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Comment by TeMPOraL | Hacker News Reader

Regarding "smart devices" and IoT, honestly, I don't qualify it as dystopian. To me, it's just pathetic.

A "smart", unnecessarily Internet-connected kettle or lightbulb or juicer isn't going to usher the second coming of fascism to the Western world. Even data breaches connected to those devices aren't going to have any meaningful impact on an average person's life. But it's sad, because it's wasteful. It's ugly. It's bad engineering. And all of this is motivated by greed and sociopathy of people putting it on the market. With each everyday item that gets attached to my butt, I lose faith in people a little more.

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> A "smart", unnecessarily Internet-connected kettle or lightbulb or juicer isn't going to usher the second coming of fascism to the Western world.

Each individual one isn't, but in aggregate they start transferring more and more control over your daily activities to faceless corporations thousands of miles away.

That is dystopian.

Thing is, most of that isn't dystopian. I can sort of buy people feeling orwellian about Alexa or Google Assistant - but as it is now, most IoT is just random startups hoping that if they abuse some users through a SaaS, they'll get to be the next Google. It never works out, and we're left with tons of electronic junk, that shouldn't even exist in the first place.

>most of that isn't dystopian

Remember that time a city in CA sent Cointelpro-esqe letters to the registered owner for vehicles their plate readers recorded going down a particular street?

There's nothing that prevents similar bad behavior from HOAs or cities/towns that have access to other data sets.

I don't want a HOA sending me brochures about recycling because my smart house reports that my ratio of trash to recyclables doesn't meet some arbitrary value. What goes on within the privacy my home is my business and mine alone to the fullest extent possible.

You can't abuse a data set you don't have. The value to society vs the potential harm of many datasets is so low they shouldn't exist at all.

> Remember that time a city in CA sent Cointelpro-esqe letters to the registered owner for vehicles their plate readers recorded going down a particular street?

No, I don’t. I’m guessing others might not, as well. Can you please supply a link?

https://www.computerworld.com/article/3011394/security/las-p...

It was the first result so it might not be the best article.

In what way is control of your daily activities transferred away by a smart kettle? Is it not going to boil the water when I want to boil the water? If it doesn't, I'll throw it away and get a regular kettle. That's pretty much the only daily activity my kettle is involved in and no amount of Internet connection is going to remove my control of it.

But what if smart kettles would became so popular that regular kettles would not be produced anymore? How would you replace it then? Or, more importantly: how about "smart" lightbulbs, door locks, refridgerators? Those are much harder to replace.

How would they? What value does being "smart" add to a kettle or fridge?

Imagine this: you're on your way home, it's a cold and wet winter night, you're dashing from the bus stop to your home and you want a hot cup when you get home. Just trigger the kettle to fill and boil enough for you with the app on your phone, and you'll be warm that much faster when you get in the door.

Maybe there's an autocoffee model, which makes your coffee to your preferences, and you get it to pre-boil while you're heading for home. Using the GPS on your phone with your average walking speed, it calculates when you'll be home so your coffee (or tea or hot chocolate) are just cooling to the perfect temperature when you walk in the door.

You may think it won't happen, but how many would use an autokettle? I wouldn't, as I don't often drink hot drinks, but my mother might because she won't have to hobble around. A blind person might, too, for a similar reason. People who prefer consistent drinks would - I have one particular friend who hates Starbucks but drinks there anyway, because it's always exactly the same.

It's a neat idea, but these things need to be secure and most of all reliable and dependable, before any of that happens.

Which means a very very long timeframe.

Thrift stores. A metal pot. A tin can. Literally any heat-conducting container placed on a stove can be a kettle. This is a technology that likely predates the written word. I don't see it going away anytime soon. We have never needed the Internet to boil water. That isn't going to change.

Consider that many appliances might be equipped with such data feeds. Consider that it might be time consuming or impossible to find a device without them.

If your kettle is deemed an interesting part of the national power infrastructure, it might even become legally mandated. I've read stories that suggest the UK power authorities watch carefully when... Dancing with the stars? finishes, because 15 seconds later, 20% of the nation puts the kettle on. It has already been suggested that "smart" thermostats might be a nice requirement, so the power company mothership can (Voluntarily, of course! initially...) reset your temperature to shape load.

