16 ms·

Due to a problem with AWS, many "smart" vacuums or doorbells will stop working

• kissiel 6y ago
  Dupe - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25220402 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25220402
  • corobo 6y ago
    Also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25214453 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25214453
• api 6y ago
  Good. Hopefully dependence on the cloud will become an anti-feature people avoid.
• SrslyJosh 6y ago
  What a wonderful world dot mp3
• sova 6y ago
  And people scoff when I ask "What happened to 'Work Offline?'"
• HatchedLake721 6y ago
  They can vacuum. They just need to get up and press the button on top of the Roomba.
  • jojobas 6y ago
    That's still ridiculous. Amazon servers have no business being between my phone and my vacuum. At least when I'm in the same local network. Ideally it should let me set up port forwarding on my router to talk to the vacuum from the outside too.
    • kaszanka 6y ago
      This is the big problem with most (all?) commercial "Internet of Things" devices. It's a real mess, and that is because this idea is unworkable from the start. What we should have instead are many, isolated "Intranets of Things".
      • jannes 6y ago
        Luckily, not everything uses WiFi. There are tons of Zigbee and Z-Wave devices which physically don't have a WiFi chip. Of course, you should build your own bridge to connect them to (rather than using the bridge of a big tech company). For Zigbee you can use the Conbee [0] and for Z-Wave you can use the Z-Stick [1] to build your own bridge. Furthermore, some of the cheaper WiFi devices that are based on the ESP8266 chip can be flashed with a custom firmware called Tasmota [2] to make them cloud-free. [0]: https://www.phoscon.de/en/conbee2 https://www.phoscon.de/en/conbee2 [1]: https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick/ https://aeotec.com/z-wave-usb-stick/ [2]: https://github.com/arendst/tasmota/#readme https://github.com/arendst/tasmota/#readme
        • kaszanka 6y ago
          A ZigBee or Z-Wave stick + Home Assistant (or openHAB, Domoticz, others) gets you more reliable operation and no notifying $MEGACORP every time you flick a light switch (or something equally dumb). Devices based on the popular ESP8266 can also frequently be freed from their cloud overlords with community-made firmware [0], [1] and used as proper Intra-o-T devices. I decided a while back that I would have no part in this Inter-o-T madness and I think it was a good choice. [0]: https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota https://github.com/arendst/Tasmota [1]: https://esphome.io/ https://esphome.io/ Heh, just noticed you linked Tasmota as well while I was writing this. Good project, I use it too!
          • thrashh 6y ago
            Trading cloud provided services with your own home grown systems just trades unreliability in one way with its own sets of maintenance and reliability problems, plus a lot of complexity that is out of reach for most people. Smart home technology is a mess and someone that cares enough needs to design an open, reliable, future secure, and user friendly system that can work wired and wireless.
  • an_opabinia 6y ago
    You’re talking about an average consumer that can’t remember their WiFi password or simply pair devices with it. Of course the future is in devices shipping their own internet, and everyone who works in that space would tell you - whether by their professional experience or through user surveys - that WiFi / local internet is the biggest obstacle.
    • raxxorrax 6y ago
      That is not universally true. There are also plans to use completely different radio stacks and offer localized control. The amount of people that do not want any cloud controlled devices is quite significant. It is also a huge waste of energy to have my device contact Amazon to set a value. Voice interfaces can be nice, but only very few customers seem to be interested. It also adds costs for customer support and you need maintenance on apps and services. I work in that space, although it is true that IoT is not central to the products, so I don't know about the latest trends. Luckily it is just a feature we like to show of on expositions. For me a line is crossed if people add security cameras directly connected to vendor networks. If that is allowed I should also be able to install my laser with 100w optical output power and face detection. I have a right to security after all.
  • mylons 6y ago
    Mine re-throws the error every 30 seconds or so after pressing said button. The only vacuuming is now manual.
• markus_zhang 6y ago
  Rule of thumb: Keep yourself as smart as possible but your items as dumb as possible.
  • userbinator 6y ago
    On the other hand, it seems most companies want the exact opposite --- the more clueless lusers they can extract profits from, the better. A lot of people are still surprised when they hear that I work in the tech industry, but don't have - and recommend against - "smart"[1] devices in my house. The majority of my appliances are simple and robust without any computers or electronics, have lasted several decades, and will likely continue functioning for many more. [1] With the exception of a single smartphone which is rooted, not constantly within arms' reach, and kept off most of the time.
    • catlifeonmars 6y ago
      What is the advantage of this strategy?
      • FooHentai 6y ago
        The strategy of locking consumers into a perpetual upgrade cycle? Profit and control. The strategy of purchasing long-lasting, simpler devices? Cost saving over the long term and independence.
        • Nition 6y ago
          Honestly, despite the claims of IoT devices, usually time saving too. Time saved in setup, time saved in maintenance, sometimes even time saved just in general use.
      • zakki 6y ago
        Creating cult.
        • 6y ago
• sova 6y ago
  Who buys internet-connected Christmas lights?
  • Godel_unicode 6y ago
    People who have mobility challenges but like the holidays...?
