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Fallout from the AWS outage: Smart mattresses go rogue
- jerlam 1y agoTitle truncated from "The Strangest Fallout from the AWS Outage: Smart Mattresses Go Rogue and Ruin Sleep Worldwide"
- goda90 1y agoI feel like we need some sort of "Offline-First" or "Offline-Compatible" certification process for "smart" devices. It would require some threshold of usability and total safety without network connection, which would vary depending on the device category. Companies in compliance could put a badge on their products so wary consumers know who to trust.
- hahn-kev 1y agoSame with games
- mvanbaak 1y agoThis. Also, not only offline-compatible but any anomaly from the api should result in the product simply ignoring the response. A simple check for 'does not connect' only handles totally offline mode, error in responses is a lot more common.
- user_7832 1y agoWhile I fully agree with you in principle, how would that realistically happen? Countries typically only pass laws after something major enough happens. If this was an IoT device that God forbid killed someone, sure, they'd be an outcry against it in the papers, and lawmakers may be galvanized enough to do something. Call me cynical or just disappointed and jaded, but short of some EU consumer advocacy group pushing for it, I don't see how anything would realistically happen. 99% of laws are made after something bad-bad has already happened.
- goda90 1y agoIt could be a voluntary certification established by a private organization. There's other examples of such a thing in a bunch of industries already.
- dpark 1y ago> There's other examples of such a thing in a bunch of industries already. Often because the government is threatening to impose regulation. I’m not sure how many examples there are of industries independently choosing to collaborate to regulate themselves.
- julianlam 1y agoWe could even go more basic... safe defaults when disconnected should be mandatory. For example, if I pull the thermostat off my wall, the furnace should drop into a fallback mode that keeps the heat above freezing (I'm in Canada where this is a concern.) I moved into a new house and did not set up the lawn irrigation system. Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule, when I would have expected it turn off in order to conserve water.
- baq 1y ago> Despite being disconnected from the cloud service, the system kept running its schedule I'd consider this a very important feature
- andylei 1y agoyour furnace doesn't know what temperature your house is if the furnace isn't connected to a thermostat
- kenhwang 1y agoThe connection between the furnace and the thermostat probably shouldn't go through the internet. So it's perfectly reasonable for the furnace to turn off when it is disconnected, because disconnection would be a very strong signal for an error state instead of regular intermittent network/service issues.
- kgermino 1y agoAre there any furnaces that do that? Certainly, the standard smart thermostat set up is that your ecobee is connected to the Internet, but controls the furnace using good old-fashioned signal wires
- sokoloff 1y agoWhich is only extremely tangentially related to "if I pull my thermostat off the wall" The overwhelmingly most common connection between a thermostat and furnace is a contact closure when calling for heat, with no ability to differentiate between “thermostat is present but not calling for heat” and “thermostat is not present” as both present as "these T-T contacts are not closed/shorted together".
- jahsome 1y agoAs the resident Tech Guy in a few circles (family/friends) I often get asked what I'd recommend with regard for "smart" products. Due to the widespread and apparently default lack of support for offline-friendly operation, my answer is always the same: dumb as possible. edit: a more succinct way of expressing my thinking is to say "the less software the better" by which which normies are are often amused.
- jama211 1y agoWhich will just lead you to a lower quality smart device with the same pitfalls but less features a lot of the time.
- jahsome 1y agoI disagree with your point about quality, but I'll indulge you for the sake of discussion. Given the choice between "lower quality" that will always work, or convenient-until-inevitably-bricked, I'll always advocate for the former.
- jama211 1y agoThe question was about when they ask for a smart device specifically. Not when they ask for a dumb device. My comparison is NOT between smart vs non smart devices.
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- recursive 1y agoI think the group of people who would buy something with "smart" in the name and also really care about reliability is pretty small. For instance, most people who want a reliable mattress would buy one that doesn't require, or allow configuration. It seems to me that most of the home automation enthusiasts are actually into configuration and troubleshooting as a hobby. And maybe doing party tricks. There's nothing wrong with that. But I don't think there are enough people to really make this badge work.
