Hacker News Reader

Comment by metadat | Hacker News Reader

> There were two strings printed with labels “SSID” and “Pwd”. I froze in horror. They wouldn’t dare. It is literally 3 meter distance. These are embedded devices, they do not need this complexity...

Responding with disbelief seems a little over the top. It isn't typically easy to run wires in pre-built spaces. Sounds like a resilient design to me.

View on HN

I recently got into microcontrollers and one of the most surprising things to me was the low cost and small size of ESP32s with wifi. Having grown up at a time when it wasn't unusual to buy a PCI card for your desktop computer that added wifi capability I had assumed that we'd still be looking at a target large device that goes for ~$20+ to get WiFi. Explicitly thinking about the ubiquity of cheap devices with wifi around me would immediately correct this view, but I had never done that and I'm sure many others haven't either

Not resiliant, because in the 10-20 year lifespan of a home electrical panel, at least one critical vulnerability is going to allow complete remote pwnage of that device. It's stupid IOT garbage that belongs in ewaste, especially with a trivial remote code execution mechanism.

Layperson will always prefer wireless. "But what if I need to move the tablet?"

Never bet against convenience.

There's not really much those devices can do - they're just metering, and don't have an active internet connection.

WiFi isn't a bad choice of communications protocol.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com