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Comment by brobdingnagians | Hacker News Reader

I am trying to get rid of any smart devices in my life. I need less things connected to the internet not more. I bought Bruce Shneier's "Click Here to Kill Everybody, and that just convinced me even more. Software is a weak point, and I'd rather have the least amount possible in my "mission critical" everyday life gadgets. I want single-purpose, purpose built devices that do that one thing very well, without connecting to the internet for a whole host of secondary, and mostly useless or even harmful surveillance, reasons.

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I never jumped on the “everything IoT” bandwagon, but recently I’ve relented a bit.

I own/use exactly 4 “IoT technologies”.

I have smart radiator thermostats that turn on/off the heat based on family presence, as well as “predict” the heating needs based on weather forecast, sunshine hours, etc.

I have a heat pump in my vacation house that is remote controlled by the internet. Not strictly needed, but very convenient in the winter.

To keep an eye on my vacation house I also have a camera that uses HomeKit Secure Video. Requires no infrastructure on my end except network.

And finally, like a lot of people I have Hue.

I control it all through HomeKit. I also keep everything on a couple of IoT VLANs, one for “trusted” devices (AirPlay, media, PlayStation, etc), and one for “everything else” with client isolation, filtered dns, IDS/IPS. No upnp/nat-pmp, no tunneling (if detectable), and no other dns servers but mine (until dns over https becomes a thing with IoT)

In the future however it might become more or less impossible to avoid. Our neighbors recently purchased a new oven, which of course comes with internet connectivity. Their new washing machine also has internet connectivity.

In the very near future everything will be connected under the pretense of providing useful feature, when in reality it’s all about pushing adds and gathering telemetry data.

How could an oven or washing machine possibly be useful remotely?! I'm a fan of connectivity, but that just seems absurd for those appliances.

Being able to remotely preheat my oven could be useful. But not enough to justify the risk of someone else remotely preheating my oven.

It could also be useful for anyone who worries they left the oven on.

"I don't worry I've left the oven on anymore. Now I worry some else turned it on."

And my concern would be that, like the diesel motor example, someone would find a failure state that starts a conflagration. Leaving it on accidentally at 200C probably won't hurt anything, but malicious hacks might be catastrophic.

> How could an oven

Starting pre-heat before you get home. Monitoring temperature away from home. Leaving a dish in the oven and starting it at a specific time, say an hour or two before you leave the office and head home for the day. Checking if you left the oven on after you left home.

> or washing machine

Notifications for the end of the cycle. Status of detergent levels if equipped ("Do I need fabric softener?" whilst at the store). Starting a load (similarly to the oven above) while you are on your way home so you don't end up with wet clothes sitting all day, so they're ready for the dryer when you walk through the door.

I get your popular cynicism, but c'mon now. None of the stuff I'm outlining there was researched, it was all off the cuff and I live in an apartment with "dumb" appliances from 1996.

Can connect with Google Home or Alexa or Siri and do phonetic commands like start program or stuff like that I guess.

I'm a new dad and when we both are busy with work, chores and the baby I find myself wishing I had IoT devices to automate a couple of stuff home.

My new oven has bluetooth and wifi connectivity. I obviously thought this sounded completely insane, but I went ahead and googled to see what people were using it for. I was actually surprised and impressed.

First, there's a way to do sous vide cooking without one of those big circulators like the one I use. They sell a device that is a little bluetooth thermometer; you can put it in a pot of water, and the induction range can keep the water at a precise temperature. No circulation, but more than good enough imo.

Then you can use the wifi to operate it remotely. So as a case scenario, one could fill a pot with ice and water and a sous vide bagged steak, then turn it on remotely, say an hour or so before getting home. Or one could conceivably leave an uncooked cake in the oven?

I will probably never bother to enable any of this, but yeah, there are uses. I don't want it, but I get it.

Most of these things can just be done by using the timer that comes with every oven. I've often set the oven to come up at around 15.00 so I can cook a stew for a few hours before getting home.

I guess people who cook more than I do could find it useful.

But then again, if you’d asked me 4-5 years ago if I could see the usefulness of smart radiator thermostats, I’d probably have said no. The ability to remotely turn on/off heating is not that big a deal (to me).

It’s only when coupled with AI to optimize savings it becomes a great thing. Since installing the smart thermostats, I save on average 30% on my heating bill, and save the environment from 30% of my CO2 emissions from heating.

The AI part learns about how much the house heats up from a given amount of sunshine, coupled with outside temperature and heat loss, and controls the thermostats accordingly. If the indoor temperature is 1C below the target at 6am, but it’s expected to be sunshine, it simply won’t turn on the heat.

remote pre-heating of the oven, remote alerts when the laundry is done. Non-connected versions of these appliances just make a really loud alarm sound when they need someone to pay attention to them, but a small notification on a phone would be more effective and less annoying.

Remote preheating? I prefer a little more work-life balance, i.e. cook when I'm at home. And use the (rather short) time for preheating to look at the paper mail or mix a drink. Or stroll through the garden for some minutes.

Other appliances, e.g. our washing machine, tell me already how long they'll take. So I can set an alarm to not forget to care for them later. And if my fridge would alarm me because its door is not properly closed, I'd rather prefer a loud alarm over a small notification which I might overlook because a mobile device is someehere else.

What do you use for IDS/IPS? I'm interested in doing something similar.

I used to run on PfSense with Suricata, but my SG-3100 would frequently get rebooted by the watchdog because the load was too high.

These days i just use a Ubiquiti Dream Machine Pro. The base version works just fine as well, the pro just fit better on the shelf, and i didn't need an additional AP.

as most products become connected you will have to pay a premium for products that are not - especially as companies try to make profits from tracking (as in SmartTvs).

