NO MORE "SMART" APPLIANCES

[MrMobodies]

For anyone wanting to avoid this crap I can heartily recommend the NEC Multisync E series displays, The 43" 4K model (E438) is around £500 and they also have 49/55 and 65 inch versions.

I like that... just buy a monitor and a setup box. More control and if the set top box or whatever starts to spam the viewers and they'd just stop using it and find something else.

If enough did that then I wonder what impact that will have on their plans.

For years I have been using a pc tv tuners until about 2018 and I gave up terrestrial when the 2 more channels started to stick on screen logos like with the rest of the hundreds of other channels that I pretend are not there.

Now I would have gone absolutely made say I buy a television from a shop, showing no adverts on display having a look at it with the remote, then when I take it home advertising starts to appear in places distracting and interfering with what I am doing. I be thinking I didn't buy the television like this with adverts on it or to do all this other stuff, I want to go back and change it for something else or my money back.

If I see it working, I am happy with it and when I pay for it and take it home I want it left alone and not interfered with remotely.

[cdev]

Whenever a debit is performed on a modern cell phone there is a location connected to it. A GPS location.

Various processes ensure that there is a chain of locations that refreshes every few seconds.

[SeanB]

Related but may not not be directly to your point.  (I think there might have been another thread on this topic already)

Samsung remotely disabled TV sets looted during looting-riot(s) in South Africa.  So, Internet connected or not, they could get in - presumably via another Samsung (or partner) devices...
-OR-
These devices require some form of activation.

Reference:
thesouthafrican.com: "Samsung disabling all looted televisions with remote blocking technology"
^{https://www.thesouthafrican.com/technology/samsung-disabling-all-looted-televisions-with-remote-blocking-technology-20-august-2021/}

This is very likely just using normal everyday connectivity over WiFi. Maybe the TV will automatically connect to an open WiFi without user interaction, but that is unlikely.
I think that 99% of people who buy such a TV just connect it to their WiFi, without really thinking about any consequences that may have. I suspect that, without ever having used a Samsung TV, that on first setup the TV *highly* recommends to connect. It may even *force* the users to connect to continue the setup, like Windows 11 Home Edition does now.

South African, and the July riots are a very close memory, seeing as I live under 5 minutes from the one major retail centre torched and looted, and the rioting was only 300m away from me when the neighbourhood got together with arms (unlike the police, who were hiding in the police stations, waiting for the mad hatter of a police minister to wake up, decide which hat or fedora he wanted to wear, and make a decision, about 4 days later on) and the private security companies, and told the looters to foetsak. Then spent 2 weeks acting as night patrol, while still having no police do anything more than say we could not shoot the looters. SANDF came around every so often to look like they could do something, but seeing as they had no ammunition, and only the MRE's that expired in 2010, they were not exactly useful.

That saying of disable the sets is not a worry for those with them, 99% of them will never actually ever be used as anything other than a dumb display, used to watch TV, or connected to one of the looted games consoles, again not going to be used online. No such thing as open WiFi here, where, due to historic monopolies, you pay per bit for data, and no home router will ever have an open wireless signal available, even the "free WiFi" in some places is supplied only after you either register on a portal, and accept the FUP agreement, or you buy data to use on them.

One of the things looted was the entire police ammunition supply, 12 million rounds, perfect for all the firearms lost or sold by the members over the years, and there are no clues as to who, how, when, though they do know roughly where they were when stolen.

[dbctronic]

Yeah, the smart-ass MBAs are buying all the "known good" brands and cheapening them, so brands really have little or no meaning any longer...
[/quote]

The whole branding industry is just garbage anymore. Buying and trashing old brands is just another rat corpse in the sewer, which is why it's so easy to get away with.

Buy And Trash is just a shortcut alternative to creating crappy brands from scratch. Snapple? They buy their juice mixes from the exact same manufacturers as Walmart and other bargain brands do. Same stuff in a differently labeled bottle. No product value added, so why buy? And, back in the mid 90s, smartass MBAs at Quaker Oats bought Snapple, paying an estimated US$1 billion too much. What did they think they were buying? All they bought was a brand name, which is an unsustainable asset without following through on the product. They're still selling oatmeal today to pay that off.

