23 ms·

The Internet of Poorly Working Things

321 points by kawera 10y ago

_asummers 10y ago
Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p3ffbaWsETUJ:https://mondaynote.com/the-internet-of-poorly-working-things-cda7a147af+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p3ffba...
walterbell 10y ago
> A look at the so-called Smart TV reinforces the observation about CE culture. In less than two years, the CPU inside the TV quickly becomes obsolete and can’t be upgraded while the display itself easily lasts a decade, and software updates are persphinctery, if they happen at all. Evocative term ("persphinctery"), what does it mean? A web search mostly references mondaynote.
- nathancahill 10y ago
  Indeed. Ironically, your comment is now one of the 8 results for me.
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  Given the limited google search results, it would appear to be a very neo neologism.
- laurentdc 10y ago
  I think it's like saying "extinct": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perisphinctes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perisphinctes
- slowmovintarget 10y ago
  The prefix "per" means through, so this made up word seems to mean "as though it came through the sphincter" a.k.a "crappy". So "persphinctery" would be a synonym of "excretory", were it actually a word.
  - noobermin 10y ago
    When mashing prefixes onto words in a way which is unfamiliar, it's usually customary to use a hyphen. E.g. "post-fact[0]" instead of "postfact". Strangely, to me, the former seems to imply that "post-" is a prefix while the latter seems to be a fact involving postal mail. [0] https://granta.com/why-were-post-fact/ https://granta.com/why-were-post-fact/
  - jwatte 10y ago
    Given that you put the letters together, it is a word. The only question is how many understand it, and which dictionaries (if any) you can find it in.
  - nathancahill 10y ago
    You got it: https://twitter.com/gassee/status/767576827963453440 https://twitter.com/gassee/status/767576827963453440
  - tempodox 10y ago
    Creative word generation is always welcome.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- ranger207 10y ago
  I think it's a corruption of "persnickety," which in my experience means "overly precise" as in a lock can be persnickety because dirt gets in and fouls the workings because there's no room for grime in the lock.
  - sk5t 10y ago
    I'll guess that the root term is "perfunctory."
- williamscales 10y ago
  Yeah, I think it's an invented term. It's not in my dictionary as a word.
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  >In less than two years, the CPU inside the TV quickly becomes obsolete If it's Linux based, this just means that the SoC vendor hasn't kept the board support package (BSP) up to date. These kinds of things are hardly ever mainlined, so it becomes difficult to update drivers, kernel versions and then even software versions (think X11)
  - wmf 10y ago
    BSPs are never updated, so that's a given. But I think he was more likely talking about codecs (no H.265? too bad) or DRM.
- someone7x 10y ago
  First thing I did is google that word, it's rather poetic. "persphinctery", one word to capture the brokenness of waiting for updates the provider has no incentive to create. I laughed because it's a very erudite sounding word with a very vulgar interpretation: "persphinctery" == "as they are shat out".
Aelinsaar 10y ago
Nothing about the impending IoT seems planned, standardized, and remotely designed with the consumer's best interest in mind. That being said, consumers for their part seem almost eager to throw their money away for truly dubious improvements. What isn't a bad idea from the get go is often a good idea ruined with careless implementation.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  Apart from the fridge that, once upon a time could show you your Google calendar[0], I have yet to see any IoT device that actually requires a cloud service for its functionality. Why can't things be built to just use local TCP/IP connections? Those work just fine on my local network, and they work just fine if I flip my VPN on when I'm not on my local network. Anything that actually needs some kind of server piece should have a server that can run locally. [0] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/UhfpcwO0X0c https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/Uhfp...
  - Aelinsaar 10y ago
    I would imagine it's the same thinking that puts multiplayer in every game, and just generally wants to keep a live connection to everything, always.
  - bpicolo 10y ago
    There are tons out there, no? Amazon Echo is a stark example, but e.g. nest camera seems to as well. https://nest.com/support/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest-Cam https://nest.com/support/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest...
    - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
      The Amazon Echo makes sense to require an Internet connection. There is nothing that the Nest cam does, apart from offsite backup, that requires it to contact the company's servers. Everything else can be local only with VPN for remote access.
  - 10y ago
Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
I've got a bunch of WiFi cameras that aren't able to access the internet[0], so really it's an "Intranet of Things". But they sometimes drop their connection, which is expected because it's WiFi, but a lot of the time they won't reconnect properly. I figure that if basic infrastructure stuff, like automatically reconnecting to WiFi, doesn't even work, what chance do we have of harder things like security working properly? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11933851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11933851
- voltagex_ 10y ago
  How much did you pay for them? I've lost all faith in consumer-level gear. I just don't think the businesses prioritise any kind of QA any more.
  - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
    They're definitely consumer-grade cameras, and most of them are at the low end of that. I'd say they are in the $50-100 CAD range per camera. That said, when they do work they work a lot better than their price would suggest.
    - voltagex_ 10y ago
      I'd probably create a Rube Goldberg-esque setup that detected when the camera dropped off wifi and power cycled (Wifi-enabled socket, it's IOT all the way down) the camera.
      - zyxley 10y ago
        There's a device for that: http://resetplug.com http://resetplug.com
      - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
        I've seriously thought of doing that. Then I came to my senses and reminded myself that if these were truly important they'd be hardwired. The cameras are capable, I just have no desire to run the cables.
flyinghamster 10y ago
Vendor lock-in gets short shrift in this article. Let's not forget Philips attempting to lock out competitor's bulbs from their Hue bridges.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  They tried, there was a shitstorm, and they reverted that. For now, at least. I'm a recent and quite happy Hue owner. I decided to go for the expensive good stuff because I learned the hard way that cheap consumer electronics is always shitty and not worth the hassle - all those trivial annoyances add up to your stress level. Also, I know a bit too much about Chinese cheap LED bulbs manufacturing quality - I don't trust them that they won't burn my house down.
GuiA 10y ago
Any smartphone from the past few years + an internet connection lets people file their taxes, watch videos, communicate by text/audio/video with pretty much anyone in the world, read online encyclopedia, order pretty much any physical good to their door, listen to music, translate languages, read books, take high resolution videos, and so much more. How do you even beat that? And what do you offer beyond that? It feels like we're reaching the flat part of the logarithmic progress curve (a much more appropriate curve for progress than the hockey stick curve) when it comes to what personal computing is going to bring to the daily lives of consumers. Of course, there are still many areas not explored by computing. Computer aided medical procedures and diagnoses, monitoring and upkeep of crops, and so many more fields will grow in the years and decades to come. And improvements to personal transportation, through i.e. self driving cars, is arguably a consumer technology. But the whole IoT movement is just a parody of itself. The vast majority of people do not want internet connected water cups or juicers or microwave ovens; and those who do soon get frustrated by the real world logistics that come with these things (higher costs, more frequent failures, lack of interoperability, etc.). I had Philips Hue bulbs for a while, and the girlfriend I lived with at the time hated them with a passion - for understandable reasons. When it comes to turning lights on and off, you can't beat a light switch, and the same logic applies to every single item we interact with daily. For instance, the Nest we had in our apartment would randomly start on and off, or suddenly stop being visible to the app, etc.
- ars 10y ago
  > flat part of the logarithmic progress curve The curve you are looking for is called the logistic. A lot of apparently exponential curves are actually logistic.
- wtbob 10y ago
  > For instance, the Nest we had in our apartment would randomly start on and off, or suddenly stop being visible to the app, etc. My own smart thermostat — from another company — has mostly been very good, but it randomly wants me to re-enter my (high-entropy, unmemorisable) password in their site to use it. Why can't I just connect to my thermostat and set up the authentication I want? Why can't I use a client certificate, or an SSH key, or just have a $&% token which lasts approximately forever? It's my* device; I should be able to do whatever I want with it. Give it (not the vendor's site) a clean API, and I can do anything.
ebbv 10y ago
All that build up and it ends up basically an ad for Amazon Echo? Disappointing. Amazon Echo is of very borderline usefulness at best. On its own it does almost nothing that the digital assistant on your phone can't already do, and a lot that it can't just because your phone is so already entrenched in your life.
- noobermin 10y ago
  I was very upset about that too. I feel lied to. Moreover, are there hard numbers about how "successful" the Echo really is? EDIT: how did IOT end up there?
  - lostlogin 10y ago
    Hard numbers from Amazon? I'm sure an unlabeled graph has been released at some point showing some kind of hockey stick growth.
- dangrossman 10y ago
  I can say "Alexa, dim the lights to 50%" and it happens. I can say "OK Google, dim the lights to 50%" and nothing happens. Both ecosystems have access to my lights (I can control them with various apps), but only one has put effort into first-party integrations with IOT platforms.
  - ebbv 10y ago
