5 ms·

IMHO IoT is a bad idea. Recently we had the choice of buying heat pumps with a standard infrared remote control, or heat pumps with wifi. You can control them

by craigds 11y ago

IMHO IoT is a bad idea. Recently we had the choice of buying heat pumps with a standard infrared remote control, or heat pumps with wifi. You can control them from your ipad! As a bit of a hacker I'd love to play with this and see if I could attach them to temperature sensors and smarts around the house. Tempting, but then a colleague pointed out that it almost certainly comes pre-packaged with bullshit closed source software from a bullshit company, full of bullshit security holes and probably never gets updates. Your chances of plugging into it with a random python script are close to nil. If it ever breaks, you'll have to pay $100 for some technically illiterate heat pump repairman to try and diagnose the issues. Good luck with that, and no thanks.

lowglow 11y ago
I think this is a HUGE problem as well. I'm building Playa, and one of my big goals is to develop an open and friendly hacker ecosystem around next gen IoT/IoE/Robotics. Hopefully as I develop the platform I can raise more awareness and crowdfund appliances people actually want to build on.
sdoering 11y ago
The source of the problem I see here is not the IoT. It is the missing regulation, that forces companies to develop open standards and enable the so inclined to hack themselves to find security wholes or what not. And most of all to make sure, that they can easily switch vendors, because all devices are able to talk to each other. If I today chose one vendor to make my heating at home smarter, I am stuck with this vendor, even if others provide better interfaces or tools in the future. This cripples user friendly innovation and what not. So, because governments do not (or do not want to) understand (be it on their own or because of lobbying), we as customers are facing a very grim looking IoT. At least, if I try to look into the future.
- pdkl95 11y ago
  > It is the missing regulation Not just regulation - we also need proper liability. If the product you sell causes damage (for whatever reason - security vulnerabilities included) then the manufacturer need to be liable. Just like every other industry. Some people will complain this will make current software development practices impossible. I join with Dan Geer and PHK's considered reply[1]: Yes, please! That was exactly the idea. [1] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt
blowski 11y ago
It feels like 'planned obsolescence' taken to its logical extremes, as the manufacturer can now remotely 'break' a product. Perhaps once consumers catch on to this, manufacturers will start to compete on whose products are supported the longest. Maybe.
- VLM 11y ago
  They could also intelligently and transparently implement planned obsolescence, which would be really nice. I am not annoyed when my bottle of laundry detergent empties. Even complaining the manufacturer only put 58 oz in the bottle knowing I'd have to buy more bottles doesn't impress me, I can see its not full and read right on the label. This isn't a serious problem at all for me because I see the exact amount thats in a bottle and purchasing more detergent transparently fits into my lifestyle as needed. It might be an environmental disaster to pollute the country with 10% more partially full detergent bottles, but for me personally, eh, whatever. What does annoy me is someone intentionally puts no heat sink on transistors or intentionally installs low temp rated capacitors such that randomly at some totally inconvenient time the appliance suddenly catastrophically fails, then I need to shop, be home for an entire day to coordinate delivery, figure out the new appliance on its schedule, its a huge PITA on the personal level. If it were scheduled and predictable, well, no problem then. I'd welcome a planned obsolescence clothes washer, for example, that had a five digit counter on the panel and when it reached zero I had to buy another. I could organize my life around that very conveniently.
  - TeMPOraL 11y ago
    Though what you describe sounds absolutely awful to me (I hate planned obsolescence for being a huge waste of limited resources as well as showing the customer a giant "fuck you"), it would at least solve the problem of important equipment breaking at the most inconvenient time (e.g. mid-Christmas). Sadly, I think we are heading towards exactly this future - except that it won't be a counter on a washing machine, it will be the extent of your lease for it. You renew your lease for the washing machine, the company replaces it with a new model and recyc^H^H^H^H^Hthrows away the old one. Hardware companies are starting to embrace DRM and connecting machines to the Internet for mostly user-hostile reasons. It's becoming less and less common that you can buy a device and utilize it to its full power the way you like. You have to pay additional fees to flip some bits that unlock functionality of your welder. Your laser cutter needs to be connected to the cloud all the time so that when the manufacturer goes down or pivots, your device gets bricked. One would think that DRMing coffee brewers is a dumbest idea ever, but in fact it is successful. As the old HN quote goes, "Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam."[0] We don't own our homes. We don't own our cars. We don't own our software. We don't own our phones. We're beginning to lose ownership over basic appliances. I'm not 100% sure yet if this trend is plain evil, but it sure feels like it. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941
vinceguidry 11y ago
> Your chances of plugging into it with a random python script are close to nil. This is very much incorrect. Device hacking has a subculture of brilliant techies that make an art out of finding and exploiting these holes. This subculture is most visibly responsible for iPhone jailbreaks, but they will hack anything they can get their hands on and post up their findings on blog posts and forums for other hackers to build on. I consider the general inadequacy of product engineering to be a huge boon to the rest of us. Hell, even the DMCA can be seen as sad engineering as its mechanisms simply aren't sufficient to stop these guys.
- Swizec 11y ago
  > an art out of finding and exploiting these holes What if I don't want to find and exploit holes. What if I just want to connect to a well-documented API and use that to communicate with the device I own? I like hacking. Building haphazard cool things is fun. Reverse engineering other people's black box software is interesting, and probably fun for some people, but it just sounds annoying to me. (which is to say my level of motivation isn't high enough to deal with all that)
  - vinceguidry 11y ago
