This is a gen x complaint. Boomers would just ask their kids to set it up because they can't get it to work. Gen x realizes what is going on and that it is bullshit to need an account for a fucking lightbulb.
My late 50s mum happily signs up with her Facebook to everything. Meanwhile it's often the people in their late 20s to 30s who were introduced to computers during their youth before everything had super streamlined GUIs who know enough about software that they realize this is a privacy concern, what internet privacy means, and why it's important. People who are older or younger than that have to go out of their way to learn how and why to look behind the easy interfaces. That's my experience and explanation at least.
Remember when our parents were super nuts about keeping your info private online, not revealing too much info to strangers, and not signing up for stupid shit? My my, how the turntables.
My 70yo mom thinks I'm crazy paranoid because of my data privacy stances, while she's dealing with constant spam and account hacks. Guess who hasn't had damn near any info issues? :D
I was never allowed to be on Club penguin or the like. I also wasn't allowed to be on Facebook when it became popular around me, until I was 14. Mum, what happened?
Tbf you weren't missing much with Facebook. It was kinda cool in the early days when it replaced MySpace (like Reddit to Digg), but that went out the window pretty quick when all your extended family are calling your parents wondering why there are tagged pictures of you dancing around a fire half naked with a liquor bottle in your hand at 3am.
My mom never actually had any idea what the internet was. My dad bought the PC for me, so he probably would've doubled down if he knew what I was seeing and maybe would've even said it was good for me or not a big deal or something
It's weird to see my 11yr old brother now with the exact same access to YouTube which I'd ironically argue is a lot worse than old rotten.com. No idea if that's true but an argument could be made, for sure
Eh the internet was a lot simpler back then. Yeah there was fucked up shit around like there is today, but social networking imo is what really screwed the pooch. Back then, people just posted screwy shit for the sake of it and had varying degrees of influence, but now almost everything out there is intended to manipulate your behavior and worldview on a mainstream level. It's a shitton more dangerous than the weirdos in chatrooms asking a/s/l.
That's because for her the only risk is about getting kidnapped or killed, stuff that needs physical contact. Getting accounts hacked and phone scams are relatively new in her life span.
It really sucks now for product comparisons. It used to be the you could look up productA vs productB and get an enthusiast going on about them, now it's purely AI generated crap.
My young family members are the worst, they just click "yes" to everything, regardless of any effort I've made to explain how things work.
Any barrier to convenience is too frustrating to them. They don't like even using full applications in their laptops, always say "wheres the app, this is too complex". 🤦🏼♂️
I know some network security folks, in their 40's, who've literally said "I don't want to be inconvenienced" when discussing why they tolerate this invasive shit.
Motherfucker, your job is securing networks. You know first hand the kind of shit going on out there.
I really wish more things just let me log in with Facebook, I don't want to fill out and make passwords for every pointless site. At least I can be somewhat confident that Facebook will follow security standards.
Might I recommend a reasonably secure browser with an in-built password generator and manager? I use Firefox. You make up a username and it generates a safe password and saves it so you don't have to remember it'd Just use a safe password for the browser itself that you can easily remember. I personally feel that's a decent compromise between secure and convenient.
I love the basic instructions for someone debating security policy nuance. It's like you don't get that he's way, way, way beyond "pick a password you can easily remember" despite the technical level of the discussion.
The person I'm replying to isn't the only one reading the comment. Chances are someone who's on the fence or hasn't interacted with the issue yet will benefit from it a little. That's what I like to think at least.
You’re probably aware, but welcome to third party tracking. You can’t truly get away from this trash unless you start doing some hardcore blocking at the network level (apps have tracking too).
Boomers would get the bulb set up by their kids, then something will happen, and you come over to find your parents sitting in a rave room because they need the light and can't fix it.
Sadly these days, it’s a hold over from boomer managers making the decision that services require logins, which in turn require accounts and emails. So gen-x managers who were taught by boomers do the same thing. It’s systematic really.
I don't think it's boomer managers doing that, necessarily; I think it's an unholy alliance of liassez-faire tech bro entrepreneurs and the propaganda marketing industry.
Every time I use an ATM I get the mental image of a 70 year old COBOL programmer desperately trying to patch holes in a sinking ship with a roll of duct tape.
Boomers were the generation that invented a lot of this tech. Most of them weren't literate, but I have known quite a few who were. Honestly same with Gen x, we grew up with it but, a lot of the good tech didn't come until later in our lives. There are tons of illiterate gen xers and millennials and gen y and z. Some people care and some people don't.
Laugh it up now. When we’re 50, our holoshere is going to require us to submit to genetic modifications to get our next soylent nutrition paste to dispense. God only knows how we connect to a person young enough in 2040 to know if it’s even possible to bypass. That kind of stuff was laughed at the last time we tried.
now, are you an old, or are you gonna send me a copy of your social security number and complete sequenced genome?
Does email work or do you have a mailing address? I'll spit in a cup and send that to you if I need to but I'd rather not have to go to the post office.
What I love was it is boomers that allows these changes so they gotta live with it. It's not like we all woke up and decided to start asking for emails for everything. It was sitting back and being cool with letting ads take over everything until they started needing more and more data so they weren't paying 30 million for beer ads to people who don't drink
Anything paying for ads shouldn't be worth it. We should be hostile to any advertising as stealing from us. They don't pay us to take our free time yet tell me anytime of your day where you are not experiencing some type of advertising.
I gotta go to work 1/3 my day. 1/3 I'm sleeping. 1/3 I get to myself except that 1/3 for me is taken up by lunches, kids sports, prepping for tomorrow's 1/3 work day. So of that 1/3 maybe I get a few hours to relax and enjoy something. So I sit down to the streaming service I cut cable for and and still get chunks of that time giving to company's Hawking me stuff I don't need wasting my free time. It gets worse when you think how much-needed of our day is being in front of some type of ads. Radio, TV, bus stops, magazines, going to kids hockey games, browsing the internet, watching movies. Even viral videos often are just paid commercials made to circumvent ad regulations and laws and to not pay websites for server time and big fixes.
It is insidious. We have been corralled into something we don't even know we're in. Like cows that don't realize are in a pasture. It all seems innocent like "I'll just ignore that thing I don't like" but deep down that thing is affecting every part of the society we are in and it's a root cause for most of what we complain about today.
For me it's that I don't want short form video anywhere near my view.
I went to a bar for a drink the other day. They had TVs all over the place which I normally don't care for but it looked like golf or something I could just ignore. After I ordered my drink I realized how wrong was.
It was actually some weird short form video TV channel. They croped the 16:9 screen into a 1:1 square with moving neon lines in the "empty space" where there was no video. Each video was about 5 seconds long and showed brainless content of people using a Rube Goldburg machine or doing card tricks and other such nonsense.
Once I realized what was happening it was too late as I got my drink and I felt compelled to finish it and pay. I tried to ignore the 5+ screens in my view but they were too big and eye-catching to really ignore. I kept catching myself looking at one of the screens after a minute or so. I felt like I was getting serotonin raped between ads.
Eventually I moved to sit by a window and stare at a tree. I'll never go back to a bar like that again.
This reads like a cyberpunk vignette; I enjoyed it. Thank you. I've started to take note when something decidedly cyberpunk happens in day-to-day life. I make a lot of notes.
screens in places where people might look at an ad will all have built in image recognition and eye-tracking.
an algorithm/model will calculate the number of people within view and an acceptable level of eyes on screen per minute (or some other time increment tbd by an industry leading marketing psychologist) depending on the task they are doing.
the algorithm/model can also calculate the local demographic
the short format video content can be easily tweaked to improve engagement. If the racing crash clips aren't generating enough engagement, then it can try indoor cat clips.
when the eye to screen levels are at or above minimum advertising levels, display an ad that would best match the target demographic that the advertiser set. The ad contents will also match the actions of the local population.
Certainly. Having worked in advertising for 25 years, that's probably just phase one. Those short videos will eventually be different for each person seeing the screen... and largely A.I. generated with few humans in the loop. In the flip side, people will probably be able to program their smart glasses to hide all that shit. It's an arms race over our attention already. See: Trudell's "mined mind." Or Bo Burnham, for that matter.
I'm a grumpy bastard and hate similar things but honestly, this doesn't sound so bad that I'd be particularly bothered by it or leave if I hadn't already ordered that beer. It's just wallpaper. If I was by myself I'd probably appreciate it on some level and if I'm with other people I'd likely stop noticing. Overall I think I'd probably prefer the bar not have them at all but it's really not that bad.
Loud sports or music that can fuck right off but otherwise, meh.
Normally I would agree with you. But they had these 50" screens in every direction except for down. I was literally staring at the floor in an attempt not to look at them. The swirling colorful "boarders" of the short format square video was eye catching enough. But with the video changing scenes every 5 seconds it was a similar effect to the Eisenstein editing style in Battleship Potemkin. The screens were screaming at you to stare at it.
It was also just total garbage content, the type of stuff I left reddit for. It was just a step above what Americans of the future watched in Idiocracy. It was truly a bizarre experience for me and also one of the most "boomer" moments I've had. Although out of everyone else in the bar, only the boomers were happily watching the short format video.
@The_Picard_Maneuver I once bought a TV sound bar that wanted me to download an app, make an account and give it detailed location information just to use it as a wired speaker. I returned it.
If there's a tape deck, you can do headphone jack to cassette tape. If you don't have a headphone jack on your phone you can get a little bluetooth reciever to headphone jack type thing.
There's also the route of using a small device to broadcast your own little AM station (same deal, gets audio from jack or bluetooth), then tune into it with your existing head unit.
Best way is to just rig up your own aux in, but that requires some doing.
Was it a Bose? I once bought Bose headphones and downloaded an app to pair it. When Bose recognized the headphones, it told me that I had used the wrong app to pair to those headphones.
@snow_bunny Nah, it was Sonos. Which, I guess the app ecosystem is their whole thing - but I didn't know that at the time. I just wanted a basic sound bar, and the reviews didn't really mention that all that extra fluff was mandatory.
In retrospect Sonos sucks for a lot of other reasons too, so I guess it was a bullet dodged.
Linux has built in drivers for most shit with no account necessary. Logitech (for example) has a third party app called Solaar that does everything Logitechs own crappy mouse/keyboard software does.
Getting away from the endless hassle of popups and drivers was my biggest motivation for switching to Linix way back in 2008.
They get processed locally. It's just that some macros are stored in the cloud (except the simple remapping s). So Razer synapse downloads them every time you turn on the computer.
I didn't make a razer account, therefore I had to remake every macro that wasn't a remapping.
Um, how about no Scott, okay? You got my money, if you wanna keep pestering for more money, I'm gonna return this original item and you aren't getting shit.
That and they can turn on when you get home after sunset. But they could do that with simple wifi connection or something. Unless your wifi is unstable I suppose.
For Android, the location permission was(is? not sure right now) basically required for anything that wanted WiFi or Bluetooth. As getting access to that, could in theory be used to locate you
Not that this was necessarily the case here, but an explanation
Required by Google, yes, but not actually required in any functional sense of the word other than the function of spying on you in another insidious way. It worked without invasive permissions for a long time and you absolutely won't convince me it wouldn't now if data collection weren't a priority.
(This isn't directed at you personally; apologies if it seems like it is.)
Yeah, but the problem is, that app developers abused the WiFi/BT permission to locate people, without them knowing about it. So at some point the permission was changed to reflect the theoretical real world potential of abuse
The downside is, that apps that don't actually require your location, will still need to ask for it
Yep technically it's called coarse location which in theory tells apps what neighborhood you're in, but can be exploited by marketing to know if you're in front of a shop stand. At least it won't drain your battery with GPS usage.
Lots of times devices need access to a thing called location just to detect certain kinds of Bluetooth. I don't know the specifics but it's a trend I've noticed. It might not be the fault of the light.
That's not even a boomer complaint. Zoomer here. I fucking hate how everything needs an account. I recently started cleaning up my mail box and this shit makes that nigh impossible. I especially hate it when it's just a shitty novelty site, if it needs an account, you bet your ass I ain't ever using it, piss off!
make an email for different things, such as one for subscriptions, one for things like this, one for professional use, etc. it's annoying but also helps 🤷🏻 i hate that we're at this point lol
My trick is that I use a domain name I've bought for my personal emails which is a catch-all address, and I sign up to websites with "(websitename)[email protected]", so I'm assuming I'll know who the culprit is when the time comes and I can do something about it with relative ease. I don't know if that's actually smart or not but I'll see how I get on.
The real solution: Buy your own domain name, and make a catch-all email address. Every account gets a new address with that account’s company in the email. Target is target@[your domain].[tld]… The benefit is that you can see exactly who is selling your info to spammers, and easily burn those accounts. You start getting spam sent to that target address? Congrats, now you know Target has sold your info and you can set a rule to automatically send any target@ emails straight to your trash. Also, get a damned password manager so every account has a unique password.
Create a fake persona. This persona has a fake name, birthday, favorite food, first pet, etc… Memorize everything about this fake person, or even just make a note about them in your phone. And none of it is real. This fake person’s info is used for all of your signup info. So when shitty fucking companies get hacked and lose all of your info, the hackers never actually got any of your info. And if you ever see spam addressed to that fake persona, you know you can immediately discard it.