    Ok so your specific lighting system integrates better with Echo than with OK Google. That says something about those combinations, it doesn't say much about Echo itself. Like I said in the comment you responded to; on its own the Echo is pretty borderline whether it's useful at all, and it can't do many things your phone assistant can. My point being; just because your combination works with your Echo and not your phone assistant doesn't mean that Echo is a device most people should buy.
    - dangrossman 10y ago
      I don't think you understand. This isn't the case of "oh that product's better integrated with Amazon than Google". Amazon has put the resources and legwork into establishing a business and development integration with every single major connected device maker in retail stores. All of them, in a way that nobody else has. I think it's wrong to say it "doesn't say much about Echo itself". It shows a focus on becoming the center of the smart home nobody else has. If a device works with Samsung SmartThings, Philips Hue, Belkin Wemo, Insteon, Lutron, Wink, Nest, HomeSeer, Almond, LIFX, GE Link, TCP, iHome, Leviton, Honeywell Lyric or TotalConnect, Ecobee, Haiku, Keen, Garageio, Z-wave or Zigbee (via a hub)... then it also works with Alexa, out of the box, because Amazon has relationships with all of them already. You just say "Alexa, discover my devices" and she finds whatever you happen to own on your network on her own, instantly knows their names (that you gave them if applicable) and capabilities, and can address them through natural language.
wtbob 10y ago
> In less than two years, the CPU inside the TV quickly becomes obsolete and can’t be upgraded while the display itself easily lasts a decade, and software updates are persphinctery, if they happen at all. That's odd — the word 'persphinctery' seems to appear only in Monday Note articles. Is this some sort of trap street[1] for medium-form articles? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street
- jpatokal 10y ago
  That looks a bit search'n'replace run amok, although I fail to see what the first half of s/?/sphincter/g could be. The end result is certainly unlovely though: rather colonoscopacetic, if you will.
  - rexfm 10y ago
    I searched the same thing, decided it's probably a pun on "perfunctory" + sphincter-clench-inducing
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- soared 10y ago
  Is there a rule where everything exists in hashtag form? Just over a year ago #persphinctery https://twitter.com/search?q=%23persphinctery https://twitter.com/search?q=%23persphinctery
- greendestiny_re 10y ago
  The writer probably wished to say "perfunctory" but experienced a brain fog moment.
m_mueller 10y ago
IMO there is a very annoying trend in household appliances towards worse and worse UI. Basically, it started with light switches already decades ago, at least in Europe. In the past, you had switches that themselves indicated what state they are in, so if you cluster them on a board it's incredibly easy to find the one switched on at the moment [1]. Then, some moron came up with switches that don't show anything anymore [2]. Nowadays you're lucky if you get switches on anything at all. This [3] is how a standard stove looks like in new Swiss apartments nowadays. Good luck explaining this to your grandma. You idiots, it has one job, getting more or less hot! Recently I took a residential elevator that just had an empty touch field when you came in. No indication of what you could do whatsoever. This immediately gave me anxiety, and I'm just 31 goddamnit. Anyways, what happened was that once the elevator door closed it gave me a selection of floors to go. [4] facepalm Please, for the love of what's holy, stop improving what doesn't need improvement! In german we have a word for this: "Verschlimmbessern". (a combination of verschlimmern='making it worse' and bessern=improving) [1] https://adventurelightingblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/light-switch.jpg https://adventurelightingblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/li... [2] http://www.schulungshandbuch.de/WebRoot/Store22/Shops/62784718/54C3/771A/FC18/5950/9A6B/C0A8/2ABB/1470/Lichtschalter.jpeg http://www.schulungshandbuch.de/WebRoot/Store22/Shops/627847... [3] http://media3.siemens-home.com/Product_Shots/915x515/MCSA00681395_2_EH645BB17E_def.png http://media3.siemens-home.com/Product_Shots/915x515/MCSA006... [4] https://www.google.co.jp/search?tbm=isch&q=schindler+touch&tbs=imgo:1&gws_rd=cr&ei=xWq6V6_KAcjK0ATj9JqYBg#gws_rd=cr&imgrc=33lIUZ1H5KvvxM%3A https://www.google.co.jp/search?tbm=isch&q=schindler+touch&t...
- seshagiric 10y ago
  +1 for the elevator anxiety. In my case there were no buttons inside the lift!! Really, nothing. One had to select your floor BEFORE entering the lift.
  - jpatokal 10y ago
    That's called a destination control system, and it works that way because of the massive efficiency gains of letting the elevators work out who should go where.
jwatte 10y ago
And then the cloud service for your door lock, light bulb or security system gets shuttered. #internetofbricks
api 10y ago
I just call it IOJ: Internet of Junk.
- dredmorbius 10y ago
  IOS: Internet of Shit. As JLG notes in the article. Io[B]T[TSoY]: Internet of (Broken) Things (That Spy on You).
  - rvense 10y ago
    Internet of Targets.
    - dredmorbius 10y ago
      Beautiful!
- yitchelle 10y ago
  Its real name is FAD.
seiferteric 10y ago
My neato botvac seems to forget its wifi settings every couple weeks :(
dredmorbius 10y ago
This isn't the first time gratuitous "technologisation of stuff" has been proposed, though it seems to be proceeding rather apace. From 1922, "Radio All the Things!": http://i.imgur.com/TSJnicdl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/TSJnicdl.jpg (Via: http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2015/01/videophones-from-future-past.html http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2015/01/videophones-from-fut... and origionally: http://wi.mobilities.ca/grant-wythoff-aerophone-telephot-hypnobioscope-hugo-gernsbacks-media-theory/ http://wi.mobilities.ca/grant-wythoff-aerophone-telephot-hyp...) Or the original book if you'd prefer: Hugo Gernsback, Radio for All (1922): https://archive.org/details/radioforall00gerniala https://archive.org/details/radioforall00gerniala I think I know what a radio phone might do. Radio clocks even exist (though a networked NTP timekeeper is more useful). I'm not sure I'd care to fly in a radio-controlled airplane. And I'm utterly perplexed at what a radio heater might be -- unless it's a microwave space heater, or an early instance of Nest.
- scholia 10y ago
  > I think I know what a radio phone might do. Radio clocks even exist I assume a radio phone would be a walkie talkie, and those can still be useful. Further, I used to have a cheap mobile phone that had a built-in FM radio, but now I have a much more expensive smartphone that doesn't -- or at least, it's not user-accessible. I also have a somewhat old radio alarm clock that gets the correct time via the mains power supply. Needless to say, the time goes wrong and you have to turn it off for a while then hope it gets the right time when it restarts. Usually it does, but sometimes it can be hours wrong for weeks. I could use my internet radio as a backup, of course, but the broadcast sound arrives way ahead of the internet sound, and if the two radios show the same time as the smartphone, that's looks like luck. Seems to me we've been screwing these things up for a while, even without the internet of things ;-)
- legulere 10y ago
  > I think I know what a radio phone might do It's just a mobile phone. > I'm not sure I'd care to fly in a radio-controlled airplane. They're unmanned and called drones. > Radio clocks even exist (though a networked NTP timekeeper is more useful) A radio clock costs few cents and works pretty much everywhere. With NTP you need to have a full IP stack and some internet reception.
binwiederhier 10y ago
Thank you for that article! I have been feeling like that for many months, and whenever I point it out to co-workers or friends, they mention the Apple-universe as the ultimate achievement of interconnectivity. And in a one-vendor universe, the world may be okay right now. Apple did a fine job there. However, interconnectivity between devices (and software) of different vendors seems to get worse and worse; standards seem to have become irrelevant. Time to market is the only thing that matters and long-term customer satisfaction and durability seem to be of no importance any more. They just don't care about integration with other vendors any more. When I saw Minority Report (2002) a few years ago, I thought dragging windows and applications across devices with a gesture would be a possibility in the not-too-distant future. Now, in 2016, this not-too-hard-to-develop feature seems almost impossible to imagine. Sharing content between devices is utterly painful or even impossible: copying large files between computers in the same Wifi without going through the Internet; playing a video from your Android phone on a Samsung TV; moving application state from your laptop to your desktop PC when you leave work; playing music from your Android phone in a brand new Audi via Bluetooth ... All of these things are absolutely achievable if vendors worked together or standards were to be developed/followed. Right now, though, it just looks like technology fragmentation is getting worse every day.
- FussyZeus 10y ago
  I was going to bring this up too, and you got close, but you're just saying it's a lack of standards and I'd say it's something far more nefarious and intentional: brand lock-in. Brands are what's missing from all the sci fi films where this stuff works, in Minority Report's D.C. Crimelab the displays aren't Samsung monitors hooked up to iPads, and THAT is what makes them work so seamlessly. No vendor wants to allow you to buy from other vendors so naturally the only time you get a seamless experience is when you sell your soul to the devil of your choice (in my case, Apple) and then your iPhone, your Macbook, your iPad and your Apple TV all work miracles right before your eyes. If I ever get an Android phone, it will never sync up properly like the iPhone. And I just have the garden variety stuff, if you buy any of this IoT crap you damn well better hope that your given manufacturer will be around for long enough to make all the things you want and that they offer good support. I have a lot of plans to make our home smart once we buy one, but when I do it will be built on open source modules that I can modify and control, and more importantly SERVICE myself when they inevitably break down after a time.
DiabloD3 10y ago
