Wait till you find out what your wifi can do.

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

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

It’s funny how these “smart” appliances are all addressing things radically important for households, but in a poisoned way from the beginning. As if those making them were just trying to get there first and win the bank.

There’s a problem of scale in industrial innovations, where bigger scale makes cost of production of something and cost for the consumer and network effect power better, meaning that there’s no market feedback to help those who came first get old and die to make space for those who come next.

I think this tendency is actually the solution - there is a feedback, it’s that lacking feedbacks on one level prohibits those undying monsters from being competitive on the next one. The niche of non-poisoned smart appliances won’t be filled by anything big, for example.

That’s also another funny moment - instead of dedicated appliances it makes it useful to have one universal one (basically a butler robot) that can be programmed. It’s an incentive in the direction of universal machines programmed by customers.

BTW, imagine a frame with various manipulators and sensors attached to an RPi via GPIO, where every manipulator/sensor can be whatever thing at all, just needs to have a manipulator/sensor description template. The OS of the RPi itself runs tasks of the “move those items of fragility categories such and such to such and such locations, remove dust and dirt from that surface, wash that window”, for which the existing set of manipulators/sensors and task sequence are optimized without user’s involvement (other than attaching them and providing the right description templates, though I suppose manipulator controllers can provide them too, and confirming the resulting jobs). That’s also where those LLMs etc are good enough, to interpret instructions and display the sequence of actions they are going to perform to get user’s confirmation. This way you won’t have to fear that you tell it something harmless and it starts a fire in the room.

Such a system needs a set of standard protocols for the sensors\manipulators, their description templates, and the representation of commands deciphered from human speech to a set of tasks, and the spaces and traits of objects. The programs visualizing the resulting offered set of tasks, deciphering the order, optimizing one set of tasks into a better one, and so on, should be pluggable. Suppose everything’s already made, just nobody really needs a thing that they can’t just buy and turn on.

OK, I like imagining, should work better instead and start my toy the weekends after the next ones (I suspect I won’t start it even by then, at least not in the initial ideologically good form ; nothing about robotics or home appliances). Spent these weekends on making a POV-Ray scene instead.

Why did I even write this.

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/

“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.”

Since I dont see it mentioned, the company is

iLife

iLife makes vacuums that map your house and can be remote controlled

Just so we are clear. You should all up your name and shame game.

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.

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

In addition, Narayanan says he uncovered a suspicious line of code broadcasted from the company to the vacuum, timestamped to the exact moment it stopped working. “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.”

They kill switched it remotely. Yikes.

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.

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

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

At first I thought ”Well, duh!”, but the manufacturer having a remote kill switch when he network blocked his vacuum from sharing his home map data with them, as well as unprotected root access when connecting to the vacuum… urgh.

The engineer says he stopped the device from broadcasting data, though kept the other network traffic — like firmware updates — running like usual. The vacuum kept cleaning for a few days after, until early one morning when it refused to boot up.

After reverse engineering the vacuum, a painstaking process which included reprinting the devices’ circuit boards and testing its sensors, he found something horrifying: Android Debug Bridge, a program for installing and debugging apps on devices, was “wide open” to the world. “In seconds, I had full root access. No hacks, no exploits. Just plug and play,” Narayanan said.