    Who is going to maintain that API? I love them as much as anybody, but lets be realistic here. There just aren't that many great engineers out there. Building on top of hacks is, once you get used to it, not all that much harder than integrating an API. Just another problem to solve. Break down problems, isolate the solutions so they can be tested independently, keep all your work in source control, treat deployment to devices as a first-order concern, and always keep a backup plan for when the device fails. You'd have to do most these things when integrating an API anyway.
    - VLM 11y ago
      Its a thermostat, not a SR-71 or a fusion reactor. If the greatest engineers are required to work on thermostats, then we're doomed as a civilization. The quantity of great engineers will not be relevant to thermostats. Under employment is a thing now, and getting more serious over time, such that going forward it'll be even less of an issue.
frik 11y ago
Open source code and hardware like Arduino and Raspherry Pi are great. Though, most IoT devices I came across are closed and of very bad quality (security issues, no updates, phone home, etc), are very dumb (brain sits "in the cloud"), often consume more energy over time and actions take longer than with normal devices (it's all about physical laws, if you want to boil water with less energy it will take longer...). Ironically, most IoT devices don't make senses in average households. Most devices simply cannot use less energy, or can be used in the night. Do you want that your washing machine starts in a room above you in the middle of the night? How will the shirts look like in the next morning? Is it funny to use the loud vacuum cleaner for 2 hours, whereas your older model had more power and you had finished your work in 1 hour? Also a recent news article highlighted that several companies from Germany (and likely other countries) like Siemens, Bosch, Miele are cheating with the energy certificate tests of household devices - exactly like VW/Bosch with Volkswagen cars. If you set a modern Miele washing machine to 60 degree Celsius it splash your shirts for a few seconds with 58 degree water (the period of the EU tests) and then use colder water (below 40 degree) for the remaining wash cycle. So they cheat to achieve the tests and consumers buy such devices. So a recent "smart device" device is often a bad investment (and sometime it even cheats on you) - there are only a few exceptions. And one is better of if it is build of open source components.
- Chris2048 11y ago
  IoT isn't just about energy conservation though...
VLM 11y ago
This is a classic integration / systems type problem. I have a generic "far north" HVAC system (aka killer efficient condensing furnace, mere afterthought of an AC unit) and its connected to an Insteon compatible thermostat via industry standard wiring and protocols (basically residential thermo is 20 mA current loop for heat/fan/cool), and that's connected to misterhouse via the usual insteon RF bridge and controller. Integrating it all is hopeless, like late night infomercials for combination fishing pole/swiss army knife/spark plug wrench gadgets. Its easier to debug industry standard components, also. I messed around with it some years ago when it was new but haven't permanently implemented anything. I ran into the following problems: 1) UI. When my MiL visits she's at the Asimov-ian technological level where everything I do is at a high enough tech level to be magic, and correspondingly she's scared/intimidated and its all just a non-starter. She still has a round honeywell with a mercury switch at her house and occasionally does the typical woman thing of adjusting it multiple times a day to either 85 or 60 degrees while complaining "it doesn't work". To a lesser extent my wife does the same thing, seeing as they're related I'm not surprised. I've tested it and it works, its just that automatic control even at the simple round honeywell thermostat level is beyond her, pretty much. This will make smart thermostats a hard sell. Magic being interchangeable with Magic, this makes smart thermostats a hard sell to most of the population, why not just put a sticker on the existing thermostat like those stickers that increase cell phone battery life 50% or reduce RF exposure by 100%, or basically the entire audiophile industry in a nutshell, or astrology. I mean a controls engineer KNOWS the bode stability plot analysis of that algorithm is superior, but to the general public its just expensive, much harder to use, astrology. Astrology being cheaper to implement than actual control theory, I guarantee the IoT will be polluted by "smart" things that are actually dumber than "dumb" things, but none the less very well marketed and likely very successful sellers because they'll be cheaper. 2) Improvement is missing. I had some ideas that sucked, but were fun to try. So cycle the ventilation fan on and off at some rate to save energy rather than run all the time. Well that makes the place stuffy and if I wanted a stuffy moldy house I'd have installed a smaller cheaper fan, I'm not paying this kind of mortgage per month to choke or be chilly, etc. I ran into similar problems with messing with temperature control, such that anything I did to alter temperatures MOSTLY just reduced comfort. As far as saving money this was not cheap back then and probably not even now, and I should have spent a couple $$$ on yet more insulation, or even newer windows, or an ever more efficient furnace, etc. The one protocol that was a winner WRT comfort was slightly warmer temps in the morning when getting up and gradual lowering by bedtime. A lot of IoT projects are like this, very techno cool nerdy impressive display of hard work and solved engineering problems, but none the less completely utterly useless in practice. Why, if I spend $300 and a lot of hours, I can turn my nice comfy house into a drafty/stuffy dump, but its cheaper just to spend $100K less on the house if you want to slum it. Anyone talking about IoT should be required to watch the black and white (free) Buster Keaton movie from about a century ago titled "electric house". There's nothing new under the sun and back when electrification was a "thing" there were plenty of crazy gadget ideas that could be made fun of (see the movie) but had no long term impact. A century from now, 99%+ of IoT will look to the future like Keaton's "electric house" looks to us. There is another immense insight to "electric house" movie that arguably the biggest impact of electricity to daily life is the microwave oven, which obviously was not predictable. If there is any high impact IoT device in the future, it won't be the 24352th model of thermostat, it'll be something unimaginable today, or at least unimaginable to almost everyone. Aside from the multiple learning aspects, Buster Keaton is hilarious so its worth the time.