> In less than two years, the CPU inside the TV quickly becomes obsolete and can’t be upgraded while the display itself easily lasts a decade, and software updates are persphinctery, if they happen at all. I refuse to buy a smart TV, and when my TV finally dies, I will probably be forced to buy one, and the first thing I will do is either disable, or just refuse to setup and use, the smart part. I will then plug a Chromecast in. That cost me $35. That actually works with the services I pay for correctly. Even those Android TV-based smart TVs are useless, because Google does not control them and cannot force the OEM to push Android updates.... although, Android TV does let you Chromecast to it, which is probably what I would use it for. Although, if I wanted Android TV, I'd buy an Nvidia Shield TV and use that instead, since it actually has a reasonable amount of horsepower, supports H265 Main10 and Rec2020 colorspace (in the hardware, AndroidTV support of it itself is upcoming), thus, true 4k support (not merely 2160p support using 8-bit Rec709/sRGB, which a lot of so called 4k devices and TVs are; for a historical perspective, see all the TVs that can only do 720p and 1080i but not 1080p, thus are not actually HDTV/Bluray compatible at all, this is the same thing al over again). Technology advances too quickly for a TV to ever be smart. I'd pay more for a dumb TV that has two more HDMI ports instead, ripping out any smart TV SoC, and ripping out the (extremely useless) cable tuner. Side note: the cable tuner is useless on cable, due to all cable companies moving to encrypting all channels, or moving to IPTV platforms entirely, thus always requiring a box (CableCard is a dead standard and was a mistake, similarly to how smart TV is a mistake and should be just as dead); the cable tuner is always useless on satellite; and if you're trying to do OTA, many TVs, even ones produced today, do not have sufficient sensitivity to dial into channels for many reasons (distance, obscured line of sight, reflections), and even with large enough antennas, you'll get better performance (and sometimes, the ONLY performance) out of a dedicated OTA box. As of which OTA box, if you need signal performance for extreme OTA situations, Channel Master's tuners, as a set top box, kind of suck, but often are the only ones that can coherently decode a signal.
- rdtsc 10y ago
  > I refuse to buy a smart TV, and when my TV finally dies, I will probably be forced to buy one, and the first thing I will do is either disable, or just refuse to setup and use, the smart part. Heh. That's what happened to me. Got a "smart" Vizio TV 4 years ago. It had a Skype + camera option. One night saw camera light come on when I wasn't using it. Quickly yanked that out. Then at some point the "apps" for Amazon stopped working for it. So that's when I disabled its networking plugged in a fire-stick and just using it as a dumb large screen for Netflix. Actually that is an interesting niche to play in -- sell a high quality TV display but just with lots of USB and power ports in the back so people can plug in their favorite stream devices. It would be lighter and thinner as well. More power efficient. Can even make a play on "this is secure, unlike other such devices". And of course the "you save by not paying for extra crap you don't want to use". Advertise that to a few sub-reddits which do xmbc, kodi development, cord cutters. Maybe get Costco on-board as well.
wangchow 10y ago
A lot has to do with the fact that most of these devices are novelties. Save for smart thermostats (can save money on heating bill), or simple efficiency-boosting products, life is generally easier without the added complexity of an interconnected-everything. A fridge is a fridge and its proven to work well for over 100 years. A toaster makes toast. The dishwasher washes dishes. Once something more useful comes around companies will invest more resources but I mean who wants a smart toaster? You pop some toast in there and let it do it's thing. Simple. We need some major breakthroughs in, for example, 3d printed gourmet meals or something.
meddlepal 10y ago
Worked on industrial IoT for five years from devices to backends. It's all garbage. Nothing works, everything is wrapped in marketing double speak, security is a Shit show and UX is virtually non-existent.
- bgentry 10y ago
  Do you have any thoughts on why? Lack of competition, race to the bottom on prices, incompetence, or some kind of vendor lock-in?
  - raarts 10y ago
    The consumer doesn't want it? I don't have anything IoT in my home. Why spend hundreds/thousands to: replace my thermostat with an app, make all of my lights remote controlled, motorize my blinds, and what else is there? It's just spending a lot of money and time for hardly any perceived advantage. Combine this with the fact the average consumer is very cash-strapped in these times.
    - bgentry 10y ago
      I was asking about industrial IoT specifically as the parent mentioned experience with that.
    - zyxley 10y ago
      Motorized blinds should have a simple and incredibly useful killer feature for literally anyone living in a city: the blinds automatically close when you go to bed, and automatically open a little while before your alarm clock goes off. The fact that getting something this simple this set up takes technical chops and a ton of cash is a massive failure on the part of the companies making these devices.
    - CaptSpify 10y ago
      > The consumer doesn't want it? Is that true though? Isn't the massive influx of cash into these proving the opposite? I see this sentiment a lot. "I don't see the point of smart things, so nobody must want them!" But that just isn't true. There's a lot of benefits to be had, and a lot of people want them.
dredmorbius 10y ago
JLG raises some excellent points and points to some excellent critics, including the Internet of Shit twitter account. Some elements to highlight: We had this problem in consumer electric goods, starting slightly over a century ago. Poorly-made devices could electrocute users, burn down homes (or offices or factories), would fail to work as advertised, fail to work, or otherwise disappoint. The result was that, at the instigation of insurance companies, an independent testing and certification service was created, Underwriters Laboratories. UL are actually looking at entering the IoT/IoS morass: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2016/0405/Can-testing-outfit-Underwriters-Laboratories-secure-the-Internet-of-Things http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2016/0405/Can-testin... More complex products make for more complex assessments. One of my most useful and oldest household purchases is also one of my oldest: a cast-iron frying pan bought 30 years ago. It functions as it did when I first bought it, I've used it daily for decades, and its function was immediately evident. Contrast the tablet and keyboard on which I'm typing this, neither of which have lived up to expectations (nor the manufacturers to their warranty obligations -- Samsung and Logitec respectively). With hardware, control interfaces, communications, server dependencies, bugs, security vulnerabilities, and more, IoT devices are vastly more complex than what they replace. Poor margins make for poor products. This seems far less well understood than it ought, particularly among the HN crowd. An undercapitalised company, or one operating on a burn-rate and prayer, or some overseas firm you've never heard of, trying to crack your local market, may well choose to skimp on quality options. Vendors who care nothing other than order fulfillment and logistics (Amazon, WalMart, Best Buy) have no vested interest in product quality. Quality itself is a difficult metric to assess, particularly lifetime quality. Product / vendor lock-in is a consequence of this. Rather than make money on initial purchase, various forms of subscription-based services are offered, or interconnectivity is provided ... as an ad-on, additional-cost, feature. Unintended consequences are a real bitch. This is an area of market failure I've been exploring which seems highly underconsidered in contemporary economics. While Akerloff's "Market for Lemons" gave us a fuller awareness of information asymmetries, I'm not aware of a general treatment for a simple inability to know the salient future outcomes of current actions. Consider Thomas Midgley, Jr.'s contributions of chlorofluorocarbons and tetraethyl lead, used in leaded gasoline. He's done more than any other engineer to put all of humanity at risk. And while lead was a known pollutant by the 1920s, the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer wasn't discovered for another 50 years. Long-lingering systemic effects are particularly pernicious. "Smart" products only offer so much additional capability. The ability of added logic or communications to a device to increase value is limited by the mode through which that object operates. Take Google's recently announced energy savings AI applications. The multi-millionfold increase in computer processing capabilities, combined with a decade's hard work at improving AI ... can deliver a ~15% energy efficiency improvement. In a Moore's Law scenario, this is about a four-month advance in processor capabilities, and given interactions of the Jevons Paradox, the end result is likely to be increasing energy utilisation, not decreasing it. Similar results are seen for automotive and aircraft control systems. Net increases in efficiency from millionfold processer capability improvements are, at best, a factor-of-two doubling, and often far less. There are examples of marked improvements, with the multiple factors compounding in shipping markets a good example: containerisation, standardisation, improved dockside handling, intermodal rail and trucking, invoice and manifest controls, etc., have increased the efficiencies (and decreased the costs) of shipping markedly. Of course, the result is that far more goods are shipped, and labour rates in advanced countries have fallen tremendously with falling negotiating advantage. Complexity increases failure modes. The more interconnections and mutual dependencies a thing has, the more ways it can fail. Any individual or combination of possible interactions needs be considered. Multiple systems with complex interactions compound this. The alternative is fully modularised and independent systems. E.g., rather than a fully integrated "IoT" refrigerator, specific sensing, control, and communications modules might be provided to monitor power, temperature, contents, and communicate these. Taking my tablet example -- apparently cases designed to specific device dimensions make the interchangeability of what ought be completely separate systems complex.
Animats 10y ago
