated "switch". This usually takes between five and fifteen attempts. Sometimes I give up and go do something else for a while.
† Because it's so difficult to operate that switch, sometimes while attempting to turn it off I will turn it off and then on again.
I remember when I had an X10 setup, and I could get in bed, hit a switch and turn off ALL the lights. (note that this backfires when you have a partner in the bathroom)
But I balked at the cloud stuff, the intrusion and the snooping and have mindfully lived with less.
I think we just have to wait (like the amish¹) until we get socially acceptable technology to adopt.
I had an X10 setup too, and it was great. I was just a teenager, so my ability to control the "whole house" was limited. But I had several of those relay-based switches and dimmers too, for the lights. I had an RF controller and the timer that was like an alarm clock. I always wanted the system you could install on a PC with DOS. I believe you could design a program and then upload it to an autonomous controller.
X10 was exciting and unusual. It works by sending coded pulses through the household AC mains themselves. You have to set a "building code" in case your neighbors use X10, too, and their electrical system is closely coupled to yours. But obviously, it does not rely on the Internet, nor sends anything very far. I believe that once they hit a transformer, the code pulses will be neutralized.
I've always been excited about stuff like motorized blinds, and being able to control them remotely would be cool, but I have likewise touched none of the commercial IOT stuff, not even the more generic stuff unless I could put a custom firmware on it.
I also will probably never trust a digital lock until they are known to be the most reliable and hassle-free option, which I assume will be never at this rate.
But, if you did want to play around with some stuff, there are non-corporate devices that don't have privacy issues and there's Home Assistant, a software package/OS if you want it that does all the home stuff. There's a learning curve going that way for sure, but what form of Freedom does not require something from you?
I’m nit-picky with lighting. We only got a smart bulb because we moved in to a (rental) house with a ridiculously-placed light switch in the kitchen. It’s behind the door when the door is open, and the door is always open.
Turns out the best part of having a smart bulb is temperature control. “Hey Siri, evening light!” makes it a really very pleasant cool, 60% kinda bright. “Daylight” is full blue, 100%. I have a couple of others.
Of course when it doesn’t work it’s maddening. But it’ll get better. It’s obviously the future, there doesn’t seem much point fighting it.
You might consider adopting smart products which allow disabling the cloud connection. Or which have no cloud connection to begin with.
At Bond Home, we tell users how to disable or redirect the device’s MQTT connections, at which point our cloud no longer can monitor or control your home. Less convenient for the user, but makes this kind of shutdown technically impossible (without more advanced shenanigans).
Sorry to nitpick (I have one of your products and have generally been quite pleased with it), but where do you explain this? I only get one unrelated article in your knowledge base searching for “MQTT” and don’t see anything in a quick web search either.
I can see convenience in turning on/off the AC if I forget when leaving the home empty (which often happens), but it's more like a "oh you wanna hook me up? sure". Not something I'd actively buy.
I do have a smart bulb and it's nice for lazy me to just tell my phone to turn it off. But a single desk light is a bit less insidious than my house locks.
Vendors yes you're right but what about hackers? It'll be absolutely amazing for criminals and enemies of all kind. Imagine the next war in a country where everyone has a smarthome. It'd be a widespread humanitarian crisis within hours.
The worst are the battery-operated thermostats that you install on individual radiators. Then inevitably the batteries will run empty and you will have a radiator heating full blast in the middle of summer...
Why would you have the heating on in the middle of the summer?
Radiator thermostats (TRVs) are for individual radiator control; they allow turning on/off zones when the heating is on, they don't control the heating itself.
It turns out that you don't even need those for the case where the radiator is difficult to access, because you can get an unpowered remote TRV that works via (it appears) some kind of heat pipe. Eg: https://www.screwfix.com/p/pegler-white-remote-adjustment-tr...
> Since it was a smart doorbell with a camera, he had a recording of exactly what happened so he was able to send that to Amazon and they reinstated his account.
If this story is true, the Amazon customer was lucky that he didn’t have a Ring doorbell. Otherwise, he probably wouldn’t have been able to access the recording and would be in a Catch-22 situation. It could have taken much longer than a week to to get his home working again.
Sure it's a pain in the ass, but this is exhibit A on why one needs to use home assistant and build your infrastructure/services for your home based on things you control. Outsourcing monitoring of cameras, control of doors, monitoring of occupancy, and related is a bad move. Especially when homes are designed to last many decades if not centuries and should work even when the internet is out or some random company dies, is acquired, gets bored with a product, decides to monetizing a service in annoying ways, or to increase the API costs to unreasonable rates.
