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Comment by retSava | Hacker News Reader

I made https://github.com/msloth/lgtv.js which can control a webos LGTV on your local network. It was in my js beginnings so pretty sketchy and not at all clean. Once I was able to control it I kind of lost interest in making it more tweakable, cleaner interface etc, but there are others that did.

At home I now run a small rpi0 with a telegram bot that, among other things, acts as a LGTV command proxy. So on my phone, I now tell my telegram bot eg "movie" which then puts the tv on the right input, sets volume, dims some hue lights and shows a nice float on the TV with a welcoming message.

It's also useful when I can't find the physical remote, or to send messages like "dinner in 10" (that shows on the TV screen in a float) to a gaming child with selective hearing enabled :).

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I used your library! When I asked Alexa to light the fireplace, a raspi turned on the home heater and the TV started playing the furnace video on Netflix :D My daughter told me she didn't understand the point, as it was not real, but the project was so much fun to implement ^_^ Thanks a lot for sharing it.

"Yule log"™

That way of communicating with your child is some black mirror shit

Why? It's just an instant message.

If you prefer shouting up the stairs through multiple doors over whatever it is they're doing, that's your prerogative of course.

Anyone remember home intercoms? They seemed to be incredibly popular in new home construction for awhile in the late 80s and early 90s where I live. They were very useful. They seemed to disappear without really being replaced by anything.

I’m considering getting a bunch of HomePod Minis to try out the intercom function.

Back when mobiles had become more accessible. My friend would phone his sister downstairs to get us some snack and drinks. She wasn't impressed, to say the least

My mother had one installed in the moid-seventies, it was a nine-days wonder in the village (well, Toronto’s Little Italy pre-gentrification).

She also had the hard-wired phone handsets rewired to use big, clunky four-prong plugs, so she could install a RadioShack-branded answering machine that was the size of a small suitcase. They hadn’t invented controllers that could rewind the outgoing message cassette, so you had to use a special cassette with an infinite loop.

You’d think that back then we had to walk uphill to AND from school, in a blizzard, in June, but actually, the weather wasn’t much worse than today and yes, hang out on my lawn all you like.

> a RadioShack-branded answering machine that was the size of a small suitcase.

Huh, interesting.

As a bit of vaguely-relevant trivia, I found this fascinating recording someone made of some phone systems from the early-mid 70s: http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/VRHQ.mp3 (~30min) (from http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/, "Two Early Voice Recognition Systems"). Not quite answering machines, but if the same technical acumen were applied to recording messages I expect the result would have been very impressive.

I look at this as an interesting way to get an idea of the bounds of the status quo of where technology was generally at around the ~70s. This is really cool, but also within the bounds of what was reasonably conceivable and maintainable for the period. The recording notes that system/technology was observed finding its way into a few different use cases.

I don't see why. Can you elaborate? Black Mirror explicitly explores paths of technology gone wrong? I might be missing the concern here.

For the record; I think its cool. I do like my LG ( but it is not connected to anything ). This is the first time ever I am actually tempted.

My daughter wanted a colour changing lightbulb in her bedroom, so I bought a Homekit-enabled one. I'll call her for dinner a couple of times, but of she still hasn't responded after that (headphones on, usually). "Hey Siri Red Alert" will start pulsing her light red.

At which point there is much grumbling and stomping. Black Mirror? Maybe, but hey, I have to get my enjoyment where I can.

Black mirror or not, I like this, and can see the enjoyment in this too :D

When I was a kid, when I didn't show up within 5 minutes of being called for dinner, I wasn't allowed to sit down at the table anymore. I then had to wait until everybody else was done, and enjoy a usually cold meal afterwards, and any dessert was usually gone by that time too. And I had to do the cleanup. Suffice it to say, we kids weren't late a lot of times.

And if you wanted to make the ceiling light flash, you had to manually and laboriously flick the switch until a parent yelled at you that it was bad for light bulbs.

Kids these days!

yeah. When it was summer and I was like 6 or 7, my parents bought me a cheap digital wrist watch with alarm function, otherwise I would have never made it back to dinner in time when I was outside on the playground, biking around with buddies or playing football (soccer). That was the most "tech" parenting I ever experienced while subject to said parenting :P

I later learned from mom that other parents too kinda relied on that thing going off, so their own kids would go home too when they heard my alarm.