There are two basic problems. 1) getting the devices to find each other and communicate in some reasonably secure way, and 2) controlling them in some user-friendly manner. 1) is still a mess. Things that are hooked to line power ought to talk over the power line. There are lots of standards for that, from the old X10 (1980s, low bandwidth, poor noise immunity, no security), bidirectional X10, Echelon (1990s, low bandwidth, very good noise immunity, some security), HomePlug (2000s, high bandwidth, some security), plus some proprietary systems. X10 refuses to die, and HomePlug's bandwidth is overkill for lighting. Echelon mostly gave up on the home and went on to become the standard for subway and rail automation (signs, lighting, HVAC, doors, etc.) because of the good noise immunity. They're working on a new approach to lighting, where LED lights run on 48VDC. This is a bit radical for home automation. If you have any of these, it's useful to have a whole-house RF filter where power enters the house or apartment to isolate your network segment from everybody else on the same pole transformer. These are cheap ($6 or so) but have to be installed by an electrician. This is a big obstacle to power line networking. Then there are the RF-based networks. WiFi, Zigbee, etc. These have range limitations and may not work through walls. Despite all the headaches of RF networking, most of the IoT vendors are going that way because they get to dump the range problem on the user.
- gerbilly 10y ago
  >If you have any of these, it's useful to have a whole-house RF filter where power enters the house or apartment to isolate your network segment from everybody else on the same pole transformer. I considered X10 a few years back, and when this issue came up I scrapped that idea. I think it would work better if these controllers used out of band communication, but that would require running an extra set of wires.
sangnoir 10y ago
I just had a chuckle: the Chrome tab I have open now (for this HN story) reads "The Internet of Poo" with the rest of the sentence faded out & cropped. How fitting
- clydethefrog 10y ago
  Related: Internet of Sh*t is a Twitter account highlighting "your best home appliances ruined by putting the internet in them". https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit
  - JMCQ87 10y ago
    It's mentioned in the article... ;)
Scea91 10y ago
Regarding the mentioned Moore's law, do we really have 1000 times more computational power on consumer devices than we had in 1996?
- majewsky 10y ago
  A quick look at Wikipedia ("List of Intel Pentium microprocessors") shows that top-of-the-line desktop CPUs ran at 200 MHz, while a current Core i7-6700K is clocked at 4 GHz. That's already a 20-fold increase. Also consider that clock rate is not everything. The number of instructions per clock has also risen, although I don't have hard numbers at hand that easily. Also consider storage. RAM clock speed is slowly, but steadily increasing, as are cache sizes across all levels. And the biggest gains in this area are made by transitioning from HDDs to SSDs, although I don't have numbers on this one, either. But the elephant in the room is floating-point performance. The GPU in my desktop PC (a 2015 AMD R9 Nano) does 8 teraflops. Compare with an Nvidia RIVA 128 from 1998, which did 5 gigaflops. [1] That's more than 1000 times faster in just 17 years. [1] http://www.nvidia.com/object/RIVA_128_FAQ.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/RIVA_128_FAQ.html
DyslexicAtheist 10y ago
Technology is no longer driven (=funded) by innovation but by the ability to produce "recurring revenue". Selling software and some support around it is no longer a viable business model. It's unicorns or nothing. Even Microsoft has seen that coming (and responded by open sourcing gradually ... from C#, ... MS Azure, ... the current Windows-10 beta that runs a Linux kernel, to PowerShell that runs on Linux). Has hell frozen over? No. But we think the only way to make money is with reselling user-data. And the VC industry reflects that. How many tech businesses that made it big today aren't built on central data harvesting of their users in exchange for "free" stuff? We've pushed all our computing to the cloud and think it's the panacea to everything. Do we really expect to apply the same business model and technology principles from virtual world to our physical devices and get away with it? Reminds me of the old phrase, "When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Problem isn't that Security is so much worse in IoT than in your typical web application stack. The problem is that it isn't any better than web-security! We have XSS and SQL injection in IoT, crypto built on shitty javascript, we have MiTM attacks, lack of authentication, ... worse, we can re-use the same exploits (shellshock, heartbleed, ...), and nearly identical attack-vectors! In the age of Shodan and MASSCAN we won't get away with that [1]. (ProTip: (from Gartner, I think): you can send payloads with MASSCAN to a gazillion connected devices by 2020 ;-)) Take a look at the issues of trust on the web! How many signing countries can we trust in our certificate chain? How confident are we that our HTTPS connection is safe (cloudflare is known to MiTM[0] half the internet, so the silly green browser padlock doesn't mean anything) Yet we expect to use the same flawed trust-model with IoT (where bugs hit us in our physical face) as we use on the web. We want to protect all this with Tor browsers, even more centralization and vendor-lock-in or even creating dystopian proposals like the ones from many EU based countries (hello Germany) that propose that the data will never leave the EU. The vendors response? I, and many others who stepped forward to report critical bugs to IoT companies are ignored, accused, blocked. I started IoT Security[5], on LinkedIn some years ago. LinkedIn is a joke of a platform I agree, but it also allows us to put all this shit right into the face of these crappy vendors. It's the perfect melting pot for marketeers and engineers ;-)) Privacy and Security have gotten worse over the years. not just for IoT but on the web in general. We point the finger to the "Internet of Shit", but do we expect if we constantly use the wrong tools for the job? We're looking to the industry to solve this for us. An industry which hasn't figured out yet how to monetize their technology without selling our private data. VC's are as much part of the problem as tech companies. What could go wrong? It's like asking an addict to seek cure by discussing it with their dealer. There is too much technical debt in terms of privacy & security that all these gadgets are either going to kill us, and as consequence will be regulated like anything else that has killed regularly in the past. If not now then as soon as the first connected car is weaponized, or the first smart-home kills someone. Nation states and their armies have become dependent on the Internet to keep us safe. They're doing a good job reminding us that the cyber-threat is real. They're right about the threat. What we're wrong about though is believing that global data harvesting by shady intelligence services will keep us safe. But they have their own agenda[4]. The way forward? Certainly not more centralization or cloud. PS: If you're also sick of all this shit, please do find me ;) there is lot's to talk and little time. [0] https://scotthelme.co.uk/tls-conundrum-and-leaving-cloudflare/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/tls-conundrum-and-leaving-cloudflar... [1] https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2024/DEF%20CON%2024%20presentations/DEFCON-24-Lucas-Lundgren-Light-Weight%20Protocol-Critical-Implications.pdf https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2024/DEF%20CON%2024%20pre... [2] https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/749583412273508352 https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/74958341227350835... [3] https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/749627963461763073 https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/74962796346176307... [4] https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2016/08/06/smartcitiess-cyber-security-role-and-ethical-challenges/ https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2016/08/06/smartcitiess...
davidgerard 10y ago
Whenever you see "Internet of Things", think "Unfixable Heartbleed Everywhere Forever".
chaostheory 10y ago
This post would be more accurate two years ago. Today IOT is usable with much less work and headaches. Sure there are still bugs, but it's a big improvement from a $40 brick. Also platforms like IFTTT, Alexa, and Homekit make it more practical as well.
sickbeard 10y ago
The internet of low margins and devices of dubious functionality. I'm truly scared that the next dotcom crash will come from iot not panning out for companies jumping into it without any forethought
supergeek133 10y ago
Working in consumer IoT on a regular basis.. here is the main problem with adoption: Every device has it's own app! Let's say eventually I want to use Echo, or SmartThings, etc. I can buy 20 devices but half of them have their own app that requires registration before I can connect it to my Echo or SmartThings hub. The reason people hold up Apple as a potential solution is you are seeing hints of them starting to steal registration tasks of even cloud connected devices. So you might ask "Why" does each device have it's own app? Because all of these companies want to "own" the customer and the associated data. The funny part to me, is I know damn well some of them don't want any part of maintaining an application and the team associated with it and the infrastructure. If someone came up with a platform that was easy to integrate, managed an app, and just shared that data for free or a nominal fee, I believe they would win.
gabomagno03 10y ago
Even though I compleatly agree with everything being said in the article ,it highly understimate how hard it actually is to build a semi-complex IoT product. Our startup realized this after 2.5 years in the making of a Smart Things competitor. For example, to debug something you need to check a larger set of things (cliente, backend, hardware, embedd software, network, etc). It will all get better but as of today it really is hard to achieve.
bingobob 10y ago
waiting to see what comes out of Google IoT project like Brillo, Weave it's been kicking around a Google for a while now seems long before the 2015 I/O announcement. maybe Fuchsia has something to do with it who knows.
ss9445 10y ago
It's true that progress is slow, partly because not enough people are tinkering and innovating in this space. We're trying to fix that by getting affordable starter kits into the hands of more developers.We saw a big gap in the market in terms of innovation at the edge especially using cellular technologies. Technologies like CAT-M and Narrowband should make this gap even smaller.
blackflame7000 10y ago
Honestly it's not that hard to design controllers. It simply requires a fundamental understanding of finite state machines. Amateur / rushed coders think the if else statement is cheap way to program in a ruleset and often end up with rare corner cases as a result. The key is to define your states, and don't ever let it ever get outside of what is expected. But if it does, make sure you can detect it and revert. This isn't rocket science. A raspberrypi is faster than computers 5 years ago, don't mistake it's price for quality.