Between the catch-all email address and the fake persona, you’re basically immune to all of the typical ads, phishing, data breaches, etc…
Their $9.99 /month service provides unlimited aliases.
And will work with a domain you own, so it's not like you're locked to them if you want to move to somewhere else down the line.
Abine (now IronVest) just sells the privacy aspect. They aren't an email provider -- that is, they don't give you an email box -- but provides this "masking" service to forward it to your regular email provider, if you already have email service.
They also do some other stuff like provide masked phone numbers that forward to your real number. They have provided masked, temporary credit card numbers with charge limits and a bogus name and address, so you don't even need to give your real name to someone you purchase something from online (though it looks like that's currently not available, says that they're bringing it back. I have used a masked credit card number from them in the past, so I know that at least some merchants will accept it, though I'd think that it'd tend to trip anti-fraud stuff at merchants, but...shrugs).
That being said, while I think that this sort of thing is a way to reduce the increasing degree of data harvesting -- you can't always choose whether-or-not to use certain services -- I think that if you have the option to choose a product or service that doesn't harvest data on you in the first place, that's really a better option.
You can also do this with dots in various places in your email with gmail. Not as descriptive as the plus sign thing but still can be useful as you can create different filters based on the location of the dots.
It depends on the mail server/provider. As a datapoint, I use Zoho Mail with 4 of my domains and they all have a catch-all that points to a single inbox.
Using Zoho, too. Unfortunately, the free version does not have IMAP or POP3. (Still does hate SMTP, though, which is fantastic for my self-hosted services)
https://www.migadu.com/ is a cheap and reliable one. Used YandexMail for years for free before, but they were shameless about reading the contents of emails and then had the audacity to remove the free tier and demand money for it.
That's a great idea! The fake information won't work for things that require real information, but it's otherwise great! Is there any retaliation you can take against companies that sell your information? I guess you could forward all of those emails to their sales address.
Or better yet try making your accounts for fake characters like Goku or ash catchem so with enough people doing the same thing we can get spammers to look at the data they bought and think hey wait a minute I've been scammed
If you set it up as a catch-all email, then anything going to the domain will hit the same inbox. From there, you can set filtering rules to send emails to whichever box you want.
I was going to buy a really sweet drone. Then I watched the Getting Started video and there was an app and an account thing, and I realized the second they shut down the service, that drone would be a paperweight.
I'm back to building my own because I'd like to use it for more than a year or two.
"We've updated our privacy policy and want to let you know we care about and value your privacy. You now agree that we can sneak into your bedroom at night and take videos of your genitals while you sleep, for sale on OnlyFans. If you disagree with this policy then we will brick your device."
I wish we could go back to the 90s as far as this shit is concerned.
Just take it out of the box and it works.
Send in a registration post card if you feel like bothering, but thats about it.
I am so sick of everything, especially shit that has no conceivable need to be online, not only demanding an internet connection, but demanding accounts and shit too.
Cause you know why they do it. They want to track you, harvest your data, and monetize it. Its not about selling you a good product, its about selling you a good listening device.
honestly this shit is so ridiculous, a fucking toothbrush wanting wifi and an account so people can spy on you even more closely than they already do, hell when it comes to regular internet services i 80% of the time nope out when they ask for an account...how do people WANT TO buy this shit 😭?
Just chiming in, if you’re using + aliases for privacy some people can just remove the plus and see your email
For example if you sign up with [email protected] the service can remove everything between the + and the @ and see your real email is [email protected]
It kinda isn't, however I found that some websites refuse to acknowledge that plusses are valid. I see this one uses dashes which might have a similar issue. Only thing I think is universally accepted are periods
As a kid I had an email address that started with a dash. Back then I regularly encountered websites that flagged it as invalid (but only if it started with it)
The format of an email address is local-part@domain, where the local-part may be up to 64 octets long and the domain may have a maximum of 255 octets.[5] The formal definitions are in RFC 5322 (sections 3.2.3 and 3.4.1) and RFC 5321—with a more readable form given in the informational RFC 3696 (written by J. Klensin, the author of RFC 5321) and the associated errata.
Local-part
The local-part of the email address may be unquoted or may be enclosed in quotation marks.
If unquoted, it may use any of these ASCII characters:
I don't want to try to escape the following for Markdown, so I'm just gonna dump it in a blockquote:
uppercase and lowercase Latin letters A to Z and a to z
digits 0 to 9
printable characters !#$%&'*+-/=?^_`{|}~
dot ., provided that it is not the first or last character and provided also that it does not appear consecutively (e.g., [email protected] is not allowed).[8]
If quoted, it may contain Space, Horizontal Tab (HT), any ASCII graphic except Backslash and Quote and a quoted-pair consisting of a Backslash followed by HT, Space or any ASCII graphic; it may also be split between lines anywhere that HT or Space appears. In contrast to unquoted local-parts, the addresses ".John.Doe"@example.com, "John.Doe."@example.com and "John..Doe"@example.com are allowed.
It is plus aliases*. It’s got additional features for them that other providers don’t have though. Like for each label (alias) you can toggle whether to get notifications, mark as unread, screen new senders, and show them in the “aggbox”. The aggbox is like an inbox, but since you don’t ever use your “bare address”, it just shows the labels you want. Your bare address autoresponds with a list of your public addresses.
* It’s technically subaddressing, using either a dash or a plus as a delimiter.
From what I can tell, not much. They use dashes "-" instead of pluses "+".
But neither of these two options provide you with much privacy. Plus addresses, as others have pointed out, can be automatically stripped (just delete everything after the plus sign) and you get the real email behind it.
This service specifically I dont know the details, but it seems there is a unique prefix per user, but no "real email".
So for instance if you use gmail you can have "[email protected]" as your real email. You then use "[email protected]" for your lemmy account. If that email gets leaked out somehow, people can easily tell your real email address is "[email protected]"
This service seems to do something very similar with the difference there is no base email, so there isnt a "[email protected]", there will only be "[email protected]". It is worth pointing out you might still be tracked because all your emails will be prefixed with "sunny". So although spammers wont be able to figure out your real email address they can just try something like "[email protected]", and if multiple of your addresses leak it will be easy to link them all up to the same person.
This also creates A LOT of lock in. Because if the service shuts down you now have dozens of services for which you don't have means to access the emails anymore.
Thank you for the feedback. These are all really good points that I’d like to address.
The vendor lock in part I agree is very important. I’m working on adding support for custom domains, which would let you migrate to another provider if Port87 ends up not working for you.
Regarding the privacy part, a long term goal is to let you create private aliases for your labels that are randomized addresses on a different domain. I haven’t started working on that yet, and supporting enterprise features will take priority.
If anyone is interested in this, check out addy.io and simplelogin, which provide this exact service and are seen as privacy friendly by the community.
Remember that any email service like this has the potential to read all your email, so pick a service you trust.
Those are email forwarders. Port87 is an email service. They provide a similar feature, but it’s not the same. They still rely on you to organize your email with filters and labels in your downstream email service.
Yes, you do need to organize your stuff downstream if you so desire (I personally prefer not to). I will leave the comment though because they provide similar funcionality and might be helpful to someone.
Create an account so you can do anything with your purchased device? That's just plain abusive. How about: thank you for using your hard-earned, post-tax funds and choosing our product. Let's get you going as fast and easily as possible, then go as far as we can to make things work before having you stop and create an account?
Only reason to create one is so you can save a persistent context for multiple types of interaction. Support multiple users, or different mobile devices, maybe groups of devices. But for a single device, out of the box, no sign up should EVER be needed.
Unless the company's priority is to hoover all your usage data, analyze it to death, invade your privacy, and sell it for profit.
Well I mean you do you. I will not be changing all my lights and such. I have thought of putting home assistant on my little server but I literally have nothing to connect to it except maybe my raspberry pi running octoprint.
I'm trying to figure out what you're even referring to. The only thing I see abbrebiated here is TV. But TV is the default way to say television even in person and has been my entire life. At least it is here in the US. Is it different elsewhere?
There kind of is an argument here that maybe more services should permit for use of public-private key authentication.
Using one password with multiple services is a problem, because you have a shared secret with the other end, and if you use the same password with multiple services, that service or people who break into it could impersonate you elsewhere.
But with public-private key encryption, you never hand out your private key. You only use it to sign a specific request sent you, so that risk doesn't exist. You can use a public-private key pair with one or multiple services.
I mean, personally, I'd kind of rather have three physical keystore devices.
One I carry with me. That stores the key or keypairs necessary to do the sort of things that I carry auth data with me -- my keys and the cards I carry in my wallet. Just means that I only need one device.
The other I leave at home, stored securely. That authenticates to maybe more-critical stuff, things like a stockbroker, maybe -- stuff where I don't need day-to-day access, and don't want to worry about my credentials going missing.
The last I keep in a safety deposit box in a bank. That has all my authentication stuff. That's to deal with catastrophic situations, like my house burns down or I get killed and need a way to pass authentication stuff. The bank makes me jump through a lot of hoops to get access to it, but it's there.
I'd like the device to have a display and a keypad, so that I don't have to trust external input devices as to what it is that I'm authenticating (e.g. smartcard point-of-sale systems do this).
I'd rather not use a smartphone for the first device. The smartphone is just too damned complicated and rapidly-changing for me to really want it to store my authentication data. I'd rather have it be a separate token, something that I can plug into a smartphone or point-of-sale terminal if I want to perform an authentication.
There are crypto tokens that contain keystores -- powered or smartcard -- but they tend to not have a screen or keypad, to save on costs. I don't really feel like that's something that I need to save on, as long as I only have one.
I'd like the device to optionally permit setting a passcode for a given key on it. That's not an ironclad form of security, but makes it harder than just pickpocketing someone's keys. And for some things, that I use all the time -- like my house -- I don't need to have a passcode.
This has a number of benefits:
If you're mugged or something, you physically are unable to authorize to things that require the keys on the device at home or the device at the bank. In fact, you can credibly say that you can't do so. That counters coercion issues:
You don't need to trust POS terminals. Sketchy terminal? Not a problem.
You can keep a log of transactions on the device.
You don't have to worry about the latest clever smartphone attack compromising your credentials.
You can use the thing the same way with a smartphone or computer or point-of-sale terminal. That's something that we really don't have today -- most people don't have smartcard readers, and vendors generally don't have support for authentication for those.
It has some downsides:
It's another device to carry.
It needs to be powered (though it could have very low power requirements, like a digital wristwatch, run for a year on a charge, unlike a smartphone, and could potentially charge off USB or similar). You wouldn't want your "keys" to lose power (though people who do stuff like smartphone payment already need to worry about this).
It is possible to have lights that automatically turn on and off and not have to log in to the bespoke lightbulb app that stops being updated in three months while simultaneously rendering your lightbulb worse than useless because now it's stuck on a dim shade of green that you can't change because the last update broke the app.
The future we were promised is there, we just need to help it into the world.
Heh. This was me when I was shopping for a new Sonic toothbrush. WHY ARE THRER APPS?!?!?? Seriously though, spending $100 for the (questionable) quality toothbrush that had zero need for my info. I don’t want stats. I don’t want to know the battery percentage.
Yeah, boomers will just brute force their way through repeated "wrong password" attempts and inevitably make a new account every time and their take away from the experience is that "new fangled technology is so convoluted and never works"
Meanwhile the millennial experience is to have zero issues actually using the product because we're technologically competent, we're just going to complain the whole time that's it's taking unnecessary data, or find weird ad hoc ways to make burner accounts.
I will lecture my dad for having 14 different email accounts and he will retort with "you also have more than 10!"
Yes old man, and I use all 10 and know exactly how they differ and what each is used for. You think you have one account when you actually have 14, they all share one password which Is probably my name written backwards, and you're sending mail to your old account address then getting mad when you can't find it in the inbox of your new account, and you still refer to all mail platforms as "Windows mail" even though you've exclusively accessed your yahoo mail via the browser for the last 5 years, and have owned a Mac for 10 years... We are not the same.
I linuxed my parents to not have to suffer that kind of nonsense any more, and it worked. No more viruses too. Then one day my dad became a maga lunatic, undermining all of my efforts to make him less irritating. They really shouldn't have killed Harambe.
Not just an AI toothbrush, an A.I. toothbrush for 🧠 geniuses 🌟.
I took this the other day while toothbrush shopping so my partner and I could laugh about it. I bought the cheapest Sonicare they make and it works as well as every other one I've had for the last decade, but without bluetooth, wifi, AI, an app, etc.
(And it's still overpriced garbage. My last one just stopped working out of the blue, almost 2 years to the day after I bought it, right outside the warranty period. Planned obsolescence is an exact science these days.)
To be fair, Oral-B doesn't require an account. You can just use it as a normal electric toothbrush. I'd also say the Oral-B is a lot better than Sonicare in terms of cleaning
Last time I bought one the Sonicare was thought to clean better. That was word from my dentist and from some online articles. Consumer Reports rates Oral B higher because of the battery lol. Both clean just fine it seems.
I have one of those. My partner got a pair of them with a heavy discount and it is an excellent toothbrush
I couldn’t tell you what it does differently i would need to download an app to see which is never gonna happen. I am using it as am bog standard electric brush and i cant be arsed to read the manual.