    • sova 6y ago
      Perhaps I spoke too unkindly and too soon. There must be a legitimate use-case. No offense intended.
• jeena 6y ago
  Ha ha! </Nelson> That's the only thing which comes to my mind when I read the headline.
  • Godel_unicode 6y ago
    Yeah, how dare handicapped people want to be able to take care of their own homes without needing someone else to come vacuum for them. I know that empathy is a problem in tech, but this thread is something else...
    • kaszanka 6y ago
      Tell me why a robot vacuum should require Internet connectivity.
      • Godel_unicode 6y ago
        If you need a robot vacuum because using a regular one isn't a realistic option for you, whether it should require internet access is irrelevant. It does, and making fun of people whose fault it isn't is mean.
        • bluepizza 6y ago
          It is not irrelevant - it is the central point of most people’s argument: that you don’t need smart devices connected to the cloud. Certainly you are able to imagine smart devices that work locally without the need of an external server.
          • Godel_unicode 6y ago
            It's totally irrelevant because it doesn't exist. Imagination doesn't matter in this instance, reality does.
            • jeena 6y ago
              But it does exist.
• pengaru 6y ago
  The IoT era is such a comedy of horrors Harry Shearer's (of The Simpsons fame) LeShow [0] has a recurring segment titled "Smart World" where he catalogs recent news coverage pertaining to IoT/"Smart" device fails, it's amusing. [0] https://harryshearer.com/le-show/ https://harryshearer.com/le-show/
  • ssss11 6y ago
    So “smart”
  • lwansbrough 6y ago
    See also: @internetofshit on Twitter
    • Balgair 6y ago
      https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit
  • mrec 6y ago
    I think it's best summed up by a tweet I saw last year: Non-magic users: collect crystals, call their pet a familiar, draw pentagrams Magic users:the most magical things I keep in my house are rocks, and I keep a hammer next to them in case they act up Source: https://twitter.com/TooMany_Monkeys/status/1120561634412584960 https://twitter.com/TooMany_Monkeys/status/11205616344125849...
    • Nition 6y ago
      That's a play on the original[1]: > Tech Enthusiasts: Everything in my house is wired to the Internet of Things! I control it all from my smartphone! My smart-house is bluetooth enabled and I can give it voice commands via alexa! I love the future! > Programmers / Engineers: The most recent piece of technology I own is a printer from 2004 and I keep a loaded gun ready to shoot it if it ever makes an unexpected noise. [1] https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthusiasts-everything-in-my-house-is-wired https://biggaybunny.tumblr.com/post/166787080920/tech-enthus...
• mastazi 6y ago
  Obviously @internetofshit is on it... Highly recommended account for those of us who struggle to see the flip side of automation https://twitter.com/internetofshit https://twitter.com/internetofshit
  • patrickaljord 6y ago
    Not a big fan of this account. It's gone political and completely anti-progress. They systematically denigrate any kind of IoT. I'm not anti-IoT per se, I think most IoT is bad but on the other hand I recognize that it can be pretty useful in many cases and once the tech become more stable it will get better. What this account is doing is like systematically making fun of all the early flying machines that failed in grotesque ways, until they started working. We shouldn't systematically attack and ridicule any attempt to innovate.
    • freeone3000 6y ago
      If those early flying machines were mass produced and sold to consumers, they absolutely should be ridiculed. Products do not deserve the same protection as prototypes.
    • mastazi 6y ago
      In the early aughts I had a media player that you could plug into your TV, you would control it with a remote and play whatever movies you had on disk. Nowadays (Apple TV, Chromecast, Fire TV etc), you have to create an account with Apple or Google or Amazon just in order to use the device at all, then another account with Netflix, Disney Plus and every other streaming service you are going to use. Did the OS receive an OTA update that you don't like? Tough luck, there's no easy way to avoid those. And don't even think about playing back files that reside on disk, even if you legally own a copy of the movie. Sometimes "progress" is not the most desirable outcome, at least from the point of view of consumers. That Twitter account, the way I see it, is anti-dark-patterns, not anti-progress.
    • thinkingemote 6y ago
      If even you think most iot is shit, you shouldn't really be surprised or upset that a twitter account called the internet of shit also thinks so.
• arbuge 6y ago
  I spent 30 minutes last night trying to figure out why my Amazon smart plug wasn't working. Very frustrating. Then I remembered seeing a news article earlier in the day about an AWS outage and connected the dots.
• encom 6y ago
  My vacuum cleaner is from the 70's. It's an AEG in some strange kind of vomit brown/green colour. It just keeps going. ...from my cold dead hands.
  • throwaway0a5e 6y ago
    I had one of those. And a $50 Walmart vacuum bests it in every way except proven longevity. Power tools have come an insanely long way since the 1970s.