Some years ago, a bunch of business wizards from India bought the British Little Chef restaurant chain. Like many older companies, Little Chef's upper management got locked into the old "we're successful" mentality, figuring that "we know what we're doing because we've been around so long". That mentality gets you into trouble every time, as it did them. They were self-blinded by being sold on their own brand name, and failed to keep up with competition.
The dumb clucks who bought them out were buying the brand name as if it were an asset, when in fact it was already a liability (being long known by customers as Little Thief), the very thing that got the founders into trouble! It got the new owners into deep water too, as they attempted to profit on the name alone rather than fix the problems that made Little Thief such a cheap buy. D'oh!!!

The lesson: Don't think in terms of searching out 'good' brand names. Every time you go to make a significant purchase, even from the same manufacturer you bought from a year ago, just treat it as unknown and do your product review homework, comparing  brands. You never know where or when in their chain of corporate ownerships a decision will be made to sell off the brand to a junkmeister just because profits are off 5% this year. It took me a few shockingly bad tool purchases to learn, and believe me, it pays off. Sad that being so paranoid and cynical turns out to be the most profitable approach.

[miegapele]

I imagine how this thread went in 1920's.

No this new fangled "smart" electricity rubbish please. They can turn it off at any time. I will not ever use it!!!! There is no need for anything more than a firewood and a candle. What advantages this "smart" light bulb has, compared to the candle?  None!!! I will not use it ever.

I wonder maybe Dave still has forum archives from 1920's? Would be interesting to read 

Otherwise technology marches on, what might be seen "smart" an unnecessary now, might look completely ordinary in few decades.

[MadScientist]

I buy mid value white goods , my kitchen has entry level Siemens  dishwater Bosch two door fridge , Electrolux microwave and oven , Beko washing machine


I find modern white goods largely excellent. I get 5 years plus from washing machines and given it’s used every day of the year that’s not bad.

The older stuff was junk too, my parents had a dishwater in the 1974 that was pure rubbish and never worked right.

[themadhippy]

my parents had a dishwater in the 1974 that was pure rubbish and never worked right.

My parents had one the same,it  was  more interested in  going out and having fun with his friends rather than doing the washing up,47 years on and its still not that keen on doing it.

[Bud]

South African, and the July riots are a very close memory, seeing as I live under 5 minutes from the one major retail centre torched when stolen....

Quite a story....Thanks for sharing.

[Circlotron]

Otherwise technology marches on, what might be seen "smart" an unnecessary now, might look completely ordinary in few decades.

I hereby coin the term “dependency creep”.

[SiliconWizard]

And so, if we don't like all our home appliances being connected to the Internet for no good reason, wait until you hear about the "Internet of Bodies".
You thought the trend was just for inanimate objects?

[cdev]

I thought this was funny!

[dbctronic]

And so, if we don't like all our home appliances being connected to the Internet for no good reason, wait until you hear about the "Internet of Bodies".
You thought the trend was just for inanimate objects?

That will happen in places like Russia first, where public opinion doesn't so much matter. Putin can't wait. Those implants will do more than just help you with your daily life, too, you can bet. Track you, punish you...
In more free countries, we'll just need to wear tin foil helmets whenever we drive under high tension electrical lines or past radio station towers. Or cell phone towers, or stand in front of microwave ovens...

[Rick Law]

And so, if we don't like all our home appliances being connected to the Internet for no good reason, wait until you hear about the "Internet of Bodies".
You thought the trend was just for inanimate objects?

That will happen in places like Russia first, where public opinion doesn't so much matter. Putin can't wait. Those implants will do more than just help you with your daily life, too, you can bet. Track you, punish you...
In more free countries, we'll just need to wear tin foil helmets whenever we drive under high tension electrical lines or past radio station towers. Or cell phone towers, or stand in front of microwave ovens...