Theres a small screen that will display how long you brushed that shows you an frowning face if you cut it short. Il leave it up to others to judge how useful that is for an adult.
My dentist has no complaints and that is really the best i can ask so yeah its a great normal electronic toothbrush if you literally ignore the ai part of it.
Oh yeah, I have the same one (or similar one in the range)! I got it because it charges faster than the non-ai version. Disregarding the digital gimmicks it is an excellent toothbrush, and I couldn't tell you if the Bluetooth/AI make it better or worse because I literally can't care about the connectivity protocols or data processing capabilities of a fucking toothbrush.
Between my partner and me, 4 to 6 times a day. I need to charge it faster because I don't have the charging base in the bathroom (UK houses don't have plug sockets in the bathroom) and I often forget to charge. When that happens, I want to wait 5 minutes to brush my teeth, not 45.
Oh. Alright. That would have been my follow up, but I was struggling to find the right way to word it, so I just resigned myself to not knowing.
"Heads" is an interesting, but accurate, descriptor.
I'm equally surprised you don't have an outlet in the bathroom, but that's a different discussion.
The way you're doing it is efficient at least, but if the mechanical part of the toothbrush fails, nobody gets to brush..... Or you have to move it around yourself I suppose, like a caveman.
Electric toothbrushes are a bit like escalators in that way. If it breaks, you can still walk up the stairs.
AI is such a dumb stupid label they slap on anything these days.
It isn't even AI, if it was it would be a fucking sentient stick you'd shove down your mouth.
Just like how they used to slap Smart on everything years ago, the device isn't smart, it just has new features.
They just abuse the terms to try and stay relevant in modern markets. It's annoying as fuck though, because actual AI is a pretty interesting concept, but I've not seen any real AI, since practically all of it is just yet another feature that someone programmed to do something specific.
With Philips you don't need to only make an account, you'll need yet another "Bridge" device (costing about as much as your lamp give or take) to get all the features.
Correct. I have a Home Assistant SkyConnect coordinator (zigbee) connected to my home server to control my RGB lighting. Fuck Phillips though, they plan to make registration mandatory under the pretence of "security"
Which is funny, cause if people cared about security they wouldnt have all those stupid useless devices in their house demanding internet connections and trackable accounts.
The real question is why our government in the USA hasn't stepped in and made any protections for our data, which would solve this issue entirely. Apps like Temu or Character.AI have very sketchy data management and privacy practices, you have no idea what they're really doing with your data, it's required to make an account for both of them. Clearly they are selling them and obtaining lots of your data to do all sorts of things with. Frankly, I don't think it should be legal to obtain huge amounts of people's data, specifying nothing about what it is actually, truly being used for
I have a lightbulb that I can change the colour temperature of. There's no internet or app connection, you toggle through the different states by rapidly turning it off and on again. Whoever designed it deserves a medal
My girlfriend always jokes with me that despite being tech-competent I am an old Luddite about tech. It is never more true than when something asks me to make an account.
I kind of wonder whether it'd be worthwhile to have a certification agency that just certifies things for privacy and non-cloud-connectivity or the like. Trying to dig through spec sheets and reviews to figure out how a product functions is a pain. I'd rather pay slightly more to just look for some privacy certification on a product. I don't really want to try to keep up with the latest privacy issues present in a given product category, would rather have a specialist do that.
Like, let me just look for a "PC-24-O" (Privacy Certification 2024 Offline) label or something on products. Saves me time. Also would let vendors like Amazon let me filter products for that certification.
Finding a fucking living room lamp where you can change brightnes, was quite a search to exclude all the iot devices. That most online shops have no filters for iot, doesn't help.
The post made me look him up (it's been years since I've seen him in anything) and I just learned that good ol' Lyle McDouchebag was a voice actor in Class of '09. TIL.
Additional to that account thing: Why does one have to install an app in order to access all functions and to toggle options of a device?
My girlfriend once has bought new headphones. In order to switch off the telephone function (you can - among other things -answer calls from the connected smartphone by touching one side of the headphones) it is required to download an app (a sloppily programmed one as well) to switch off this specific function. All other functions (volume, play, back and forward) are operated with buttons.
I heard about the same thing but with printers: The scan settings can only be toggled by an app (I think it was HP who has that feature - who else!?)
I got Sonoff relay switch, you can use guest account for it. But yeah all these smaet thing require a server and internet connection, so creating an account is mandatory in most case. One time my internet is down outside my control and i can't switch on my ventilation fan and have to use the manual switch on it, it's quite annoying. Kinda wish there's one made for just local because i don't need to use it remotely.
That's the annoying part. From what i can tell, unless i read it wrong, Home Assistant basically merge every devices from multiple app into one central control unit, but it seems to me that i still need an account and connect my device to all those app in order for it to function.
but it seems to me that i still need an account and connect my device to all those app in order for it to function.
It depends. Some devices are fully local and don't require an account, some require an account temporarily and then never again (can use a throwaway email), some require an ongoing cloud connection.
I'd look into zigbee, since those devices inherently don't connect with the outside world at all. Maybe Matter as well, although I don't know enough about it to confirm.
I second this. I always try to get Zigbee on MQTT compatible devices. However, for all the devices I have that require cloud connection, I found a way to locally control them from home assistant and block them from accessing the internet in my firewall after the setup was complete.
It will do a lot of that, but I find it incomprehensible why people tolerate those devices. It will also link up to Zigbee and Z-Wave devices that don't require accounts.
HA itself has a username and password local account but I don't think that's what the meme means because it isn't a forced online account.
I wanted a countertop dishwasher. Home depot doesn’t have them in stores, it was online only. I figured it would probably make me make an account in order to check out. I said nah.
its a shame you have to do this, but you can use HomeAssistant to disconnect a lot of those lights from their 'clouds'
I bought dirt cheap RGBW bulbs from walmart and now I'm essentially emulating their 'cloud' on my local network. (tuya)
no more losing ability to control lights if the ISP goes down
It's one of those things people don't really think about checking because it's so moronic from the get go. If I'm buying headphones I shouldn't have to check if I can use all functionality without needing to download an app and creating an account. They're headphones, they're supposed to output (and input if they also have a mic) sound. They don't need a dedicated app that also requires an account. There was a time when checking for that wouldn't even cross my mind.
I definitely wouldn't blame the customer for not checking the moronic things companies put in their products. Times are changing and I do have to check how much control I actually have over the hardware I'm buying, but it shouldn't be like that.
It is so frustrating. Especially when you did your research but the information is out of date. Widget2000 rev1 was fine but Widget2000 rev2 requires an account.
Or it doesn't require an account but your options are "yes" or "ask again later." So all of your searches say it's fine. But if my experience is degraded for no good reason just because I don't want an account, that is a weak win at best.
But then there's factors like in-ear/earbuds, waterproof, noise-canceling, sound-quality/technology, price... a bit of research is advised here, if not your only factor is cheap. There's in-ear with quad drivers even, still in the range of 90$!
I am the only person in the entire country who knows and follows the rules for operating a vehicle.
This is a constant source of frustration for me. Im on the spectrum and even though my logical, intelligent side of the brain understands that rules are just words; the emotional part of my brain just screams "THATS NOT HOW THIS WORKS" every time someone hits their hazard lights and just gets out of their car in the middle of a 35mph road.
Streaming services were better than cable for about 3 years somewhere between 2013 and 2019. Now there's too many, they're too expensive, and they shuffle their libraries around too much.
I wanna watch key and peele. oops its not on the comedy central app? who owns comedy central....hmmm....paramount? okay its on paramount plus...and its just a link that takes me to Amazon video? why? just play the show what is this
I don't remember how many I've made since gmail came out, but when I tried to make a new one recently, it told me that I'd reached the max number for my phone number (which it required at account creation).
If you want a lightbulb that changes colors to be controlled by a phone or network accessible device, as opposed to some other sort of special RF remote, and you DONT want random other people to be able to control or possibly disable or damage your lights, then it kinda needs to have an account.
By all means, avoid iot stuff if it's not your thing, but then why are you looking at color changing lightbulbs? The ones that need special remotes are terrible gimmicks and the ones that get wired into a hardwired home automation system cost a fortune to set up and require a ton of installation.
My nephew says that about everything. Millennials seem to be totally okay with giving away personal stuff as long as it's by choice. Otherwise it's a hard fuckno.
If you don't want someone else controlling those things, you do indeed need an account. If you are fine with a physical switch to control lights then just stick to that.
You do indeed need to authenticate that device to your other devices. But that doesn't require a middleman who won't care what happens to your hardware after they go under.
I live alone in my apratment, I live in a suburb of Stockholm.
The winters gets dark in Sweden, so when I come home I open the door to a black hole, damn depressing.
But if I can turn on the lights when I am on my way home it feels as if I have someone at home waiting for me, vastly improving my mental health during the winter.
This feature alone put a smart light system in the top 5 things I have ever bought.
Yep, I agree fully, and the most annoyibg part is that it would be conceptually easy to get rid of all accounts and still have remote control of the system with access control.
Build the system so that the bridge gets a UUID from the Hue servers, when an app is connected to the bridge have it get the UUID and generate a token for the device.
Then when an external request comes to the Hue server authenticate it with the token and forward it to the bridge.
If you get a new device, simply connect it to the bridge as normal and you are done.
Then have a local admin password on the bridge to clear old tokens, and a nice reset switch to clear all config.
Conceptually, way easier for a user to use, and little need to store personal information on the Hue servers.
I know how things work. I'm still using the hue app, but I added my hue bridge to my home assistant (running on a core i5 micro system, instead of a raspberry Pi), and I've been replacing my lights with zwave bulbs from inovelli as they break or stop working (or were just adding new lights to the system).
I'm struggling with how to grant outside access right now. Either I'm going to use zerotier or do a global redirect through a port forward or reverse proxy or something. Maybe a CloudFlare thing.... I dunno. I haven't decided, but the need to connect from outside the house is pretty small, so I'm not in a rush to make a decision.
I'll eventually get rid of hue. By comparison, the bulbs are pretty dim, but bluntly, they're pretty old now, some are starting to fail. Takes a long time for LED bulbs to fail, so it probably won't be long now.
I own a few domain names, so I would use that. Since it's DHCP for my WAN, I might go with a dynamic DNS but use a redirect from my domain name to it (CNAME entry, if you're familiar with DNS).
But ZT is superior to wire guard (and most other VPN systems) in that it does automatic NAT traversal. So if I use ZT, I don't need to worry about port forwards. ZT does everything for me (NAT "hole punching" and handles all aspects of the VPN connection).
With CloudFlare, I can use one of my domain names, pointed at their service and essentially it acts as a combination of reverse proxy and VPN to the system....
I'm mostly concerned about any exploits related to the web service built into Casa OS, that someone could spoof a request that breaks security, so I'm hesitant to just expose it to the internet like that. VPN would be better but requires a lot more set up on the family computers, phones and such.
There's also the option of Nabu Casa, the home assistant cloud subscription, which would help home assistant financially (which is a good thing), and get me the functionality I'm looking for, but I'm not keen on yet-another-subscription-service coming out of my account every month. I've been trying to cut back on those things. I already don't pay for Netflix, Disney+, etc. I don't really want to add to that list that I'm trying to get to zero.
Also, I can see a method of setting up remote access to the system without an account.
Simply have the hue bridge report a UUID and set a token in the app when you press the button to authorize the phone.
The Hue servers accepts and forwards the request to a specified UUID as long as it is signed with an approved token.
There is a local admin password to remove individual tokens, and a nice reset button on the bridge that will clear any config and let you start again.
Sure you can use VPNs, however I may be an IT guy but I don't have the energy to deal with this stuff on my free time, I'd rather be out walking with my camera
I'm also an IT guy. I'm trying to make most of my stuff at home "smart" and had to go down the home assistant rabbit hole just to get everything managed under a single app. All so that my family doesn't have to deal with it (I have to suffer so they don't).
I started a long time ago with hue, when they were just about the only name in home automation. Luckily it integrates with home assistant, but I'm buying all generic zwave bulbs now, and I'm planning to replace them all as they die off, so I don't have to overhaul the system and throw out a bunch of stuff that still works.
My only real problem is that, I picked zwave because it's primarily 900mhz, and ZigBee is 2.4ghz, I'm trying to keep the home automation in a separate wireless band from my WiFi; but the majority of home automation stuff that's coming out is ZigBee, or based on similar protocols that use the 2.4 GHz band (matter and thread seem to both be built on top of ZigBee, or at least 2.4ghz).
It's frustrating because it's very rare that some cool new home automation thing hits the market and it has a zwave variant available.
Anyways. I'm just saying, I've been on a journey, and it's been frustrating. I understand why you wouldn't want to screw around with this stuff in your off time. My advice: don't change. Go for that walk with your camera. Enjoy.
My only real problem is that, I picked zwave because it’s primarily 900mhz, and ZigBee is 2.4ghz, I’m trying to keep the home automation in a separate wireless band from my WiFi;
Yeah, I'm a little worried about where we're going with all the stuff hitting 2.4 GHz. I mean, a lot of these devices are going to be spewing radio-frequency emissions for a long time to come, and if you saturate the airwaves too heavily in an area, nobody can use anything reliably.