by craigds 11y ago

lowglow 11y ago

I think this is a HUGE problem as well. I'm building Playa, and one of my big goals is to develop an open and friendly hacker ecosystem around next gen IoT/IoE/Robotics. Hopefully as I develop the platform I can raise more awareness and crowdfund appliances people actually want to build on.

sdoering 11y ago

The source of the problem I see here is not the IoT. It is the missing regulation, that forces companies to develop open standards and enable the so inclined to hack themselves to find security wholes or what not. And most of all to make sure, that they can easily switch vendors, because all devices are able to talk to each other. If I today chose one vendor to make my heating at home smarter, I am stuck with this vendor, even if others provide better interfaces or tools in the future. This cripples user friendly innovation and what not. So, because governments do not (or do not want to) understand (be it on their own or because of lobbying), we as customers are facing a very grim looking IoT. At least, if I try to look into the future.

pdkl95 11y ago
> It is the missing regulation Not just regulation - we also need proper liability. If the product you sell causes damage (for whatever reason - security vulnerabilities included) then the manufacturer need to be liable. Just like every other industry. Some people will complain this will make current software development practices impossible. I join with Dan Geer and PHK's considered reply[1]: Yes, please! That was exactly the idea. [1] http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt http://geer.tinho.net/geer.blackhat.6viii14.txt

blowski 11y ago

It feels like 'planned obsolescence' taken to its logical extremes, as the manufacturer can now remotely 'break' a product. Perhaps once consumers catch on to this, manufacturers will start to compete on whose products are supported the longest. Maybe.

