amazon doesn't get a free ride on my residential internet service or arbitrary use of radio spectrum in my home.
note: I also have no smart doorbells, cloud connected security cameras, internet enabled lightbulbs, etc. They're nothing but riddled with bugs, incompatibilities, security holes, disgusting configuration options, obsolescence in less than a few years, etc.
just you wait until manufacturers of "internet of shit" things go really evil, and integrate low cost LTE radios into them with their own billing/centralized management/VPN system. it's already been proven that giving your smart tv the wifi password is a bad idea, because it'll just retrieve and display ads, and/or submit all your usage history to its manufacturer for resale to unknown 3rd parties. Now what if random items of electrical consumer technology phone home whether you want them to or not...
Sooner or later we'll need regulation to prevent devices from requiring network connection.
I don't think we'll ever get it though.
energy consumption
There are unintuitive outcomes which could arise like: smaller companies might need to develop a product with access to the web to keep costs manageable, but larger companies, using their capital, are able to establish proprietary wireless connectivity (which is not the internet) that smaller companies are unable.
Peer to peer connectivity over public networks is a great asset for smaller companies with disruptive ideas, and this could destroy that.
I have no issues with a product having an option for internet connectivity, or even requiring it if it is a critical component of it's function.
Internet connectivity is not a critical component of my <dishwasher|washing machine|dryer|fridge|car>'s function however.
My understanding of the fake/non-mmWave 5G is it dramatically decreases cost for network operators. If that is true (please correct me if I am wrong), what stops tv manufacturers from including a tiny modem with its own gsm Internet connection that can do things like see if there is an update available or fetch weather information (based on included gps module)? Or the real reason, ads. They could even be simple text ads if network operators decide to charge a lot for data.
But damn, that's a short list.
What's worse is you'll have to have a monthly subscription to their service or it won't work.
I bet there are people just salivating at the thought of all that MRR.
Our future is one in which we don't own a damn thing. We're all renters.
Why bother? They'll iust use your neighbor's wifi (at extra rf pollution cost to your house) or the surveillance system on the streetlamp outside being paid for by your tax money
or remove the opt out option from 'your' phone
This is why we need viable open source phone OSes. Refuse to “just install the app”!
Personally I benefit from being able to control the type of light and change it over the course of the day, and I've found a couple of uses for automatic switches which improve my life as well.
Point being, these things at least can be liberated from the IoT, where we all know what the S stands for.
[1] https://sonoff.tech/product/diy-smart-switch/sonoff-dongle-p... [2] https://www.zigbee2mqtt.io/ [3] https://www.home-assistant.io/
Yeah how dare they call them smart when they're such shitty products. Totally inferior quality.
EDIT: Recently I saw a lightbulb that cost $20, you know why? Better light. That's it.
You know what I'd love to buy these days? Jammers for inside the home, just to make sure there is no incidental communication.
Meaning that if you have any appreciable portion of traffic on the public SSID it can impact your own speeds/jitter/latency/service. It's not like these devices have indepenent secondary 2.4/5.x GHz 802.11ac/ax radios for the public SSID operating in their own separate 20/40/80 MHz channels.
I use my own equipment for a whole host of reasons, but I also appreciate having WiFi I can connect to more often than not without having to drain my phone's battery using it as a hotspot.
If you want a CCTV camera you can still get 'old school' commercial grade IP cameras from eBay. Mercifully free of cloud attachment, but with ftp, email and http notification. Probably will have dynamic DNS, but that can be useful.
- pushing updates to slow down older iOS to "encourage" users to buy a new phone
- starting with the iPhone they didn't even sell official spare parts, and did all they could to make it hard to crack the phones open (proprietary screw, fuck that) to repair them
- lying to consumers about warranty laws, implying their products would be covered only 1y despite european regulations mandating 2y minimum
- getting into cushy mafia-like agreements with phone providers which inundated the market with "cheap" iPhones subsided by non-iPhone subscribers
- using proprietary connectors wherever they can (no ethernet? no jack? FUCK)
- by making it harder to use non-Apple-approved applications on MacOS and making it so applications can't even start when their "approval" server is down?!