- dpark 1y agoThis is a weird take, especially in an environment where so many products are now “smart” whether you want them to be or not.
- recursive 1y agoIf the products are smart even if I don't want them to be, it's even easier for them to not have this certification badge, even if I want them to.
- dpark 1y agoI wasn’t talking about the hypothetical certification. I was talking about this: > I think the group of people who would buy something with "smart" in the name and also really care about reliability is pretty small.
- gclawes 1y agoIsn't this kind of (but not completely) the idea behind smart device standards like Matter?
- tekno45 1y ago48Hrs in a faraday cage and only power. Whatever works from inside goes on the certified offline list of features.
- mentalgear 1y agoCouldn't agree more. The main issue is the data-greed mentality that has arisen over the last 20 years or so (basically every company trying to copy Big Tech). They all want to harvest user data and make the users as dependent as possible (which also opens up the door for subscription services later on, and their walled garden won't allow users to easily move).
- ryeguy_24 1y agoThis is a very smart idea. I couldn't turn my Ring Alarm off and I was on the same Wifi connection as the system. In retrospect, it would be quite smart to switch over to local network.
- Larrikin 1y agoHome Assistant has basically built this system already with their platinum level certification. It's a huge project but only the smaller IoT companies are taking it seriously
- luxuryballs 1y agoI’m shocked they wouldn’t have that as a primary design approach, how absolutely depressing is that for a physical product?
- prmoustache 1y agoI rather feel that we don't need most so called smart devices because: 1) they aren't smart 2) they are answers to questions/need that don't exist in the first place
- crooked-v 1y agoMatter/Thread is pretty much that; any online features are in addition, not core functionality.
- ncallaway 1y agoThis is the biggest reason why I look for Matter-compatible smart home devices. It means I can put them on a locked down network, with no internet access, and I know at least the Matter supported compatibility will function offline. I think it would be smart for Matter to lean into the "offline local control" aspect of their branding and certification requirements.
- amluto 1y agoHow easy is it to commission a Matter device onto a specific WiFi network? And how easy is it to set up a Thread network without Internet access? I haven't actually tried this, but: - The Home Assistant Matter commissioning tool doesn't have any documentation at all about how the network is selected AFAICS. - The Thread organization seems extremely proud of how Thread devices can access the Internet. Apple TV doesn't seem friendly at all to preventing its Thread Border Router from forwarding to the Internet. Home Assistant's OTBR add-on has no useful configuration whatsoever AFAICS. The easiest way to get it right would seem to be to buy something like a Sonoff POE-capable Thread dongle and sticking it on a VLAN, except that those, for some reason, seem to support Thread RCP but not being a Border Router themselves, and then you're back to managing your own OTBR installation.
- WaitWaitWha 1y agoThread as i see it currently is a locked ecosystem that cannot be breached. so far, all the Thread devices I have been interested in will only accept their own manufacturers' thread border router.
- 0x457 1y agoI'm pretty sure "all the Thread devices I have been interested in will only accept their own manufacturers' thread border router." that device won't get thread/matter certified. Are you sure this isn't a case of different matter version support? In which case, in my experience, thread border router works just fine, but the controller needs to support such devices.
- WaitWaitWha 1y agoThis is the way. My rule #1 in home automation is making sure none of the technology fails its original function without connection. I implement Home Assistant to assist in homes for non-technologist. Every single thing i implement must function independently, without the vendor or any internet connection. i.e., z-Wave locks must function with or without connectivity. Switches must switch on/off with or without zigbee, and valves must be able to close/open without that wifi.
- tonymet 1y agothis is a great idea that I've been toying with too. Something like OU / Orthodox Union certification for Kosher or UL for electrical & electronic equipment. A Right-To-Operate & Right-to-Repair certification There are a few sub-certifications: - OF: Offline-First as you mentioned - JE: Jailbreak-Escrow -- the firmware install keys are held in escrow and will be published if the company goes defunct -- allowing ongoing repair & control. - FE: Firmware-Escrow -- firmware source will be published if the company goes defunct. - FA: Firmware-Audit -- firmware is compiled by certifiers to verify BOM, security, privacy & online dependencies. Another benefit would be a "nutrition label" showing active online traffic & data shared.