Me too, I'm both IT with a specialization in networking (and further specialization in wireless), but I'm also a qualified amateur radio operator (ham radio).
To say I know wireless bands and constraints with available frequencies, contention, interference, scattering, attenuation and free space path loss, is an understatement.
Zwave and ZigBee, at the time I was making the decision to go one way or another, about two-ish years ago (maybe a bit more), were fairly comparable, and the set of what was available was fairly equivalent. This was before matter/thread were barely a concept, and long before anything thread/matter compliant was on the market. So I weighed the options based on a few factors and one of the more important factors that went into the decision was the 900mhz band that's used. Zwave now has 2.4ghz, I don't remember seeing any 2.4ghz support on zwave at the time.... That was so important because of the interference that ZigBee would have created, and suffered from, with the WiFi in the house. We have 7 access points in the house and plans to add a couple more. Not all of them are broadcasting on 2.4ghz for the same reasons, but still, it's a lot of activity getting crammed into a fairly small band.
Bluetooth is already on 2.4ghz, so we're already going to hit some interference, plus all the problems we are likely going to experience from neighbors.
2.4 GHz is a really small band, around 72 mhz wide in total (from 2401 MHz to 2473 MHz). While 5ghz is more like 745 MHz (5150 - 5895 MHz), with some caveats due to regulations. It's still nearly, if not more than, 10x the channel width, depending on regulations.
I have band steering on, but we have some older IoT stuff, mostly smart speakers, which are 2.4ghz only, so we still need it.
To say our houses 2.4 GHz is occupied, is an understatement. We need to keep that band as free as possible, and zwave had the right specs to make it happen. Then the entire home automation community seemed to pivot almost entirely to ZigBee, thread, and matter, running on 2.4ghz. sigh.
Not to mention that microwaves run at 1000W of power or more, at 2.45mhz with only a poorly built Faraday cage to protect the airspace. I try to make sure that the microwaves in the house have good isolation, for safety and communication integrity, but still, that doesn't matter if the neighbor uses their microwave often and doesn't care if the signals are properly isolated. Even 1/100th of the power leaking out (around 100W) is 100x more powerful than most wifi access points (which usually sit around 100mW or 0.1W of transmit power)...
2.4ghz is a mess. I don't want to use it, but I can't avoid it.
And everyone seems to be dogpiling stuff onto the band for no discernable reason. 900mhz is pretty "slow" in terms of bandwidth, but how much bandwidth do you need to tell a lightbulb to turn on, or have a device report that a button was pressed (for a light switch for example).
It doesn't make sense. Everyone seems hellbent on making 2.4ghz their go-to, and not understanding why that's a terrible idea. 900mhz has better penetration power, and more than enough bandwidth for the task. Use it, FFS.
Like, you can add frequency-hopping-spread-spectrum stuff, but that isn't a magic wand; I means that yeah, maybe the FHSS device is more-resistant to interference on any one frequency, but it also means that it's edging into more spectrum space.
And the problem is if the only way you can reliably get a signal through is by ramming the power up, that creates bad incentives.
I used to have a Logitech gamepad (an F710) that ran using a proprietary 2.4 GHz wireless protocol. Used it happily for years, I can't comfortably use it now, because, over the past several years, some devices has shown up that eeevery now and then disrupts the connection briefly. And that's with the receiver's antenna and the transmitter's antenna just a few feet away, with a clear line of sight. Bluetooth gamepads still work okay; I believe that the protocol has got more reliability built into it.
Now, okay, gamepads are maybe a worst-case scenario. They have hard real-time constrants; you really notice it in the middle of a fast-paced video game if your gamepad stops responding. Just delaying and retransmitting is problematic. Something like, say, a baby monitor briefly dropping out doesn't matter so much.
But by the same token, they're also the canary in the coal mine.
I have wondered if the end game is going to have to be taking the really high bandwidth things, stuff like WiFi, and shifting it to requiring line-of-sight and a mechanically-aimed laser or something like that.
I try to make sure that the microwaves in the house have good isolation, for safety and communication integrity,
Hmm. How do you do that? Like, go to a brick-and-mortar-store that has plugged-in microwaves with a some kind of spectrum analyzer? Just keep buying microwaves until you find one that you like?
I haven't paid attention to microwaves, but I have been a little concerned about what LED bulb power supplies do; they're apparently a rather significant and growing source of noise as everyone is replacing their (silent) incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs. I've actively tried to find low-RF-emission bulbs, and it's a pain.
As I understand it, the basic problem is a combination of the facts that:
They are using a hefty amount of juice.
The power line is unshielded, and so can act as an antenna as a PWM power supply flips on and off.
Lamps designed for incandescent A19 bulbs, were never designed with LEDs in mind, so the LED's power supply isn't built into the lamp; instead, you have to put a small, high-power power supply where users are very price-sensitive in a very small space: inside the bulb.
Even if there were a low-RF-emission rating, which there isn't, it's not as if someone can do something about other people using them.
I suppose that in the long term, this problem will probably slowly solve itself if people just wind up moving in the direction of lamps designed specifically for LEDs (usually with non-removable LEDs); maybe lamp-integrated power supplies will perform better. But even an LED bulb will hopefully last a long time, not to mention a lamp. So that's not happening any time soon.
FHSS is not magic. In some ways it makes things worse for other protocols while avoiding problems for itself.
Which leads me into The next comments you made about interference sources. With microwaves and LED bulbs and such. While I do have an SDR, I don't use it for wireless cleanliness. My access points, mainly Cisco aironet 2802i series, have a feature called "clean air" which isn't new for Cisco, but other vendors are starting to add similar features to their access points. I believe it's been included in most mid-range aironet access points since wireless N (around the 2600, maybe before)... Anyways, the built in radios will listen for and analyse interference and provide information related to it.
Clean Air will report pretty much everything that can be interference with decent accuracy. I've personally seen the following: radar, Bluetooth, microwave (oven), and "non-wifi" as interference sources. I believe "non-wifi" is the catch-all for something that can't be identified.
Clean Air also reports on what channels are impacted by the inference, and I can also get reports on nearby wifi networks, and what channels they're on, the frequency width that's set on foreign access points.... On top of that, it gives me a report on how busy the channels are for the configured channels on the access points, with classifications for my wifi traffic, others wifi traffic, noise, and inference.
With microwaves, I mainly watch the clean air report, if I see microwave (oven) interference, I try to reference the time of the interference, and figure out if the microwave was in use during that time. If it lines up consistently, time to replace the microwave.
In my experience, new microwaves rarely have an isolation problem. The mark quality in the manufacturing of the microwave, is how long before that happens. Some last a long time, others lose their isolation fairly quickly. Pre-testing isn't very useful since the isolation is usually fine when It's new.
To the same point it'll pick up interference from other sources, like lightbulbs. So if that's picked up at all, I'll have to correlate what lights are on and when, to figure out which ones are the problem. To date, the interference is either off-band, or not significant enough to trigger clean air.
I know CFL's put off way more RF interference than LED bulbs. The high frequency required for florescent lamps is far worse than the RF put out by most LED bulbs.
I've considered getting an ekahau sidekick to get a better wireless spectrum analysis, but there's no way I could afford one right now. If I had more of a purpose for it, beyond my curiosity, then maybe. As it stands, no way. It's in the neighborhood of $2000+. Unless I can use it to help pay the rent, I won't be picking that up.
This is a gen x complaint. Boomers would just ask their kids to set it up because they can't get it to work. Gen x realizes what is going on and that it is bullshit to need an account for a fucking lightbulb.
I think it's a complaint from everyone but Gen z, who are just used to it.
I can’t fucking stand making more accounts just because companies want to collect data. The gen-z people I know can’t either.
Used to it ≠ Not complaining about it
Ah. Resignation is NOT acceptance.
Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.
As genz, can confirm
I think this is a common-sense complaint, mostly unrelated to generation.
I mean yeah we are used to it but it's still shitty. Are you not used to it?
I'm too poor to have this complaint, I guess. I have to do everything manually still
Gen z to me is just the boomers mark II.
For what reason? That doesn't make any sense.
I meet a lot of overentitled Gen z. They remind me of the boomers that I also meet a lot of. Of course neither group can see it.
This might surprise you, but people are people no matter what generation they were born in.
Boomers is a name for a specific reason.
So you agree.
Millennial here. We are in agreement.
My late 50s mum happily signs up with her Facebook to everything. Meanwhile it's often the people in their late 20s to 30s who were introduced to computers during their youth before everything had super streamlined GUIs who know enough about software that they realize this is a privacy concern, what internet privacy means, and why it's important. People who are older or younger than that have to go out of their way to learn how and why to look behind the easy interfaces. That's my experience and explanation at least.
Remember when our parents were super nuts about keeping your info private online, not revealing too much info to strangers, and not signing up for stupid shit? My my, how the turntables.
My 70yo mom thinks I'm crazy paranoid because of my data privacy stances, while she's dealing with constant spam and account hacks. Guess who hasn't had damn near any info issues? :D
I was never allowed to be on Club penguin or the like. I also wasn't allowed to be on Facebook when it became popular around me, until I was 14. Mum, what happened?
Tbf you weren't missing much with Facebook. It was kinda cool in the early days when it replaced MySpace (like Reddit to Digg), but that went out the window pretty quick when all your extended family are calling your parents wondering why there are tagged pictures of you dancing around a fire half naked with a liquor bottle in your hand at 3am.
Not personally, but I remember the feeling
My mom never actually had any idea what the internet was. My dad bought the PC for me, so he probably would've doubled down if he knew what I was seeing and maybe would've even said it was good for me or not a big deal or something
It's weird to see my 11yr old brother now with the exact same access to YouTube which I'd ironically argue is a lot worse than old rotten.com. No idea if that's true but an argument could be made, for sure
Eh the internet was a lot simpler back then. Yeah there was fucked up shit around like there is today, but social networking imo is what really screwed the pooch. Back then, people just posted screwy shit for the sake of it and had varying degrees of influence, but now almost everything out there is intended to manipulate your behavior and worldview on a mainstream level. It's a shitton more dangerous than the weirdos in chatrooms asking a/s/l.
That's because for her the only risk is about getting kidnapped or killed, stuff that needs physical contact. Getting accounts hacked and phone scams are relatively new in her life span.
Then: Don't trust everything you read on the internet, and Wikipedia isn't legitimate because anyone can edit it
Now: Some loud moron on Youtube told me a thing and I believe it 100%.
Then: people on the internet were mostly technically adept and creating webpages because they enjoyed them.
Now: people on the internet are mostly ad tech attention economy scams and creating LLM spam blogs for PPC revenue.
It's just easier now for a conspiracy loon to find something that matches their preconceived biases.
It really sucks now for product comparisons. It used to be the you could look up productA vs productB and get an enthusiast going on about them, now it's purely AI generated crap.
My young family members are the worst, they just click "yes" to everything, regardless of any effort I've made to explain how things work.
Any barrier to convenience is too frustrating to them. They don't like even using full applications in their laptops, always say "wheres the app, this is too complex". 🤦🏼♂️
that's not just young people that's 80~90% of users
You're not wrong. Ffs.
I'd say you made the point better than any of us.
I know some network security folks, in their 40's, who've literally said "I don't want to be inconvenienced" when discussing why they tolerate this invasive shit.
Motherfucker, your job is securing networks. You know first hand the kind of shit going on out there.
I really wish more things just let me log in with Facebook, I don't want to fill out and make passwords for every pointless site. At least I can be somewhat confident that Facebook will follow security standards.
Based on their long track record of privacy excellence?
They dont care about your privacy, they do care about their security, which your account being compromised would hurt.
Might I recommend a reasonably secure browser with an in-built password generator and manager? I use Firefox. You make up a username and it generates a safe password and saves it so you don't have to remember it'd Just use a safe password for the browser itself that you can easily remember. I personally feel that's a decent compromise between secure and convenient.
I love the basic instructions for someone debating security policy nuance. It's like you don't get that he's way, way, way beyond "pick a password you can easily remember" despite the technical level of the discussion.
The person I'm replying to isn't the only one reading the comment. Chances are someone who's on the fence or hasn't interacted with the issue yet will benefit from it a little. That's what I like to think at least.
That's still shifting responsibility to the users, which is great for all these crappy products, but we should be demanding better.
Of course, but meanwhile, we have to take of our own privacy.
They still have a profile on everyone, established long before we could limit anything.
Hahahahahaha Facebook follow security standards? Your fucking kidding, right?
Facebook, probably the first greatest scourge of privacy invading companies (worse than Google), follows secjrity standards?
The motherfuckers have a profile on me, and I've never once been on any Facebook website or service, let alone logged into any Facebook crap.
You’re probably aware, but welcome to third party tracking. You can’t truly get away from this trash unless you start doing some hardcore blocking at the network level (apps have tracking too).
Boomers would get the bulb set up by their kids, then something will happen, and you come over to find your parents sitting in a rave room because they need the light and can't fix it.
And haven't mentioned the issue even though it's been like that for months.
Nope. Mom's meross bulb got a little fucked in a power failure. She unscrewed its green self and put in a regular bulb.
Boomers WILL solve this. But they'll go low-tech even if it means unplugging the cord to turn it off.
Hahahahaha "rave room" ain't that the truth
Gen X here and can confirm.