I'm incredibly resistant to adding complexity to my home unnecessarily (I debug stuff at work all day, can't be bothered at home), but I am slowly adding things because they are useful.
Mostly they're smart because they save on wiring. For a while I've had all of my living room lighting (ceiling, as well as standard lamps and a table lamp) all Hue so they get turned on and off together. Standalone and useful. I've been experimenting with HA running on a Pi because I want to do a slightly complicated combination of PIR and timing for some outside security lights and it'll be trivial with HA.
That sounds like you're not resistant to adding complexity to your home.
My Philips Hue bulb was replaced with a dumb one when it crapped out and I turn it on and off with a telescoping pointy finger that lives next to my bed ;)
I like some things reasonably smart (boiler, ventilation), devices that learn from the occupant’s behaviour in order to be more economical with energy for instance. I'm not a fan of other "smart" tech, like lights, stoves, ovens, fridges, etc.
My heating is demand based and my ventilation is measurement based. There is no real need for smart there past a set point and some hysteresis. An analogue comparator is enough tech there!
The moment you make it clever past this you incur the overheads of the whole system production in the efficiency cycle. That means the manufacture and distribution of a complex computer system.
you never know how culture shifts. Remember when it was unheard of to pay for things over the internet? What about the times where you could be solicited off the street for an interview and you freely give your address for potential mail from strangers?
Never know what will be normalized in the next generation. Or what will be considered crazy later on.
"Update: I was not truly in the dark for a week. My smart home runs mostly locally and Alexa really is just a polymorphic interface. I was just able to use Siri. Though out of habit I’d sometimes say “alexa” only for her to remind me she’s locked out."
So none of this home shutdown actually happened. It's fake news.
So the guy was saved by dependency on two corporations instead of one. That fixes the monopolistic control issue, but not the remote disabling of devices and services that you paid for and are supposed to control.
Exactly. If a technology is used against its users the problem isn't that technology.
Any device that is closed source and connected will be used to spy on their users, from simple business driven profiling to more shady things, but it's certain that it will do other things than those advertised. Consumers should learn to ask for privacy as a default and be a lot more selective in what they surrender their data to. So far, it seems a lost battle to me.
Not to invalidate your point, but some countries have the concept of "utility" defined in law. This adds a bunch of gates that must be passed before the provider can cut service. Your power can only be cut after months of non-payment and not, e.g., because you are racist to their worker.
Also, the power going out doesn't break your legacy door locks.
I don't need electricity to enter my house. Anyway, I was talking about full control, not basic services. Of course I can't do everything alone, being forcibly closed out of my house is clearly another issue.
It's insanity (literally, if you speak to some therapists, but that's a longer story).
My thermostat automatically keeps the temperature at the temperature I set. How much smarter does it need to be? My doorbell rings so I can hear it an answer the door, like the fully abled person I am. My fridge keeps things at the temperature I set. Where are the problems these smart devices are solving?
The first post of the linked forum thread says he was locked out of all his devices after a delivery driver misheard his automated doorbell response as saying something "inappropriate" and reported it to Amazon, who suspended his account for a week.
How far do I need to read into the thread to find the alternate story you're describing?
> ...an Amazon spokesperson said, "We work hard to provide customers with a great experience while also ensuring drivers who deliver Amazon packages feel safe. In this case, we learned through our investigation that the customer did not act inappropriately, and we’re working directly with the customer to resolve their concerns while also looking at ways to prevent a similar situation from happening again."
Seems like they kind of confirmed it? Or what dd you read that indicated otherwise?
"I was not truly in the dark for a week. My smart home runs mostly locally and Alexa really is just a polymorphic interface. I was just able to use Siri."
Even at that the only thing turned off was his Amazon Echo.
Initial reporting on this story, especially the right-wing press, made it out like he was physically locked out of him home, or his appliances were remotely disabled. Neither is at all accurate.
Alexa, Siri, and Google are mostly just voice assistant front ends. I use Lutron for shades and lights, and have connected all front ends to them. Alexa is pretty much useless so I’m not sure about it’s reliability (well, I can turn off my Samsung TV), Siri works well but often has unexplained outages where it just doesn’t work for days at a time, and Google is pretty reliable as well as useful (and also drives my nest/google security cameras).