People who are not rich enough to buy everything single purpose will have to pick and choose.

Tracking and ads. Now that your TV menus have ads embedded, it’s a small leap from there to have to watch a commercial before you can start your washing machine

And a small leap from there to start your vibrating ring.

This prostate stimulation was bought to you by Geico

Personally I hope ecological collapse nips this black mirror future were tumbling in to.

Things feel bleak.

If anything, ecological collapse might hasten this future.

Just last week, there was this news about the Texas power company that remotely raised temperatures on people's thermostats to save power and avoid brownouts/blackouts. This predictably caused public outrage as people discovered what was in the fine print that they signed without reading, but from the perspective of the power company, everything worked as intended, so I absolutely expect to push these remote-controllable thermostats even harder moving forward.

I was counting that as an example of a tech done well! CA does this too, but afaik, it is advertised as such when one signs up for a free Smart meter and there is even a slightly better rate offered.

I just don’t see an alternate way to implement this. Prompting users via pricing is not something that will quick enough or intuitive enough. Also the sacrifice they are asked to make is at most a few degrees

>I just don’t see an alternate way to implement this.

Increase capacity.

By running the system ever closer to the bone you simply cause more disasters.

We are all underestimating the level of fluctuation in energy requirement caused by a slight weather change. If the system were to have capacity comparable to max possible usage, the rates would be sky high. This is not like storing water and even that we can’t store beyond a certain point. See what happens with flood and drought patterns. The power company will sell it to someone cheap, we just don’t store it

https://www.upi.com/Archives/1983/03/14/The-last-episode-of-...

>remotely raised temperatures on people's thermostats to save power

why would raising temperatures save power? probably a silly question but I'm confused.

It was presumably the upper threshold before air conditioning came on.

Explanation for those wondering why this needed explanation: Most thermostats set the lower threshold before heating comes on, so turning it up would use more energy.

thanks to you and everyone for the explanation - I haven't lived in the U.S for 20+ years now so I forgot all about air conditioning.

Raising the temperature during a heat wave is the same as increasing the threshold where the ac unit kicks in. So instead of all these ac units clicking on to cool off houses at any temp above 70 degrees, the ac units click on at 80 degrees. That change saves a ton of energy.

One of the things I do during the year is set the AC according to the outside temperature. During the winter months, my house is set to 70 degrees. As the average outside temperature rises, I increase it by 2 degrees for every 10 from 60. So when it's 100 degrees outside, it's 78 indoors. I have an older unit and watched in horror last year as it struggled and failed to cope with 110 degree temperatures.... I basically just gave up, shut it down, and waited until night time to turn it back on.

Raising the temperature the thermostat is set to maintain the house at, thus less power is used to cool it in a hot environment.

because air conditioning runs less.

Managing an integrated grid using household solar and battery as part of the supply management is one thing.

Adjusting people's usage for demand management is another.

They need to be separated and managed differently.

Instead of push adjusting HVAC for demand, they could use proper price signals with the appropriate local automation at the household that can be over-ridden by the consumer.

I agree price signals and local automation are the way to go. I would love to have my HVAC run according to the true cost of electricity, also minimizing CO2 emissions.

BUT giving the grid operators emergency control over demand is a useful tool when the grid is close to failure. Too many people will just hit override unless the price signals are very high. When grid operators know people will die if their system goes down and it’s on the brink, people choosing to be 4 degrees cooler is such an immoral choice I’m OK removing that choice from them.

Also very helpful to reduce shocks to the system after any outages by temporarily limiting HVAC restarts.

> Too many people will just hit override unless the price signals are very high.

But that's the point of an energy market, it will adapt the price signal to the supply and the demand. People will override it without thinking only the first time. The second time they will remember the humongous bill they got because of that and will think twice.

These programs are opt-in and normally come with incentives like a $75 gift card or a free thermostat.

It's possible that people are using thermostats that are still provisioned to the previous tenets electrical bill.

It's a important technological achievement to be able to shift and schedule loads so that we can switch to more efficient energy sources. Requiring the power generation companies to service the upper percentage of usage is a lot of expensive environmentally as well as economically.

Ecological collapse will likely tumble us more into a black mirror future as populations become increasingly dependent on technology to fulfill their needs.

Said every generation ever.

At the very least, people should be able to make an informed choice about ads & tracking. The (imperfect) analogy would be e.g., a Kindle which is a bit cheaper if you buy one that shows ads on the lock-screen.

Regulation also helps, e.g., in the UK LG's smart TVs have a toggle to enable content fingerprinting, and it's off by default.

If you can even get non-Smart TVs.

Last month I gave our nice SmartTV to a friend and bought low quality non-Smart TV from Walmart for $199. Really low quality but running it with just a new Apple TV box is a UI delight. My wife is unhappy with the downgrade, but I love it - much more private, no unwanted SmartTV apps and having the UI driven in ways I didn't like, being forced to have the old device on the Internet, etc.

I'm with you on this one.

I refuse to buy any appliance that requires a connection to the internet. I look for things that are straightforward to repair and maintain.

Agreed, but the My Book doesn't require a connection. It can use it, optionally, but I don't think it would run afoul of this prepurchase test.

Now, as for how they ended up configured to be accessible from the internet, I'm not sure. Is that a user-facing option? Is it on by default? Did WD have a responsibility to disable the feature when they stopped maintaining it?

Plenty of IoThings don't "require a connection", yet end up on the Internet anyway, which is perhaps worse.

That's one of the reasons why the transition to IPv6 is good : IoT directly connected to the Internet without any NAT is going to be the default assumption.

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