- tonymet 1y agoCTA is supposed to be providing this. They develop industry standards and help make them accessible to consumers to encourage a healthy consumer electronics marketplace.
- fortran77 1y agoAnd can it function either without electricity (like is your Toto Washlet flushable without power) or at least in a steady state (powered, but needs no human input, environmental sensors, or network support to operate). This is useful for shabbos modes as well as failsafe.
- tonymet 1y agogreat suggestion. I'm baffled at how many devices force a dependency from a mechanical feature --> electricity --> online control logic when the mechanical feature should work fine alone
- Marsymars 1y ago> like is your Toto Washlet flushable without power Hey, I got myself a water-pressure powered bidet so it still works without power.
- bakugo 1y ago> Companies in compliance could put a badge on their products so wary consumers know who to trust. This would only work out for the companies if the average consumer actually cared about "offline-first", which they very much don't. It would be a very small and ever shrinking market.
- hinkley 1y agoI had a dilemma at my longest job. We had a monolith (but not monorepo) that had big Conway’s Law problems. We wanted to start making microservices. We had a couple sidecars that I either wrote or did reconstructive surgery on, but the few microservices we had were dumb. One created head-of-line problems for fanout, asking a question that could have been a Consul long poll. The other really could have been run entirely in Bamboo if we hadn’t cheaped out on agent size. I killed the former, but the latter used a larger slice of all of our modules than all of the sidecars combined. It was also an offline process, writing into dark content in S3. So I could break it for an hour without anyone noticing, and in some environments I could go a full work day without rolling it back as long as I watched for production alerts (and I was on the team that did). If I got rid of it then all library and runtime upgrades would get harder, though half the team ignored my advice anyway and then we had occasional P1s or 2s because of it. My experience, there and elsewhere, is that offline logic of any flavor at least pays for itself in terms of code-build-test cycles, fairly quickly and self-evidently. But some people think it sounds counterintuitive and push people to “go fast” without it. Which only happens if they double down and cut more corners.
- giancarlostoro 1y agoI'm genuinely shocked this isn't the default. Imagine if your fridge stopped working because it could not connect to the internet. Which I had forgotten about mine, and it did not connect for like two years, it worked just fine.
- blopp99 1y agoJeff Geerling talked about it on a video about his Washer. Totally agree.
- xnx 1y ago> I feel like we need some sort of "Offline-First" or "Offline-Compatible" certification process for "smart" devices. If there's a subscription, then it doesn't work offline.
- anotherevan 1y agoThe best piece of home "automation" in my house is a big flashing red LED in the ceiling near the front door that is connected to a magnetic reed switch that tells us if we left the garage door open.
- KoftaBob 1y agoThat's essentially what Matter + Thread is. The Matter smart home standard, which can run on the Thread wireless protocol, allows products to work without an internet connection for local controls. Matter is pretty common on newer smart home products, while Thread is a bit newer so it's only supported on some products right now.
- raverbashing 1y agoWho needs a PID controller when you can just send things over the internet and have some overdesigned nodejs script to fumble with numbers right?
- nicce 1y agoJavaScript programmer is cheaper. And so the decision was excellent.
- bluGill 1y agoJavascript on a local machine would be easier to settup than a network. But I've installed linux from floppies before and so I know how to do each by hand. If you rely on a standare distribution it sets up the network and starts a browser automatically so you just need to set a url which seems easier - but only because the complexity is hidden.
- raverbashing 1y agoIf you're happy with this then you can't complain when things get enshittified
- nicce 1y agoThere might have been some sarcasm included.
- raverbashing 1y agoAh sorry, my sarcasm detector was running on us-east-1 ;)
- amarcheschi 1y agoNot entirely related, but sleeping hot I've managed to mitigate the terrible sweaty nights in summer by using an outlast topper. It's not a miracle, but at least I just feel hot and not incredibly hot. I honestly didn't believe it would do something, but it does something
- jama211 1y agoPersonally I use air conditioning but for those that can’t this is great advice
- saltwounds 1y agoEven with AC air gets trapped between the mattress, the person, and covers. Different materials help circulate air and keep a cooler feel.