• peterburkimsher 6y ago
  I work at an IoT company, not for home automation, but GPS vehicle tracking and temperature monitoring of commercial fridges, among others. I agree that requiring connectivity for essential home appliances and door locks is downright foolish. My mum saw this news, and asked me "Did this affect your client's IoT system, Peter?" Here's my reply. Cloud computing is just somebody else's computer. https://xkcd.com/908/ https://xkcd.com/908/ Amazon sells time on their computers, and calls the service "AWS". Actually, Amazon have 24 computers•. https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ https://aws.amazon.com/about-aws/global-infrastructure/ One of their computers is called US-east-1. That is the one that broke. The other Amazon computers (e.g. EU-west-1 in Ireland, AP-northeast-1 in Tokyo) were all fine. Some of our programs run on AWS, but we are using the computer in Sydney (AP-southeast-2). So our services weren't affected. Only the people using US-east-1 were affected. This is the default computer for many people in the US. Even big companies like Google and Facebook sometimes use AWS computers. We also use DigitalOcean's computers for some other clients. That's like AWS but cheaper and slower. I helped copy files from one computer to another. That's called "DevOps". Peter • Technically it's a huge server farm with many computers, but they all have the same basic inputs and outputs: power [0], Internet access, air conditioning. Anything in the same physical location could be affected by earthquakes, fires [1], power cuts, Internet connections going offline, etc. This is why daddy likes to keep an off-site backup, for safety. The government spies on people by seeing what is happening on Amazon's computers. Wikileaks [2] has more detailed information about who is doing the spying in each place (usually a company around the corner). [0] https://www.carolinajournal.com/news-article/amazons-wind-farm-links-nonexistent/ https://www.carolinajournal.com/news-article/amazons-wind-fa... [1] https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/01/09/fire-amazon-data-center-construction-site-ashburn-contained https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/archives/2015/01/09/fire... [2] https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/map/ https://wikileaks.org/amazon-atlas/map/
  • moduspol 6y ago
    > Anything in the same physical location could be affected by earthquakes, fires [1], power cuts, Internet connections going offline, etc. It's worth noting different AZs within the same region are supposedly architected to have their own redundant power and Internet connectivity. AFAIK a single fire shouldn't take out more than one, either. If a region-wide outage is caused by any of those things, it's because something else isn't working as expected. And this region has had region-wide issues before. Still, boiling cloud computing down to "somebody else's computer" is an oversimplification I see too often from cynical techies. It's like calling a restaurant "somebody else's kitchen." Yeah, it is. But it's missing the point to frame it that way.
• grawprog 6y ago
  I made a comment a few days ago on hn where I went off on a tangent about our upcoming dystopian world where everyone lives under a corporate bubble where our company of choice dictates every aspect of our lives. I didn't include the ability to clean ones home or the ability for someone to ring your doorbell in that rant because that seemed a little over the top...well...thanks world...you proved me wrong.
• mssundaram 6y ago
  This reminds me of the other day when my power went out in the middle of washing laundry. I was going to take out the wash to put it on the line to dry but the lid was locked and because it is a solenoid switch, I wasn't able to open the washer (it requires power to open). This kind of device isn't even "smart" in the sense of internet connectivity, but it did really surprise me that it was not configured to release if not powered.
  • userbinator 6y ago
    You say "lid", but is it a side-load washer? Those have a valid reason to not open if the power is cut --- because they'll empty their contents all over the floor. I have an old top-loader, it doesn't care at all (or know) whether the lid is closed.
    • WalterBright 6y ago
      It still should have a manual way to open it.
    • mssundaram 6y ago
      It is a top loader. I don't understand why it has a lock. It has been very annoying actually, because I am used to letting the washer fill up while loading it.
      • megablast 6y ago
        So you don’t hurt yourself by putting your arm in while it’s spinning.
        • roywiggins 6y ago
          Seems easier and cheaper just not to put your arm in there while it's spinning. Toploaders have existed for actual decades without solenoids locking them closed, is this actually a problem or just some manufacturer putting in a solenoid because their side loaders have one?
• xphilter 6y ago
  Tried to print something at my in-laws and couldn’t because it couldn’t connect to HP servers to make sure they’re part of some “ink club” lol.
• ROARosen 6y ago
  I don't get what these commenters' issue is.... That's almost the equivalent of sayin "People Can't Vacuum or Use Their Doorbell Because their electric company's power line is down."
  • jessaustin 6y ago
    Solar, wind, and batteries are improving. Eventually it will also seem ridiculous to require constant power shipped from some remote location.
    • prawn 6y ago
      Plus, you can currently solve a blackout with a generator. Or a backup internet connection in case of your ISP being down. Sounds like neither would solve an issue with these sorts of devices requiring remote servers to be online.
      • ROARosen 6y ago
        You're narrowing down my line of reasoning to a specific example and then disputing it. But you didn't answer to the overall fact that there are central points of failure in most electronic devices/infrastructure that are even more critical than a vacuum cleaner. Yet we still rely on them. That doesn't make the whole "electric" infrastructure "a mess". And BTW not every blackout can be solved with a generator. For instance a city-wide blackout, in regard to streetlamps etc. Also, not everyone can install a generator. Not every landlord allows a generator etc etc. Even if you had a city-specific generator, that can just as well fail. Now, if your not concerned with a backup system failing you shouldn't need to be concerned with Amazon's system failing as they also have multiple backup systems in place.
        • prawn 6y ago
          I was talking to @jessaustin and not really interested in debating the entire topic. Just saying that an individual in a given situation can have some control over things like power and connectivity, but zero control over their IoT device working if the server goes down.