- and so much more, just like with every other company
We need tech that empowers people. Private companies and Nation States are building a dystopian nightmare that's the exact opposite of that (we're in a cross-over fanfiction mixing Orwell and Huxley). Apple is certainly part of that.
Also really? you are either all-loving-god or the devil, no greys for you
How are these two things connected with the partent's post?
>you are either all-loving-god or the devil, no greys for you
No, but Apple is certainly a dark kind of grey: https://www.fsf.org/news/the-problems-with-apple-arent-just-....
Yes because we're all brainwashed into "making a living". In what world is it normal to have to pay just to live?! Making money is precisely the mindset that's destroying our entire planet.
I'm not saying things are binary good/evil but capitalism is certainly the one thing creating the most suffering on this planet, and is essentially the driving force behind everything climate change.
It's hard to find a corporation that can fill any form of ethical criteria. Maybe an organic bakery sources local products and produces quality breads, but when it comes to IT there is no "ethical company" because everything we build relies on slave labor from mines/factories and extreme pollution in the global south...
BUT i would be tempted to say an IT company is on the other side of the spectrum if it attempts to respect its users by fighting hard against planned obsolescence (only sourcing quality materials, making disassembly/replacement easy) and for free computing (full schematics for every single part of the hardware, full source code for all firmware). I just don't know a single IT corporation that fits the bill, although Purism/Pine64/Oxide get closer than most.
We need 30+ years warranty on all devices. How come washing machines from the 50s are still working today, but those produced 5 years ago are breaking down as we speak? Yes, that's because of profits, as explained previously. Eliminate profit as a driving force for society and suddenly you'll see a lot of data points starting to improve.
Apple down older iPhones to make their batteries last longer. They were penalized by court for not communicating this decision to iPhone owners, not for slowing down battery.
You can be pushed by shareholders/public opinion, in the same way they get pushed to be environmentally or privacy conscious
But GPL isn't the only kind of open source. In fact, it's an extreme form. I've spent a lot of time contributing to open source projects, but I stay away from GPL, because they are really limiting in what you can do with them.
Edit: I know where you are coming from, and I respect and understand it. But to me maximum freedom is allowing devs and creators to set their own terms for allowing use of their products (nobody is forced in that scenario). If it's GPL/MIT/BSD, I think that is absolutely great. But I also respect you if you don't and I may use your software if feel I can trust you.
What kind of value is that? We've been living very well without it for decades and it sounds like that tech is a very powerful enabler of stalkers while providing little value to the average person.
> Issues like this battery drain are of course unacceptable but I trust that that will be fixed by Apple.
How could you fix it? The concept of Airtags is to track every device at all times, which requires active cooperation (and battery usage) from said devices. You could poll devices less often, but the problem would still be here.
I got my shoulder bag, kindle, passport, notepad, medicine, and cdc vax card back after they were stolen from me thanks to airtags.
Perhaps they provide no value to the “average” person (as if that is a thing), but they are invaluable to many.
Just make a tag to place on the back of your phone that reflects a signal, and have a "remote" that when you press the button sends a signal and tries to catch reflection, beeping at a certain volume depending on signal strength.
It's just like those "speech to text" machine learning programs. It's fantastic value for people who can't write, but applied to everyone it has overall very dangerous and damaging consequences.
I actually quite like that this particular feature is opt out because the goal is to make the mesh network actually useful and not just a white paper theoretical application with zero adoption. Requiring labor of any kind will exclude much of the population from the start, which, for this particular utility, is not tenable.
> It feels like the companies are piggybacking on my internet connection, hardware and electricity for free to literally power their closed network. I don't get paid a penny for it, but their shareholders sure do.
You get access to the benefits of this particular mesh network, which lets you locate your Apple devices more reliably than without it.
> Open mesh networks could be really cool, but instead of open networks, we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home, while excluding you, me and everyone else except Amazon and their partners from doing amazing things with the meshnets.