I have a color scheme in my Hue setup called “Rig for Red.” I like being able to say “Alexa, turn on Rig for Red in Living Room.” :-)

Rename Alexa to Vasiliy so you could then ask it for one ping only.

What would be full Black Mirror would have that voice message sent to the device the headphones are being used so that the actual message is heard as well. Maybe with the klaxon sound effect preceding the message. Oh, having the red light pulse as well still. No need to not use it when available. Maybe even combine movie universes and have an animated envelope read the message a la Harry Potter.

I think that's basically just a notification. Where it gets creepy is when parents install 24/7 surveillance cameras in their childrens bedrooms.

I can kinda understand it when it's about being able to quickly check if your baby is okay, but I doubt every parent has the decency to disable it eventually to give their child some privacy.

There's no way there aren't lots of children growing up with zero privacy right now.

My wife and I have three children and we don’t allow any cameras in the house. We believe some level of privacy is needed for normal human development and a healthy overall sense of well being.

I just turn off the device wifi on the router if my child is not paying attention.

But sending someone a text message on the phone isn’t?

I routinely SSH to my kid's iMac and use the 'say' command to deliver important messages. Like "this computer will be rebooting in 30 seconds ..."

Self destruct. Then play the mission impossible music.

I need answers for this statement...

Ok open up, what is your kid doing on an iMac? (You didn't expect the question huh)

If you ever want a kid to listen to you, try airplaying to the Apple TV from your phone, turn on selfie camera and deliver the message

Nah. We have Nest Mini's in our kids rooms, and I will routinely cast my phone audio to those speakers, turn the volume to max, type my message into the Google Translate webpage and then press the "Read Aloud" button. It's funny and it works.

Hehe, if that were the only modus of communication, yeah :). Thankfully it isn't, we are also known for leaving messages in the snow, ads in the local newspaper under pseudonyms, anon leetspeaks on the dark webs, and occasionally speaking with one another :).

I do like Black mirror :)

Note that telegram is not e2e encrypted, so you're sharing your private family communications with logging servers in russia.

Telegram is indeed not E2E encrypted, and messages sent to/from bots cannot opt into E2E; but would you happen to have a citation handy for more information on these logging servers in Russia you speak of? Thanks!

"In August 2014, SORM-2 usage was extended to monitoring of social networks, chats and forums, requiring their operators to install SORM probes in their networks."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SORM

Telegram didn’t comply that rule and Russia tried to block Telegram that time without success

unlike say, Google Inc

Telegram is not hosted in russia, but you are right, trusting telegram, is trusting ceo Pavel Durov and hist good intentions, much better than any big tech, but not even close to a proper e2ee

My apologies, you're completely right, Telegram is not hosted in Russia. I don't know where I got that idea in my head from...

USA: PRISM is probably still a very active project. This is the program where the NSA would request access to major US companies (notably Google and Microsoft) and the companies would grant them access to some of their databases. The NSA slide says that "it varies by provider" what information the NSA is privy to, but it never breaks it down fully to say exactly which provider is providing which data. The NSA slides do mention email contents, photos, etc., so it's probably safe to assume that at least some of the major providers are/were providing contents and not just metadata.

Googler, opinions are my own. I wasn't at Google when PRISM was discovered.

As far as I understand, your take on this is incorrect. At least for Google, people that worked there were pissed, some posting nasty posts about the NSA hacking their network. My understanding was, that the NSA tapped the lines between data centers.

The NSA was able to hack Google, because there inter datacenter communication was not encrypted, partially because it was on private fiber that they fully owned. After this project came to light, Google already had a project in the works to encrypt all traffic between data centers, which they enabled shortly after.

PRISM is the code for FAA702 collection, and has nothing to do with the Google/Yahoo WAN cable taps, which had the codename MUSCULAR.

PRISM continues to date. The USG can get any data they want out of Google without a warrant.

Your description of PRISM is wrong. The FBI issued court orders for the content (not metadata) of specific accounts to US Internet companies. The Internet companies reviewed the court orders and set up forwarding of some of those accounts' data. PRISM then ingested a subset of the data from the FBI DITU's systems (those collected from foreign accounts) into the NSA's databases. The slides Snowden released are very clear about this.

And? Everyone with a cloud cron job or doing the same thing on a compute instance hosted somewhere has the same reality

Telegram is just a nice platform, have you tried using it? basically just a standard ui so that none of your bots need frontend development

Why regurgitate something about the optional e2e feature

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