Just to be clear, I can avoid this by not purchasing devices like the Echo or Ring, right?
Amazon Sidewalk
471–480 of 687 posts
Re: Amazon Sidewalk
#472If anyone is interested, I wouldn't mind collaborating to create a privacy oriented SmartTV or PC for devs or simply an industrial grade dumb TV. I have experience designing and building 70" industrial displays that utilize Samsung LCD panels. These "industrial" panels are normally twice the price of consumer grade ones but are designed to operate 24/7 with a MTBF of 100k hours (approx. 11 years) and are usually twic…
I’d buy one
Re: Amazon Sidewalk
#473If anyone is interested, I wouldn't mind collaborating to create a privacy oriented SmartTV or PC for devs or simply an industrial grade dumb TV. I have experience designing and building 70" industrial displays that utilize Samsung LCD panels. These "industrial" panels are normally twice the price of consumer grade ones but are designed to operate 24/7 with a MTBF of 100k hours (approx. 11 years) and are usually twic…
Can it support AirPlay? I hate how AirPlay enabled devices can be so expensive.
you'd have to plug in an AirPlay-capable device, most likely. For a device to support AirPlay natively, you have to sign up to a complex and expensive licensing process with Apple that includes a ton of validation testing.
Re: Amazon Sidewalk
#474Earlier quoted context omitted.
Except for the LCD panel itself, everything else (the controller, PSU, wire harnesses, connectors, etc) are already easily serviceable. If you can build a computer, you can service this display. A big bonus with my industrial design would be that the casing itself is made out of metal and harder to damage than plastic casing of most large format displays. For your specific case, is that a consumer grade panel? What i…
Awesome! Yeah it’s a super thin, dumb TV and other than the fact that black shots always revealed some inconsistent lighting on it it’s decent. The recent problem is that once in a while a vertical segment (probably 1/5 or 1/6 of the width of the screen) is discolored and mostly black.
Well, any LCD panel requires 2 things to work: a controller and a power-supply/inverter specifically designed to light up the display LEDs. In consumer grade displays, these components can be 3 different things (ie controller, psu, and inverter) and are fairly cheap to replace. You can generally find them on eBay. The only way to really damage an LCD panel is by dropping it and if that is not the case with your display, you can bring it back to life by identifying which of the 3 components might be bad and replacing it. Don't be scared to get surgical with your display. In the end, you will most likely learn more than you will regret.
Re: Amazon Sidewalk
#475So, if I buy a so called Smart-TV (not because I like it but because traditional ones are getting harder to find) but don't set up it on my home network so it can't phone home, it could scan around anyway and find other open devices more than willing to participate in my personal data exfiltration? If the Amazon project succeeds, I would expect in a few months most home devices manufacturers, to partner to implement…
IMO. There should be a market for: - Dumb panels (not monitors). Perhaps stripped down recycled smart tvs. - Smart tvs but with user replaceable firmware. Think OpenWRT for TVs. Maybe the same guy who does the dumb panels could sell those but with a raspberry pi in place of the logic board. Of course a monitor solves these issues but these are normally smaller and more expensive.
"Smart tvs but with user replaceable firmware" THIS, I've never thought about it before, but I'd definitely pay extra for a TV that has a open firmware for users to replace.
Re: Amazon Sidewalk
#476If anyone is interested, I wouldn't mind collaborating to create a privacy oriented SmartTV or PC for devs or simply an industrial grade dumb TV. I have experience designing and building 70" industrial displays that utilize Samsung LCD panels. These "industrial" panels are normally twice the price of consumer grade ones but are designed to operate 24/7 with a MTBF of 100k hours (approx. 11 years) and are usually twic…
Is that something like this: https://displayy.studio/ I remember seeing them on HN a year ago, I assume that they haven't moved that far because COVID etc?
A while back it was called ironcast! The rename confused me a bit
Re: Amazon Sidewalk
#477Earlier quoted context omitted.
An extremely interesting prospect you've got here. What's stopping you from doing it right now?
I would guess the massive investments needed for a hardware startup.
Most of the upfront cost for hardware is usually setting up tooling and assembly lines for manufacture. In this case, I'd assume most if not all parts already exists and can be sourced. That negates a lot of it.
Re: Amazon Sidewalk
#478I do research on mesh networking, and the response to Sidewalk in the tech community has been pretty discouraging. People have rightly brought up Apple's Find My network as a similar application; companies are leveraging existing, ubiquitous devices to create additional network transport layers. See also, the proliferation and adoption of the Thread protocol. This doesn't mean we have to use these networks! But this…
Thank you. I'm baffled by how positive the HN community was to AirTags, but not to this...? And aren't more networks a good thing? Shouldn't there be another competitor here? Also, I'm not sure where people are getting that Amazon is bad at privacy. Amazon isn't Facebook, nor is it even Google Analytics, nor has it been involved in any user/privacy data scandal I can think of. I mean, most of the criticism of Amazon…
> Also, I'm not sure where people are getting that Amazon is bad at privacy.
Oh, I dunno, profiting from selling law enforcement nearly unrestricted access[1] to their existing IOT offerings as part of what they call "the new neighborhood watch"[2] while also profiting facial recognition offerings (Rekognition) doesn't really give me the impression they're good at privacy. In fact, it makes Google Analytics seem down right charitable in comparison.
[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/11/19/police-...
[2] https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2019/08/28/doorbel...
Re: Amazon Sidewalk
#479If anyone is interested, I wouldn't mind collaborating to create a privacy oriented SmartTV or PC for devs or simply an industrial grade dumb TV. I have experience designing and building 70" industrial displays that utilize Samsung LCD panels. These "industrial" panels are normally twice the price of consumer grade ones but are designed to operate 24/7 with a MTBF of 100k hours (approx. 11 years) and are usually twic…
Can it support AirPlay? I hate how AirPlay enabled devices can be so expensive.
Sure, I'd just use a $99 Apple TV for that whenever needed.
edit: I am getting old. AppleTV used to be $99 and it seems prices have gone up a little since. Either way, AppleTV would be my goto method whenever AirPlay is required.
Re: Amazon Sidewalk
#480Please don’t support Amazon from creating another network-effect product that creates vendor lock-in, and privacy issues. Convenience should not be the end-all goal, as the ad blatantly states, but instead interoperability and open-protocols.
Convenience isn't a goal, per se. It's a by-product of sorts. When things work and are intuitive, they're very convenient. Economically, it can be useful to design many things this way.
A good doorknob is ready-at-hand: it's just about invisible to me until it breaks and, suddenly, it's present and bright in my mind. I've been in the woods and become unsafe: everything around becomes suddenly, viscerally present. That's not a feeling I want often. But individual things I attend to (like watching what I eat or trying to ID a bird by its song) make the world much more colorful, and make me feel more a part of it. Plus, as the comments here suggest, immediate convenience can lead to downstream perils (e.g. in terms of data collection).