- jama211 1y agoTrue, then you don’t have to use as much electricity too
- stronglikedan 1y agoI go camping often throughout the year, and sometimes sleep in a tent in 85-100+F weather. If I put a box fan at the foot of the bed, blowing straight over me, it will cool me down to the point where I wake up and pull a blanket over me. (I always start with a sheet because cool air blowing directly onto on the bottom of my feet is uncomfortable.) Don't underestimate the power of the simple box fan.
- sojournerc 1y agoWait, camping and box fan don't exactly jive in my mind. Car camping with electric I suppose? Camping for me is 30lbs in a backpack. Definitely no fans or power banks.
- whyenot 1y ago
- bananapub 1y agothis isn't fallout from the AWS Outage, it's fallout from a bunch of idiots at another company designing a product badly and then selling it and not caring how bad it was
- __float 1y agoThis company has received this feedback (and claimed "it's coming soon") for actual years, now. This was raised in some of their earliest HN threads!
- jimmar 1y agoGateway timeout, 504 host error. I can't access the article about an outage because of an outage. Reliability is hard, apparently.
- JKCalhoun 1y ago(Hoping someone will print it out and mail it to me.)
- AbstractH24 1y agoAnd the company that posted it describes itself as "a blockchain platform offering decentralized solutions for remote work" gulp
- teach 1y agoThe original link works for me now, but here's a different site with more detail and some responses from 8Sleep: https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/aws-crash-causes-2000-smart-beds-to-overheat-and-get-stuck-upright-3272251/ https://www.dexerto.com/entertainment/aws-crash-causes-2000-...
- fair_enough 1y agoGateway timeout, 504 host error. My mattress is stuck foot-side up.
- 1-6 1y agoEven though this is a light-hearted headline, there is a larger problem brewing as critical tech is increasingly connected to the cloud.
- russfink 1y ago“Brewing…” et tu, smart coffee maker?
- MomsAVoxell 1y agoThe I See What You Did There 2000™. Yeah, I've got one of those.
- 827a 1y agoPaying $4000 and $20/month for the privilege of living a Black Mirror episode is peak 2020s.
- goopypoop 1y agoI can't be the only one who imagined mattresses folding up with people inside
- purpleflame1257 1y agoA few got stuck in inclined positions,but these don't actually tilt enough to crush even under normal conditions.
- MomsAVoxell 1y agoI simply don't care how it was done, the fact of rebooting mattresses is already just too much. It is both a huge kick in the pants, and hilarious at the same time. What, the heck, are we doing, I dunno ...
- slinkydeveloper 1y agoThat will be a premium feature available through the gold subscription 49$ a month
- mavamaarten 1y agoSoooo you couldn't change some mattress setting on a cloud-controlled mattress. Not exactly "ruin sleep worldwide" and "go rogue". What trash journalism. Also those images, wow, I really would have preferred no images over these soulless, generic AI-generated impressions.
- aidos 1y agoThe lead character in the first image has a sort of “essence of forehead”
- Groxx 1y agothey're even more blatant in some other articles: https://quasa.io/media/indie-filmmaking-flees-los-angeles-crippled-by-fees-and-bureaucracy https://quasa.io/media/indie-filmmaking-flees-los-angeles-cr... I think we can just immediately write this site off as "probably complete-trash blogspam"
- alwa 1y agoDo all content-spam “journalists” use the same LLM prompt to dial up the faux drama? > Picture this: You're tucked in, ready for a night of optimized REM cycles, when your app pings an error. No more tweaking the chill to a crisp 55°F or firing up the "cool mode" for those midnight hot flashes. > The core temperature control? Utterly crippled without the cloud. Users reported the app freezing on loading screens, refusing to connect, and leaving them stranded in whatever thermal hell their last setting dictated. Toothless rhetorical questions, false or confusing stakes, awkward attempts at flippant tone… Why would they have set it to an hellacious temperature? Wtf mattress goes to 55 degrees? Why are these stakes existential? Sleep on the couch or the floor ffs… > The hits kept coming. Smart sleep tracking? Dead in the water—no logging of phases, no biometric insights, just a void where your sleep score should be. These stakes seem low. I guess it sells, but… And then a roundup of internet comments like “unacceptable” with unfunny padding. If this is what the future of “internet journalism” looks like, I’m optimistic that enough demand will remain for the real thing that they’ll find a way to fund some.
