Hacker News Reader

Comment by deanCommie | Hacker News Reader

"extend the low-bandwidth working range of devices to help find pets or valuables with Tile trackers, and help devices stay online even if they are outside the range of their home wifi"

Seems like a genuine customer problem. If you want to set up smart lights through your back yard, or a smart sensor at the edge of your driver, they might not have WiFi connectivity to the rest of your house.

Hence the Sidewalk metaphor - a mesh network allows the devices to hop access from one another.

There is also a pretty detailed Privacy/Security Whitepaper and it's important to point out this before any alarmist "Amazon is spying on you!" pearl clutching: https://m.media-amazon.com/images/G/01/sidewalk/final_privac...

View on HN

> Seems like a genuine customer problem. If you want to set up smart lights through your back yard, or a smart sensor at the edge of your driver, they might not have WiFi connectivity to the rest of your house.

That sounds like a "you" problem, not a "me" problem. If "you" are setting up smart devices where "you" don't have connectivity, "you" should provide the connectivity, not "me". (Note: I don't have a problem with devices piggy backing on/extending their owner's network).

TFA mentions possible issues with FTC and TOS violations with customers' ISPs. But what about overages? Who's liable for those? Is there going to be a metered breakdown of network usage? Will AMZN cover costs of overages due to neighbor usage? What about potential liability issues? Infosec issues?

This just sounds like a too easy setup for a class action lawsuit.

I agree. And what, you're gonna rely on some neighbor's AMZN device proxying the internet for you? I hope the availability of that "smart" sensor or whatever isn't too important.

It’s not an Internet proxy. There is so much misinformation about this it’s nuts. It’s a network to talk to AWS IoT API. It’s not giving random devices access to your network.

> It’s a network to talk to AWS IoT API

Except Alexa is extensible, so you can't draw any kind of barrier around what's actually being done using that network.

And IoT has a flawless record of security. There's no way someone could find a vulnerability in a device connected to a sidewalk network. Oh... wait.

The IoT devices are exactly the ones I don't want on the network!

Am I misunderstanding? Some device belonging to property X uses the internet connection of property Y to connect to the internet to talk to AWS. Isn't that what's happening? Or is there some kind of VPN being used here?

Can Apple devices use your mobile data to participate in the FindMy network? This seems like a weird line to draw.

The apple airtag devices do the same thing. They can get online via any apple device. Not sure if that applies to other FindMy devices though. I hope it does =)

> They can get online via any apple device.

Airtags don’t “get online.” Apple devices take note of the Airtag’s identifying characteristics (I don’t know how this is defined) and report back to Apple having been in proximity to them. They are “dumb” with respect to the internet. Just Bluetooth beacons.

Isn't that effectively the same thing, though? The airtags are useful because they cause other people's devices to transmit their location.

Apple sells this as a feature on new phones (which people implicitly associate as a communications device). Lights and doorbells are supposed to be dumb devices, not network gateways for the general public.

It would be like Ford announcing that they had been putting USB ports in the bumper of every car for the last 5 years, and starting today you can walk up to any random persons car and charge your phone.

So you're saying the doorbell that uses machine learning to detect people and objects and the send me videos of them is a dumb device? I'd love to see a smart one!

Ahh, thank you for the correction.

When this tech falls into the wrong hands we are all so screwed.

This is the crux of the issue. I have spent a lot of my adult life in places that would horrify the average westerner. The root of the problem in recognizing what could go wrong with this stuff, is never having been exposed to a jurisdiction of political power which is run by murderous psychopaths outside a rule of law that benefits anyone but the psychopaths. Of course "authorities" will always continue to push boundaries and seek to embiggen the largesse of their power, but we in the developed world are so lucky! Most of us here on HN have won some sort of cosmic lottery with odds more infinitesimal than any other lottery that could ever exist. But an unfortunate side effect of never having been exposed to the various hazards of human civilization that almost every other human before us has endured, is not having built up any "ideological antibodies" against these sorts of things.

I've seen comments on Youtube that seemed shocked that Youtube could trace comments to an IP address! We are deep in it now, approaching a point where the barrier to entry to understand how the technology functions is too much even for capable specialists to fully comprehend the rampant abuse happening at this very moment. How often do we as technical people find out about some new god damned thing some god damned tech company is doing to steal our data or otherwise exploit us as "customers"? And even people who are technically capable of grasping the depth of the power of this technology are still busy hammering away on their keyboards to make it more powerful, having never had to worry about violent psychopaths with political power. We are creating a truly terrifying nightmare of brutal suffering for our grandchildren or their children.

Some people would argue it already is in the wrong hands. Without any conspiracy theory required, it is controlled by a tiny, wealthy elite with power and connections to manipulate our political discourse and ensure their new power is not scrutinised.

"You can help me, I can help you". My smart lights work where I don't have connectivity, but you do, and your tile tracker works where you don't have connectivity, but I do.

It's really quite similar to Apple's Find My network.

I just wish this was going to some open collective where everyone could benefit, rather than just Amazon customers...

Helium is exactly what you describe. People deploy APs that provide coverage and in turn get fractions of pennies for transferring data from random peoples devices.

https://www.helium.com/

I've seen this and it looks interesting. A true offline mesh large-scale network would probably not be feasible, so some kind of authority would be required. And crypto does seem to work for that to keep it decentralized, but I'm not sure I like their implementation. I've got a few LoRa radio kits and Raspberry Pis, but am not allowed to setup my own node. Rather I have to purchase one from them.

Apple's Find My network is far far more limited in scope

I think the real value is for the devices that can move, such as that Tile. You have practical way of ensuring they don't move into a dead spot, and for trackers no way to ensure they don't go beyond range.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com