General > General Technical Chat
IoT
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eti:

--- Quote from: Wilksey on December 14, 2022, 01:41:06 am ---Some strong opinions coming in!

It certainly is an issue with companies going out of business - i've had several "smart" devices stop working because the company went bust and their servers shut down, one was a GPS tracker and the other was a fitness tracker, as soon as they lost contact with their overlord they stopped working, prime example is Dave's latest Sonos video of things being bricked as the company decide they are obsolete and you must upgrade to their newest product.  Subscription models for these things after you've spent a pretty penny on them also takes the proverbial.

The only real benefit to some smart devices are those to help the disabled out, but unless you find an open source device then you are at the manufacturers mercy.  And yes having multiple phone apps to do things are a pain, which is where OpenHAB comes in handy.

I do miss Silicon Valley!  But proves a valid point, why a "smart" fridge?  You may as well just have a shopping list on your phone, my nephew not that long ago went on a spending spree on my brother in law's Alexa, all conveniently linked to credit cards with no barriers to ordering, had all manners of items turn up as and when he saw an advert on TV he used to tell Alexa he wanted one as he saw his parents order shopping and bits through Alexa he knew how to do it.

Cloud based services are also overused, a product my wife uses at her workplace is cloud based, they got hacked and the servers compromised and thousands of peoples financial information was stolen before they realised and the servers were shut off for 2 weeks whilst they investigated and repaired, the company was an accounting software one so god knows how many people lost access to their fancy cloud platform on that occasion!

Personally I steer well clear of any devices that need registering or I don't have the software for secured and downloadable.

Even cars have buttons to press instead of a key or things to swipe over, but have a "hidden" key just in case, why not just use a bloody key!  The amount of times I get "Key not detected" because I've got it in my pocket instead of smearing it over the dashboard somewhere drives me bonkers!

IoT and other buzz words are becoming a toxic presence, everything is sold with an IoT or Cloud badge these days, and people are gullible and fall for the hype until it stops working.

--- End quote ---

It would be amazing if some Russians could hack these shitty cloud services and bring them crashing down without chance of recovery. All the “big names” with their sheer arrogance and disdain, need a cyber kick in the balls.
xrunner:
It's just marketing now I assume. Like the washing machine - I couldn't care less about it being WiFi ready. But if they don't put that in, some competitor will add it to their product, and they will say that theirs has more features. So here we go, get ready for toasters, vacuum cleaners, and toilets to all be IoT.
tom66:
Many of these WiFi smart apps are provided by Tuya, a Chinese smart device company that has a frickin' weird business model that seems completely unsustainable.

Like literally, they take a single fee for one device when manufactured to access Tuya cloud (less than a dollar from my understanding) and this then grants lifetime access for these functions.

It's basically a Ponzi scheme, as long as people keep buying this tat they'll be fine, but if they stop the cloud will lose its funding.

Well the question is... how many smart lightbulbs can you buy??

Also, it doesn't seem 'great' to be giving remote control of all sorts of devices over to a single company, in a country not known to be in favour of privacy and independence.
MikeK:

--- Quote from: tom66 on December 14, 2022, 09:21:51 am ---Like literally, they take a single fee for one device when manufactured to access Tuya cloud (less than a dollar from my understanding) and this then grants lifetime access for these functions.
--- End quote ---

And most people should be aware by now that "lifetime" promises are meaningless.
woody:
While I absolutely share the overall sentiment here regarding IoT in toasters and the like I think some of the technology has nice possibilities for cheaply networking your own 'things'.

I made a monitoring device (prototype) that uses LoRaWan. You could network this device over a semi-public network like TTN or a proprietary network like (in NL) TTI or KPN . But then you're dependent on their continuous presence and they make you pay for every step. You can also do it yourself. ATM my device talks via my own gateway to my own NS/AS that feeds the information to a (web)app. Most of these components (except the LoRa modems) are open source and are run on my own hardware.

Devices are relatively cheap, take very little power, are usable over a solid range and enable one to put networked stuff in places where this was not feasible before.
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