It's also a millennial complaint.
Sincerely, elder millennial who recently had to make separate accounts for a lightbulb and an air cooler and is sick of that bullshit.
Sadly these days, it’s a hold over from boomer managers making the decision that services require logins, which in turn require accounts and emails. So gen-x managers who were taught by boomers do the same thing. It’s systematic really.
I don't think it's boomer managers doing that, necessarily; I think it's an unholy alliance of liassez-faire tech bro entrepreneurs and the
propagandamarketing industry.It's happening purely because people tolerate it.
Boomer isn't really used as a generational term nowadays
Gen Z doesn't know what a "boomer" is...
Not wanting to be exploited by tech coorporations, technological literacy, is not a boomer thing.
but also have you met boomers? Tech literacy as we knew never existed.
Born too late to be blissfully unaware about technology
Born too early to be blissfully unaware about technology
Born in just the right time to have the cursed knowledge on how all of the cobbled together tech stack out there barely works
Every time I use an ATM I get the mental image of a 70 year old COBOL programmer desperately trying to patch holes in a sinking ship with a roll of duct tape.
Me too, except any time I have to deal with the US banking system. Ever used ACH? What a wreck.
It's a fucking nightmare, but I have heard rumors that it is in the process of being replaced with a new nightmare.
Boomers were the generation that invented a lot of this tech. Most of them weren't literate, but I have known quite a few who were. Honestly same with Gen x, we grew up with it but, a lot of the good tech didn't come until later in our lives. There are tons of illiterate gen xers and millennials and gen y and z. Some people care and some people don't.
Laugh it up now. When we’re 50, our holoshere is going to require us to submit to genetic modifications to get our next soylent nutrition paste to dispense. God only knows how we connect to a person young enough in 2040 to know if it’s even possible to bypass. That kind of stuff was laughed at the last time we tried.
just keep an eye on pirate forums or learn how to steal ig
Gen X and Millennials to the rescue
Quick, invent everything before we get too old!
Gen X would like a word
nobody cares about Gen X
How is this a boomer complaint? Why does everyone need my email and info?
So they can sell it to spam companies obviously.
Er I mean... For better customer exploitation!
Shit, I'm really not good at this but they're going to send me to the
to exploit you. not being exploited at a molecular level is boomer shit.
now, are you an old, or are you gonna send me a copy of your social security number and complete sequenced genome?
Does email work or do you have a mailing address? I'll spit in a cup and send that to you if I need to but I'd rather not have to go to the post office.
do you have like a cloud storage with at least 1TB? if not, we're gonna have to sneakernet this.
I lack that much cloud storage, I'll see if I can track down a station wagon I can fill up with tapes.
I very much appreciate this. I mean, you are proving that you're not an old, but I won't be sure until you do it.
What I love was it is boomers that allows these changes so they gotta live with it. It's not like we all woke up and decided to start asking for emails for everything. It was sitting back and being cool with letting ads take over everything until they started needing more and more data so they weren't paying 30 million for beer ads to people who don't drink
Any beer paying millions in ads isn’t worth drinking.
Anything paying for ads shouldn't be worth it. We should be hostile to any advertising as stealing from us. They don't pay us to take our free time yet tell me anytime of your day where you are not experiencing some type of advertising.
I gotta go to work 1/3 my day. 1/3 I'm sleeping. 1/3 I get to myself except that 1/3 for me is taken up by lunches, kids sports, prepping for tomorrow's 1/3 work day. So of that 1/3 maybe I get a few hours to relax and enjoy something. So I sit down to the streaming service I cut cable for and and still get chunks of that time giving to company's Hawking me stuff I don't need wasting my free time. It gets worse when you think how much-needed of our day is being in front of some type of ads. Radio, TV, bus stops, magazines, going to kids hockey games, browsing the internet, watching movies. Even viral videos often are just paid commercials made to circumvent ad regulations and laws and to not pay websites for server time and big fixes.
It is insidious. We have been corralled into something we don't even know we're in. Like cows that don't realize are in a pasture. It all seems innocent like "I'll just ignore that thing I don't like" but deep down that thing is affecting every part of the society we are in and it's a root cause for most of what we complain about today.
Ok boomer.
Lol jk
For me it's that I don't want short form video anywhere near my view.
I went to a bar for a drink the other day. They had TVs all over the place which I normally don't care for but it looked like golf or something I could just ignore. After I ordered my drink I realized how wrong was.
It was actually some weird short form video TV channel. They croped the 16:9 screen into a 1:1 square with moving neon lines in the "empty space" where there was no video. Each video was about 5 seconds long and showed brainless content of people using a Rube Goldburg machine or doing card tricks and other such nonsense.
Once I realized what was happening it was too late as I got my drink and I felt compelled to finish it and pay. I tried to ignore the 5+ screens in my view but they were too big and eye-catching to really ignore. I kept catching myself looking at one of the screens after a minute or so. I felt like I was getting serotonin raped between ads.
Eventually I moved to sit by a window and stare at a tree. I'll never go back to a bar like that again.
This reads like a cyberpunk vignette; I enjoyed it. Thank you. I've started to take note when something decidedly cyberpunk happens in day-to-day life. I make a lot of notes.
I could increase the cyberpunk feeling by turning the TVs off with a flipper zero. I haven't felt the need to yet but it's always an option.
Remember when phones had ir transmitters
I was so jealous of my dad's HTC one, haha.
that's the direction we all need to be moving, if we're going to survive/avert the water wars.
That's an idea...
Extrapolating a bit, here are the next steps
Certainly. Having worked in advertising for 25 years, that's probably just phase one. Those short videos will eventually be different for each person seeing the screen... and largely A.I. generated with few humans in the loop. In the flip side, people will probably be able to program their smart glasses to hide all that shit. It's an arms race over our attention already. See: Trudell's "mined mind." Or Bo Burnham, for that matter.
CHILI'S IS ABLEIST AND HAS LITTLE SCREENS KN EVERY DAMN TABLE THAT DISTRACT ME.
I went to a restaurant awhile ago and they told me to order using the little screen on the table. I said "no thanks" and left.
I'm a grumpy bastard and hate similar things but honestly, this doesn't sound so bad that I'd be particularly bothered by it or leave if I hadn't already ordered that beer. It's just wallpaper. If I was by myself I'd probably appreciate it on some level and if I'm with other people I'd likely stop noticing. Overall I think I'd probably prefer the bar not have them at all but it's really not that bad.
Loud sports or music that can fuck right off but otherwise, meh.
Normally I would agree with you. But they had these 50" screens in every direction except for down. I was literally staring at the floor in an attempt not to look at them. The swirling colorful "boarders" of the short format square video was eye catching enough. But with the video changing scenes every 5 seconds it was a similar effect to the Eisenstein editing style in Battleship Potemkin. The screens were screaming at you to stare at it.
It was also just total garbage content, the type of stuff I left reddit for. It was just a step above what Americans of the future watched in Idiocracy. It was truly a bizarre experience for me and also one of the most "boomer" moments I've had. Although out of everyone else in the bar, only the boomers were happily watching the short format video.
I have this exact same reaction.
It's like a race to the bottom.
@The_Picard_Maneuver I once bought a TV sound bar that wanted me to download an app, make an account and give it detailed location information just to use it as a wired speaker. I returned it.
I wish more people would do this!
If more people acted this way this wouldn't be the standard
The only radio with Bluetooth that fits my older car requires a fucking Android app to sync Bluetooth... Fuck you pioneer!
Thankfully there's a ton of workarounds for that.
If there's a tape deck, you can do headphone jack to cassette tape. If you don't have a headphone jack on your phone you can get a little bluetooth reciever to headphone jack type thing.
There's also the route of using a small device to broadcast your own little AM station (same deal, gets audio from jack or bluetooth), then tune into it with your existing head unit.
Best way is to just rig up your own aux in, but that requires some doing.
Was it a Bose? I once bought Bose headphones and downloaded an app to pair it. When Bose recognized the headphones, it told me that I had used the wrong app to pair to those headphones.
@snow_bunny Nah, it was Sonos. Which, I guess the app ecosystem is their whole thing - but I didn't know that at the time. I just wanted a basic sound bar, and the reviews didn't really mention that all that extra fluff was mandatory.
In retrospect Sonos sucks for a lot of other reasons too, so I guess it was a bullet dodged.
Good, cause it sounds like absolute junk
That's my pet hate with everything.
A mouse doesn't need an account. Just let me install the shit and configure it you fucks.
Linux has built in drivers for most shit with no account necessary. Logitech (for example) has a third party app called Solaar that does everything Logitechs own crappy mouse/keyboard software does.
Getting away from the endless hassle of popups and drivers was my biggest motivation for switching to Linix way back in 2008.
Does it work with the g pro mice? I fucking hate the logi app
I used it with a G503, it should work.
You just connect them as everything Bluetooth in Linux and they work
Then I though it would be nice to see battery levels and stuff, and installed Linux solar and now I have dumb pop ups every once in a while.
Sure, but it's not exactly easy to remap all the extra non-standard buttons on my g602 & g604
Not only an account. The Razer Naga needs connection to the cloud so the macros work properly
Outrageous. Do the macros get processed in the cloud or what?
Cheaper than putting the hardware for it in the mouse.
This shit I don’t get. Your computer can’t handle that? Loading up tons of trash in the cloud is fucking atrocious.
But now they can say "cloud compatible" in the board meeting!
They get processed locally. It's just that some macros are stored in the cloud (except the simple remapping s). So Razer synapse downloads them every time you turn on the computer.
I didn't make a razer account, therefore I had to remake every macro that wasn't a remapping.
Well that is honestly so dumb. Why not just store it locally somewhere?
I had the same question.
I tried so hard to ask razer support. But I couldn't get a reasonable answer out of them.
I would have returned that instantly upon discovery. I'll add Razer to my denylist of brands.
Um, how about no Scott, okay? You got my money, if you wanna keep pestering for more money, I'm gonna return this original item and you aren't getting shit.
Ladies and gentlemen, Scotty don't.
Scotty n'est pas
The Olympics required four apps. Five if you count Visa Go, which just outright didn't work. All of them want you to make accounts and send you shit.
No, lightbulb, I won't give you my location
(actually happened)
I think it was requested on mine for the sunrise/sunset feature, but let me just put in a zip code after I declined location access
That and they can turn on when you get home after sunset. But they could do that with simple wifi connection or something. Unless your wifi is unstable I suppose.
Or, you know, a photodiode.
Or you use a VPN on your router
For Android, the location permission was(is? not sure right now) basically required for anything that wanted WiFi or Bluetooth. As getting access to that, could in theory be used to locate you
Not that this was necessarily the case here, but an explanation
"required"
Required by Google, yes, but not actually required in any functional sense of the word other than the function of spying on you in another insidious way. It worked without invasive permissions for a long time and you absolutely won't convince me it wouldn't now if data collection weren't a priority.
(This isn't directed at you personally; apologies if it seems like it is.)
Yeah, but the problem is, that app developers abused the WiFi/BT permission to locate people, without them knowing about it. So at some point the permission was changed to reflect the theoretical real world potential of abuse
The downside is, that apps that don't actually require your location, will still need to ask for it
Yep technically it's called coarse location which in theory tells apps what neighborhood you're in, but can be exploited by marketing to know if you're in front of a shop stand. At least it won't drain your battery with GPS usage.
It works without it though. 🤔
Lots of times devices need access to a thing called location just to detect certain kinds of Bluetooth. I don't know the specifics but it's a trend I've noticed. It might not be the fault of the light.
Over my dead body
Fighting side by side with a boomer?
What about side by side with a friend?
How about side by side with your mother?
It means the fight may continue well over 10 pm. I'm in.
That's not even a boomer complaint. Zoomer here. I fucking hate how everything needs an account. I recently started cleaning up my mail box and this shit makes that nigh impossible. I especially hate it when it's just a shitty novelty site, if it needs an account, you bet your ass I ain't ever using it, piss off!
make an email for different things, such as one for subscriptions, one for things like this, one for professional use, etc. it's annoying but also helps 🤷🏻 i hate that we're at this point lol
My trick is that I use a domain name I've bought for my personal emails which is a catch-all address, and I sign up to websites with "(websitename)[email protected]", so I'm assuming I'll know who the culprit is when the time comes and I can do something about it with relative ease. I don't know if that's actually smart or not but I'll see how I get on.
I just auto tag using the term "unsubscribe". It tags as "automated/spam" unless another filter such as banking, games, or in contacts triggers
"Or sign in with your Facebook account"
No, this isn't Facebook!
The real solution: Buy your own domain name, and make a catch-all email address. Every account gets a new address with that account’s company in the email. Target is target@[your domain].[tld]… The benefit is that you can see exactly who is selling your info to spammers, and easily burn those accounts. You start getting spam sent to that target address? Congrats, now you know Target has sold your info and you can set a rule to automatically send any target@ emails straight to your trash. Also, get a damned password manager so every account has a unique password.
Create a fake persona. This persona has a fake name, birthday, favorite food, first pet, etc… Memorize everything about this fake person, or even just make a note about them in your phone. And none of it is real. This fake person’s info is used for all of your signup info. So when shitty fucking companies get hacked and lose all of your info, the hackers never actually got any of your info. And if you ever see spam addressed to that fake persona, you know you can immediately discard it.