I also have specific apps on my phone (eg Lutron, Yale, Samsung) that bypass voice assistant front ends. But the reason I use voice assistants at all is that I can control all my shades at once to raise and lower them (as well as turn all the living room lights on), basically bulk convenience.
I only use one assistant but yes, being able to send a command to do a bunch of things at once is pretty awesome. Some things in this genre that I do on a daily basis:
"turn the outside lights on" -- I have two different structures with lights hung around the underside of the roofs. It's very dark where I live. Walking between buildings at night is really easy now because everything is illuminated between both places without installing a really long three-way switch.
"turn the outside lights off" -- Maybe I'm already outside looking at the sky and want a little more clarity. Now I don't need to go find all the light switches for everything that is on.
"turn all the lights off" -- I'm laying in bed, about to go to sleep. Did I forget to turn anything off?
"time for bed" -- It's time to dim the lights and start cooling my brain down. This sets the scene nicely from wherever I happen to be.
--
I don't trust it for things like locks/garage door openers/etc. Compromising my network shouldn't compromise my physical security.
Having it on your lock allows you to ask Siri if you locked your door or if your door is ajar. No more going down in the middle of the night to check to see if you remembered to close and lock your door, you just go down and look. Also, auto lock acted 10 minutes is nice. Not to mention proximity unlocks, but I see how people are paranoid.
The paranoia for me is less from the Siri/Apple ecosystem side and more from the 3rd party lock ecosystem. It's really hard for me to trust a company that has made physical locks for their entire existence to, all of a sudden, get software and networking security right. This is especially when their product reaches out to some cloud service, by default, to be able to remote-unlock.
Then it comes down to wifi security over the long-haul. If I do things properly, I need several different networks because I have old-hardware (eg: a solar inverter) that only supports up to a certain generation of WEP or WPA and will likely never get updates. However, good luck getting everything happy with multiple networks or any kind of partitioning. I think the average consumer case is a simple, all-encompassing network with everything on it and that's what many ecosystems assume. Either that or they assume that everything will talk through a cloud-provided endpoint... or both in some cases!
This all feels like the problem hasn't really been solved yet so I'll stick with physical-only locks for the time being. All of that being said, it sure would be nice to be able to check on the door+lock status from my Home app.
Again, Apple/Siri is just a front end, Yale does the actual work. You can take some features and skip some, so it’s not an all or nothing thing. I’m thinking about changing to a Level+ lock because they support Apple key, which allows you to unlock on tap contact with your watch or phone. The biggest features for me would be auto lock and some sort of quick unlock, which could be based on NFC rather than Wi-Fi.
Sort-of. It's also a remote-capable front-end. I can turn my lights on/off from an arbitrary internet connection through it which means it's also a cloud service of some kind.
This is the issue though and it's the same issue we have with smart-displays/TVs. There are way too many ways to accomplish the same thing. You want to turn volume up with an AppleTV connected to a display? Maybe it works through the volume on the Apple remote, maybe it doesn't. Do you have a remote control for the TV? That should work except you have HomePods or a soundbar or ... something.
Bringing it back to smart locks: Do the locks support only NFC or is NFC one of the options? If it supports WiFi, is it also calling out to its own cloud endpoint while playing nicely with these other ecosystems? Why do we have more than one mechanism to access the lock? From a purely security standpoint, each additional mechanism offers yet another weakness. From a consumer (prosumer?) standpoint, it's more options for convenience. The market will often choose convenience and we end up where we are today.
I have a little smart plug/power meter that I love. It's great at what it does but there is one huge flaw: when it isn't plugged in, it shows the last status (on/off) in the home app and in the app specific to the tech. Let's just say I learned not to plug a refrigerator into it. This leads me to know that status mechanisms are definitely not fool-proof in this ecosystem. Then I consider a smart-lock and think, "nope, not for me."
The Level 1 lock supports Wi-Fi along with NFC. But you can disable the Wi-Fi if you want. But it is a software disable so you have to still trust the software. At least on a Yale lock, the Wi-Fi module is optional and removable. But having it in enables most of the nice features (otherwise it’s just a lock with a passcode you type in).
For me, I feel like I’m gaining more security than I’m losing, so it’s still worth it.
What’s interesting is Rossman says in a follow up video that his affiliate link account was killed soon after publishing that video. So not only are they watching his videos, but they’re petty enough to respond that immaturely.
Says a lot about the culture over there. A lot of SV type companies are totally politically captured and it seems like less and less actual innovation is coming out of them.