321 points by kawera 10y ago

Google cache: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p3ffbaWsETUJ:https://mondaynote.com/the-internet-of-poorly-working-things-cda7a147af+&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:p3ffba...

walterbell 10y ago

> A look at the so-called Smart TV reinforces the observation about CE culture. In less than two years, the CPU inside the TV quickly becomes obsolete and can’t be upgraded while the display itself easily lasts a decade, and software updates are persphinctery, if they happen at all. Evocative term ("persphinctery"), what does it mean? A web search mostly references mondaynote.

nathancahill 10y ago
Indeed. Ironically, your comment is now one of the 8 results for me.
Aelinsaar 10y ago
Given the limited google search results, it would appear to be a very neo neologism.
laurentdc 10y ago
I think it's like saying "extinct": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perisphinctes https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perisphinctes
slowmovintarget 10y ago
The prefix "per" means through, so this made up word seems to mean "as though it came through the sphincter" a.k.a "crappy". So "persphinctery" would be a synonym of "excretory", were it actually a word.
- noobermin 10y ago
  When mashing prefixes onto words in a way which is unfamiliar, it's usually customary to use a hyphen. E.g. "post-fact[0]" instead of "postfact". Strangely, to me, the former seems to imply that "post-" is a prefix while the latter seems to be a fact involving postal mail. [0] https://granta.com/why-were-post-fact/ https://granta.com/why-were-post-fact/
- jwatte 10y ago
  Given that you put the letters together, it is a word. The only question is how many understand it, and which dictionaries (if any) you can find it in.
- nathancahill 10y ago
  You got it: https://twitter.com/gassee/status/767576827963453440 https://twitter.com/gassee/status/767576827963453440
- tempodox 10y ago
  Creative word generation is always welcome.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
ranger207 10y ago
I think it's a corruption of "persnickety," which in my experience means "overly precise" as in a lock can be persnickety because dirt gets in and fouls the workings because there's no room for grime in the lock.
- sk5t 10y ago
  I'll guess that the root term is "perfunctory."
williamscales 10y ago
Yeah, I think it's an invented term. It's not in my dictionary as a word.
voltagex_ 10y ago
>In less than two years, the CPU inside the TV quickly becomes obsolete If it's Linux based, this just means that the SoC vendor hasn't kept the board support package (BSP) up to date. These kinds of things are hardly ever mainlined, so it becomes difficult to update drivers, kernel versions and then even software versions (think X11)
- wmf 10y ago
  BSPs are never updated, so that's a given. But I think he was more likely talking about codecs (no H.265? too bad) or DRM.
someone7x 10y ago
First thing I did is google that word, it's rather poetic. "persphinctery", one word to capture the brokenness of waiting for updates the provider has no incentive to create. I laughed because it's a very erudite sounding word with a very vulgar interpretation: "persphinctery" == "as they are shat out".

Aelinsaar 10y ago

Nothing about the impending IoT seems planned, standardized, and remotely designed with the consumer's best interest in mind. That being said, consumers for their part seem almost eager to throw their money away for truly dubious improvements. What isn't a bad idea from the get go is often a good idea ruined with careless implementation.

Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
Apart from the fridge that, once upon a time could show you your Google calendar[0], I have yet to see any IoT device that actually requires a cloud service for its functionality. Why can't things be built to just use local TCP/IP connections? Those work just fine on my local network, and they work just fine if I flip my VPN on when I'm not on my local network. Anything that actually needs some kind of server piece should have a server that can run locally. [0] https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/UhfpcwO0X0c https://productforums.google.com/forum/#!topic/calendar/Uhfp...
- Aelinsaar 10y ago
  I would imagine it's the same thinking that puts multiplayer in every game, and just generally wants to keep a live connection to everything, always.
- bpicolo 10y ago
  There are tons out there, no? Amazon Echo is a stark example, but e.g. nest camera seems to as well. https://nest.com/support/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest-Cam https://nest.com/support/article/Do-I-need-Wi-Fi-to-use-Nest...
  - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
    The Amazon Echo makes sense to require an Internet connection. There is nothing that the Nest cam does, apart from offsite backup, that requires it to contact the company's servers. Everything else can be local only with VPN for remote access.
- 10y ago

Mister_Snuggles 10y ago

I've got a bunch of WiFi cameras that aren't able to access the internet[0], so really it's an "Intranet of Things". But they sometimes drop their connection, which is expected because it's WiFi, but a lot of the time they won't reconnect properly. I figure that if basic infrastructure stuff, like automatically reconnecting to WiFi, doesn't even work, what chance do we have of harder things like security working properly? [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11933851 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11933851

voltagex_ 10y ago
How much did you pay for them? I've lost all faith in consumer-level gear. I just don't think the businesses prioritise any kind of QA any more.
- Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
  They're definitely consumer-grade cameras, and most of them are at the low end of that. I'd say they are in the $50-100 CAD range per camera. That said, when they do work they work a lot better than their price would suggest.
  - voltagex_ 10y ago
    I'd probably create a Rube Goldberg-esque setup that detected when the camera dropped off wifi and power cycled (Wifi-enabled socket, it's IOT all the way down) the camera.
    - zyxley 10y ago
      There's a device for that: http://resetplug.com http://resetplug.com
    - Mister_Snuggles 10y ago
      I've seriously thought of doing that. Then I came to my senses and reminded myself that if these were truly important they'd be hardwired. The cameras are capable, I just have no desire to run the cables.

flyinghamster 10y ago

Vendor lock-in gets short shrift in this article. Let's not forget Philips attempting to lock out competitor's bulbs from their Hue bridges.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
They tried, there was a shitstorm, and they reverted that. For now, at least. I'm a recent and quite happy Hue owner. I decided to go for the expensive good stuff because I learned the hard way that cheap consumer electronics is always shitty and not worth the hassle - all those trivial annoyances add up to your stress level. Also, I know a bit too much about Chinese cheap LED bulbs manufacturing quality - I don't trust them that they won't burn my house down.

GuiA 10y ago

Any smartphone from the past few years + an internet connection lets people file their taxes, watch videos, communicate by text/audio/video with pretty much anyone in the world, read online encyclopedia, order pretty much any physical good to their door, listen to music, translate languages, read books, take high resolution videos, and so much more. How do you even beat that? And what do you offer beyond that? It feels like we're reaching the flat part of the logarithmic progress curve (a much more appropriate curve for progress than the hockey stick curve) when it comes to what personal computing is going to bring to the daily lives of consumers. Of course, there are still many areas not explored by computing. Computer aided medical procedures and diagnoses, monitoring and upkeep of crops, and so many more fields will grow in the years and decades to come. And improvements to personal transportation, through i.e. self driving cars, is arguably a consumer technology. But the whole IoT movement is just a parody of itself. The vast majority of people do not want internet connected water cups or juicers or microwave ovens; and those who do soon get frustrated by the real world logistics that come with these things (higher costs, more frequent failures, lack of interoperability, etc.). I had Philips Hue bulbs for a while, and the girlfriend I lived with at the time hated them with a passion - for understandable reasons. When it comes to turning lights on and off, you can't beat a light switch, and the same logic applies to every single item we interact with daily. For instance, the Nest we had in our apartment would randomly start on and off, or suddenly stop being visible to the app, etc.

ars 10y ago
> flat part of the logarithmic progress curve The curve you are looking for is called the logistic. A lot of apparently exponential curves are actually logistic.
wtbob 10y ago
> For instance, the Nest we had in our apartment would randomly start on and off, or suddenly stop being visible to the app, etc. My own smart thermostat — from another company — has mostly been very good, but it randomly wants me to re-enter my (high-entropy, unmemorisable) password in their site to use it. Why can't I just connect to my thermostat and set up the authentication I want? Why can't I use a client certificate, or an SSH key, or just have a $&% token which lasts approximately forever? It's my* device; I should be able to do whatever I want with it. Give it (not the vendor's site) a clean API, and I can do anything.

ebbv 10y ago

All that build up and it ends up basically an ad for Amazon Echo? Disappointing. Amazon Echo is of very borderline usefulness at best. On its own it does almost nothing that the digital assistant on your phone can't already do, and a lot that it can't just because your phone is so already entrenched in your life.

noobermin 10y ago
I was very upset about that too. I feel lied to. Moreover, are there hard numbers about how "successful" the Echo really is? EDIT: how did IOT end up there?
- lostlogin 10y ago
  Hard numbers from Amazon? I'm sure an unlabeled graph has been released at some point showing some kind of hockey stick growth.
dangrossman 10y ago
I can say "Alexa, dim the lights to 50%" and it happens. I can say "OK Google, dim the lights to 50%" and nothing happens. Both ecosystems have access to my lights (I can control them with various apps), but only one has put effort into first-party integrations with IOT platforms.
- ebbv 10y ago
  Ok so your specific lighting system integrates better with Echo than with OK Google. That says something about those combinations, it doesn't say much about Echo itself. Like I said in the comment you responded to; on its own the Echo is pretty borderline whether it's useful at all, and it can't do many things your phone assistant can. My point being; just because your combination works with your Echo and not your phone assistant doesn't mean that Echo is a device most people should buy.
  - dangrossman 10y ago
    I don't think you understand. This isn't the case of "oh that product's better integrated with Amazon than Google". Amazon has put the resources and legwork into establishing a business and development integration with every single major connected device maker in retail stores. All of them, in a way that nobody else has. I think it's wrong to say it "doesn't say much about Echo itself". It shows a focus on becoming the center of the smart home nobody else has. If a device works with Samsung SmartThings, Philips Hue, Belkin Wemo, Insteon, Lutron, Wink, Nest, HomeSeer, Almond, LIFX, GE Link, TCP, iHome, Leviton, Honeywell Lyric or TotalConnect, Ecobee, Haiku, Keen, Garageio, Z-wave or Zigbee (via a hub)... then it also works with Alexa, out of the box, because Amazon has relationships with all of them already. You just say "Alexa, discover my devices" and she finds whatever you happen to own on your network on her own, instantly knows their names (that you gave them if applicable) and capabilities, and can address them through natural language.