- qingcharles 1y ago
- KolmogorovComp 1y ago> But when AWS went dark, the system locked into that toasty preset, disabling any cooling override. Browne spent the night marinating in his own perspiration, tweeting updates like a man betrayed: "Backend outage means I'm sleeping in a sauna He didn’t thought about… unplugging the bed?
- Groxx 1y agotheir LLM probably didn't suggest it
- sauercrowd 1y agoThis whole article feels like majorly overblown. I mean yes would be nice if the 2 mattress has an offline mode, but I'm sure everyone was fine for a day without it.
- macintux 1y agoThere's an ancient joke about liberal arts majors who, when presented with a malfunctioning microwave that's throwing sparks, desperately try to turn it off; eventually an engineering student wanders by and pulls the plug.
- Xenoamorphous 1y agoIt might not be easily reachable? Some people put the wire inside the drywall for aesthetic reasons for stuff that you rarely unplug, like a TV. A matress can fall in that category.
- throitallaway 1y agoHighly doubtful that someone would do that, but OK: turn off the breaker then.
- smileysteve 1y agoThat's terrifying when a heated mattress is resistive heating and can cause a fire.
- bluGill 1y ago
- imagetic 1y agoMy local pub, vet hospital, and many many other neighborhood establishments were still battling the outage well after the work day had ended.
- noir_lord 1y agoOpticians equipment was partially offline, the machine they use to take retina photo's couldn't sync. It captured the image locally so the opticians where back and forth checking them manually.
- 1970-01-01 1y agoI refuse to call them engineers if they shipped it without a manual, offline mode for an $8000 (lifetime costs) piece of equipment. >“Eight Sleep confirmed there’s no offline mode yet, but they’re working on it.”
- jakub_g 1y agoThe article (quasa.io, first time seeing this domain, first time ever on HN) doesn't inspire confidence with those AI generated images (which seem to be all over other articles too). It seems to be AI slop to me. Although googling on the subject, there are other articles in other websites on the same subject.
- mulakosag 1y agoHaven't read the article but sounds like the Cory doktrow's radicalized where a lady cannot go to work because her toaster is not working because the cloud provider used by the toaster company went bankrupt.
- platevoltage 1y agoIt would appear this website is down. 504 error.
- praptak 1y agohttps://web.archive.org/web/20251021173904/https://quasa.io/media/the-strangest-fallout-from-the-aws-outage-smart-mattresses-go-rogue-and-ruin-sleep-worldwide https://web.archive.org/web/20251021173904/https://quasa.io/...
- micromacrofoot 1y agowait is this the same company that had a backdoor that allowed their employees to ssh into customer mattresses to collect sleep data? https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/removing-jeff-bezos-from-my-bed https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/removing-jeff-bezos-from-my...
- aksss 1y agoAbility to ssh into my mattress (locally) would be a feature not a bug. :D Of course, allowing remote access is ridiculous.
- elric 1y agoThe more I see shit like this, the more I want to pursue my little fantasy job of starting a factory that builds dumb devices. A simple microwave. A simple dishwasher. Stuff that isn't connected to any garbage cloud and just works. No touchscreens. Just physical buttons. Something that works equally well for elderly as for us geeks. Oh well, I guess it'll remain a fantasy.
- MomsAVoxell 1y agoThe frequency by which I truly wish Douglas Adams was still alive is closing in on a very new pitch, I do have to say. Mattresses disconnecting from the global God Computer and ruining everyones sleep, just .. I can't. Its far, far too funny. I'm pretty sure Mattress Software Developers are on the Golgafrinchan Ark Fleet Ship B. Or maybe, C.
- frm88 1y agoThis!! That was exactly my first thought when reading the headline, together with fond thoughts of Squornshallows Zeta. I was really surprised to have to scroll this far down to see a Hitchhiker's Guide reference. I mean, the joke basically writes itself.