I don't have to care about some companys loss leader product eventually going from free to paid, or being disabled alltogether because they decided that Smarthome isn't something they actually want to be in.
Sucks for the planet, sucks for peoples wallets as most of that is probably going straight to the landfill :(
There's a lot of technology product that should never have been produced. Try watching a video on YouTube reviewing random crap from Wish. You'd be in awe of the amount of absolute garbage that's produced. Most of it doesn't even work, so why bother making it and just jump to straight up robbing people.
Much of the current IOT and smart home products are only slight better. Much of it will be useless once the manufacturer decides that they don't actually want to support a 10 year old device. Maybe they are bought out, go bankrupt, change business or the stockholders demand higher returns and they bump your subscription 10x.
It somewhat impressive that we've managed to build business that are completely blind to the fact that a five year update cycle actually isn't that impressive, or that killing of services and products will generate excessive amounts of waste. It probably to complex to regulate correctly, but really it should be a rules that you place documentation and perhaps code in escrow when you release an IOT device, once you no longer wish to support that device, the code and documentation should be released.
This could only work if you are forced to release the copyrights and patents as well. Or if they’re sold the buyer must maintain the service for some arbitrary number of years (say 10) until it’s unlikely a majority of the users are still using the service, or offer full refunds.
I had some doubts about the veracity of this story since there’s so little information in the linked article. It turns out that it is true – and was already submitted to Hacker News a number of times over the past month or so:
> My Amazon “community privileges” got suspended for “racism” after I correctly told a Chinese air filter company that their product was garbage. They false-flagged my review for racism. My review was not racist in any way. Suddenly, twenty years of my Amazon reviews (including long essays on academic books) got deleted
Something to think about the next time you honestly review something on Amazon.
I closed my Amazon retail account recently because their automated customer service screwed up a warranty claim. The humans I finally talked to were useless. I realised at that point I was an inconvenience past making the initial sale.
Why would I risk anything like a smart home on that level of service, support and customer care?
AWS are only marginally better, despite being a high rolling enterprise customer.
I'm building a smart home currently into the old beat up house i'm fixing up!
Home assistant is great, I bought almost all the sensors and cameras online and they operate over zigbee, Matrix server to act as an alert box and a ghetto "intercom" system... having lots of fun with it and most of that is from me refusing to use google or amazons smart home IoT-phone-home products. I'm sure there are things I'm missing out on but it's been a lot of fun hacking them all together on a little mini-pc I picked up.
If anyone is wondering why Free Software is important, that's a big reason right there.
If you have a corporation in complete control of the computers in your home, they are not yours by definition. Arguably, your home is no longer yours if these computers are central to the functioning of your home.
I'm always careful with going all-in on modern "ecosystems", like buying "everything Apple", "everything Google", having "all my data in XYZ Cloud" without some way to cut them out of the loop.
Similar to how I can add cameras to ZoneMinder and keep all my data on-prem, is there a platform that people can move their home automation to and have full control over cloud access, ideally with a hardware compatibility list and preferably without having to hack the firmware? Also ideally light-weight enough to run on a RasPi or mini-pc. I assume this platform would also need to be able to make API calls only those I configure to Amazon, Walmart, CVS, VPS providers, Utility bills, IRS, etc... to purchase my 10,000 rolls of toilet paper so it should be vendor agnostic and must not talk when not expected to. reward the most affordable, reliable and unbiased vendors and not leak data
I'm right there with everyone else who wants to raise a pitchfork and hop on the Amazon-critical bandwagon.
But, I felt it worth pointing out back then and again here that the seemingly bizarre choice of doorbell response "Excuse me, can I help you?" left me unsurprised that the delivery driver "misheard" it and set off this round of media hoopla.
Last year I canceled my Prime and am doing my best to use alternatives. But it's become hard, I still sometimes use Amazon and pay for shipping or use the free long-ass shipping if it exists.
Was surprised to see in the comments that Tay Zonday had his decades of Amazon book reviews deleted when a vendor flagged a negative review he wrote about an air filter as racist.
This kind of shit is why I still advise everyone who asks me (as the tech guy in the family) not to use any home automation that is connected to the cloud.
I have a dumb home. No smart thermostat. No smart doorbell. No cameras festooning the outside of my house. No smart TV. No smart home owner.