wtbob 10y ago

> In less than two years, the CPU inside the TV quickly becomes obsolete and can’t be upgraded while the display itself easily lasts a decade, and software updates are persphinctery, if they happen at all. That's odd — the word 'persphinctery' seems to appear only in Monday Note articles. Is this some sort of trap street[1] for medium-form articles? [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trap_street

jpatokal 10y ago
That looks a bit search'n'replace run amok, although I fail to see what the first half of s/?/sphincter/g could be. The end result is certainly unlovely though: rather colonoscopacetic, if you will.
- rexfm 10y ago
  I searched the same thing, decided it's probably a pun on "perfunctory" + sphincter-clench-inducing
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
soared 10y ago
Is there a rule where everything exists in hashtag form? Just over a year ago #persphinctery https://twitter.com/search?q=%23persphinctery https://twitter.com/search?q=%23persphinctery
greendestiny_re 10y ago
The writer probably wished to say "perfunctory" but experienced a brain fog moment.

m_mueller 10y ago

IMO there is a very annoying trend in household appliances towards worse and worse UI. Basically, it started with light switches already decades ago, at least in Europe. In the past, you had switches that themselves indicated what state they are in, so if you cluster them on a board it's incredibly easy to find the one switched on at the moment [1]. Then, some moron came up with switches that don't show anything anymore [2]. Nowadays you're lucky if you get switches on anything at all. This [3] is how a standard stove looks like in new Swiss apartments nowadays. Good luck explaining this to your grandma. You idiots, it has one job, getting more or less hot! Recently I took a residential elevator that just had an empty touch field when you came in. No indication of what you could do whatsoever. This immediately gave me anxiety, and I'm just 31 goddamnit. Anyways, what happened was that once the elevator door closed it gave me a selection of floors to go. [4] facepalm Please, for the love of what's holy, stop improving what doesn't need improvement! In german we have a word for this: "Verschlimmbessern". (a combination of verschlimmern='making it worse' and bessern=improving) [1] https://adventurelightingblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/light-switch.jpg https://adventurelightingblog.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/li... [2] http://www.schulungshandbuch.de/WebRoot/Store22/Shops/62784718/54C3/771A/FC18/5950/9A6B/C0A8/2ABB/1470/Lichtschalter.jpeg http://www.schulungshandbuch.de/WebRoot/Store22/Shops/627847... [3] http://media3.siemens-home.com/Product_Shots/915x515/MCSA00681395_2_EH645BB17E_def.png http://media3.siemens-home.com/Product_Shots/915x515/MCSA006... [4] https://www.google.co.jp/search?tbm=isch&q=schindler+touch&tbs=imgo:1&gws_rd=cr&ei=xWq6V6_KAcjK0ATj9JqYBg#gws_rd=cr&imgrc=33lIUZ1H5KvvxM%3A https://www.google.co.jp/search?tbm=isch&q=schindler+touch&t...

seshagiric 10y ago
+1 for the elevator anxiety. In my case there were no buttons inside the lift!! Really, nothing. One had to select your floor BEFORE entering the lift.
- jpatokal 10y ago
  That's called a destination control system, and it works that way because of the massive efficiency gains of letting the elevators work out who should go where.

jwatte 10y ago

And then the cloud service for your door lock, light bulb or security system gets shuttered. #internetofbricks

api 10y ago

I just call it IOJ: Internet of Junk.

dredmorbius 10y ago
IOS: Internet of Shit. As JLG notes in the article. Io[B]T[TSoY]: Internet of (Broken) Things (That Spy on You).
- rvense 10y ago
  Internet of Targets.
  - dredmorbius 10y ago
    Beautiful!
yitchelle 10y ago
Its real name is FAD.

seiferteric 10y ago

My neato botvac seems to forget its wifi settings every couple weeks :(

dredmorbius 10y ago

This isn't the first time gratuitous "technologisation of stuff" has been proposed, though it seems to be proceeding rather apace. From 1922, "Radio All the Things!": http://i.imgur.com/TSJnicdl.jpg http://i.imgur.com/TSJnicdl.jpg (Via: http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2015/01/videophones-from-future-past.html http://www.darkroastedblend.com/2015/01/videophones-from-fut... and origionally: http://wi.mobilities.ca/grant-wythoff-aerophone-telephot-hypnobioscope-hugo-gernsbacks-media-theory/ http://wi.mobilities.ca/grant-wythoff-aerophone-telephot-hyp...) Or the original book if you'd prefer: Hugo Gernsback, Radio for All (1922): https://archive.org/details/radioforall00gerniala https://archive.org/details/radioforall00gerniala I think I know what a radio phone might do. Radio clocks even exist (though a networked NTP timekeeper is more useful). I'm not sure I'd care to fly in a radio-controlled airplane. And I'm utterly perplexed at what a radio heater might be -- unless it's a microwave space heater, or an early instance of Nest.

scholia 10y ago
> I think I know what a radio phone might do. Radio clocks even exist I assume a radio phone would be a walkie talkie, and those can still be useful. Further, I used to have a cheap mobile phone that had a built-in FM radio, but now I have a much more expensive smartphone that doesn't -- or at least, it's not user-accessible. I also have a somewhat old radio alarm clock that gets the correct time via the mains power supply. Needless to say, the time goes wrong and you have to turn it off for a while then hope it gets the right time when it restarts. Usually it does, but sometimes it can be hours wrong for weeks. I could use my internet radio as a backup, of course, but the broadcast sound arrives way ahead of the internet sound, and if the two radios show the same time as the smartphone, that's looks like luck. Seems to me we've been screwing these things up for a while, even without the internet of things ;-)
legulere 10y ago
> I think I know what a radio phone might do It's just a mobile phone. > I'm not sure I'd care to fly in a radio-controlled airplane. They're unmanned and called drones. > Radio clocks even exist (though a networked NTP timekeeper is more useful) A radio clock costs few cents and works pretty much everywhere. With NTP you need to have a full IP stack and some internet reception.

binwiederhier 10y ago

Thank you for that article! I have been feeling like that for many months, and whenever I point it out to co-workers or friends, they mention the Apple-universe as the ultimate achievement of interconnectivity. And in a one-vendor universe, the world may be okay right now. Apple did a fine job there. However, interconnectivity between devices (and software) of different vendors seems to get worse and worse; standards seem to have become irrelevant. Time to market is the only thing that matters and long-term customer satisfaction and durability seem to be of no importance any more. They just don't care about integration with other vendors any more. When I saw Minority Report (2002) a few years ago, I thought dragging windows and applications across devices with a gesture would be a possibility in the not-too-distant future. Now, in 2016, this not-too-hard-to-develop feature seems almost impossible to imagine. Sharing content between devices is utterly painful or even impossible: copying large files between computers in the same Wifi without going through the Internet; playing a video from your Android phone on a Samsung TV; moving application state from your laptop to your desktop PC when you leave work; playing music from your Android phone in a brand new Audi via Bluetooth ... All of these things are absolutely achievable if vendors worked together or standards were to be developed/followed. Right now, though, it just looks like technology fragmentation is getting worse every day.

FussyZeus 10y ago
I was going to bring this up too, and you got close, but you're just saying it's a lack of standards and I'd say it's something far more nefarious and intentional: brand lock-in. Brands are what's missing from all the sci fi films where this stuff works, in Minority Report's D.C. Crimelab the displays aren't Samsung monitors hooked up to iPads, and THAT is what makes them work so seamlessly. No vendor wants to allow you to buy from other vendors so naturally the only time you get a seamless experience is when you sell your soul to the devil of your choice (in my case, Apple) and then your iPhone, your Macbook, your iPad and your Apple TV all work miracles right before your eyes. If I ever get an Android phone, it will never sync up properly like the iPhone. And I just have the garden variety stuff, if you buy any of this IoT crap you damn well better hope that your given manufacturer will be around for long enough to make all the things you want and that they offer good support. I have a lot of plans to make our home smart once we buy one, but when I do it will be built on open source modules that I can modify and control, and more importantly SERVICE myself when they inevitably break down after a time.