RFID has been in medical prosthetic for almost 10 years now, may be even longer.  If you have anything artificial in you, you are a walking radio transmitter already.  That said, people willing submit to stuff like a smart watches and even smart sneakers (athletic shoes).

Given what have been said about recent college graduations even on this forum, it appears the smarter the devices the dumber the users.  As smart users decrease (by smart, I mean intelligent+use rather than just intelligent), we may reach a threshold where we wont be able to maintain a high tech society.  Imagine a whole society who can only communicate in sentence fragments, reading and comprehending a 2 page document would be quite a challenge.  Abstract thinking require smartness so ability to abstract is correspondingly on the decline.

Making a CPU for example, it requires more than a fab.  It requires a lot of supporting technologies - from stuff like high speed computers, high resolution microscopes, etc., etc., to low tech stuff like a screw driver or a hammer.  All these must come from an industrial society capable of producing all the exciting as well as boring stuff.  To staff those factories, we need reasonably smart people.  Should we reach that point where we don't have enough smart people, we may well become a society that declined back to earlier phases of our industrial age.

I am not feeling good about the future of homo sapiens.

[LoveLaika]

Are we doomed to follow the teachings of Walden?

[Rick Law]

Are we doomed to follow the teachings of Walden?

Who is this Walden fellow... I had to look up what this fellow's teaching is:
"In Walden, Thoreau explores the life in solitude. He was interested in a sustainable and minimalistic way of living, and he wanted to live close to nature, to take all of the inspiration for writing it could give him. So he built his own little cabin near the Walden Pond, and summarized all expenses in his book."

I was speculating about the "failed world" if we drop below the knowledge mass threshold needed to maintain our current high tech society.  Thus, I would choose the word subsistence over the word minimalist.  Minimalist has a suggestion of doing so by choice where as subsistence doesn't have that suggestion of choice.  When surviving in subsistence, the only "sustainability" one would likely worry about is one's own "sustainability".

If such failure do occur, humans will have to re-learn how to do some of the lower tech stuff and re-grow the supporting chain necessary for the high tech stuff we take for granted today.  Great as our manufacturing is now, you can't make a smart phone without the dumb glue factory working.  We need a good mass of adequately smart people to make it work, and I am not encouraged by the grit nor the wittiness of recent college grads.  I do hope I am wrong, but it appears to me that the supply of smart arse grads far out numbers the supply of smart brain grads.

[Scherms]

I thought this was funny!

Code: [Select]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K3pYZwol6Dc

As an industrial engineer this 'cool' stuff only occurs in our bad dreams...
 

[dbctronic]

I've recently cruised a few math forums, looking to discuss some ideas, and was quite disappointed to find that they are nearly all just homework help oriented. Little curiosity or originality, just "I have to do this by Friday...", "Can't I just...", "Do I need to learn real analysis?". On the Maths Forum, one joker has taken over with dozens of questions all currently in play.
It's not entirely their fault. Higher education has, for decades now, increasingly focused on grade point average, not real learning. Only the well heeled can attend institutions that turn out real grads. The rest are becoming blab schools.
If that's their approach to math, or engineering, or whatever they're doing, may the gods of invention save us all.

[SiliconWizard]

And so, if we don't like all our home appliances being connected to the Internet for no good reason, wait until you hear about the "Internet of Bodies".
You thought the trend was just for inanimate objects?

That will happen in places like Russia first, where public opinion doesn't so much matter. Putin can't wait. Those implants will do more than just help you with your daily life, too, you can bet. Track you, punish you...
In more free countries, we'll just need to wear tin foil helmets whenever we drive under high tension electrical lines or past radio station towers. Or cell phone towers, or stand in front of microwave ovens...

Sure.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/33584018/

[SilverSolder]

[...]   I am not encouraged by the grit nor the wittiness of recent college grads. [...]

A college degree is the new high school diploma....    with a huge lifetime debt attached to it!

More families should do critical thinking about whether each particular child is suited to higher education, but that wouldn't be "fair" so we are where we are...

