Technology

At this point, if you buy a smart thing you have to know it's spyware.

“Someone — or something — had remotely issued a kill command,” he wrote.

“I reversed the script change and rebooted the device,” he wrote. “It came back to life instantly. They hadn’t merely incorporated a remote control feature. They had used it to permanently disable my device.”

In short, he said, the company that made the device had “the power to remotely disable devices, and used it against me for blocking their data collection… Whether it was intentional punishment or automated enforcement of ‘compliance,’ the result was the same: a consumer device had turned on its owner.”

On paper all of this stuff is a great idea that would make our appliances more functional.

In reality, the best case scenario is that it’s sold to our corporate overlords so they can slap an ad on your refrigerator and sell you more plastic waste.

Worst case, it’s sold to ICE or some other fascist regime.

https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/10/ring-cameras-are-about-to-get-increasingly-chummy-with-law-enforcement/

Wait till you find out what your wifi can do.

I used to be on a mailing list where American companies offered money to people in the third world for menial manual tasks. Like sending pictures of random crap from different angles and such. One time I got an email offering 4 of these things and $100 and all I had to do was put one of them in my home and use it for a week and give the other 3 away. Goes without saying they're clearly a privacy nightmare.

In case anyone's interested, there's actually open-source self-hosted robot vacuum firmware for select models

Yeah that issue has been around for at least a couple years now. Luckily my robovac doesn't have WiFi or bluetooth

Sheeesh, his fucking mobile phone mapped and photographed his house long ago.

I remember about news of some Israeli intelligence operatives who jogged around their HQ only to be outed by their tracks on Strava.

If you have a robot vacuum, and the robot vacuum makes a persistent map (as opposed to the older "dumber" models that just bounce around randomly), they all send that map back to some remote server. In fact, most of those robots won't even enable the mapping feature unless they're connected to the Internet (which is absolute bullshit considering most of those robots generate, process, and store that map locally, so there's literally no reason to send it off somewhere).

So your options are to just use the robot without ever connecting it to the Internet and be happy with the reduced featureset, root the robot and install Valetudo on it, or just vacuum manually. But until manufacturers are forced to let us actually own the smart devices they sell is, under no circumstances should you ever let one touch the Internet.

He’s going to have a heart attack to find out that the floor plan to most houses are available online and have been for a long time.

I mean, this has been known about for pretty much all smart vacuums.

But who the fuck is going to use the layout of your house for anything?

I mean, UCSC researchers used WiFi to detect a human heartbeat.

I've been looking into robotic lawnmowers, and they're basically the same. The more primitive ones have a hall effect sensor under their snout feeling for a wire you bury around the edge of your yard, and do the "go until you hit something, turn a random amount, repeat until low battery, follow perimeter to dock" or they require phoning home in some way, shape or form.

Meanwhile, some guy's got an open source system that runs on a Raspberry Pi on the mower itself.

I guess I'm willing to believe that some of the LIDAR or camera-only guided mowers need some serious processing power to create the maps they use for guidance around the yard, and that's more practical to do on the company's servers than on the device itself...except not really; we've got decently powerful ARM SoCs that don't cost much, don't take a lot of power to run, and can do that job. The reality is, you can't get a pedometer app for a smart phone that doesn't broadcast sensor telemetry to two continents these days.