If your kettle and your fridge and your thermostat and your toilet and your alarm clock and your television and your front door and your car and your vacuum and your..... are all chirping little pixels of your life picture to the mothership, you are surveiled to a degree beyond the erotic dreams of the Stasi.

Further: this bleak picture presumes that all of these little fomites are well implemented. In point of fact, many of them are wide open gateways to black hats.

Defcon has had a bunch of extremely interesting talks since IoT became a buzzphrase. Not that they were boring before, but the sheer scale of incompetence on behalf of the IoT manufacturers is astounding.

>I've read stories that suggest the UK power authorities watch carefully when... Dancing with the stars? finishes, because 15 seconds later, 20% of the nation puts the kettle on.

The classic example is Eastenders (a soap set in London where everyone is miserable) and was more recently an issue with the Great British Bake Off, but the effect has apparently declined in recent years due to BBC iPlayer/catchup services/Netflix. [0]

[0] http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/10/03/no-more-electrici...

To me, it's not really the control of activities that will be transferred away, it's the information that people can glean from (for example) the usage logs which can be used to build a significant profile about your movements.

For example, the kettle boiled this amount of water this many times a day. The kettle isn't boiled between 6am and 6pm so we can deduce that nobody is home during those hours, but the autoboil function initiates at 5.30am on weekdays so we know the owner gets up early. On some Fridays it's later, so they either work more hours or they're off socializing. The quantities boiled suggest that only one person is drinking a hot drink most days. More water is boiled on Saturday mornings, suggesting that someone else spends the night on Friday. External access from the smartphone app comes from $provider but two different phones, suggesting that the drinker has access to two phones.

Now add in a name, phone number, and credit card usage data obtained from a third party, and suddenly you have something that someone will want. If it proves valuable enough, other manufacturers make a similar product, and suddenly a "dumb" kettle becomes much harder to get.

Boiling regularly on weekday mornings and late on weekends? Likely someone with regular employment and able to pay bills. Boiling times consistent with working shifts? Hm, likely working class.. Boiling times irregular and most of the time late in the morning? Looks unemployed, don't sell anything on credit..

yup, I just want a thermostat that I can remotely access -directly- and not through someone else's server. Just keep track of my IP addr myself, and yes if the ISP swaps it out for another I'll have to update it when I get there again... blah, blah, blah, yes' it'd be fine with me.

Yet I cannot fine one. Every single 'smart' thermostat has some corporate service I have to negotiate through for access, and of course if that is down, well, I'm outta luck. and, they're surely accumulating all of my data.

Anybody know of one?

If you check out Home Assistant's climate control category, you can look for devices with IoT class "local polling" and "local push".

There are a number of options there.

Scroll to the bottom of this page for the listing:

https://home-assistant.io/components/climate/

looks quite interesting - thanks!

Not sure about IP thermostats, but if you're willing to get a USB stick to interface with the network, a thermostat that speaks Z-Wave might be your best bet. This one seems highly rated on Amazon[0], but there are lots to choose from.

From there I'd recommend using something like Home Assistant[1] - it's an open source project that provides a UI for a ton of different smart home gear. I use it at home to control some smart lights and automate things based on whether I'm home or not. (There's also OpenHAB, but in my experience configuring that is much more involved.)

[0] https://www.amazon.com/GoControl-Thermostat-Z-Wave-Battery-P... [1] https://home-assistant.io/

It's relatively easy to build one yourself. I did it, it works great.

I used 2 ESP8266's - one in the temperature sensing and control box in my office, and one controlling a relay inside the boiler. When it's too hot the relay is opened to switch the boiler off, when it's too cold the relay is closed to switch the boiler on.

The question is, do you trust your own handiwork to the extent you're not worried it'll malfunction and burn your house down, or freeze your pipes during winter? Personally, I'm reluctant to have electronics I built myself connected to mains and running unsupervised for longer periods of time.

Well, some parts of it are a lot more likely to fail-deadly than others. A commercial power supply that outputs 12V or whatever your servo wants basically can't burn anything.

As for bugs in the control code freezing your pipes? Well, just give the code as much care as you give to driving and you should be fine. ;)

(The serious solution to that is to have a dead simple failsafe controller that switches between on, off and auto, where auto is controlled by your crazy inventions.)