• tus88 6y ago
  Serves 'em right.
  • roywiggins 6y ago
    It is not consumers' fault that they have to go out of their way to find smart appliances that don't fail when servers go down. It's genuinely hard to tell by looking at something whether it can cope with only having access to the local wifi. If my smart plug and my phone are on the same WiFi there's no good reason why they can't communicate without a go-between.
• alacombe 6y ago
  The problem is that the whole architecture is broken. The only reason these devices are "smart" is because they are connected to the brain on the cloud. Even if the device included some smart features, which often ends up cost prohibitive at scale, connecting to the cloud solve tech-illiterate user configuration issues... "Download an app, create an account, register your device which 'phoned home' previously, and you're done. Essentially, the cloud brain acts as a as a hub in the "smart" devices topology.
• cjdell 6y ago
  I've learned my lesson and no longer buy WiFi connected "smart" devices, unless I can flash them with custom firmwares. ZigBee isn't without its flaws too but at least I can guarantee that the device doesn't require someone's online service to function. I just wish more devices offered it. Pretty much anything with WiFi in it requires installing some dodgy looking app that requires you sign in with yet another account, and will probably stop working in a few years or when you eventually need to reconfigure your home's WiFi network.
  • karlkatzke 6y ago
    To be fair, I personally no longer buy WiFi “smart” devices, but I don’t mind if my wife buys them. I get the dual benefit of having the “smart” when it works, and pointing and laughing at her when it doesn’t, because I told her so.
    • _underfl0w_ 6y ago
      This actually sounds like the perfect middle ground.
      • mrpopo 6y ago
        Except it doesn't cut on the gigantic waste of electronic components that IoT is creating, and no one is talking about.
        • bamboozled 6y ago
          This is why I don't like "smart devices". They're the most likely thing to be obsolete in the shortest amount of time.
    • DavidSJ 6y ago
      And on top of that, your TV manufacturer gets to spy on you. It’s win-win-win.
      • 6y ago
• meehow 6y ago
  it reminds me this commercial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwPtcqcqz00 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwPtcqcqz00
• afrojack123 6y ago
  This is what they get for buying Amazon microphone and Amazon camera.
• User23 6y ago
  I learned my lesson on IoT crap with the Pantelligent. It was an absolutely great kitchen device until it was a paperweight.
• EMRZ 6y ago
  The less tech any home-use item the best. Keep it simple
• ricardobeat 6y ago
  Just bought a Ring device on a whim, so I can get notifications on my phone when I'm out of range of the doorbell. It arrived today. Spent quite some time wondering why it wouldn't finish the setup or work at all... it gets literally stuck in a loading state when you press the doorbell button. I 1) am appalled that connection loss is not dealt with correctly, and 2) did not expect it to stop functioning completely without internet as it does not require a cloud subscription.
• ppod 6y ago
  Looks like this site is down maybe they should have hosted it with a reliable cloud provider.
• Taek 6y ago
  There's a more sinister yet subtle implication to this, which is that Amazon can de-platform people from their own homes. If the doorbell stops accidentally when Amazon goes down, it can also stop intentionally at Amazon's discretion.
  • ChrisMarshallNY 6y ago
    Hey landlords! Try the new Amazon Deadbeat-B-Gone™ service! $19.99/month! Never have to worry about being a lead in Pacific Heights again!
    • mrzimmerman 6y ago
      A friend of mine who lives in New York actually has an apartment where all building an unit access uses an RFID enabled lock system with an app on the phone. It’s very easy for the owner to lock someone out and the system went out twice and they couldn’t get in. She doesn’t even get a physical key for a back up.
      • whoopdedo 6y ago
        Read the lease carefully. Two years ago some tenants in NYC won a lawsuit against their landlord for not giving them keys.[1] Anyway, I assume Amazon is already considering what GP proposed. They have a program called Alexa for Residential[2] marketed to property managers who want to put IoT things in apartments. [1] https://www.cnet.com/news/tenants-win-rights-to-physical-keys-over-smart-locks-from-landlords/ https://www.cnet.com/news/tenants-win-rights-to-physical-key... [2] https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/09/amazons-alexa-for-landlords-is-a-privacy-nightmare-waiting-to-happen/ https://www.gizmodo.com.au/2020/09/amazons-alexa-for-landlor...
        • donmcronald 6y ago
          "Alexa, evict the peasant in apartment 6B."
