I have an ancient programmable thermostat. It allows me to program heating and cooling for the house. It is wired. I do not host my private information on the cloud. I do not have to send wireless data. I do not have to worry about security updates, feature patches, or bugs. It was thoroughly tested under a waterfall development cycle with strict functional requirements.

I have a sprinkler system with similar qualities.

Mine isn't, because I always forget to activate rain delay. And under our water restriction, we could get fined for watering within 24 hours of rain.

I'm assuming you always remember?

No, I use a rain sensor. Also not connected to the internet.

The consumer market desires cheap, fast, and push button easy solutions. The manufacturers have to comply, and due to technological and financial constraints they opt to open up ports and use fixed default passwords. It's not going to change until the consumer is aware of the risks, and I can't imagine that happening soon. We might see 100m node botnets before that.

> The manufacturers have to comply

They don't have to do shit. They chose it themselves. IoT market is pretty much pure marketing/hype creation. Current solutions don't make any sense, and are pushed to people who don't understand it.

There are deeper problems here though. Current smartphone model doesn't make any sense either, but this is something even many techies are blind about. Like apps, third of which shouldn't exist in the first place, and another third should be OS-level components. Interoperability sucks because everyone is trying to make a lock-in business out of their small part in the solution.

But I'm just a grumpy techie myself. Until the world gets its shit together (i.e. never), I'll continue to build my smart home out of Raspberry Pis and DIY components, while also telling everyone to avoid anything that's done over cloud.

It doesn't desire that in a vacuum, it's been heavily marketed to. Meanwhile there is no marketing to try and extol the value of not connecting your toaster, because of course, that doesn't sell more toasters.

Yes, agreed.

I am seriously thinking there might be a market for lobotomizing smart appliance. Niche market, but still.

Much like rooting mobile phones to get around restrictions on how you can use them. Problem might be that the IoT market is not as concentrated into two or three products. So you would need to have the know-how to lobotomize across many products.

You bring up a valid point.

The ecosystem is going to be huge, so focusing on larger companies, with classical appliance lines (fridge, toaster, TV), that open source their firmware makes sense.

Within a certain product line code gets reused often, so you could work with specific product lines.

Also it really depends on how far you want to go with this and what options the firmware gives you to work with.

I don't get the internet connected part of a lot of the devices. Why not just use Bluetooth to smartphone. And have the smartphone proxy all data to the internet.

It could go over Wi-Fi too. The problem isn't the network - the problem is that devices require a connection to things outside your LAN.

wifi gives the device a direct connection to/from the internet. Bluetooth stops that outright, and the application code decides which Bytes get sent to the device.

But i guess if there was a patch to WiFi which gave it a LAN connection only then that'd be cool.

You mean from POV of the smartphone? Fair enough. Though you can route Internet over Bluetooth too. So forcing devices to use BT is not a solution simply because it'll make the devices to ask for Internet connection over BT.

The devices themselves should not need Internet connection, period.

While that approach could technically work, in practise the support calls will be very lengthy and eat up all of your profit and then some.

That just shows how bluetooth is flawed and too complicated.

its easier on the customer and developer for there to be a passwordless local protocol.

I think how the wireless Apple headphones pair is how all these iot devices should be paring with your smartphone. Then its a if you are near it you interact with it.

Very, very, few applications really require remote access vs proximity based access.

I have a device that works exactly that way, and it's fine. I don't know what failure mode you have in mind.

I don't find bluetooth headphones, speakers and mice to always reliably and robustly connect. Several times a month the solution is to force a re-pairing. An informal poll amongst friends and colleagues shared the same experiences.

When bluetooth works, it works well. But the failures are very difficult to diagnose and address. Those are what the calls will be about and why they will be lengthy.

Television is moving to the internet. Some people don't even use broadcast/cable/sat, just internet.

Other than that, most every appliance you can get non internet options. In fact, internet options are rarer / premium items

So just don't connect it. Are you saying these appliances don't work at all without internet connectivity?

That's probably what GP is implying, because that's how it works. More and more devices require Internet connectivity for no real reason except ensuring vendor's business.

See e.g. a laser cutter featured once on HN, that offloaded its basic computations to my butt, turning it into $2000-worth big paperweight if you lost your Internet connection.

I mean, I understand that people need to make money, but some of the business models today are so user-hostile that it's no longer funny.

> Are you saying these appliances don't work at all without internet connectivity?

Yep. Can't use my Vizio Smartcast TV without connecting it to the internet for 10 hours of updates. Can't use my Nexus 5 without connecting it to the internet to upload my identity to Google.