- MomsAVoxell 1y ago> I mean, the joke basically writes itself. I think this is how we got into this mess in the first place. Brains the sizes of planets, making new brains that are actually planets. And so on.
- EnderWT 1y agoDo people really like these AI-generated articles?
- qingcharles 1y agoWe suffer them sometimes because there is some nugget of information in there. I'd prefer the link to go to a not-AI article on the subject, but here we are.
- geekymartian 1y agoI scrolled too far to find this comment. That was hard to read, had ChatGPT "grammar" all over and AI images with frowny customers to top it off
- fortran77 1y agoI'm really glad my Toto Neorest doesn't depend on cloud services.
- ChuckMcM 1y agoRoomba redux[1]. Seems ill advised to have appliances that cannot function when offline and reminded me of push back I got at Google for telling them offline maps were essential (in spite of the product manager insisting "everyone has internet everywhere, and where it isn't at the moment it will be by next year.") Unrelated: That entire article and illustrations are all gen-AI. yuck. [1] https://fntalk.com/tech/dead-roombas-stranded-packages-and-delayed-exams-how-the-aws-outage-wreaked-havoc-across-the-u-s/ https://fntalk.com/tech/dead-roombas-stranded-packages-and-d...
- throitallaway 1y agoThank you for your service. I spent a few years traveling all around North America and I can assure you that offline mode is very necessary for Maps. These Bay Area engineers need to go to the Rocky Mountains sometime and see how their phones act there when they have zero connectivity.
- rurp 1y agoIt's wild that they needed this even explained to them, but I figured as much given how terrible Maps and some other Google products are at working in offline mode. One of the most basic features in Maps, simply adding a pin to the map, has been broken for many years if you don't have an active internet connection. There's absolutely no reason you need internet to save a pin locally and it originally worked fine, but they clearly can't be bothered to fix simple glaring issues like that now.
- frm88 1y agoI can recommend Mapy. You can download maps per country, state and even region, so not overly much storage space used. Route planning and navigating offline - it even let's you plan tours based on kilometers and/or time (this is particularly nice when hiking in an unfamiliar region). Modes are: car, bike, mountain bike and foot. I've been using it for years now and like it a lot. It's free with some premium options, I believe. https://mapy.com/en/ https://mapy.com/en/
- Simulacra 1y agoIt was unusual for my Amazon Alexa to turn more into the paperweight that it has become. Too many devices are helplessly dependent on the cloud, and when that cloud breaks, or the company stopped supporting the device, consumers are left without.
- drnick1 1y agoAnd this is why all of my "smart" home devices are managed through Home Assistant without Internet access. I simply won't buy a device that can't be used that way. I shouldn't have to create an "account" or provide a name and email address to use a device that I physically own. A good way to start is to look for Zigbee devices; the protocol is local only by design and the Zigbee coordinator/router can be a simple USB dongle connected to an ordinary PC.
- para_parolu 1y agoAny suggestions for robot vacuum?
- xyx0826 1y agoValetudo. I haven’t had personal experience using it (due to an unsupported model of NAND memory chip), but I’ve heard good words: https://valetudo.cloud/ https://valetudo.cloud/ That said, I did some research last year before buying my first robot vacuum. I wasn’t able to find a project - Valetudo included - that would support the bigger, fancier robots made by Roborock etc. If you’re looking to decloud a recent model, I don’t have a good answer.
- Shopper0552 1y agoI've got Valetudo running on a Dreame LS40. If anyone has any questions, feel free to ask me. It's been installed for a few months now, and I bought it specifically to install Valetudo on it.
- PeterStuer 1y agoHonestly, the dumber the better. The old 0 smarts Vileda VR102 still outperforms most of the expensive sensor laden connected units I've encoutered. Sadly no longer available (except online at 4x their original cost).
- torginus 1y agoI have a Xiaomi one, and that also connects to the cloud if you wanna use the smartphone app, but you can just not connect it to the internet, set it down, push the button and it does its thing
- neilv 1y agoIoT products tend to be a disgrace of either criminal negligence or malevolence. I wonder whether the first pushback will be when people who worked on IoT products have trouble finding jobs at companies doing anything else (other than clubbing baby seals, or running blockchain scams).
