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Comment by shinratdr | Hacker News Reader

> Only to find out later that both services stopped working, so you got charged money you didn't know you were being charged, and your house was open to being looted.

Wait, in this scenario am I blind & deaf or something? Because I can see my lights turn off when I leave and turn on when I arrive. I can hear and see the lock close when I leave and hear and see it open when I return.

I'm definitely not saying IoT is perfect, but this argument is idiotic. I can also leave my lights on and forget to lock my house with a manual setup, both things I have done before as I'm sure we all have.

Honestly, for a community of users that is entirely focused on tech startups, this is a ludicrous amount of FUD.

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Yes, and I've left my keys in the outside of the front door all night, with the keys for both cars attached, probably. Fortunately it's a good neighbourhood...

I'd like houses to have something like central locking, like cars have had for ages. I just don't want it to depend on the Internet, except if I deliberately choose to connect it somehow.

I'd also like to be able to read my gas meter without having to change my clothes afterwards having fought my way through dense vegetation and spiders' webs and knelt down in the mud. But I don't want a "smart" meter connected to the Internet. I just want a local radio link to my own hardware.

Any chance I could have these things without having to build them myself?

Yes, this has been around for years. It's just basic "smart home" stuff. Zwave/Zigbee devices are plentiful. If you don't want to do it yourself then you pay a company to come in and make your home "smart", they'll sell you everything from the controller to the remote to control everything.

80% of the comments in this entire thread are about the woes of connecting everything to the internet which is a fair concern but it's not like non internet connected equivalents haven't been available for decades.

Do you seriously imagine that a complex piece of software, combined with a complex piece of hardware, both of which requiring power to work, and probably a network, would be more reliable than physical, offline, dumb keys and switches?

Of course you don't. You'd have to be an idiot to believe that. So my main point, that technology makes shit more complicated with more failure potential, stands.

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