Long ago, I saw a movie as a kid in the 1970s called Demon Seed, where this big computer gained consciousness and extended it's presence to a smart home (well, smart home with tech from the 1970s). It scared the heck out of me, even though seeing it now it's pretty tame...regardless of the whole impregnating a woman with it's child.
I have a smart home and it works great, but it all runs locally. ZigBee for most devices, because it is an encrypted local mesh communication protocol. The things that use wifi have no internet connection. Home Assistant is open source and runs everything locally. If a vendor of any products doesn't support their ZigBee hub anymore I don't care. Home Assistant is my ZigBee Hub. If any cloud service is shut off I don't care, because nothing is in the cloud.
If you build new KNX is great. It works with Home Assistant and it's just a bus system. You program it once and it works for decades.
The only concession we have is a smart TV, try find dumb ones today. Oh, and a basically always disconnected, when not used, Alexa and a Google smart speaker I got for free once which I haven't seen in quite a while...
Oh I have a TV that's "smart", but like you it's not connected at all to my WiFi. It's just a dumb terminal to my AppleTV. On levels of trust, I would put the AppleTV above my old Nvidia Shield and MUCH higher than my old Roku box.
My main gripe with smart devices is their sketchy software that may or may not have vulnerabilities in them and may or may not be diligently updated with security fixes by the company that makes them. If I can concentrate most things to one device...like the AppleTV, which gets updates all the time...then I can isolate problems. If I have to worry about a myriad of things throughout the house, that's something else.
Ours is network connected. But then it is a model than runs Amazon Fire TV natively, and nothing else from the TV set OEM. Wouldn't make much sense to not connect the TV, and connect the plugged in Fire TV stick... That being said, despite being rather happy with it (mostly, the storage runs full way too often for my taste), I'd rather have simply a dumb display.
I live in a log cabin in the back woods with no thermostat, no doorbell (or even locks). No smart TV. Everything is as low-tech as possible. I have seen how the sausage is made.
I don't have smart home stuff at my own house except for some cameras, which aren't being used in an automated manner. I installed cameras, a water heater flood monitor, and a smart switch at a vacation home shared by me and my siblings. Sometimes things need rebooting and a smart switch lets me do that remotely. But things that can inadvertently lock you out or do something expensive with your HVAC are not for me.
I understand a tech-enthusiasm driven deployment of "smart" devices in your home — not for me, you understand, but I get that people like shinies — but when is this going to end?
Hasn't the novelty warn off for people yet? Or maybe it has for the first wave, and it's just going to take a while before everyone who's susceptible goes through the process of realising it's pointless?
It seems that as a companies size, breadth of product, market, share, and reliance by the general population increases, that the burden of proof, and its ability to turn off its services on a whim should decrease, and customer protections should increase.
Well, this is what it looks like when someone builds on another private entity's infrastructure. This kind of risk is built-in from the start, and as such, I think it must be considered before investing in it.
Let's produce even more e-waste please. Let's do our best to end this quick, maybe in the next turn of the wheel we'll get better cards (or smarter humans that can live with a "dumb" house)
I don't like racists either, but I don't understand how you don't draw the conclusion from this story that there was both centralisation of power and abuse of power.
First - he wasn't racist. It was misheard. And second just because a company thinks you're racist they shouldn't be able to take reprisals because they don't have the appropriate checks and balances appropriate for that sort of power - we've all read the stories of Google shutting down people's accounts with no appeal.
What you've got here is vigilante justice, misapplied to someone who's innocent. This should involve an appropriate system with appropriate checks and balances - like the justice system.
I'm not sure this is unequivocally "vigilante justice". Because to me, it seems more like "We reserve the right to refuse service to anyone."
The intent of Amazon was not to disable the guy's smart home, or lock him out of his house. Amazon intended to deny him service across the board by suspending his account. Being logged out of Alexa is a side-effect of that, but we don't know if Amazon took an inventory of services he uses before they made the decision to suspend.
So, if it were a real incident of racist abuse and Amazon suspended the account, would that matter? People can be denied government benefits if they act abusively toward a case worker. They can also be denied medical treatment and ejected from a hospital if they are abusive to HCPs there. (Exception for mental hospitals, where they just get locked down and sedated instead.)
So does a company like this Reserve the Right to Refuse Service to Anyone? Or are they too deep and wide to exercise that right? If a company controls your digital life and holds most of your personal data, do they have the right to cut off your access with an AI-based decision? I'm not sure it's "vigilante justice" but it may be more like "racketeering".