          • 6y ago
• lcuff 6y ago
  Perhaps next we will connect our toilets to the IoTs, so that the waste can be disposed of by smart routing of what's in the toilet. But then, oh shit, what if the network goes down? Have to hold it 'till Amazon servers come back up. :-)
• cam-perry 6y ago
  "People Can't Read About Amazon's Servers Being Down Because Eminetra's Servers Are Down"
  • quotha 6y ago
    Hosted on AWS no doubt
  • SilasX 6y ago
    Well, there was the time that the "server down" icon for S3 wouldn't render because it was itself hosted on S3: >In fact, the five-hour breakdown was so bad, Amazon couldn't even update its own AWS status dashboard: its red warning icons were stranded, hosted on the broken-down side of the cloud. https://www.theregister.com/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/ https://www.theregister.com/2017/03/01/aws_s3_outage/
• madrox 6y ago
  It hasn't helped that iOS and Android haven't always made it easy to connect to other local devices that aren't bluetooth. Cloud services are handy, cheap intermediaries for lots of device/user interaction. LAN connectivity is a lot more complicated than it seems on the surface, with devices constantly going offline depending on power consumption and what chipsets are in the device (which is a function of what price point the makers were targeting). And yes, there are technical solutions to this (just add an IoT hub, just add this chipset, etc), but don't forget how cost-driven IoT still is. People want the features of smart devices, but won't pay 5x the cost for it...unless you're Apple making headphones. IoT is still very much a hack-driven industry. I do 100% agree that the software side is substandard, but until some of these chips get cheaper it's surviving on small margins.
• Kirr 6y ago
  Reminds me Philip K. Dick’s short story “The Day Mr. Computer Fell out of Its Tree” (written in 1977). "It had been a bad idea from the start, back in 1982, to operate every mechanism from a central source. Of course, the basic idea had sounded good: with the ozone layer burned off, too many people were behaving irrationally, and it had become necessary to solve the problem by some electronic means immune from the mind-slushing ultra violet radiation now flooding earth. Mr. Computer had, at the time, seemed to be the answer. But, sad to say, Mr. Computer had absorbed too much freaked-out input from its human builders and therefore, like them, Mr. Computer had its own psychotic episodes."
• ping_pong 6y ago
  Yes, the IoT of things can have some really absurd behavior. But, it's pretty awesome as well. We are currently out of town for Thanksgiving, and some packages came that we weren't suspecting. We asked one of our friends in the neighborhood to come by our place, and I opened up my garage remotely, and they put it in for us. It super easy and overall awesome.
  • chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    If you have friends that reliable and trustworthy, you can just ask them to watch the packages at their own home.
    • notRobot 6y ago
      Or give them a key
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  • rsanheim 6y ago
    As opposed to your neighbors just hold your packages at their place, and you grab them when you get back home? Heck in pre-covid times, that would give you a nice little opportunity to say hi and have a chat with a neighbor. The failure modes of most IoT stuff are just not worth the "inconvenience" most of them are solving for, especially when it has to do with safety or security things and we know how easily hackable most IoT software is.
    • julianlam 6y ago
      That specific example was peak "solution in search of a problem". Now instead of having your neighbour pick up the package, you can watch them from your garage camera, see them look around your garage for a bit (because of course why wouldn't you), leave, and close the door after them! Excellent.
      • 6y ago
• yuskii 6y ago
  My vacuums and doorbell are working just fine, so strange
• atum47 6y ago
  I was working on a "solution" to automate stuff without relying on big players like Amazon or Google. A more DIY approach. I end up creating two projects (that really needs refactoring): https://github.com/victorqribeiro/rpiapi https://github.com/victorqribeiro/rpiapi https://github.com/victorqribeiro/mychatbot https://github.com/victorqribeiro/mychatbot and I even record some videos of me using this two projects to control a raspberry car with voice controls. None of my friends were interested in it. They all got Alexa or some other assistant. So, eventually I end up putting my projects in the drawer. But hey, who knows now they would appreciate a custom made solution that doesn't steal your data or infringe your privacy!
  • hutzlibu 6y ago
    DIY is usually quite hacky and not polished. Most people want shiny first. Offer people something that works reliable ... and they go for it.
    • PopeDotNinja 6y ago
      That’s why I prefer MacOS to Linux. I like the polished UI and kick butt trackpad.
      • OJFord 6y ago
        I like that too, but I prefer Linux because once I have something the way I want it, it doesn't change unless I tell it to.
        • fakedang 6y ago
          This was a big driver for me moving from Windows to Linux last month. Some stupid automatic update and the next thing you know my computer's hard disk gets corrupted, resulting in a disk cleanup that deleted all of my important stuff. Thankfully I had everything stored separately (cloud+hardware). Not to mention the new Windows update slowed down my other PC severely.
    • 6y ago
• lo_fye 6y ago
  I bought a large dumb 4K TV (hard to find!) from Haier for cheap at Costco. Love it. It’s connected via Apple TV 4K, which I can easily upgrade whenever I want. I have Lutron Caséta in-wall smart switches which communicate with their hub. Not a single delay or bug in 8 years. And they are intuitive for non-techies to use. It’s just a light switch. I also have some Philips Hue for accent lighting. It frequently fails to respond. I think HomeKit is better because it at least has to pass Apple’s certification process for some minimum bar of quality. It’s also nice that all HomeKit stuff works through the ControlCentre app. You can 100% avoid ALL manufacturer-specific apps for daily use.
  • ourmandave 6y ago
    I have a TCL 4K Roku TV. It's like a dumb panel because I didn't connect to wifi or plug in anything but my PCs video card.
  • gnicholas 6y ago
    Does HomeKit rely on a cloud infrastructure? That is, if my Comcast internet goes out (but my local wifi is still up), can I turn on/off my lights via the Home app? Can sensors I have still trigger actions? I'm thinking of getting various HomeKit compatible plug/switches/sensors and am trying to figure out what the communications path is.