DiabloD3 10y ago

> In less than two years, the CPU inside the TV quickly becomes obsolete and can’t be upgraded while the display itself easily lasts a decade, and software updates are persphinctery, if they happen at all. I refuse to buy a smart TV, and when my TV finally dies, I will probably be forced to buy one, and the first thing I will do is either disable, or just refuse to setup and use, the smart part. I will then plug a Chromecast in. That cost me $35. That actually works with the services I pay for correctly. Even those Android TV-based smart TVs are useless, because Google does not control them and cannot force the OEM to push Android updates.... although, Android TV does let you Chromecast to it, which is probably what I would use it for. Although, if I wanted Android TV, I'd buy an Nvidia Shield TV and use that instead, since it actually has a reasonable amount of horsepower, supports H265 Main10 and Rec2020 colorspace (in the hardware, AndroidTV support of it itself is upcoming), thus, true 4k support (not merely 2160p support using 8-bit Rec709/sRGB, which a lot of so called 4k devices and TVs are; for a historical perspective, see all the TVs that can only do 720p and 1080i but not 1080p, thus are not actually HDTV/Bluray compatible at all, this is the same thing al over again). Technology advances too quickly for a TV to ever be smart. I'd pay more for a dumb TV that has two more HDMI ports instead, ripping out any smart TV SoC, and ripping out the (extremely useless) cable tuner. Side note: the cable tuner is useless on cable, due to all cable companies moving to encrypting all channels, or moving to IPTV platforms entirely, thus always requiring a box (CableCard is a dead standard and was a mistake, similarly to how smart TV is a mistake and should be just as dead); the cable tuner is always useless on satellite; and if you're trying to do OTA, many TVs, even ones produced today, do not have sufficient sensitivity to dial into channels for many reasons (distance, obscured line of sight, reflections), and even with large enough antennas, you'll get better performance (and sometimes, the ONLY performance) out of a dedicated OTA box. As of which OTA box, if you need signal performance for extreme OTA situations, Channel Master's tuners, as a set top box, kind of suck, but often are the only ones that can coherently decode a signal.

rdtsc 10y ago
> I refuse to buy a smart TV, and when my TV finally dies, I will probably be forced to buy one, and the first thing I will do is either disable, or just refuse to setup and use, the smart part. Heh. That's what happened to me. Got a "smart" Vizio TV 4 years ago. It had a Skype + camera option. One night saw camera light come on when I wasn't using it. Quickly yanked that out. Then at some point the "apps" for Amazon stopped working for it. So that's when I disabled its networking plugged in a fire-stick and just using it as a dumb large screen for Netflix. Actually that is an interesting niche to play in -- sell a high quality TV display but just with lots of USB and power ports in the back so people can plug in their favorite stream devices. It would be lighter and thinner as well. More power efficient. Can even make a play on "this is secure, unlike other such devices". And of course the "you save by not paying for extra crap you don't want to use". Advertise that to a few sub-reddits which do xmbc, kodi development, cord cutters. Maybe get Costco on-board as well.

wangchow 10y ago

A lot has to do with the fact that most of these devices are novelties. Save for smart thermostats (can save money on heating bill), or simple efficiency-boosting products, life is generally easier without the added complexity of an interconnected-everything. A fridge is a fridge and its proven to work well for over 100 years. A toaster makes toast. The dishwasher washes dishes. Once something more useful comes around companies will invest more resources but I mean who wants a smart toaster? You pop some toast in there and let it do it's thing. Simple. We need some major breakthroughs in, for example, 3d printed gourmet meals or something.

meddlepal 10y ago

Worked on industrial IoT for five years from devices to backends. It's all garbage. Nothing works, everything is wrapped in marketing double speak, security is a Shit show and UX is virtually non-existent.

bgentry 10y ago
Do you have any thoughts on why? Lack of competition, race to the bottom on prices, incompetence, or some kind of vendor lock-in?
- raarts 10y ago
  The consumer doesn't want it? I don't have anything IoT in my home. Why spend hundreds/thousands to: replace my thermostat with an app, make all of my lights remote controlled, motorize my blinds, and what else is there? It's just spending a lot of money and time for hardly any perceived advantage. Combine this with the fact the average consumer is very cash-strapped in these times.
  - bgentry 10y ago
    I was asking about industrial IoT specifically as the parent mentioned experience with that.
  - zyxley 10y ago
    Motorized blinds should have a simple and incredibly useful killer feature for literally anyone living in a city: the blinds automatically close when you go to bed, and automatically open a little while before your alarm clock goes off. The fact that getting something this simple this set up takes technical chops and a ton of cash is a massive failure on the part of the companies making these devices.
  - CaptSpify 10y ago
    > The consumer doesn't want it? Is that true though? Isn't the massive influx of cash into these proving the opposite? I see this sentiment a lot. "I don't see the point of smart things, so nobody must want them!" But that just isn't true. There's a lot of benefits to be had, and a lot of people want them.

dredmorbius 10y ago

JLG raises some excellent points and points to some excellent critics, including the Internet of Shit twitter account. Some elements to highlight: We had this problem in consumer electric goods, starting slightly over a century ago. Poorly-made devices could electrocute users, burn down homes (or offices or factories), would fail to work as advertised, fail to work, or otherwise disappoint. The result was that, at the instigation of insurance companies, an independent testing and certification service was created, Underwriters Laboratories. UL are actually looking at entering the IoT/IoS morass: http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2016/0405/Can-testing-outfit-Underwriters-Laboratories-secure-the-Internet-of-Things http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Passcode/2016/0405/Can-testin... More complex products make for more complex assessments. One of my most useful and oldest household purchases is also one of my oldest: a cast-iron frying pan bought 30 years ago. It functions as it did when I first bought it, I've used it daily for decades, and its function was immediately evident. Contrast the tablet and keyboard on which I'm typing this, neither of which have lived up to expectations (nor the manufacturers to their warranty obligations -- Samsung and Logitec respectively). With hardware, control interfaces, communications, server dependencies, bugs, security vulnerabilities, and more, IoT devices are vastly more complex than what they replace. Poor margins make for poor products. This seems far less well understood than it ought, particularly among the HN crowd. An undercapitalised company, or one operating on a burn-rate and prayer, or some overseas firm you've never heard of, trying to crack your local market, may well choose to skimp on quality options. Vendors who care nothing other than order fulfillment and logistics (Amazon, WalMart, Best Buy) have no vested interest in product quality. Quality itself is a difficult metric to assess, particularly lifetime quality. Product / vendor lock-in is a consequence of this. Rather than make money on initial purchase, various forms of subscription-based services are offered, or interconnectivity is provided ... as an ad-on, additional-cost, feature. Unintended consequences are a real bitch. This is an area of market failure I've been exploring which seems highly underconsidered in contemporary economics. While Akerloff's "Market for Lemons" gave us a fuller awareness of information asymmetries, I'm not aware of a general treatment for a simple inability to know the salient future outcomes of current actions. Consider Thomas Midgley, Jr.'s contributions of chlorofluorocarbons and tetraethyl lead, used in leaded gasoline. He's done more than any other engineer to put all of humanity at risk. And while lead was a known pollutant by the 1920s, the effects of CFCs on the ozone layer wasn't discovered for another 50 years. Long-lingering systemic effects are particularly pernicious. "Smart" products only offer so much additional capability. The ability of added logic or communications to a device to increase value is limited by the mode through which that object operates. Take Google's recently announced energy savings AI applications. The multi-millionfold increase in computer processing capabilities, combined with a decade's hard work at improving AI ... can deliver a ~15% energy efficiency improvement. In a Moore's Law scenario, this is about a four-month advance in processor capabilities, and given interactions of the Jevons Paradox, the end result is likely to be increasing energy utilisation, not decreasing it. Similar results are seen for automotive and aircraft control systems. Net increases in efficiency from millionfold processer capability improvements are, at best, a factor-of-two doubling, and often far less. There are examples of marked improvements, with the multiple factors compounding in shipping markets a good example: containerisation, standardisation, improved dockside handling, intermodal rail and trucking, invoice and manifest controls, etc., have increased the efficiencies (and decreased the costs) of shipping markedly. Of course, the result is that far more goods are shipped, and labour rates in advanced countries have fallen tremendously with falling negotiating advantage. Complexity increases failure modes. The more interconnections and mutual dependencies a thing has, the more ways it can fail. Any individual or combination of possible interactions needs be considered. Multiple systems with complex interactions compound this. The alternative is fully modularised and independent systems. E.g., rather than a fully integrated "IoT" refrigerator, specific sensing, control, and communications modules might be provided to monitor power, temperature, contents, and communicate these. Taking my tablet example -- apparently cases designed to specific device dimensions make the interchangeability of what ought be completely separate systems complex.

