Comment on AWS crash causes $2,000 Smart Beds to overheat and get stuck upright
DaddleDew@lemmy.world 5 months ago
People in the 80’s: “In the year 2025 we’re going to have hoverboards and flying cars!”
2025: “I can’t use my bed because the servers are down”
Never buy anything that needs to be connected to a server to work for no good reason.
Smart products themselves are not the issue. The issue is making everything cloud based. The solution is companies designing their products so they can be controlled over the network.
It’s a fucking bed! It doesn’t need a persistent connection to some server. The problem is that they also want to mine and sell your data.
Smart products are part of the issue, and smart products that fail in dumb ways are a really big part of the issue.
Any smart product, pretty much by definition, has to have a computer in it. Anything with a computer in it can be hacked. There’s really no good reason that your bed should have an attack surface.
If you are going to have smarts in something, it really needs to fail well. Like, for a bed, it should have something that bypasses the smarts and lets it go back to “dumb bed” mode no matter what. No matter what position it’s in, it should be possible to make it go flat even if you have no Internet connection. In fact, even if the smart parts are not working at all, there should be a way to make it go flat, even if that’s a purely mechanical system that allows you to bypass the motors.
The easiest way to implement this is to avoid the IoT entirely. I strive to avoid any smart products that cannot be perpetually used offline (a.k.a. most of them).
It’s true, and there’s nothing IoT that is absolutely essential. But, if they were secure and safe, there are a lot of IoT things I’d like to have.
Smart products are named oxymoronically.
That’s the key. They want to mine and sell the data
Albbi@lemmy.ca 5 months ago
Also people in the 80’s: “I love my waterbed, but my back is killing me for some reason.”