For projects like that, you don't connect anything to the mains at all. Specifically:

- At least in US, thermostats control is low-voltage (24 V AC), and come from low-power transformer which will just stop working on overload (ask me how I know :) ), so there is no electrical fire danger

- You never plug anything into the AC outlet directly -- you always use AC/DC adapters (and not the ones bought on ebay for minimum price, too)

- To prevent freeze hazard, you also leave original thermostat hooked up, but set it to really low temperature (10C/50F).

- Overheating house is possible, and you definitely need to consider this in your software (for example, require periodic control messages to keep your boiler on). However, I do not think it is an actual fire hazard -- likely, there are hardware safeties in your heater to prevent that. Still, if you are worried about this, you can install a second thermostat in series with your relay and set it to max temperature you ever want.

That's a very interesting point, I built my own system, but I don't trust my own handiwork enough, so I went the middle route: I got a Siemens RDF302 thermostat (which is a dumb thermostat with a Modbus RTU interface for remote control) and then I use a raspberry pi to change the setpoint temperature according to a remote signal or schedule. The actual decision to turn on/off the boiler however, is still left to a "real" thermostat made by a professional company, and a malfunction of the automated system is likely to result in a failure to change the setpoint, not in infinite heating.

The problem is there isn't really much of a market for something like that. Sure, you can have detailed documentation on such a product that explains how it's functioning, why it might drop out when your ip changes, etc., but who is going to understand that? People like you and me, yes, but we're a pretty small market.

In order for there to be a reasonable audience for a product, you have to target the least knowledgeable person - or at least someone pretty far south of the median. Those people aren't going to understand what's happening, and they're going to get upset each time their ip resets and they can't connect to their thermostat anymore. They're going to take the frustration to the thermostat company, they're not going to understand what the service rep tells them, and they're going to return the product, leave a bad review, and buy a nest.

No one wants to be in the position of making and selling such a product. That's why you pretty much need to make your own with an esp8266. And that's why so many of these IoT devices end up being far too bloated.

Is there a way to bundle a dynamic DNS offering that would make the changing of an IP address invisible to the home user. It's 2018, so I'm wondering if setting this up has become easier than it has in the past. Just trying to think of something to keep the idea viable.

> The problem is there isn't really much of a market for something like that. Sure, you can have detailed documentation on such a product that explains how it's functioning, why it might drop out when your ip changes, etc., but who is going to understand that? People like you and me, yes, but we're a pretty small market.

I understand why this is not available as a standalone product. The window is probably too small to warrant it. I don’t understand why no company appears to offer it as an option to a product that otherwise “just works.”

Sure, it would require additional investment on the part of the manufacturer to include an “expert-mode” toggle that lets the user make their own decisions, but a market exists for people who want that. Money is being left on the table.

>> Money is being left on the table.

It sure is -- I'd buy that immediately.

The nice part about it is, if their "cloud" services actually added value, I'd be happy to sign up for that too.

I just want a direct access and a fall-back if their cloud goes offline (and I read about that happening in the reviews of every single one).

And sure, we're a subset of the market, but I'd expect a sufficiently large subset to make it worthwhile.

If it was a really good unit with high-quality sensors, WiFi connectors and other components, I'd pay more than for a Nest.

> The problem is there isn't really much of a market for something like that.

These days, the internet gives you access to several billion people. Even a very niche market can translate into a large customer base and a nice, profitable business.

If what you said were true, there'd be no routers which claimed to support DD-WRT out of the box as a marketing point.

The market for people who want to control their thermostat directly is exactly the same. And the best part? The manufacturer can support that AND have their 3rd-party cloud shebang going on, these are not mutually exclusive.

Why don't you just turn the damn thing up when you get home?

I agree. It takes about 10 min to warm up the house, no problem.

Remote access is so I can turn it down remotely because I forgot to when I left :-)

That depends on the kind of heating you have on the house. Air vent heating takes 10 minutes. Radiators take some 40 minutes. Underfloor heating takes about 90 minutes.

Remote control does make sense for some, not all cases.

I'm actually looking for one for my shop, which has a longer heat-up time

For home, I agree that the programmable ones are ok, although they fall down when we travel for more than a week -- we have to either run it an unnecessary day, or arrive to an extra-cold house, so if there was a good one, it'd still be handy there.

> that gets attached to my butt

Wait a minute, I don't have that extension installed at work...

I have it installed on all desktop machines and had it for so long now, that I keep forgetting about it. Must have edited the post, that's usually how it sneaks into comments ;).

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