Animats 10y ago

There are two basic problems. 1) getting the devices to find each other and communicate in some reasonably secure way, and 2) controlling them in some user-friendly manner. 1) is still a mess. Things that are hooked to line power ought to talk over the power line. There are lots of standards for that, from the old X10 (1980s, low bandwidth, poor noise immunity, no security), bidirectional X10, Echelon (1990s, low bandwidth, very good noise immunity, some security), HomePlug (2000s, high bandwidth, some security), plus some proprietary systems. X10 refuses to die, and HomePlug's bandwidth is overkill for lighting. Echelon mostly gave up on the home and went on to become the standard for subway and rail automation (signs, lighting, HVAC, doors, etc.) because of the good noise immunity. They're working on a new approach to lighting, where LED lights run on 48VDC. This is a bit radical for home automation. If you have any of these, it's useful to have a whole-house RF filter where power enters the house or apartment to isolate your network segment from everybody else on the same pole transformer. These are cheap ($6 or so) but have to be installed by an electrician. This is a big obstacle to power line networking. Then there are the RF-based networks. WiFi, Zigbee, etc. These have range limitations and may not work through walls. Despite all the headaches of RF networking, most of the IoT vendors are going that way because they get to dump the range problem on the user.

gerbilly 10y ago
>If you have any of these, it's useful to have a whole-house RF filter where power enters the house or apartment to isolate your network segment from everybody else on the same pole transformer. I considered X10 a few years back, and when this issue came up I scrapped that idea. I think it would work better if these controllers used out of band communication, but that would require running an extra set of wires.

sangnoir 10y ago

I just had a chuckle: the Chrome tab I have open now (for this HN story) reads "The Internet of Poo" with the rest of the sentence faded out & cropped. How fitting

clydethefrog 10y ago
Related: Internet of Sh*t is a Twitter account highlighting "your best home appliances ruined by putting the internet in them". https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit
- JMCQ87 10y ago
  It's mentioned in the article... ;)

Scea91 10y ago

Regarding the mentioned Moore's law, do we really have 1000 times more computational power on consumer devices than we had in 1996?

majewsky 10y ago
A quick look at Wikipedia ("List of Intel Pentium microprocessors") shows that top-of-the-line desktop CPUs ran at 200 MHz, while a current Core i7-6700K is clocked at 4 GHz. That's already a 20-fold increase. Also consider that clock rate is not everything. The number of instructions per clock has also risen, although I don't have hard numbers at hand that easily. Also consider storage. RAM clock speed is slowly, but steadily increasing, as are cache sizes across all levels. And the biggest gains in this area are made by transitioning from HDDs to SSDs, although I don't have numbers on this one, either. But the elephant in the room is floating-point performance. The GPU in my desktop PC (a 2015 AMD R9 Nano) does 8 teraflops. Compare with an Nvidia RIVA 128 from 1998, which did 5 gigaflops. [1] That's more than 1000 times faster in just 17 years. [1] http://www.nvidia.com/object/RIVA_128_FAQ.html http://www.nvidia.com/object/RIVA_128_FAQ.html

DyslexicAtheist 10y ago

Technology is no longer driven (=funded) by innovation but by the ability to produce "recurring revenue". Selling software and some support around it is no longer a viable business model. It's unicorns or nothing. Even Microsoft has seen that coming (and responded by open sourcing gradually ... from C#, ... MS Azure, ... the current Windows-10 beta that runs a Linux kernel, to PowerShell that runs on Linux). Has hell frozen over? No. But we think the only way to make money is with reselling user-data. And the VC industry reflects that. How many tech businesses that made it big today aren't built on central data harvesting of their users in exchange for "free" stuff? We've pushed all our computing to the cloud and think it's the panacea to everything. Do we really expect to apply the same business model and technology principles from virtual world to our physical devices and get away with it? Reminds me of the old phrase, "When your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail". Problem isn't that Security is so much worse in IoT than in your typical web application stack. The problem is that it isn't any better than web-security! We have XSS and SQL injection in IoT, crypto built on shitty javascript, we have MiTM attacks, lack of authentication, ... worse, we can re-use the same exploits (shellshock, heartbleed, ...), and nearly identical attack-vectors! In the age of Shodan and MASSCAN we won't get away with that [1]. (ProTip: (from Gartner, I think): you can send payloads with MASSCAN to a gazillion connected devices by 2020 ;-)) Take a look at the issues of trust on the web! How many signing countries can we trust in our certificate chain? How confident are we that our HTTPS connection is safe (cloudflare is known to MiTM[0] half the internet, so the silly green browser padlock doesn't mean anything) Yet we expect to use the same flawed trust-model with IoT (where bugs hit us in our physical face) as we use on the web. We want to protect all this with Tor browsers, even more centralization and vendor-lock-in or even creating dystopian proposals like the ones from many EU based countries (hello Germany) that propose that the data will never leave the EU. The vendors response? I, and many others who stepped forward to report critical bugs to IoT companies are ignored, accused, blocked. I started IoT Security[5], on LinkedIn some years ago. LinkedIn is a joke of a platform I agree, but it also allows us to put all this shit right into the face of these crappy vendors. It's the perfect melting pot for marketeers and engineers ;-)) Privacy and Security have gotten worse over the years. not just for IoT but on the web in general. We point the finger to the "Internet of Shit", but do we expect if we constantly use the wrong tools for the job? We're looking to the industry to solve this for us. An industry which hasn't figured out yet how to monetize their technology without selling our private data. VC's are as much part of the problem as tech companies. What could go wrong? It's like asking an addict to seek cure by discussing it with their dealer. There is too much technical debt in terms of privacy & security that all these gadgets are either going to kill us, and as consequence will be regulated like anything else that has killed regularly in the past. If not now then as soon as the first connected car is weaponized, or the first smart-home kills someone. Nation states and their armies have become dependent on the Internet to keep us safe. They're doing a good job reminding us that the cyber-threat is real. They're right about the threat. What we're wrong about though is believing that global data harvesting by shady intelligence services will keep us safe. But they have their own agenda[4]. The way forward? Certainly not more centralization or cloud. PS: If you're also sick of all this shit, please do find me ;) there is lot's to talk and little time. [0] https://scotthelme.co.uk/tls-conundrum-and-leaving-cloudflare/ https://scotthelme.co.uk/tls-conundrum-and-leaving-cloudflar... [1] https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2024/DEF%20CON%2024%20presentations/DEFCON-24-Lucas-Lundgren-Light-Weight%20Protocol-Critical-Implications.pdf https://media.defcon.org/DEF%20CON%2024/DEF%20CON%2024%20pre... [2] https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/749583412273508352 https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/74958341227350835... [3] https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/749627963461763073 https://twitter.com/ValbonneConsult/status/74962796346176307... [4] https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2016/08/06/smartcitiess-cyber-security-role-and-ethical-challenges/ https://blog.valbonne-consulting.com/2016/08/06/smartcitiess...

davidgerard 10y ago

Whenever you see "Internet of Things", think "Unfixable Heartbleed Everywhere Forever".

chaostheory 10y ago

This post would be more accurate two years ago. Today IOT is usable with much less work and headaches. Sure there are still bugs, but it's a big improvement from a $40 brick. Also platforms like IFTTT, Alexa, and Homekit make it more practical as well.

sickbeard 10y ago

The internet of low margins and devices of dubious functionality. I'm truly scared that the next dotcom crash will come from iot not panning out for companies jumping into it without any forethought

supergeek133 10y ago

Working in consumer IoT on a regular basis.. here is the main problem with adoption: Every device has it's own app! Let's say eventually I want to use Echo, or SmartThings, etc. I can buy 20 devices but half of them have their own app that requires registration before I can connect it to my Echo or SmartThings hub. The reason people hold up Apple as a potential solution is you are seeing hints of them starting to steal registration tasks of even cloud connected devices. So you might ask "Why" does each device have it's own app? Because all of these companies want to "own" the customer and the associated data. The funny part to me, is I know damn well some of them don't want any part of maintaining an application and the team associated with it and the infrastructure. If someone came up with a platform that was easy to integrate, managed an app, and just shared that data for free or a nominal fee, I believe they would win.

gabomagno03 10y ago

Even though I compleatly agree with everything being said in the article ,it highly understimate how hard it actually is to build a semi-complex IoT product. Our startup realized this after 2.5 years in the making of a Smart Things competitor. For example, to debug something you need to check a larger set of things (cliente, backend, hardware, embedd software, network, etc). It will all get better but as of today it really is hard to achieve.

bingobob 10y ago

waiting to see what comes out of Google IoT project like Brillo, Weave it's been kicking around a Google for a while now seems long before the 2015 I/O announcement. maybe Fuchsia has something to do with it who knows.

ss9445 10y ago

It's true that progress is slow, partly because not enough people are tinkering and innovating in this space. We're trying to fix that by getting affordable starter kits into the hands of more developers.We saw a big gap in the market in terms of innovation at the edge especially using cellular technologies. Technologies like CAT-M and Narrowband should make this gap even smaller.

blackflame7000 10y ago

Honestly it's not that hard to design controllers. It simply requires a fundamental understanding of finite state machines. Amateur / rushed coders think the if else statement is cheap way to program in a ruleset and often end up with rare corner cases as a result. The key is to define your states, and don't ever let it ever get outside of what is expected. But if it does, make sure you can detect it and revert. This isn't rocket science. A raspberrypi is faster than computers 5 years ago, don't mistake it's price for quality.