• DoreenMichele 6y ago
  I stopped vacuuming years ago because of my health issues. At some later date, I saw studies about how they can spread germs and throw particulates into the air. I have a wood floor and no carpeting. Instead of cleaning a lot, we do all we can to just not let things get dirty/germy, like taking our shoes off near the door. I spend all my time online but own zero IoT devices. I'm really enjoying some of the comments here, like this one: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25224914 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25224914
  • wnevets 6y ago
    > stopped vacuuming years ago because of my health issues. Did a sealed vacuum with a HEPA filter not work?
    • DoreenMichele 6y ago
      That doesn't prevent it from spreading germs and I probably couldn't afford something like that. We kept a hand vac for a time and emptied it and washed the little bag thing immediately after every use. We also tried a few other things. I'm happy with my wood floors. I don't plan to go back to carpeting.
    • p1mrx 6y ago
      Even with imperfect filtration, I imagine it's better to kick up some dust a few times a year, than let it accumulate and kick it up with every step.
      • DoreenMichele 6y ago
        If your condition is serious enough and incurable, not allowing dust to exist and wiping down wood floors instead of vacuuming is a better option than either of the two options you posit as the only possible outcomes.
        • mafuy 6y ago
          How do you deal with skin waste etc.? Reducing dust is certainly possible, but I thought it is just impossible to bring it even remotely close to zero to make vacuuming unnecessary.
• lazyjones 6y ago
  If that scares you, imagine that banks and hospitals use AWS these days...
• surround 6y ago
  Website down, somewhat ironically. Archive: https://web.archive.org/web/20201127000008/https://eminetra.com.au/people-cant-vacuum-or-use-their-doorbell-because-amazons-cloud-servers-are-down/74505/ https://web.archive.org/web/20201127000008/https://eminetra....
• thedudeabides5 6y ago
  #themachineisdown
• shoulderfake 6y ago
  hhaahhaahahahahahaha. Ohhhh how sweeet it is
• snarkypixel 6y ago
  I'll go against the grain here but I think it's all fine.. it's part of the 99.9999%; we've just hit the 0.0001%. It'll get better over time and the pros outweigh the cons.
  • surround 6y ago
    Downtime aside, could you elaborate on why you think it’s all fine? This is my thought process: Pros - convenience Cons - bad for privacy and security. I believe the cons outweigh the pros.
    • alphachloride 6y ago
      Perhaps he believes the pros outweigh the cons.
    • kenjackson 6y ago
      Convenience often trumps those two, unless it is horrifically bad. Like I won’t use an email provider, no matter how convenient, if there is no good authentication. The risk of big company doing something evil though is typically one I’ll take.
  • gibolt 6y ago
    Will it? AWS is the mort reliable service, and even it has outages. Then there are the thousands of other internal service dependencies. Any third party IoT device relies on those and then their own awful software stack and silly putty + paperclips code. All of this ignores the added hardware complexity and likelihood of failure
    • deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    • shiftpgdn 6y ago
      AWS doesn't have some sort of magic reliability factor, in fact it's less reliable than GCP/Azure as it doesn't do live migration of EC2 instances. Ultimately it's up to developers to create a system that can survive during outages.
• paxys 6y ago
  Ring works perfectly fine offline if wired up to a traditional chime. Roomba can still clean your house without wifi, you just need to trigger it manually rather than through the app. Every smart plug I have seen has a physical button. People here need to relax with the exaggerations. This thread is the perfect example of how far away "tech people" are from reality for the average user.
  • Laarlf 6y ago
    Amen. Even though you could build a smart home with stuff like home assistant that would solve these issues altogether
• Camas 6y ago
  Writing an entire article on a few tweets.
• geodel 6y ago
  This seems reasonable to me. Disappointing thing is refrigerators and HVACs aren't smart enough. Ideally I'd love to see a refrigerator which has VSCode built in. So I can keep my cool and finish my story when those agile daily standup meetings start getting hot.
• jassany 6y ago
  Single Point of Failure... is a phrase we'll be hearing and conversing about a lot more in the coming years. As SaaS, Cloud Providers, and Other Tech companies solidify their necessity for the function of everything else... aka centralization around 4-5 tech companies which their infrastructure literally runs everything else. It only stands to make us more and more vulnerable as a society. It's like having one power station powering the entire electrical grid, monumentally stupid.
• thotsBgone 6y ago
  I was forced to log in to Sengled just to turn on my lights after it auto-logged me out. IoT is garbage.
• pauljurczak 6y ago
  We've got off easy this time. Wait a few years and a major outage like this will leave your "self-driving" car stranded in the middle of nowhere or crashed into a lane divider.
• rmason 6y ago
  Couldn't these companies have lambda's running on Azure, not costing them anything when not being used. After say three failures to connect to AWS the service would change to Azure for say 24 hours?
  • itisit 6y ago
    As another commenter is right to point out, a multi-region setup would suffice—no additional cloud provider(s) necessary. This outage says more about companies failing to architect adequate failover than it does about the risks of the cloud.