If I'm rude to the butcher, they should absolutely be able to deny service. The difference with the big platforms is that denying service has rather more comprehensive effects. This is a core problem that doesn't show up in this situation - these companies have accumulated so much power over individual's lives that their use of that power needs to be regulated due to the possibility of abuse. The EU DMA recognises this in terms of consumer protection, but the problem is much broader.
For example - if Amazon just denied delivery service here, that would be fine. It's the fact that they provide delivery service but also automate the customers home, and also provide their TV service, and also provide servers for them at work that causes the problem.
> People can be denied government benefits if they act abusively toward a case worker. They can also be denied medical treatment and ejected from a hospital if they are abusive to HCPs there.
I don't agree that this should be possible. I know in the UK (because I just asked a doctor friend) that it is unheard of to refuse treatment. It's a theoretical possibility but in practice they get the police and use some combination of medical and physical restraint. For benefits, they should continue to get them and be otherwise punished by the legal system if appropriate.
I think what you’re touching on is that the burden to shut someone out of essential services that in most developed countries are referred to as utilities (water, electricity, natural gas, Telecommunications) should be much higher than say the local bowling alley denying you service. And then, on top of that there are probably some large services that should be re-defined as utilities given their increasing reliance in a modern era. In particular large tech (google, Apple, Amazon, meta) and airlines.
I would like to push back a little on the IoT haters here. I assist in the management of a number of short-term rental homes. The short-term rental industry is enabled in large part because of IoT. For example, we use Wi-Fi enabled digital door locks to provide custom door codes for guests and cleaners. These codes can be managed and monitored remotely.
More specifically, in one trial we implemented the (keyless) Google Nest x Yale Lock [1] - great when it was working, but locksmiths were called on more than one occasion when it was not. Then we had the epiphany to implement the (keyed) Yale Assure Lock Touchscreen with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth [2], which solved that problem giving us the fail normal desired outcome. It was only in talking with Yale tech support that we realized these are virtually the same locks (one keyed / one not), and despite a near absence of technical supporting information, they both worked just as well on Google Home.
I cannot emphasize the fail normal requirement enough with IoT devices, as discussed elsewhere here. We similarly provision a large number of other IoT devices to improve guest experience including Nest thermostats, Nest Protect smoke and CO alarms, Chromecast Google TV, and (outside) Google Nest security cameras/floodlights. Most guests now require these features at a minimum.
I apologize that this reads somewhat as a Google advertisement, and that is one of my problems with IoT and IMHO one of the main reasons for its lack of wider adoption - product lines are proprietary and there are no well-implemented standards for cross-vendor compatibility. For example, Amazon eero wifi nodes cannot be substituted with Google Nest Wifi nodes - they use incompatible proprietary mesh networking technology.
You can implement the features you want for your rental home without the downsides we hate by merely doing end-to-end encrypted communication--and likely even peer-to-peer direct communication (and, if not, using a neutral third party to coordinate rather than the manufacturer)--from your computer to the device in question and requiring manual approval of firmware updates, which should not involve any kind of vendor signature requirement.
The default assumption that the company selling the product should have complete control over the software running on the device at all times, that they should have complete control over usage and access of the device, and that they even should have complete visibility to all of the data collected by the device, is so ridiculous as to be downright egregious: it requires someone who has almost nothing but contempt for users--even if they want to claim they somehow are helping them "for their own good"--to even contemplate such an architecture.
Would I be correct in concluding then that your suggested "end-to-end encrypted communication--and likely even peer-to-peer direct communication ... to the device in question" is simply not possible without individual case-based custom engineering?
> The default assumption ... to even contemplate such an architecture.
At the risk of being further down-voted, I couldn't agree with you more about this last paragraph. Alas my systems integration skills are not up to speed with implementing "end-to-end encrypted communication--and likely even peer-to-peer direct communication ... to the device in question", but I am thrilled to know that can be done. Are you able to cite any such systems/products where that is possible?
Once you've sold it, it shouldn't be yours anymore. Inviting this kind of surveillance into your home, where we're being policed by profit-driven corporations, is the biggest condemnation of this sort of IoT crap. Imagine if my car stops working if Toyota disapproves of something I say. Imagine I can't pay for food because of something I said.
Pulling this sort of crap should be punished with heavy fines.
And if companies are at the same time held responsible for the stuff that goes through their servers and that creates an impossible situation for them, then maybe they shouldn't be creating these sort of dependencies at all.