M_Gargantua posted:

I'm looking forward to legal ransomware come 2024, where you have to rent your lightbulbs from the power company and they remotely disable them if you're not paying their exorbitant service fees while also paying double for your power consumption.

'Due to an imminent snowstorm surge pricing has been enabled, your thermostat is currently unavailable, please pay Eversource energy a $300 fee to activate home heating'

M_Gargantua posted:

I'm looking forward to legal ransomware come 2024, where you have to rent your lightbulbs from the power company and they remotely disable them if you're not paying their exorbitant service fees while also paying double for your power consumption.

'Due to an imminent snowstorm surge pricing has been enabled, your thermostat is currently unavailable, please pay Eversource energy a $300 fee to activate home heating'

M_Gargantua posted:

I thought that was actual ransomware though?

I guess we should come up for a better name for when your corporate overlords do it with the states sanction.

Vasudus posted:

There was a big IoT thing last week about how some smart thermostat company had their central servers go down and people couldn't get the unit working and were freezing. I think the funniest part was that it did in fact have a manual mode but most people were too dumb to figure that out or too stubbon to use it.

A Bad Poster posted:

I must be one of the idiots, because I have some Hue lights, and one day my internet went out and I couldn't figure out how to turn the lights in my place on because the app wouldn't work without wifi.

Vasudus posted:

There's plenty of neat uses of IoT things. I just question the execution of a lot of them.

BigDave posted:

Alexia and Google Home really bug me, mostly because of the privacy implications.

If the FBI or whoever wants a wiretap in my house, they need to go before a federal judge and show probable cause.

But now, I pay Amazon for the privilege of putting a tap in my bedroom? Who's to say that Amazon won't grant access to the cops or NSA?

That's a pretty big privacy violation for the convince of finding out the weather forecast from my bed.

JHVH-1 posted:

psydude posted:

Did you try a light switch?

mlmp08 posted:

C-SPAM is digging up some real "good" Chief challenge coin minions. What the gently caress, Navy?

A Bad Poster posted:

They require the power to be on at all times for the lights to work, so as far as I know the only way to turn the light on is through the app.

mlmp08 posted:

C-SPAM is digging up some real "good" Chief challenge coin minions. What the gently caress, Navy?

psydude posted:

They lights automatically turn on when power is removed and then reapplied. Turn off the switch and then turn it back on and the light will turn on. You can then use them as normal light bulbs.

BigDave posted:

Alexia and Google Home really bug me, mostly because of the privacy implications.

If the FBI or whoever wants a wiretap in my house, they need to go before a federal judge and show probable cause.

But now, I pay Amazon for the privilege of putting a tap in my bedroom? Who's to say that Amazon won't grant access to the cops or NSA?

That's a pretty big privacy violation for the convince of finding out the weather forecast from my bed.

quote:

Most of the plantations around us were new, their rise a direct consequence of policy decisions made half a world away. In the mid-2000s, Western nations, led by the United States, began drafting environmental laws that encouraged the use of vegetable oil in fuels — an ambitious move to reduce carbon dioxide and curb global warming. But these laws were drawn up based on an incomplete accounting of the true environmental costs. Despite warnings that the policies could have the opposite of their intended effect, they were implemented anyway, producing what now appears to be a calamity with global consequences.

The tropical rain forests of Indonesia, and in particular the peatland regions of Borneo, have large amounts of carbon trapped within their trees and soil. Slashing and burning the existing forests to make way for oil-palm cultivation had a perverse effect: It released more carbon. A lot more carbon. NASA researchers say the accelerated destruction of Borneo’s forests contributed to the largest single-year global increase in carbon emissions in two millenniums, an explosion that transformed Indonesia into the world’s fourth-largest source of such emissions. Instead of creating a clever technocratic fix to reduce American’s carbon footprint, lawmakers had lit the fuse on a powerful carbon bomb that, as the forests were cleared and burned, produced more carbon than the entire continent of Europe. The unprecedented palm-oil boom, meanwhile, has enriched and emboldened many of the region’s largest corporations, which have begun using their newfound power and wealth to suppress critics, abuse workers and acquire more land to produce oil.

Milo and POTUS posted:

I'm more worried about the security implications. Huge companies can't even keep your private info safe. Who's to say someone won't gain access because of slapdash security and just use your devices to literally see if you're not home. It's 2018, you're being watched constantly by the government anyway.

Casimir Radon posted:

The one thing I'll never trust is a "smart" lock.

mlmp08 posted:

C-SPAM is digging up some real "good" Chief challenge coin minions. What the gently caress, Navy?

Knives Amilli posted:

While i hate minions with the fire of a thousand suns, i do like creative military tchotchke like challenge coins and unit patches. Wish someone had a grand database of all em.

Handsome Ralph posted:

Yeah that's where I'm at.

I like my Nest thermostat but know how to switch it to manual if need be and my hue bulbs are nice. But gently caress trusting my front doors deadbolts to an IoT device.

Casimir Radon posted:

The one thing I'll never trust is a "smart" lock.