• zachd1_618 6y ago
  Playing devils advocate here. My power goes out probably three times per year. Water stopped working in my building twice this year. I lost my physical house key last year. My WiFi has issues probably once a quarter and needs to be restarted. My brand new vehicle (automobiles generally have the highest requirements for reliability AFAIK) wont shift into 1st gear (manual transmission) once every thousand miles. I feel like this community especially, but we in tech tend to forget that everything fails. It is inevitable. We get all riled up about “iot this” and “I never use connected devices that” but honestly I feel like our digital reliability is just as high as the “analog” tooling so many of us proudly retreat to. Shit fails. Once a month when it happens in a manner like this the HN community gets up in arms like we are the sole arbiters of reason when it comes to technology. Downvote away :-)
  • baby 6y ago
    Apple to oranges.
    • zachd1_618 6y ago
      Care to elaborate? My assertion is just that, in the end, I’ve had roughly the same experience due to different root causes more often this year due to old school problems than IOT and connectivity bugs. Just saying that random anomalies are the norm, not something (for me at least) to get worked up about
  • sillysaurusx 6y ago
    It's a fair point, and you're right. But there's one difference: when your power goes out, it affects your area. Amazon's server outage covers a much larger area. I won't claim "the whole world," since server outages often aren't global, but sometimes they are.
    • zachd1_618 6y ago
      Good point! Impacts are more widespread
  • 6y ago
• rusteh1 6y ago
  Services that actually matter don't use this model. Over an appropriate time period AWS availability is exemplary. However do note. Avoid us-east-1 if at all possible. Understand that despite the documentation, service control planes do not operate in isolation between availability zones. If you need higher uptime you need to have cross regional deployments. When AWS says a service is global, it actually means us-east-1 :)
• baby 6y ago
  two schools of thought: 1. It's fine, when you buy a smart or connected device, you want the extra features, and you consciously accept that connection issues will impact your products. This is similar to the way electricity issues will impact products that require electricity, and products like a kettle can be offered in electrical and non-electrical versions. 2. It's not fine, it is not clear that internet/service issues will impact your product, and the more people buy these the more it'll become a thing, impacting everybody else. Products that can afford it (like a doorbell) should be made to work even when services are down.
• softwaredoug 6y ago
  IoT wouldn’t be such a shit show if we designed in good manual failovers. There should always be functionality available at the next lowest complexity level.
• dwd 6y ago
  How many sci-fi plots does it take an engineer to remember that controlling everything from a central location is a bad move?
• max_entropy 6y ago
  “The door refused to open. It said, “Five cents, please.” He searched his pockets. No more coins; nothing. “I’ll pay you tomorrow,” he told the door. Again he tried the knob. Again it remained locked tight. “What I pay you,” he informed it, “is in the nature of a gratuity; I don’t have to pay you.” “I think otherwise,” the door said. “Look in the purchase contract you signed when you bought this conapt.” In his desk drawer he found the contract; since signing it he had found it necessary to refer to the document many times. Sure enough; payment to his door for opening and shutting constituted a mandatory fee. Not a tip. “You discover I’m right,” the door said. It sounded smug. From the drawer beside the sink Joe Chip got a stainless steel knife; with it he began systematically to unscrew the bolt assembly of his apt’s money-gulping door. “I’ll sue you,” the door said as the first screw fell out. Joe Chip said, “I’ve never been sued by a door. But I guess I can live through it.” ― Philip K. Dick, Ubik
  • costcopizza 6y ago
    This excerpt has been posted a couple times on HN and I’m gonna upvote it every time.
  • redisman 6y ago
    Love that book. It’s PKDs best right alongside Do Androids Dream... Later he tilted a bit too far in to the psychedelic and spiritual but it’s beautiful when he hits the balance just right.
  • qz2 6y ago
    This is how you get me to read a book :)
  • pjc50 6y ago
    Most people's reaction to the prospect of micropayments.
    • qz2 6y ago
      My reaction turned out to be microthefts.
• gnicholas 6y ago
  When things like this go down, it makes me wonder what would happen if Twitter were built on the affected infrastructure. What would be the backup platform? I'd look here (HN), but where would others look? Facebook? LinkedIn?
• m3kw9 6y ago
  Hosting your own local server has it’s pains too, and most people doesn’t know how. The down rate of cloud services still likely have better up time than most can guarantee with their own servers.
• tracerbulletx 6y ago
  Aside from these same couple tweets every news story cites, is there any documented evidence of the exact impact on smart vacuums and doorbells? What models? What happened specifically?
  • L-four 6y ago
    I had to press the button on my Roomba to clean the house. Couldn't choose to clean a particular area because the app didn't work.
• tannhaeuser 6y ago
  Why would anyone buy a "smart" doorbell with batteries, lighting, and other useless crap only there to fail? I could see it's convenient when renovating and having forgotten to do the wiring, or to pimp a condo for sale, but otherwise you can get the same Honeywell ding-dongs for 10-15 bucks plus converter plus 8V panel that we've used for ages, and that last basically forever.