- praptak 1y agoRelevant: "I found a backdoor into my bed" https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/removing-jeff-bezos-from-my-bed https://trufflesecurity.com/blog/removing-jeff-bezos-from-my... HN discussion https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43129439 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43129439
- buellerbueller 1y agoBuy stupid products; win stupid prizes?
- B-Con 1y agoI want to see the postmortem, although I'm sure we never will. > Eight Sleep's system, which relies on backend servers for everything from real-time adjustments to data syncing, had no fallback. "It's unacceptable," fumed one early complainant on X, echoing the frustration of many who shelled out for "seamless" smart sleep only to face analog purgatory. I'm guessing that this is a typical "smart" device setup where the cloud is essentially a tunnel between the app and the device that also saves a copy of all transmitted state for backup and data mining. The simplest design from the company's POV, but the worst design for resilience. The real question: Was this an explicit or implicit product decision? ie, was it an explicit PM decision that local comms didn't match product requirements, or did they outsource it to the lowest bidder and have no idea this was a ticking time bomb, or did eng have to cut features to make some deadline, etc? If Eight Sleep doesn't have an at least an internal postmortem then someone should lose their job. As a user, I would prefer the devices communicate locally and use a cloud tunnel only as backup. But this means engineering has to support two communication stacks, which is obviously more expensive than one. And the local network option is probably harder to build since cloud-based has so much tooling available. My baseline expectation - that I can't believe I'm actually typing out - is that an appliance should operate as expected without Internet access. My only smart device is a door lock because a PIN is easier than a house key for our lifestyle, but even that isn't connected to Wi-Fi.
- cameldrv 1y agoWeirdly eightsleep apparently is sending 16GB of data per month worth of telemetry. It's been pointed out that that's about enough for a live audio stream of everything that happens in your bedroom. It can't be cheap to process that much data. These wifi based smart home devices just fundamentally don't serve their customers. 1. You pay money for a device 2. You pay money for monthly service 3. They sell your private data on the backend, not to worry though, it's "anonymized", but of course it gets sold and then deanonymized 4. AWS goes down and your house doesn't work 5. Eventually they go out of business or get bored and you have to buy and install all new stuff.
- greycol 1y agoI mean not to defend the telemetry philosphy (my smart home setup is local only with a couple of tell-tale heart exceptions[1]) but I'd expect that any cheap sensor net where your trying to infer data from indirect sensors would be grabbing as much data as possible especially if it didn't have strong local processing. But yeah don't buy products that don't work local only, if they require online the temptation will be to great at some point to abuse that requirement. [1] They're slowly driving me insane and I'll destroy them for the peace of mind at some point if an update doesn't brick them first.
- _wire_ 1y agoPeter Neumann's Risks Digest, since 1985! https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/ https://catless.ncl.ac.uk/Risks/
- isr 1y agoDoes this remind anyone of the Jin Yang fridge hack, from "Silicon Valley"?
- gcatellani2k 1y agoHow could it ruin somebodys sleep, when they could just simply pull the plug? And in case of the preheated matress just lay it outside or put some ice on it. Seems like constructed problems to me. And: whoever buys products that can only be run when it connects to a foreign server is an idiot. There should be laws preventing cloud-only physical products, as this causes unnecessary waste as soon as the companies stop offering the service (for whatever reason). They should at least habe to offer containerized versions of the backend service that can be run locally.
- qmmmur 1y agoCan people stop using these utterly cringe ai generated photos? It doesn’t make your content more interesting and I actually think less of what you have to say, especially if it’s from Grok.
- cadamsdotcom 1y agoSmart is an outdated adjective for these devices.
- pshirshov 1y agoAt least not smart shitters, right?
- speedylight 1y agoNothing terrifies me more than those heated mattresses, you’re basically sleeping on a comfortable stove top.
- glimshe 1y agoMy Mattress Factory dumb mattress demonstrated incredible resilience during the outage, helping maintain its 100.00% uptime.