Between the catch-all email address and the fake persona, you’re basically immune to all of the typical ads, phishing, data breaches, etc…
That's a massive ballache
Bitwarden can do both automatic email creation and also store the identity(s) and fill them in for you.
So it doesn't need to be a ballache, can be one-click transparent.
Commercial email providers will typically provide some number of aliases aimed at doing this for you.
Proton Mail's a popular provider in Switzerland, for example:
https://proton.me/mail/pricing
Their $3.99 /month service provides 10 aliases.
Their $9.99 /month service provides unlimited aliases.
And will work with a domain you own, so it's not like you're locked to them if you want to move to somewhere else down the line.
Abine (now IronVest) just sells the privacy aspect. They aren't an email provider -- that is, they don't give you an email box -- but provides this "masking" service to forward it to your regular email provider, if you already have email service.
https://ironvest.com/pricing/
Their $39/year service provides 50 aliases.
Their $99/year provides unlimited aliases.
They also do some other stuff like provide masked phone numbers that forward to your real number. They have provided masked, temporary credit card numbers with charge limits and a bogus name and address, so you don't even need to give your real name to someone you purchase something from online (though it looks like that's currently not available, says that they're bringing it back. I have used a masked credit card number from them in the past, so I know that at least some merchants will accept it, though I'd think that it'd tend to trip anti-fraud stuff at merchants, but...shrugs).
That being said, while I think that this sort of thing is a way to reduce the increasing degree of data harvesting -- you can't always choose whether-or-not to use certain services -- I think that if you have the option to choose a product or service that doesn't harvest data on you in the first place, that's really a better option.
Fyi, this can be done with Gmail as well. Just add a plus sign at the end of your email. I.e. your_email+target @ Gmail.com
Except most companies have wised up to this, and automatically scrub anything after the +. Because why wouldn’t they?
You can also do this with dots in various places in your email with gmail. Not as descriptive as the plus sign thing but still can be useful as you can create different filters based on the location of the dots.
What service do you use for the catch all emails? I use "simple login" currently with my own domain. But, I'd love to look at other options.
It depends on the mail server/provider. As a datapoint, I use Zoho Mail with 4 of my domains and they all have a catch-all that points to a single inbox.
Using Zoho, too. Unfortunately, the free version does not have IMAP or POP3. (Still does hate SMTP, though, which is fantastic for my self-hosted services)
https://www.migadu.com/ is a cheap and reliable one. Used YandexMail for years for free before, but they were shameless about reading the contents of emails and then had the audacity to remove the free tier and demand money for it.
I have one of the yearly deals on MXRoute. Unlimited domains. Been using them for almost 3 years.
That's a great idea! The fake information won't work for things that require real information, but it's otherwise great! Is there any retaliation you can take against companies that sell your information? I guess you could forward all of those emails to their sales address.
Or better yet try making your accounts for fake characters like Goku or ash catchem so with enough people doing the same thing we can get spammers to look at the data they bought and think hey wait a minute I've been scammed
Or just stop buying useless products that demand internet access when they dont need it, and stop making those accounts.
How do I make a spam email address using my own domain name?
If you set it up as a catch-all email, then anything going to the domain will hit the same inbox. From there, you can set filtering rules to send emails to whichever box you want.
How do I set up any email using my domain name?
I was going to buy a really sweet drone. Then I watched the Getting Started video and there was an app and an account thing, and I realized the second they shut down the service, that drone would be a paperweight.
I'm back to building my own because I'd like to use it for more than a year or two.
Far from being a boomer, but 100% agree with it.
It is sad to think there are people who don't think this is ridiculous and are just accepting that.
That's not a boomer thing. Boomer will be like "sure, I'll give you all the informations you want, even the name of my dog and my credit card number".
How else are they going to email you 20 times about changes to their privacy policy?
And then the inevitable email when they have to admit that all the data they gathered on you was stolen and that there is nothing you can do about it.
"We've updated our privacy policy and want to let you know we care about and value your privacy. You now agree that we can sneak into your bedroom at night and take videos of your genitals while you sleep, for sale on OnlyFans. If you disagree with this policy then we will brick your device."
I wish we could go back to the 90s as far as this shit is concerned.
Just take it out of the box and it works.
Send in a registration post card if you feel like bothering, but thats about it.
I am so sick of everything, especially shit that has no conceivable need to be online, not only demanding an internet connection, but demanding accounts and shit too.
Cause you know why they do it. They want to track you, harvest your data, and monetize it. Its not about selling you a good product, its about selling you a good listening device.
honestly this shit is so ridiculous, a fucking toothbrush wanting wifi and an account so people can spy on you even more closely than they already do, hell when it comes to regular internet services i 80% of the time nope out when they ask for an account...how do people WANT TO buy this shit 😭?
Exactly - it's not about selling you a product, it's about you becoming a product they can then sell to third parties.
I wrote an email app called Port87 for this. Every account gets its own address, and everything to that address goes in its own label.
How's this different from plus aliases?
Just chiming in, if you’re using + aliases for privacy some people can just remove the plus and see your email
For example if you sign up with [email protected] the service can remove everything between the + and the @ and see your real email is [email protected]
It kinda isn't, however I found that some websites refuse to acknowledge that plusses are valid. I see this one uses dashes which might have a similar issue. Only thing I think is universally accepted are periods
I haven’t found any place that doesn’t accept a dash.
As a kid I had an email address that started with a dash. Back then I regularly encountered websites that flagged it as invalid (but only if it started with it)
But then again, that was almost 25 years ago
I'm not saying that they won't, but they're non-compliant then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Email_address#Local-part
I don't want to try to escape the following for Markdown, so I'm just gonna dump it in a blockquote:
Oh I concur, it's super annoying. I want to track who sells my info to spammers dammit
It is plus aliases*. It’s got additional features for them that other providers don’t have though. Like for each label (alias) you can toggle whether to get notifications, mark as unread, screen new senders, and show them in the “aggbox”. The aggbox is like an inbox, but since you don’t ever use your “bare address”, it just shows the labels you want. Your bare address autoresponds with a list of your public addresses.
* It’s technically subaddressing, using either a dash or a plus as a delimiter.
From what I can tell, not much. They use dashes "-" instead of pluses "+".
But neither of these two options provide you with much privacy. Plus addresses, as others have pointed out, can be automatically stripped (just delete everything after the plus sign) and you get the real email behind it.
This service specifically I dont know the details, but it seems there is a unique prefix per user, but no "real email". So for instance if you use gmail you can have "[email protected]" as your real email. You then use "[email protected]" for your lemmy account. If that email gets leaked out somehow, people can easily tell your real email address is "[email protected]"
This service seems to do something very similar with the difference there is no base email, so there isnt a "[email protected]", there will only be "[email protected]". It is worth pointing out you might still be tracked because all your emails will be prefixed with "sunny". So although spammers wont be able to figure out your real email address they can just try something like "[email protected]", and if multiple of your addresses leak it will be easy to link them all up to the same person.
This also creates A LOT of lock in. Because if the service shuts down you now have dozens of services for which you don't have means to access the emails anymore.
Thank you for the feedback. These are all really good points that I’d like to address.
The vendor lock in part I agree is very important. I’m working on adding support for custom domains, which would let you migrate to another provider if Port87 ends up not working for you.
Regarding the privacy part, a long term goal is to let you create private aliases for your labels that are randomized addresses on a different domain. I haven’t started working on that yet, and supporting enterprise features will take priority.
Thats really nice. I appreciate your concerns with privacy and user experience!
Ill be sure to keep my eyes on the project
Your app looks amazing. Looking forward to it becoming available!
Thank you. :)
If anyone is interested in this, check out addy.io and simplelogin, which provide this exact service and are seen as privacy friendly by the community. Remember that any email service like this has the potential to read all your email, so pick a service you trust.
Those are email forwarders. Port87 is an email service. They provide a similar feature, but it’s not the same. They still rely on you to organize your email with filters and labels in your downstream email service.
Thanks for clarifying.
Yes, you do need to organize your stuff downstream if you so desire (I personally prefer not to). I will leave the comment though because they provide similar funcionality and might be helpful to someone.
WHAT DOES GOD NEED WITH A STARSHIP?!?!?
Wasn't that scene from Star Trek II (specifically, when the Reliant approached them suspiciously), not Star Trek V?
Haha, yes... It's definitely the wrong movie. Good eye!
It's called data mining
Create an account so you can do anything with your purchased device? That's just plain abusive. How about: thank you for using your hard-earned, post-tax funds and choosing our product. Let's get you going as fast and easily as possible, then go as far as we can to make things work before having you stop and create an account?
Only reason to create one is so you can save a persistent context for multiple types of interaction. Support multiple users, or different mobile devices, maybe groups of devices. But for a single device, out of the box, no sign up should EVER be needed.
Unless the company's priority is to hoover all your usage data, analyze it to death, invade your privacy, and sell it for profit.
And your last point is moot because that is the exact priority. Sell product which in turn makes customer into product.
look into home assistant. you can unlink almost every device from their cloud and run them locally. No internet connection needed.
I use it for WAY more than lights. I can monitor and control my 3D printer and weed grow, remotely. Now I have ONE app for all my IOT devices
I luckily dont really have any IOT devices
I love that my lights turn off 15 minutes after I leave home, and turn on as I enter. I don't touch light switches ever.
also they all dim according to the sun setting and rising, so they are always the perfect brightness. And helps my sleep schedule.
When I walk into a friends place at night and the lights are all searingly bright white I cringe
Well I mean you do you. I will not be changing all my lights and such. I have thought of putting home assistant on my little server but I literally have nothing to connect to it except maybe my raspberry pi running octoprint.
I love being connected to my printer's remotely through home assistant. I can cancel a job if I see it is failing
People abbreviating random words when there's literally no need to.
I got absurdly upset over someone abbreviating information as "inf." recently.
watch out for infosec.
I feel like some people are just too lazy to speak.
I'm trying to figure out what you're even referring to. The only thing I see abbrebiated here is TV. But TV is the default way to say television even in person and has been my entire life. At least it is here in the US. Is it different elsewhere?
I was responding to the "What's the most boomer complaint you have?" - not complaining specifically about the abbreviations in the screenshot.
Ah. That makes way more sense.
People making contractions when there is literally no need to.
I known'nt what you mean.
Meanwhile in my password manager: 727 login accounts 😶
1510 in my Keepass and 1423 in my Bitwarden 😬
That's collected over 15+ years though.
Mine has 40.
There kind of is an argument here that maybe more services should permit for use of public-private key authentication.
Using one password with multiple services is a problem, because you have a shared secret with the other end, and if you use the same password with multiple services, that service or people who break into it could impersonate you elsewhere.
But with public-private key encryption, you never hand out your private key. You only use it to sign a specific request sent you, so that risk doesn't exist. You can use a public-private key pair with one or multiple services.
I mean, personally, I'd kind of rather have three physical keystore devices.
One I carry with me. That stores the key or keypairs necessary to do the sort of things that I carry auth data with me -- my keys and the cards I carry in my wallet. Just means that I only need one device.
The other I leave at home, stored securely. That authenticates to maybe more-critical stuff, things like a stockbroker, maybe -- stuff where I don't need day-to-day access, and don't want to worry about my credentials going missing.
The last I keep in a safety deposit box in a bank. That has all my authentication stuff. That's to deal with catastrophic situations, like my house burns down or I get killed and need a way to pass authentication stuff. The bank makes me jump through a lot of hoops to get access to it, but it's there.
I'd like the device to have a display and a keypad, so that I don't have to trust external input devices as to what it is that I'm authenticating (e.g. smartcard point-of-sale systems do this).
I'd rather not use a smartphone for the first device. The smartphone is just too damned complicated and rapidly-changing for me to really want it to store my authentication data. I'd rather have it be a separate token, something that I can plug into a smartphone or point-of-sale terminal if I want to perform an authentication.
There are crypto tokens that contain keystores -- powered or smartcard -- but they tend to not have a screen or keypad, to save on costs. I don't really feel like that's something that I need to save on, as long as I only have one.
I'd like the device to optionally permit setting a passcode for a given key on it. That's not an ironclad form of security, but makes it harder than just pickpocketing someone's keys. And for some things, that I use all the time -- like my house -- I don't need to have a passcode.
This has a number of benefits:
You don't need to trust POS terminals. Sketchy terminal? Not a problem.
You can keep a log of transactions on the device.
You don't have to worry about the latest clever smartphone attack compromising your credentials.
You can use the thing the same way with a smartphone or computer or point-of-sale terminal. That's something that we really don't have today -- most people don't have smartcard readers, and vendors generally don't have support for authentication for those.
It has some downsides:
It's another device to carry.
It needs to be powered (though it could have very low power requirements, like a digital wristwatch, run for a year on a charge, unlike a smartphone, and could potentially charge off USB or similar). You wouldn't want your "keys" to lose power (though people who do stuff like smartphone payment already need to worry about this).
It costs something.
My lightbulbs don't require an account, I just get up from the couch and turn them off, has been working perfectly for decades 😘👌
It is possible to have lights that automatically turn on and off and not have to log in to the bespoke lightbulb app that stops being updated in three months while simultaneously rendering your lightbulb worse than useless because now it's stuck on a dim shade of green that you can't change because the last update broke the app.
