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Comment by stuntkite | Hacker News Reader

I am really surprised at the amount of voice control units my security conscious friends have installed. I find them offensive. Sure we all want our house to be the starship enterprise, but it's not, it's a house. IoT means just another out of date linux box. I'll stick to using keys for my door.

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I mean you could do these things properly. Have the voice control live on the device entirely without internet connection, make it absolutely clear when the device is listening at all etc. But that's not what these companies want to provide, because they want to capture dat sweet sweet data and the bulk of consumers don't care enough.

For me it just seems totally unnecessary. I can't find anything severely wrong with a light switch or a key and no amount of useless convenience is going to convince me to part with my money. That said, I was a caretaker for a disabled guy through college and can't imagine how much better IoT devices make life for people such as him.

I've heard alexa is huge for people with dementia. Checking the day/time. Pill reminders. Managing lights, music, etc. For people with disabilities, I think it's great. I wish it wasn't tied to an ad machine, but whatever.

People that are able bodied however, I don't think it's even that effective at managing lights, music, or whatever. It's mostly the novelty of arguing with a robot.

I'm perfectly able-bodied and I use my Echo almost exclusively to play music now, after having done it through stereos for decades. It's just easier (usually -- classical music is awful). I don't think I want it to control my lights or anything, but for weather, music, and alarms it's been great.

A lot of it is pretty gimmicky right now, granted, but that's not where things are going. The logical conclusion this is all heading towards is really all about coordination of device/thing across the household. Convenience is really at the heart of it, which means for a percentage of the population, it won't ever catch on, because as you say, there's nothing WRONG with a physical key for your house.

But we said the same about cars, but how much more convenient is it to just put your hand on the car door handle, and it unlocks and opens for you? How much easier is it to just get into the car and hit a button to start it because the key fob is in your pocket?

They're small improvements of quality of life, but added up, and it makes for a better experience moving through the world.

Security is a HUGE issue of course, and to a large extent we need to figure it out, but there's good progress being made. And IoT devices aren't (as another comment says) just another outdated Linux box. OTA (over the air) updates are a real thing now, and done securely are as safe as updating your desktop machine at home.

The question is: how long will these IoT devices receive security fixes?

/me Looks at probably the only two devices from an entire production run from a startup in 2013 that're still getting updated.

I built the private ARCH pacman repo for these, and the GPG signed OTA software update mechanism running on the devices. I'm _still_ proud of it.

When the startup failed the hosting bills didn't get paid and the domains became "assets for sale" by the liquidator. Even though I'm still updating/securing things for my devices, I have no way to share those updates to the customers we sold em to...

:sigh:

Yeah, that's what's worrisome about IoT gadgets: what happen when the company goes belly up?

Tell that to my sous vide. I've got an IoT litter box too. I'm aware of the problems, but I try to keep the number of extraneous IoT devices down and isolating them on my network. Just because some people are doing it well now, doesn't mean they all do. Most of it is a zigbee+arduino and a gnarly software stack.

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