VLM 11y ago
They could also intelligently and transparently implement planned obsolescence, which would be really nice. I am not annoyed when my bottle of laundry detergent empties. Even complaining the manufacturer only put 58 oz in the bottle knowing I'd have to buy more bottles doesn't impress me, I can see its not full and read right on the label. This isn't a serious problem at all for me because I see the exact amount thats in a bottle and purchasing more detergent transparently fits into my lifestyle as needed. It might be an environmental disaster to pollute the country with 10% more partially full detergent bottles, but for me personally, eh, whatever. What does annoy me is someone intentionally puts no heat sink on transistors or intentionally installs low temp rated capacitors such that randomly at some totally inconvenient time the appliance suddenly catastrophically fails, then I need to shop, be home for an entire day to coordinate delivery, figure out the new appliance on its schedule, its a huge PITA on the personal level. If it were scheduled and predictable, well, no problem then. I'd welcome a planned obsolescence clothes washer, for example, that had a five digit counter on the panel and when it reached zero I had to buy another. I could organize my life around that very conveniently.
- TeMPOraL 11y ago
  Though what you describe sounds absolutely awful to me (I hate planned obsolescence for being a huge waste of limited resources as well as showing the customer a giant "fuck you"), it would at least solve the problem of important equipment breaking at the most inconvenient time (e.g. mid-Christmas). Sadly, I think we are heading towards exactly this future - except that it won't be a counter on a washing machine, it will be the extent of your lease for it. You renew your lease for the washing machine, the company replaces it with a new model and recyc^H^H^H^H^Hthrows away the old one. Hardware companies are starting to embrace DRM and connecting machines to the Internet for mostly user-hostile reasons. It's becoming less and less common that you can buy a device and utilize it to its full power the way you like. You have to pay additional fees to flip some bits that unlock functionality of your welder. Your laser cutter needs to be connected to the cloud all the time so that when the manufacturer goes down or pivots, your device gets bricked. One would think that DRMing coffee brewers is a dumbest idea ever, but in fact it is successful. As the old HN quote goes, "Any sufficiently advanced business model is indistinguishable from a scam."[0] We don't own our homes. We don't own our cars. We don't own our software. We don't own our phones. We're beginning to lose ownership over basic appliances. I'm not 100% sure yet if this trend is plain evil, but it sure feels like it. [0] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8227941

vinceguidry 11y ago

> Your chances of plugging into it with a random python script are close to nil. This is very much incorrect. Device hacking has a subculture of brilliant techies that make an art out of finding and exploiting these holes. This subculture is most visibly responsible for iPhone jailbreaks, but they will hack anything they can get their hands on and post up their findings on blog posts and forums for other hackers to build on. I consider the general inadequacy of product engineering to be a huge boon to the rest of us. Hell, even the DMCA can be seen as sad engineering as its mechanisms simply aren't sufficient to stop these guys.

Swizec 11y ago
> an art out of finding and exploiting these holes What if I don't want to find and exploit holes. What if I just want to connect to a well-documented API and use that to communicate with the device I own? I like hacking. Building haphazard cool things is fun. Reverse engineering other people's black box software is interesting, and probably fun for some people, but it just sounds annoying to me. (which is to say my level of motivation isn't high enough to deal with all that)
- vinceguidry 11y ago
  Who is going to maintain that API? I love them as much as anybody, but lets be realistic here. There just aren't that many great engineers out there. Building on top of hacks is, once you get used to it, not all that much harder than integrating an API. Just another problem to solve. Break down problems, isolate the solutions so they can be tested independently, keep all your work in source control, treat deployment to devices as a first-order concern, and always keep a backup plan for when the device fails. You'd have to do most these things when integrating an API anyway.
  - VLM 11y ago
    Its a thermostat, not a SR-71 or a fusion reactor. If the greatest engineers are required to work on thermostats, then we're doomed as a civilization. The quantity of great engineers will not be relevant to thermostats. Under employment is a thing now, and getting more serious over time, such that going forward it'll be even less of an issue.