I agree that what mesh networking is being utilized for right now is not really very close to its potential, but there's also not much reason why Amazon or Apple should open their platforms up to third parties at this time. If you want to create something useful with mesh networking you have to sell the idea to the general population. Massive corporations like Apple, Google, or Meta are at a big advantage by having a huge network of users already from which they can push their ideas to the public, but it's a significantly greater challenge for anyone without that resource. Still, I think it could be done.
And people nearby you? Apple is draining your battery for their benefit, using your cellular data for their benefit.
I get that a lot of people seem to have the issue with it being opt-out rather than opt-in. I think that this sort of feature needs to be opt-out because it better aligns with human behavior.
They didn't opt in to it. That's the issue.
People who live in the Apple ecosystem don't do so in a vacuum. Apple announced AirTags to enormous fanfare, and clearly explains how they work.
They immediately sold out and are no doubt continuing to sell quite vigorously.
Does the median customer want AirTags and Find My Device to work well? We could do some polling to be absolutely sure, but I'm going to just skip that and say yes, they do.
Meanwhile, if it bothers you, you can turn it off.
More than likely if you ask for more than what exists what will actually happen is that another blurb will show up in the long terms of service that most people don't read and people aren't any more enlightened about what exactly their device does.
So far, far, far away from where google/apple/ms have drawn it.
It's not so cut and dry and being that dogmatic about it in one direction when there's clear and significant downsides to doing that way is shortsighted. Even if you prompt the user asking for permission for every single thing going on on their device, what do you think the outcome of that will be? Most people I know have tons of notifications from every app they install on their phone because they don't even look at the popup after the first couple times it appears.
Eg how much energy or how much bandwidth.
Then we could make an informed decision.
I had to be told by the Internet that it was even happening to an extent that could be noticed.
It would be interesting to have stats though.
Are there other monopolies you think are good for you? For others? For the world?
There's literally nothing stopping anyone else from developing an AirTag competitor.
If you allow third party applications utilize the tech but require an opt-in, it's effectively useless. If you allow third party applications to do so without an opt-in, it's dangerous.
Tile has a monopoly on Tile devices. Ford has a monopoly on F-150s.
Yes a company has a monopoly on its products in many/most cases. That doesn’t mean they have a monopoly on the market though.
What is perhaps problematic is that it's not visible enough that this feature has tradeoffs or that there is an option to opt out, or even that the feature exists, but that problem exists for all sorts of software on the phone.
Looking at your Xfinity, coverage across all of SF..
Usually, not. You get the full bandwidth of your DSL line when you need it, the hotspot either only gets what remains (aka is in idle) or has its own PPPoE session that lives outside of your contractual bandwidth limit (obviously that one only works when the line bandwidth is greater than the bandwidth you're paying for).
On that one, you login with your Xfinity account.
I don’t feel that it works especially well. They make it difficult to log into different hot spots. They have a “remember this device” thing, that doesn’t work very well.
To be fair, it's not a bad idea... if it was open for everyone (helping out one another) and not just benefiting their customers (helping the company extend its reach). As much as i hate Free ISP here in france, for some time when it was impossible for me to get connected to xDSL (but my neighbor was!) FreeWifi really helped me stay connected to the Internet.
Still, fuck them for calling it FreeWifi (wtf, a corporation is like the exact opposite of freedom). If you're looking for truly free wifi communities, i strongly recommend to check out Freifunk they've been doing that for a long time building OpenWRT images for popular consumer modem/routers in Germany.
How does this foundational principle not apply to Apple 40 years later?
[1] The Hacker Crackdown Book - by Bruce Sterling
That's exactly what they're doing
I didn't realize Apple AirTags were enabling ads for Amazon, or apple was using AirTags to pump ads for Apple, or is this just an exaggeration? Surely we got more mesh network than ones that push ads? I like the ones that help you find lost/stolen things.
Open mesh networks could be really cool, but instead of open networks, we get mesh networks that only allow Alexa to pump ads into your home, while excluding you, me and everyone else except Amazon and their partners from doing amazing things with the meshnets.