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Comment by kurthr | Hacker News Reader

I'm stunned that almost anyone would go through the effort of connecting their oven to WiFi. I'll be more concerned when these become 5G connected and start charging you a monthly fee for connection. I wouldn't be surprised if in the future you can get $100 OFF! by signing up for the $5/mo service that you just can't seem to cancel (or it's free for the first year when you sign up with a credit card).

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Just finished reading "Ubik", I found it partly amusing and also prescient that to get thru a door or make coffee required putting a nickel in the slot. Practically everything required a small payment in order to use it. We seem to be almost there: cars, ovens, tv's, dishwashers...the list goes on.

Yes, agreed. No other writer has so well captured the helpless, bemused terror of being imprisoned by small helpful machines.

Device manufacturers are starting to build mesh networks so pretty soon your devices won't need to connect to your WiFi in order to phone home.

I was about to scoff that even if the oven, fridge, microwave, and dishwasher are all talking to each other, I'm not going to connect any of them to the Internet.

But then I realized that my neighbor might connect his to the Internet, and that a low-bandwidth 433 or 900 MHz radio mesh can hop from house to house until it finds any house that's connected to the Internet.

BRB, off to replace my drywall with a Faraday cage...

Amazon Sidewalk already does this. For what it's worth, they claim you can opt out. I'm not sure I trust that the transceiver is always off.

Removing antennas from electronics isn't too hard, or worst case, physically damaging them or installing faraday cages.

Seems like an interesting cottage industry that could bloom around intentionally stupifying your unwanted smart home.

I'm sure they'll just throw error messages until they've managed to establish a connection. Device manufacturers have already shown they'd rather cripple your devices than respect your wishes.

Antennas on cheap consumer devices are often just a trace on the PC board. Still not that hard to remove (could just cut the trace), but harder to do without damaging anything than unplugging an external one.

Enclose your kitchen in a Faraday cage.

The best feature of an internet connected oven is that the clock is always accurate. No more manual updates after a DST change.

We've had clocks for decades that synchronize to atomic time sources accurate to within 1 second over 100 million years that automatically correct for daylight savings time that do it all by just listening to publicly available radio broadcasts, no wi-fi or information harvesting required.

This solution is so cheap that you can buy it in the cheapest alarm clocks.

This is not a good reason to have wifi on an oven.

> We've had clocks for decades that synchronize to atomic time sources accurate to within 1 second over 100 million years that automatically correct for daylight savings time that do it all by just listening to publicly available radio broadcasts, no wi-fi or information harvesting required.

In the US we have:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/WWVB

> WWVB is a time signal radio station near Fort Collins, Colorado and is operated by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).[1] Most radio-controlled clocks in North America[2] use WWVB's transmissions to set the correct time.

Atomic clocks are less reliable and require more expensive circuitry. Everyone has wifi and a simple SOC that has everything needed to run the oven, display, and do WIFI at the same time can be found for pennies. Plus, internet connected is a selling point.

Huh? Wifi soc is way more expensive than a statically tuned radio receiver. The atomic clock isn't in the device, that's the point.

I was thinking more of the case of poor reception where you need a receiver outside and the device is inside.

Ok, I did not know about that. Why isn't this more popular? I have a fancy $1000 high end microwave that does not have wifi and does not sync its time. We've learned to ignore its clock.

Radio time has never worked for me in Boston on any of the devices I've owned. I'm sure I'm not alone. It's simply too far away or there's too much interference or both.

This came up in a Reddit thread[1] yesterday; anecdote from there[2]:

> "My favorite part is I have 3 Samsung Wifi Appliances including microwave and double oven and I really couldn’t think of a great feature other than the clock automatically setting. Well fuck me when I found out they don’t set themselves at all, and in fact they don’t even have memory so the slightest power outage means I have to reset $3k worth of appliances manually. Oh and each of them have different ways to set the clock so it’s always fun trying to set them differently in PM. No I’m not salty."

[1] "Appliance makers sad that 50% of customers won’t connect smart appliances" - https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10l6vl0/applian...

[2] https://old.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/10l6vl0/applian...

If only everything in my home would sync to my local NTP GPS time source...

WiFi should provide a clock even if you're not connected.

Some routers (e.g. asus with asuswrt-merlin) can intercept all NTP traffics and redirect them to router's NTP server.

Can you elaborate, how does that work? Just having a wifi radio chip, you can get the time by listening to other wifi broadcasts in the area?

or a notification on your phone when the oven is at temperature, has been left on, when the timer has gone off...

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