The future we were promised is there, we just need to help it into the world.
grocery stores trying to get me to sign up for their reward program or whatever
Im surprised Aldi hasnt completely taken over the entire country by now because of how they skip all the bullshit
its a grocery store. i walk in, i buy food, i leave
could not be simpler.
My local Kroger, however, has automated price cards that adjust to scalp their customers during high-traffic periods.
this is a practice that should be rewarded via targetted arson of distribution centers until our demands are met
oops autocorrect lmao
i meant this is a practice that should be outlawed via legislation that follows our due processes
Heh. This was me when I was shopping for a new Sonic toothbrush. WHY ARE THRER APPS?!?!?? Seriously though, spending $100 for the (questionable) quality toothbrush that had zero need for my info. I don’t want stats. I don’t want to know the battery percentage.
Me shopping for (human) scales. This one tells you body fat, BMI, etc. Oh cool! Wait that screen is pretty small. Read fine print, needs app.
Same brand of scales, same functions, bigger screen to tell you the details, no app. Significantly cheaper.
Why would you choose the one that requires an app instead of the one that does the same without an app for cheaper?
I just want this stupid fad with smart devices coming with with obligatory app and account creation to be over already.
None of the boomers I know care about this and some even have duplicate accounts due to forgetting about them.
Yeah, boomers will just brute force their way through repeated "wrong password" attempts and inevitably make a new account every time and their take away from the experience is that "new fangled technology is so convoluted and never works"
Meanwhile the millennial experience is to have zero issues actually using the product because we're technologically competent, we're just going to complain the whole time that's it's taking unnecessary data, or find weird ad hoc ways to make burner accounts.
I will lecture my dad for having 14 different email accounts and he will retort with "you also have more than 10!"
Yes old man, and I use all 10 and know exactly how they differ and what each is used for. You think you have one account when you actually have 14, they all share one password which Is probably my name written backwards, and you're sending mail to your old account address then getting mad when you can't find it in the inbox of your new account, and you still refer to all mail platforms as "Windows mail" even though you've exclusively accessed your yahoo mail via the browser for the last 5 years, and have owned a Mac for 10 years... We are not the same.
I linuxed my parents to not have to suffer that kind of nonsense any more, and it worked. No more viruses too. Then one day my dad became a maga lunatic, undermining all of my efforts to make him less irritating. They really shouldn't have killed Harambe.
Haha, I bought my mom a chrome book. Best thing I ever did, it works just as well as her iPhone. It cost $250 also.
No viruses or printing issues!!!
It's happening to Gen x too. My mom has like 10 Google accounts, and gets frustrated when I can't help her with her Google home stuff. 😂
Yeah, my dad has 7 consecutive Gmail accounts, numbered 3-10. It's silly.
I get emails from all 7 on regular basis too.
I'm just gonna be that person and point out that that's actually 8 accounts then.
I don't want my computer to treat me like an idiot, it's my computer let me run whatever commands I want.
Companies just don't get enough resistance to this behaviors if more people went against them things wouldn't be in the state they are now.
Apparently there are toothbrushes that use AI. What fuckery is this?
Not just an AI toothbrush, an A.I. toothbrush for 🧠 geniuses 🌟.
I took this the other day while toothbrush shopping so my partner and I could laugh about it. I bought the cheapest Sonicare they make and it works as well as every other one I've had for the last decade, but without bluetooth, wifi, AI, an app, etc.
(And it's still overpriced garbage. My last one just stopped working out of the blue, almost 2 years to the day after I bought it, right outside the warranty period. Planned obsolescence is an exact science these days.)
To be fair, Oral-B doesn't require an account. You can just use it as a normal electric toothbrush. I'd also say the Oral-B is a lot better than Sonicare in terms of cleaning
Last time I bought one the Sonicare was thought to clean better. That was word from my dentist and from some online articles. Consumer Reports rates Oral B higher because of the battery lol. Both clean just fine it seems.
My favorite thing about these toothrbrushes is that they still use nimh batteries and haven't updated to lithium ion yet.
I have one of those. My partner got a pair of them with a heavy discount and it is an excellent toothbrush
I couldn’t tell you what it does differently i would need to download an app to see which is never gonna happen. I am using it as am bog standard electric brush and i cant be arsed to read the manual.
Theres a small screen that will display how long you brushed that shows you an frowning face if you cut it short. Il leave it up to others to judge how useful that is for an adult.
My dentist has no complaints and that is really the best i can ask so yeah its a great normal electronic toothbrush if you literally ignore the ai part of it.
Oh yeah, I have the same one (or similar one in the range)! I got it because it charges faster than the non-ai version. Disregarding the digital gimmicks it is an excellent toothbrush, and I couldn't tell you if the Bluetooth/AI make it better or worse because I literally can't care about the connectivity protocols or data processing capabilities of a fucking toothbrush.
Why do you need it to charge faster? How often are you brushing your teeth?
Between my partner and me, 4 to 6 times a day. I need to charge it faster because I don't have the charging base in the bathroom (UK houses don't have plug sockets in the bathroom) and I often forget to charge. When that happens, I want to wait 5 minutes to brush my teeth, not 45.
You and your partner share a toothbrush?
Seems odd.
But I'm not here to judge. Thanks for answering my question. I appreciate it.
It's electric - we don't share the heads!!
Oh. Alright. That would have been my follow up, but I was struggling to find the right way to word it, so I just resigned myself to not knowing.
"Heads" is an interesting, but accurate, descriptor.
I'm equally surprised you don't have an outlet in the bathroom, but that's a different discussion.
The way you're doing it is efficient at least, but if the mechanical part of the toothbrush fails, nobody gets to brush..... Or you have to move it around yourself I suppose, like a caveman.
Electric toothbrushes are a bit like escalators in that way. If it breaks, you can still walk up the stairs.
AI is such a dumb stupid label they slap on anything these days.
It isn't even AI, if it was it would be a fucking sentient stick you'd shove down your mouth.
Just like how they used to slap Smart on everything years ago, the device isn't smart, it just has new features. They just abuse the terms to try and stay relevant in modern markets. It's annoying as fuck though, because actual AI is a pretty interesting concept, but I've not seen any real AI, since practically all of it is just yet another feature that someone programmed to do something specific.
"Tomar, what would you say if a lightbulb in your house grew a mouth and asked you to make an account to make it purple?"
Grew a mouth, you say?
With Philips you don't need to only make an account, you'll need yet another "Bridge" device (costing about as much as your lamp give or take) to get all the features.
IIRC, Phillips devices use Zigbee and can be controlled with stuff like Home Assistant and OpenHAB.
Correct. I have a Home Assistant SkyConnect coordinator (zigbee) connected to my home server to control my RGB lighting. Fuck Phillips though, they plan to make registration mandatory under the pretence of "security"
Which is funny, cause if people cared about security they wouldnt have all those stupid useless devices in their house demanding internet connections and trackable accounts.
The real question is why our government in the USA hasn't stepped in and made any protections for our data, which would solve this issue entirely. Apps like Temu or Character.AI have very sketchy data management and privacy practices, you have no idea what they're really doing with your data, it's required to make an account for both of them. Clearly they are selling them and obtaining lots of your data to do all sorts of things with. Frankly, I don't think it should be legal to obtain huge amounts of people's data, specifying nothing about what it is actually, truly being used for
I have a lightbulb that I can change the colour temperature of. There's no internet or app connection, you toggle through the different states by rapidly turning it off and on again. Whoever designed it deserves a medal
My girlfriend always jokes with me that despite being tech-competent I am an old Luddite about tech. It is never more true than when something asks me to make an account.
I kind of wonder whether it'd be worthwhile to have a certification agency that just certifies things for privacy and non-cloud-connectivity or the like. Trying to dig through spec sheets and reviews to figure out how a product functions is a pain. I'd rather pay slightly more to just look for some privacy certification on a product. I don't really want to try to keep up with the latest privacy issues present in a given product category, would rather have a specialist do that.
Like, let me just look for a "PC-24-O" (Privacy Certification 2024 Offline) label or something on products. Saves me time. Also would let vendors like Amazon let me filter products for that certification.
Finding a fucking living room lamp where you can change brightnes, was quite a search to exclude all the iot devices. That most online shops have no filters for iot, doesn't help.
Bro it's Guitarmasterx7 out in the wild.
The post made me look him up (it's been years since I've seen him in anything) and I just learned that good ol' Lyle McDouchebag was a voice actor in Class of '09. TIL.
Holy shit
Oi m8, you got an account for that?
Additional to that account thing: Why does one have to install an app in order to access all functions and to toggle options of a device?
My girlfriend once has bought new headphones. In order to switch off the telephone function (you can - among other things -answer calls from the connected smartphone by touching one side of the headphones) it is required to download an app (a sloppily programmed one as well) to switch off this specific function. All other functions (volume, play, back and forward) are operated with buttons.
I heard about the same thing but with printers: The scan settings can only be toggled by an app (I think it was HP who has that feature - who else!?)
I got Sonoff relay switch, you can use guest account for it. But yeah all these smaet thing require a server and internet connection, so creating an account is mandatory in most case. One time my internet is down outside my control and i can't switch on my ventilation fan and have to use the manual switch on it, it's quite annoying. Kinda wish there's one made for just local because i don't need to use it remotely.
If you're willing to take the time to learn, you could always setup your own local home assistant server.
https://www.home-assistant.io/
I personally love having full control over my smart devices locally, as well as being able to use a variety of different brands seamlessly!
The learning curve can be rather steep though, especially if you aren't already tech savvy.
That's the annoying part. From what i can tell, unless i read it wrong, Home Assistant basically merge every devices from multiple app into one central control unit, but it seems to me that i still need an account and connect my device to all those app in order for it to function.
It depends. Some devices are fully local and don't require an account, some require an account temporarily and then never again (can use a throwaway email), some require an ongoing cloud connection.
I'd look into zigbee, since those devices inherently don't connect with the outside world at all. Maybe Matter as well, although I don't know enough about it to confirm.
I second this. I always try to get Zigbee on MQTT compatible devices. However, for all the devices I have that require cloud connection, I found a way to locally control them from home assistant and block them from accessing the internet in my firewall after the setup was complete.
It will do a lot of that, but I find it incomprehensible why people tolerate those devices. It will also link up to Zigbee and Z-Wave devices that don't require accounts.
HA itself has a username and password local account but I don't think that's what the meme means because it isn't a forced online account.
I wanted a countertop dishwasher. Home depot doesn’t have them in stores, it was online only. I figured it would probably make me make an account in order to check out. I said nah.
Home depot and Lowes both let you make purchases as a guest without an account. I have done it recently at least.
its a shame you have to do this, but you can use HomeAssistant to disconnect a lot of those lights from their 'clouds' I bought dirt cheap RGBW bulbs from walmart and now I'm essentially emulating their 'cloud' on my local network. (tuya)
no more losing ability to control lights if the ISP goes down
Minimal effort to investigate before you buy. But i guess most tech is bought on reflex.
It's one of those things people don't really think about checking because it's so moronic from the get go. If I'm buying headphones I shouldn't have to check if I can use all functionality without needing to download an app and creating an account. They're headphones, they're supposed to output (and input if they also have a mic) sound. They don't need a dedicated app that also requires an account. There was a time when checking for that wouldn't even cross my mind.
I definitely wouldn't blame the customer for not checking the moronic things companies put in their products. Times are changing and I do have to check how much control I actually have over the hardware I'm buying, but it shouldn't be like that.
It is so frustrating. Especially when you did your research but the information is out of date. Widget2000 rev1 was fine but Widget2000 rev2 requires an account.
Or it doesn't require an account but your options are "yes" or "ask again later." So all of your searches say it's fine. But if my experience is degraded for no good reason just because I don't want an account, that is a weak win at best.
But then there's factors like in-ear/earbuds, waterproof, noise-canceling, sound-quality/technology, price... a bit of research is advised here, if not your only factor is cheap. There's in-ear with quad drivers even, still in the range of 90$!
You can do all that research and not find out you need an account. I know because it has happened to me.
Same. I've returned more than one item for refund for pulling that shit.
Ok, fair point.
This is something Matter was supposed to address at least for IoT stuff, but it's still not great.
Fuck that. I don't give that shit out either. Completely unnecessary.
This is a constant source of frustration for me. Im on the spectrum and even though my logical, intelligent side of the brain understands that rules are just words; the emotional part of my brain just screams "THATS NOT HOW THIS WORKS" every time someone hits their hazard lights and just gets out of their car in the middle of a 35mph road.
I wanna watch key and peele. oops its not on the comedy central app? who owns comedy central....hmmm....paramount? okay its on paramount plus...and its just a link that takes me to Amazon video? why? just play the show what is this
Why does my TIVO think I want to record Swamp Loggers?
Time to make another Gmail account
They eventually limit you.
It's been so long that I don't know where else to even create an email account. I imagine Proton must be popular here?
Ooo I didn't know. How many can I chain? I have 12 separate accounts from beta that I've chained off of without that issue so far
I don't remember how many I've made since gmail came out, but when I tried to make a new one recently, it told me that I'd reached the max number for my phone number (which it required at account creation).
