That really sucks.
I had a feeling I’d hear something like that from you. Thanks, I needed a good laugh.
Don’t worry, 5G is supposed to fix this bug by allowing internet connections despite your preferences.
Never mind the Amazon Sidewalk project using Amazon devices to share wifi with other devices that need internet to serve their corporate masters
Fortunately a robot vac is only likely to be used at home (which for me avoids some of those problems). But, yes, things could always get worse in the future.
To my mind, the future problem will be when devices flat out refuse to operate unless you give them internet access - and that applies to household appliances, cars and who knows what else.
It is a safe guess, nobody will be using a robot vac to clean up chad in a SCIF.
Security cameras are some of the worst offenders. Unless you use an airgapped wired system, there are NO commercial solutions with cryptographically verifiable E2EE; manufacturera can access all video & audio. Furthermore, choices are limited to Chinese white-label (primarily Dahua & Hikvision), or American spyware.
The closest I’ve seen is DIY hardware with the seemingly unmaintained MotionEyeOS, or DIY software with the (out of stock potentially indefinitely) PineCube.
A safe and private robo-vac and ip-security camera would be great products. A (less-smart/non-internet)TV too. I’m a bit worried that pretty soon we’ll be looking for safe and secure refrigerators, ovens, blenders etc. [at least for now there are dumb alternatives for those… for now]
Btw: Appliance makers sad that 50% of customers won’t connect smart appliances - Ars Technica (quote: built with an “acquire, upload, whatever” mindset)
Did users change their Wi-Fi password
Based on my reading of “other people’s problems” … this is a frequently occurring problem.
- User has a WiFi router with ISP X. Router comes with default unpredictable values for SSID and passphrase.
- User configures all the WiFi clients as they are purchased. Everything working. Yay!
- User changes to a different ISP, Y. Gets new preconfigured router, hence different SSID and passphrase.
- All WiFi clients stop working.
- Only the smartphones get moved over to the new WiFi.
- Sometimes that’s because the user can’t find the username and password needed to get into the other appliances in order to reconfigure WiFi / never had the needed username and password (because the installer did the initial configuration) / doesn’t know how to do it.
(Needless to say that if you want continuity of access to the internet by appliances then the sensible approach is to reconfigure the new WiFi router manually, overriding ISP Y’s default configuration, copying the SSID and passphrase from the old router to the new router - even though that isn’t great security.)
However as a general rule the manufacturer should be able to tell the difference between this scenario and the scenario that the user just decided never to give the smart appliance access to the internet - because in the former scenario the manufacturer will at least see connections from the appliance for the first N days, weeks, months or years i.e. until the user changes ISP.
Yes, saw that yesterday. You have got to be kidding me. I assume though that in a “degraded” no-internet / no-app mode, the air fryer is still basically usable as an actual air fryer.
One would hope. But I can easily imagine a not-so-distant future in which they are, or retroactively become, “tango uniform.”
I recently learned about a cup/mug heater that requires an app to use it:
The Ember Mug has sensors that sends its data to the app, so you can configure the drinking temperature to your preference, or create presets for measuring caffeine intake. It has more integrated support for the Apple ecosystem, allowing you to locate the Ember Travel Mug 2+ using Apple’s Find My network.
And airfryers: https://www.theregister.com/2024/11/05/air_fryer_spyin (among others) [Why???]
Yeah. And the crux of all of the spies out there is that we paid for them. They don’t price the product and then add the cost of injecting the Spy. We pay for the spy, plus the cost to the company to collect and analyze the data-for-sale.
AND,
whatever product they are selling, consumers paid to make the ad, place the add, and pay out hit-fees. Everything we buy, the price includes making and distributing ads, along with the packaging, inks, colour, and the rent for where it sits on the shelves.
IMO, we are the most sought after commodity on the Internet. People buy a phone. The most egregious abuses of people’s rights to privacy, and will keep something on the phone they don’t want their mother to read, yet let corporations, Social Media, news, retailers, government etcetera… see all, know all about the devices operator.
~s
See also:
Except for those companies that do, sort of. In other words, the price of the product is discounted because the company is incorporating consideration of the future revenue from selling your data. Hence if you buy the product but manage to use the product without leaking data then your purchase is being subsidised by those users of the product who don’t know any better or who don’t care.
However you still need to consider the ethical and strategic considerations that if a vendor can do that and undercut other companies who refuse to sell your data then some of those other companies will eventually be forced out of business and ultimately you may find that you have no ethical companies left to do business with.
There are always exceptions to everything. But unlike social mores minorities now make the decisions.
Are you implying that there are still “ethical companies” around!!! OMG, who is it?
I left that open for you to plug away.
~s
OK, consider it a spectrum from 0% ethical to 100% ethical, and at the 100% ethical end of the spectrum there may be no companies anyway.
OK, I left it open for you. The answer is Purism company.