[mapleLC]

Smart everything is just an acceleration, or perhaps better said, institutionalization, of planned obsolescence.

End of life was just a software term that started to get used a lot in the 00s... now its everything.  Companies are basically going to make you a product that will live a certain amount of time and that's it.  Goodbye choice when they ALL do it.  And they WILL all do it.

You think this started with printers?  Oh no.  Look at the conspiracy with lightbulbs over 100 years ago.

These companies viewed you as a consumer in the past.  Now, they view you as a source of steady stream income.  Everything is being "serviced" to the point where all your money disappears into monthly fees.

By design.

Data is the new currency for both government and the corporate world.  They are as addicted to it in the way a pair of drug addicts accelerates the demise much faster than a single addict can.  We agreed to a world where our personal data is not ours... this was a big, big mistake. You are now surveilled constantly, even by that "smart" fridge you love logging into to see a picture of food on shelves. It was all so worth it.

[mapleLC]

Otherwise technology marches on, what might be seen "smart" an unnecessary now, might look completely ordinary in few decades.

I hereby coin the term “dependency creep”.

Better labeled as co-dependency creep, to then become subjugation.  Well said, otherwise.

What they want from you is dependency creep, what is happening is co-dependent because of the data mining pathology of corpo and gov entities.

It's troubling how many are agreeing to this foolishness, a population literally asking for dependence, then they become more abusive, and the only logical end state is subjugation, which may already be true for all I know.

[mapleLC]

[...]   I am not encouraged by the grit nor the wittiness of recent college grads. [...]

A college degree is the new high school diploma....    with a huge lifetime debt attached to it!

More families should do critical thinking about whether each particular child is suited to higher education, but that wouldn't be "fair" so we are where we are...

Think of it as a largely unorganized group of entities out there with institutional control over their populations.

Humans have not learned to manage entropy.

Its a simple lesson of physics we can't seem to adopt as truthful in our real world:

We allow systems to consume us.  Entropy happens.  They become corrupt.

Here is the divide:

We do nothing.

or

We understood entropy and either put forward the resources needed to manage it, or shrink it until the entropy fades.

Edit: perhaps it wasnt obvious, but its very hard to put forward resources into a corrupt system to fix it because the corrupt system will consume those resources into defending its corruption.  Shrinking works.  The next time you see someone throwing money at a problem, remember entropy.

[SilverSolder]

[...]
It's troubling how many are agreeing to this foolishness, a population literally asking for dependence, then they become more abusive, and the only logical end state is subjugation, which may already be true for all I know.

The majority of people simply don't (yet) see what is happening...    but they will, when their household budgets hit a "subscription brick wall" and they have to start making choices:  do I eat, or subscribe? 

[mapleLC]

[...]
It's troubling how many are agreeing to this foolishness, a population literally asking for dependence, then they become more abusive, and the only logical end state is subjugation, which may already be true for all I know.

The majority of people simply don't (yet) see what is happening...    but they will, when their household budgets hit a "subscription brick wall" and they have to start making choices:  do I eat, or subscribe? 

Expand that thinking, its more subtextualized.  The best prison is the one you walk into willingly.

It will only be subscription. Humans are adaptable.  A subscription to eat will not seem alien.  You just need to 5 monkey the population.

When they are all walking in and just a few of us are left yelling nooooo.... who wins? 

[SilverSolder]

[...]
It's troubling how many are agreeing to this foolishness, a population literally asking for dependence, then they become more abusive, and the only logical end state is subjugation, which may already be true for all I know.

The majority of people simply don't (yet) see what is happening...    but they will, when their household budgets hit a "subscription brick wall" and they have to start making choices:  do I eat, or subscribe? 

Expand that thinking, its more subtextualized.  The best prison is the one you walk into willingly.

It will only be subscription. Humans are adaptable.  A subscription to eat will not seem alien.  You just need to 5 monkey the population.

When they are all walking in and just a few of us are left yelling nooooo.... who wins?

We'll all end up going with the flow, to a greater or lesser extent,  when it suits us....