frik 11y ago

Open source code and hardware like Arduino and Raspherry Pi are great. Though, most IoT devices I came across are closed and of very bad quality (security issues, no updates, phone home, etc), are very dumb (brain sits "in the cloud"), often consume more energy over time and actions take longer than with normal devices (it's all about physical laws, if you want to boil water with less energy it will take longer...). Ironically, most IoT devices don't make senses in average households. Most devices simply cannot use less energy, or can be used in the night. Do you want that your washing machine starts in a room above you in the middle of the night? How will the shirts look like in the next morning? Is it funny to use the loud vacuum cleaner for 2 hours, whereas your older model had more power and you had finished your work in 1 hour? Also a recent news article highlighted that several companies from Germany (and likely other countries) like Siemens, Bosch, Miele are cheating with the energy certificate tests of household devices - exactly like VW/Bosch with Volkswagen cars. If you set a modern Miele washing machine to 60 degree Celsius it splash your shirts for a few seconds with 58 degree water (the period of the EU tests) and then use colder water (below 40 degree) for the remaining wash cycle. So they cheat to achieve the tests and consumers buy such devices. So a recent "smart device" device is often a bad investment (and sometime it even cheats on you) - there are only a few exceptions. And one is better of if it is build of open source components.

Chris2048 11y ago
IoT isn't just about energy conservation though...

VLM 11y ago

This is a classic integration / systems type problem. I have a generic "far north" HVAC system (aka killer efficient condensing furnace, mere afterthought of an AC unit) and its connected to an Insteon compatible thermostat via industry standard wiring and protocols (basically residential thermo is 20 mA current loop for heat/fan/cool), and that's connected to misterhouse via the usual insteon RF bridge and controller. Integrating it all is hopeless, like late night infomercials for combination fishing pole/swiss army knife/spark plug wrench gadgets. Its easier to debug industry standard components, also. I messed around with it some years ago when it was new but haven't permanently implemented anything. I ran into the following problems: 1) UI. When my MiL visits she's at the Asimov-ian technological level where everything I do is at a high enough tech level to be magic, and correspondingly she's scared/intimidated and its all just a non-starter. She still has a round honeywell with a mercury switch at her house and occasionally does the typical woman thing of adjusting it multiple times a day to either 85 or 60 degrees while complaining "it doesn't work". To a lesser extent my wife does the same thing, seeing as they're related I'm not surprised. I've tested it and it works, its just that automatic control even at the simple round honeywell thermostat level is beyond her, pretty much. This will make smart thermostats a hard sell. Magic being interchangeable with Magic, this makes smart thermostats a hard sell to most of the population, why not just put a sticker on the existing thermostat like those stickers that increase cell phone battery life 50% or reduce RF exposure by 100%, or basically the entire audiophile industry in a nutshell, or astrology. I mean a controls engineer KNOWS the bode stability plot analysis of that algorithm is superior, but to the general public its just expensive, much harder to use, astrology. Astrology being cheaper to implement than actual control theory, I guarantee the IoT will be polluted by "smart" things that are actually dumber than "dumb" things, but none the less very well marketed and likely very successful sellers because they'll be cheaper. 2) Improvement is missing. I had some ideas that sucked, but were fun to try. So cycle the ventilation fan on and off at some rate to save energy rather than run all the time. Well that makes the place stuffy and if I wanted a stuffy moldy house I'd have installed a smaller cheaper fan, I'm not paying this kind of mortgage per month to choke or be chilly, etc. I ran into similar problems with messing with temperature control, such that anything I did to alter temperatures MOSTLY just reduced comfort. As far as saving money this was not cheap back then and probably not even now, and I should have spent a couple $$$ on yet more insulation, or even newer windows, or an ever more efficient furnace, etc. The one protocol that was a winner WRT comfort was slightly warmer temps in the morning when getting up and gradual lowering by bedtime. A lot of IoT projects are like this, very techno cool nerdy impressive display of hard work and solved engineering problems, but none the less completely utterly useless in practice. Why, if I spend $300 and a lot of hours, I can turn my nice comfy house into a drafty/stuffy dump, but its cheaper just to spend $100K less on the house if you want to slum it. Anyone talking about IoT should be required to watch the black and white (free) Buster Keaton movie from about a century ago titled "electric house". There's nothing new under the sun and back when electrification was a "thing" there were plenty of crazy gadget ideas that could be made fun of (see the movie) but had no long term impact. A century from now, 99%+ of IoT will look to the future like Keaton's "electric house" looks to us. There is another immense insight to "electric house" movie that arguably the biggest impact of electricity to daily life is the microwave oven, which obviously was not predictable. If there is any high impact IoT device in the future, it won't be the 24352th model of thermostat, it'll be something unimaginable today, or at least unimaginable to almost everyone. Aside from the multiple learning aspects, Buster Keaton is hilarious so its worth the time.