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Comment by jchw | Hacker News Reader

It is extremely frustrating to watch "connected" "smart" devices repeatedly do exactly what we knew they would do, and yet nobody ever learns a damn thing. People will keep on buying Internet-connected devices, manufacturers will keep making them, this sort of thing will keep happening, and the rest of us will struggle to even find mass-manufactured things that are not Internet-connected and "smart".

Even devices that are pretty much for "self-hosting" are increasingly trying to sneak in cloud-connected back doors, like Synology DSM trying to sneak in cloud authentication to your local NAS. Stop trying to make the devices I bought for the purposes of having locally-managed devices depend on cloud services! My local network is not just a fucking gateway to cloud services!

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Maybe the solution is not to abstain from the latest tech, but to regulate companies that make these devices so the shenanigans are actually illegal. It is not a problem that should only be solved by ideologically driven people who are willing to tinker and suffer, but rather a protection all citizens enjoy.

As long as companies can buy politicians in the US don't expect it to take off.

I'm not fully convinced that legislation alone can fix all of our problems, but for what it's worth, I'm all for it.

That said, regulation probably won't solve my problem, because what I want are devices that are specifically not designed to just be cloud-connected thin-client devices. I doubt regulation is going to entirely prevent this class of device from existing. And it's only going to get worse: look at what Microsoft is doing, they're literally trying to shift Windows into being a fucking cloud service.

Legislation is the most direct way to solve multi-agent coordination problems, which is what this is. The majority of consumers want cheaper easier products, but in aggregate that leads to negative outcomes for society where we have traded off important values that can't compete on price.

The problem is getting voters and legislators to buy into the idea that those values are important and not worth trading off.

If anything regulators will prefer to abolish NON-connected devices.

The very iPhone I’m reading this on is one trade war/sanction away from becoming a useless brick of electronics that probably can’t even show the time without calling to Apple every now and then.

I gave up on Ubiquiti because of the cloud nonsense. Altium is pushing cloud hard (and pushing me to KiCAD). I'm a weirdo for using a mac w/ only a local account (no apple id). I can't buy any new or electric vehicles because they're all 'smart'.

The cloud is artificial, so it must be chemtrails, which explains why modern software feels like its giving me cancer. Wake up sheeple. /s

Can’t you use ubiquiti fully locally? I haven’t tested my setup but I can access the web ui directly through the device ip

Iirc they've got a one-year timeout for updates, after which they'll make you sign in with a unifi web account in order to update. Deeply frustrating.

If you want an electric truck (or potentially an SUV), consider looking at an Edison Motors pickup truck retrofit. They are technically Diesel Electric instead of pure electric but you can customize the battery load if you want to run full electric. They don't do all the stupid cloud connected software stuff and they are all about repairability/self maintenance.

Probably the only electric vehicle manufacturer that isn't egregiously tech-bro-y and dripping in dark patterns.

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