Anyone remember Lyle and Dexter Manning from the Machinima series "Sanity not Included?"
If you want a lightbulb that changes colors to be controlled by a phone or network accessible device, as opposed to some other sort of special RF remote, and you DONT want random other people to be able to control or possibly disable or damage your lights, then it kinda needs to have an account.
By all means, avoid iot stuff if it's not your thing, but then why are you looking at color changing lightbulbs? The ones that need special remotes are terrible gimmicks and the ones that get wired into a hardwired home automation system cost a fortune to set up and require a ton of installation.
My nephew says that about everything. Millennials seem to be totally okay with giving away personal stuff as long as it's by choice. Otherwise it's a hard fuckno.
And that's why boomers are constantly 'hacked'.
If you don't want someone else controlling those things, you do indeed need an account. If you are fine with a physical switch to control lights then just stick to that.
You do indeed need to authenticate that device to your other devices. But that doesn't require a middleman who won't care what happens to your hardware after they go under.
I can see the point of needing an account for a smartbulb, if you are away from home and want to turn on the lights before you arrive, it is needed.
But... Why?
I live alone in my apratment, I live in a suburb of Stockholm.
The winters gets dark in Sweden, so when I come home I open the door to a black hole, damn depressing.
But if I can turn on the lights when I am on my way home it feels as if I have someone at home waiting for me, vastly improving my mental health during the winter.
This feature alone put a smart light system in the top 5 things I have ever bought.
It is damn nice.
I get the account for a hub, but maybe if you buy like the 1 bluetooth bulb and that has to have an account, that would feel kind of dumb.
Yep, I agree fully, and the most annoyibg part is that it would be conceptually easy to get rid of all accounts and still have remote control of the system with access control.
Build the system so that the bridge gets a UUID from the Hue servers, when an app is connected to the bridge have it get the UUID and generate a token for the device.
Then when an external request comes to the Hue server authenticate it with the token and forward it to the bridge.
If you get a new device, simply connect it to the bridge as normal and you are done.
Then have a local admin password on the bridge to clear old tokens, and a nice reset switch to clear all config.
Conceptually, way easier for a user to use, and little need to store personal information on the Hue servers.
The problem is, unless you lock yourself into a single ecosystem, like hue, you need multiple apps to manage your fucking lights.
.... Or you can get home assistant or something.
I know how things work. I'm still using the hue app, but I added my hue bridge to my home assistant (running on a core i5 micro system, instead of a raspberry Pi), and I've been replacing my lights with zwave bulbs from inovelli as they break or stop working (or were just adding new lights to the system).
I'm struggling with how to grant outside access right now. Either I'm going to use zerotier or do a global redirect through a port forward or reverse proxy or something. Maybe a CloudFlare thing.... I dunno. I haven't decided, but the need to connect from outside the house is pretty small, so I'm not in a rush to make a decision.
I'll eventually get rid of hue. By comparison, the bulbs are pretty dim, but bluntly, they're pretty old now, some are starting to fail. Takes a long time for LED bulbs to fail, so it probably won't be long now.
I own a few domain names, so I would use that. Since it's DHCP for my WAN, I might go with a dynamic DNS but use a redirect from my domain name to it (CNAME entry, if you're familiar with DNS).
But ZT is superior to wire guard (and most other VPN systems) in that it does automatic NAT traversal. So if I use ZT, I don't need to worry about port forwards. ZT does everything for me (NAT "hole punching" and handles all aspects of the VPN connection).
With CloudFlare, I can use one of my domain names, pointed at their service and essentially it acts as a combination of reverse proxy and VPN to the system....
I'm mostly concerned about any exploits related to the web service built into Casa OS, that someone could spoof a request that breaks security, so I'm hesitant to just expose it to the internet like that. VPN would be better but requires a lot more set up on the family computers, phones and such.
There's also the option of Nabu Casa, the home assistant cloud subscription, which would help home assistant financially (which is a good thing), and get me the functionality I'm looking for, but I'm not keen on yet-another-subscription-service coming out of my account every month. I've been trying to cut back on those things. I already don't pay for Netflix, Disney+, etc. I don't really want to add to that list that I'm trying to get to zero.
Too many options. Ugh.
Sure, you have a very valid point.
Also, I can see a method of setting up remote access to the system without an account.
Simply have the hue bridge report a UUID and set a token in the app when you press the button to authorize the phone.
The Hue servers accepts and forwards the request to a specified UUID as long as it is signed with an approved token.
There is a local admin password to remove individual tokens, and a nice reset button on the bridge that will clear any config and let you start again.
Sure you can use VPNs, however I may be an IT guy but I don't have the energy to deal with this stuff on my free time, I'd rather be out walking with my camera
I'm also an IT guy. I'm trying to make most of my stuff at home "smart" and had to go down the home assistant rabbit hole just to get everything managed under a single app. All so that my family doesn't have to deal with it (I have to suffer so they don't).
I started a long time ago with hue, when they were just about the only name in home automation. Luckily it integrates with home assistant, but I'm buying all generic zwave bulbs now, and I'm planning to replace them all as they die off, so I don't have to overhaul the system and throw out a bunch of stuff that still works.
My only real problem is that, I picked zwave because it's primarily 900mhz, and ZigBee is 2.4ghz, I'm trying to keep the home automation in a separate wireless band from my WiFi; but the majority of home automation stuff that's coming out is ZigBee, or based on similar protocols that use the 2.4 GHz band (matter and thread seem to both be built on top of ZigBee, or at least 2.4ghz).
It's frustrating because it's very rare that some cool new home automation thing hits the market and it has a zwave variant available.
Anyways. I'm just saying, I've been on a journey, and it's been frustrating. I understand why you wouldn't want to screw around with this stuff in your off time. My advice: don't change. Go for that walk with your camera. Enjoy.
Yeah, I'm a little worried about where we're going with all the stuff hitting 2.4 GHz. I mean, a lot of these devices are going to be spewing radio-frequency emissions for a long time to come, and if you saturate the airwaves too heavily in an area, nobody can use anything reliably.
Me too, I'm both IT with a specialization in networking (and further specialization in wireless), but I'm also a qualified amateur radio operator (ham radio).
To say I know wireless bands and constraints with available frequencies, contention, interference, scattering, attenuation and free space path loss, is an understatement.
Zwave and ZigBee, at the time I was making the decision to go one way or another, about two-ish years ago (maybe a bit more), were fairly comparable, and the set of what was available was fairly equivalent. This was before matter/thread were barely a concept, and long before anything thread/matter compliant was on the market. So I weighed the options based on a few factors and one of the more important factors that went into the decision was the 900mhz band that's used. Zwave now has 2.4ghz, I don't remember seeing any 2.4ghz support on zwave at the time.... That was so important because of the interference that ZigBee would have created, and suffered from, with the WiFi in the house. We have 7 access points in the house and plans to add a couple more. Not all of them are broadcasting on 2.4ghz for the same reasons, but still, it's a lot of activity getting crammed into a fairly small band.
Bluetooth is already on 2.4ghz, so we're already going to hit some interference, plus all the problems we are likely going to experience from neighbors.
2.4 GHz is a really small band, around 72 mhz wide in total (from 2401 MHz to 2473 MHz). While 5ghz is more like 745 MHz (5150 - 5895 MHz), with some caveats due to regulations. It's still nearly, if not more than, 10x the channel width, depending on regulations.
I have band steering on, but we have some older IoT stuff, mostly smart speakers, which are 2.4ghz only, so we still need it.
To say our houses 2.4 GHz is occupied, is an understatement. We need to keep that band as free as possible, and zwave had the right specs to make it happen. Then the entire home automation community seemed to pivot almost entirely to ZigBee, thread, and matter, running on 2.4ghz. sigh.
Not to mention that microwaves run at 1000W of power or more, at 2.45mhz with only a poorly built Faraday cage to protect the airspace. I try to make sure that the microwaves in the house have good isolation, for safety and communication integrity, but still, that doesn't matter if the neighbor uses their microwave often and doesn't care if the signals are properly isolated. Even 1/100th of the power leaking out (around 100W) is 100x more powerful than most wifi access points (which usually sit around 100mW or 0.1W of transmit power)...
2.4ghz is a mess. I don't want to use it, but I can't avoid it.
And everyone seems to be dogpiling stuff onto the band for no discernable reason. 900mhz is pretty "slow" in terms of bandwidth, but how much bandwidth do you need to tell a lightbulb to turn on, or have a device report that a button was pressed (for a light switch for example).
It doesn't make sense. Everyone seems hellbent on making 2.4ghz their go-to, and not understanding why that's a terrible idea. 900mhz has better penetration power, and more than enough bandwidth for the task. Use it, FFS.
Like, you can add frequency-hopping-spread-spectrum stuff, but that isn't a magic wand; I means that yeah, maybe the FHSS device is more-resistant to interference on any one frequency, but it also means that it's edging into more spectrum space.
And the problem is if the only way you can reliably get a signal through is by ramming the power up, that creates bad incentives.
I used to have a Logitech gamepad (an F710) that ran using a proprietary 2.4 GHz wireless protocol. Used it happily for years, I can't comfortably use it now, because, over the past several years, some devices has shown up that eeevery now and then disrupts the connection briefly. And that's with the receiver's antenna and the transmitter's antenna just a few feet away, with a clear line of sight. Bluetooth gamepads still work okay; I believe that the protocol has got more reliability built into it.
Now, okay, gamepads are maybe a worst-case scenario. They have hard real-time constrants; you really notice it in the middle of a fast-paced video game if your gamepad stops responding. Just delaying and retransmitting is problematic. Something like, say, a baby monitor briefly dropping out doesn't matter so much.
But by the same token, they're also the canary in the coal mine.
I have wondered if the end game is going to have to be taking the really high bandwidth things, stuff like WiFi, and shifting it to requiring line-of-sight and a mechanically-aimed laser or something like that.
Hmm. How do you do that? Like, go to a brick-and-mortar-store that has plugged-in microwaves with a some kind of spectrum analyzer? Just keep buying microwaves until you find one that you like?
I haven't paid attention to microwaves, but I have been a little concerned about what LED bulb power supplies do; they're apparently a rather significant and growing source of noise as everyone is replacing their (silent) incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs. I've actively tried to find low-RF-emission bulbs, and it's a pain.
As I understand it, the basic problem is a combination of the facts that:
They are using a hefty amount of juice.
The power line is unshielded, and so can act as an antenna as a PWM power supply flips on and off.
Lamps designed for incandescent A19 bulbs, were never designed with LEDs in mind, so the LED's power supply isn't built into the lamp; instead, you have to put a small, high-power power supply where users are very price-sensitive in a very small space: inside the bulb.
Even if there were a low-RF-emission rating, which there isn't, it's not as if someone can do something about other people using them.
I suppose that in the long term, this problem will probably slowly solve itself if people just wind up moving in the direction of lamps designed specifically for LEDs (usually with non-removable LEDs); maybe lamp-integrated power supplies will perform better. But even an LED bulb will hopefully last a long time, not to mention a lamp. So that's not happening any time soon.
FHSS is not magic. In some ways it makes things worse for other protocols while avoiding problems for itself.
Which leads me into The next comments you made about interference sources. With microwaves and LED bulbs and such. While I do have an SDR, I don't use it for wireless cleanliness. My access points, mainly Cisco aironet 2802i series, have a feature called "clean air" which isn't new for Cisco, but other vendors are starting to add similar features to their access points. I believe it's been included in most mid-range aironet access points since wireless N (around the 2600, maybe before)... Anyways, the built in radios will listen for and analyse interference and provide information related to it.
Clean Air will report pretty much everything that can be interference with decent accuracy. I've personally seen the following: radar, Bluetooth, microwave (oven), and "non-wifi" as interference sources. I believe "non-wifi" is the catch-all for something that can't be identified.
Clean Air also reports on what channels are impacted by the inference, and I can also get reports on nearby wifi networks, and what channels they're on, the frequency width that's set on foreign access points.... On top of that, it gives me a report on how busy the channels are for the configured channels on the access points, with classifications for my wifi traffic, others wifi traffic, noise, and inference.
With microwaves, I mainly watch the clean air report, if I see microwave (oven) interference, I try to reference the time of the interference, and figure out if the microwave was in use during that time. If it lines up consistently, time to replace the microwave.
In my experience, new microwaves rarely have an isolation problem. The mark quality in the manufacturing of the microwave, is how long before that happens. Some last a long time, others lose their isolation fairly quickly. Pre-testing isn't very useful since the isolation is usually fine when It's new.
To the same point it'll pick up interference from other sources, like lightbulbs. So if that's picked up at all, I'll have to correlate what lights are on and when, to figure out which ones are the problem. To date, the interference is either off-band, or not significant enough to trigger clean air.
I know CFL's put off way more RF interference than LED bulbs. The high frequency required for florescent lamps is far worse than the RF put out by most LED bulbs.
I've considered getting an ekahau sidekick to get a better wireless spectrum analysis, but there's no way I could afford one right now. If I had more of a purpose for it, beyond my curiosity, then maybe. As it stands, no way. It's in the neighborhood of $2000+. Unless I can use it to help pay the rent, I won't be picking that up.
Meanwhile, you accept that the social media hedonic treadmill needs an user account. Curious?