  • Laarlf 6y ago
    It’s just Amazon being a dick. Smart home stuff, especially with home assistant, works well and without internet, self hosted, many things even have fallbacks for when there is no connection to your home assistant server. But Amazon makes smart home the iot hellhole that we thought we left behind. Well then. And no, smart home is convenient even for normal houses.
• trianglem 6y ago
  Is there anyway to route what alexa’s microphones pick up to another system (say a raspi) so I am certain it is not listening in when I don’t say the word Alexa. There could be primitive voice recognition on the raspi that would then pass on the full command to Alexa and then on to Amazon for normal processing if it recognizes the command starts with “Alexa”. Is this in the realm of possibility?
• KingOfCoders 6y ago
  Will never happen if you just have multi availability zones and pay for them.
• jelliclesfarm 6y ago
  Didn’t this happen already a few years ago? massive S3 outage happened in 2017. Some connected devices were very confused. Mayhem..of a not-minor variety.. but also a tad hilarious: https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/2/14792442/amazon-s3-outage-cause-typo-internet-server https://www.theverge.com/2017/3/2/14792442/amazon-s3-outage-... [..] On Tuesday morning, members of the S3 team were debugging the billing system. As part of that, the team needed to take a small number of servers offline. “Unfortunately, one of the inputs to the command was entered incorrectly and a larger set of servers was removed than intended,” Amazon said. “The servers that were inadvertently removed supported two other S3 subsystems.” The subsystems were important. One of them “manages the metadata and location information of all S3 objects in the region,” Amazon said. Without it, services that depend on it couldn’t perform basic data retrieval and storage tasks.[..] [..] While S3 was down, a variety of other Amazon web services stopped functioning, including Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), which is also popular with internet companies that need to rapidly expand their storage. Amazon said S3 was designed to be able to handle losing a few servers. What it had more trouble handling was the massive restart. “S3 has experienced massive growth over the last several years and the process of restarting these services and running the necessary safety checks to validate the integrity of the metadata took longer than expected,” the company said.[..] And this!! [..] It’s also making a change to the AWS Service Health Dashboard. During the outage, the dashboard embarrassingly showed all services running green, because the dashboard itself was dependent on S3. The next time S3 goes down, the dashboard should function properly, the company said.[..]
• pers0n 6y ago
  That's why I'll never buy any "smart" home stuff. With traditional locks, lights, etc they will last decades. No one is going to support 10yr or even 30yr old smart home devices, causing you to have to upgrade all that stuff later.
• enobrev 6y ago
  This is why I've kept my home automation offline with zwave. Zwave has its own barrel of shit, but at least it stays inside the barrel. When I first started playing with HA a few years ago, I got an internet connected hub, and it eventually occurred to me that every time I walked into a room some server somewhere else was notified before my light came on. What an insane round trip to rely upon!! Some server about 800 miles away just told my lights that I was in my dining room. Granted it was cool that it happened quickly enough to be useful, but what a dumb thing to rely upon. Add to that the unreliability of comcast and I felt like an idiot complaining that my lights weren't working because of my internet connection. Now I rely upon zwave2mqtt and the occasional spare time to write my automations in javascript. It's imperfect, but no company in the world will ever know . And no internet required.
• 2ion 6y ago
  The solution is geo-redundant API endpoints with Anycast. I imagine few IoT gimmicks are launched by vendors who both have the resources to implement this, maintain it and actually care. Keeping a geo-redunant data set in sync is pretty tricky, considering a lot of devs can't even get it right locally.
  • pas 6y ago
    No need for super fancy anycast. Simple DNS with round-robin retry is more than enough. Oh, and CockroachDB.
• mvanbaak 6y ago
  If companies only listened to the CTO of the infra supplier they use: 'Everything breaks all the time, design your infra with that in mind' AWS has multiple regions, and within a region multiple availability zones. If you are as big as roomba, you should simply have your api's running in more than one region. Then, if us-east-1 goes down (which happens from time to time) your users will not notice (ok, the geeks will because latencies will change) So yeah, while the underlying problem was an outage of a region of AWS, it's not AWS that failed in this case. People should simply design their applications like AWS is telling them.
• gpmcadam 6y ago
  Surely the problem isn't that a specific AWS region is down but that the developers put all their eggs in that basket?
• zeepzeep 6y ago
  > AWS-dependent vacuums What a world...
• kristianpaul 6y ago
  For that and privacy reasons i run my home automation with Home Assistant project
• dbattaglia 6y ago
  "What we can do now is probably not a good idea to rely on the same company for half of our Internet infrastructure." Am I the only one who feels like this is kind of a ridiculous conclusion the article makes? I don't know the author's credentials but it feels like a knee-jerk reaction by someone who doesn't know what they are talking about. I'm not aware of any other cloud vendor that doesn't ever have outages, and I'd be even more worried if my vacuum relied on the manufacturers own data centers. I think a better conclusion is for vendors to use redundant cloud regions and availability zones, and for consumers to maybe not buy internet-enabled devices if %0.001 downtime is unacceptable to you.
• Scea91 6y ago
  Is it the reason why my Roomba started vacuuming at midnight and scared the st out of us roughly 4 days ago?