The dumbass internet of things:

Yeah, it’s not hard to find. I’m not searching for it though. Honestly I blame people who don’t change factory passwords as well as the perverts who hack them. In fact I think manufacturers should make damn sure that they include several places in the manual and packaging that shouts CHANGE THE FUCKING PASSWORD YOU IDIOT!

For that matter the system shouldn’t work at all without a legitimate new password installed. But worse than that is the general manufacturer disdain for security in the first place that makes these hacks so easy for attackers to develop. Most of these things have very limited inputs and outputs. They shouldn’t be that hard to secure if the vendor cared about doing so.

Heh. Can you picture the returns? The reviews?

“This thing is a piece of crap. Broken out of the box.”

I assume you have to use a baby monitor with some kind of app. If the app pops up a screen saying ENTER PASSWORD AND WRITE IT DOWN SOMEWHERE DUMBASS I think that ought to take care of that one problem, anyway. Maybe the lightbulb controller doesn’t need a password lockout, but then you better be happy with the neighbor kid strobing your house purple and green whenever they want…

Old school baby monitors were originally just a wide band transmitter and receiver. Sometimes you picked up weird stuff on the receiver. People thought there were dead people talking to them. This same kind of idiot parent then had to purchase monitors that were higher tech. Eventually the tech evolved, as it does. But the users, as they do, remained stupid.

I want smart curtains that shut off the man cave when I’m watching TV and turn on when I stop. Maybe a thin film that changes opacity at a signal for easy of installation.

You can use the same film to coat the house if it’s cheap. Black in winter, light colored in summer.

“It’s too bright in here.”

I’m sorry, I got rid of my plasma for the shiny promise of 4k. It’s not as good.

I make all my smart TVs dumb by never hooking them up to the internet.

yea, then use external device to play netflix, so you can drop it when it get compromised

Yep! At least Roku and Amazon update their devices often, and yeah when those devices get old, just get a new one. I haven’t believed the TVs have been keeping up app wise, same goes for several appliances.

Something I’ve been wondering about with this: Do most smart TVs do the thing where they make an open WiFi network looking for a phone or something to do network setup? How easy is it to tell it to not connect to WiFi and also to override setup options like these? Never owned a smart TV myself, but I’ve been annoyed by other devices before.

My TVs are a little bit older now, so they didn’t have apps on phones when I set them up. It was a pretty basic set-up where you go into the menu of the TV and tell it to either hookup to Wi-Fi, providing a password, or in some cases connect it wired.

I do not have experience with anything where the TV is anxiously seeking to accept an app request. I have a few soundbars that look to pair with bluetooth though, but not from a TV, usually another device.

Every time we lose internet in the middle of the night, my mom just starts pushing buttons (claims she’s not) but she always winds up trying to get the TV online and into someone else’s network and not the Roku that she actually uses. She doesn’t understand electronics at all. It’s just the TV isn’t working.

I don’t know what “most” TVs do. What I did on mine was configure it to connect to my wifi, got the initial updates, then I blocked it in my router.

I’ve plugged in a LAN line in maybe twice over the last 4 years on my 2016 Sony LCD. It did update both times. But other than that I like my TV dumb.

My new phone is smart enough to hop off a wifi network that doesn’t currently have connectivity, switching to mobile data (which I have an unlimited amount of yay) automatically, and continuously double-check the wifi network in the background, switching back once it’s up and running again.

Which, given how fabulously unreliable my Spectrum internet has been the last few days, is awesome.

Except that these new fangled smart lights are connected to the wifi and can only receive commands from something connected to the same router. And if I forcibly move the phone onto the wifi while it knows it’s down, that disables its “automatically switch off and periodically check for connectivity” service in favor of “stay on this wifi network until the ends of the earth or until you purge it from your list of known networks.” Which is annoying, cuz then the phone is stuck on the wifi (which is out and not good for anything but controlling the lights at that point, obviously), unless I forcibly switch it to data (bad signal in several rooms in my house, so not my preferred permanent solution) and remember to manually get back on the wifi later.

Now, sure, I could just turn the lamp off manually if I’m going to bed and the wifi is out like it was last night, but doing so occasionally makes the bulbs forget what wifi is and makes me do setup again, which is also annoying.

Anyways, long story short, IoT devices suck, even if I can turn my room cool blue with a quick spoken command to Google Assistant.

Every time i set-up a new smart plugin, camera or light bulb I just want to scream at someone. It just seems ridiculously complex. I mean disconnect my phone from the internet to it only to have it failed to update firmware or Alexa doesn’t see it but it insists it’s online or maybe you just wake up one day and it won’t do anything until you re-add it again for whatever reason. I do like walking into a room with my arms full asking for the lights to be turned on though.

IoT devices are not all bad…you could catch the guy you hired to inspect your home jerking off on your kid’s Elmo doll.

Well that’s disturbing on a whole extreme level.