- dabbz 1y agoMy mattress is starting to sag. I'd consider it 99.99% uptime at this point.
- colonial 1y agoMeanwhile, (checks mattress tag) Pottery Barn has had 100.0% uptime for the past two years!
- sjw987 1y agoMost smart appliances are ticking timebombs, and most serve no real purpose. I get that sometimes they can be neat, and I myself went through a phase myself of building a "smart apartment". All I learned is the smart speaker assistants degrade over time, companies (even relatively big ones) go bust and take down any app support as they go, and that my life isn't too busy to fit small tasks into my day. Incredible premiums to (maybe) simplify some relatively small home tasks. I've found it much more fulfilling to do many of those tasks myself and treat it like downtime from the other things I do.
- sjw987 1y agoI guessed before I got to the article this would be eightsleep, the smart mattress being shilled by half of the podcast / influencer community, alongside LMNT drink and Athletic Greens powder. All overpriced tat that is surplus to requirement. You don't need thousands of pounds of "smart mattress" to sleep. You need to stop staring at last nights REM/deep/light sleep split on your blue light emitting phone an hour before bed, do something relaxing, maybe take a warm shower an hour before bed, cool your sleeping room and slow your breathing as you lay down. Saved you ... £3000, and presumably some subscription. For the other two, eat healthier in general, and more green vegetables, respectively. I guess the mattress goes hand-in-hand with the current sleep tracking trend. Your Garmin, Oura, Whoop or Apple Watch cannot give you good analysis of your sleep based purely off of your heartrate. There is little to no backing for this one metric to prove a sleep score, or readiness score, and by paying attention to these laughably inaccurate scores you just placebo yourself into feeling worse (or better, but usually worse) about last nights sleep.
- pathartl 1y agoIt's definitely overpriced and over engineered, but maintaining body temperature during sleep is a massive factor of sleep quality.
- reorder9695 1y agoTo be fair the situation LMNT and alike is useful in isn't one where you just eat healthier in general, it's specifically useful when youre losing a lot of electrolytes usually during exercise, counterintuitively eating healthier may make that worse as healthier usually means less salt which is the primary electrolyte lost. LMNT and alike comes in there to replace electrolytes when needed without messing up your diet too badly, it's just 95% of the population don't exactly need this, but for people who do it's a genuinely valuable product.
- kstrauser 1y agoThis affected me and my wife. We have an Eight Sleep mattress courtesy of my employer, which is probably the only way I'd have something that expensive. I've slept on everything from Navy bunks to plain dirt to the nice memory foam mattress we have now. I'm not finicky. But while I'm not going to shill for Eight Sleep, I've gotta say that they're really nice. Well, normally, when they're working as expected. It has an automatic routine where our bed[0] is nicely cool when we climb in at bedtime. Then it warms up a little overnight when we're in deep sleep. Finally, it gets uncomfortably warm at alarm time, as a way to encourage you to want to get out of bed. It also uses sensors to detect how much you're moving around, pairs that with the room temperature, and uses that to, say, turn the temperature down if you're thrashing around on an especially warm night. Know how in San Francisco, the weather's almost always perfect except for those rare days when it's too warm to get comfy at night? Honestly, it's ideal for getting through those without having to crank the window air conditioner[1]. During the outage, my wife and I both woke up because we were too hot. Our bed wasn't overly warm, like if it were on the "it's time to wake up, get moving!" setting. It was just a normal "ugh, it's so hot in the room, I wish I could sleep!" kind of thing. I'm glad to hear they're upping their offline game to handle these situations more gracefully. I don't know if I'd recommend anyone go out and buy an Eight Sleep. They're pretty pricy and you can buy a lot of air conditioning for that money, if the cooling feature is the main reason you'd want it. However, if you have the opportunity to get one on someone else's budget[2], absolutely do it! It's really very pleasant to climb into a cool bed on a warm night, and presumably vice versa. They work as advertised. Except, you know, when the Internet's out. [0]Our settings are individualized, but similar. [1]For those outside SF, AC is unusual here. We almost never need it so most places don't have it. [2]Huh, wonder if you could use it to spend down an FSA?