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I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

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Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#231

Post by thayne »

9991 wrote: post #211
eastbound wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

After maintaining online services, I’m quite sure it’s vulnerabilities. It’s extremely costly after 3-5 years to maintain old software. Ex: You have a thermostat or an alarm system that runs Debian, Debian gets a vulnerability, you try to upgrade it, but you need to change Debian versions, and your old stack isn’t supported on the newer version. Nowadays you need to keep patching all your old appliances, keep the old…

Perhaps it's too radical, but if this is the main concern, you could still build appliances with Linux that just aren't networked. Take a page out of Battlestar Galactica's playbook.

Or at least, only connect to the local network.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#232

Post by freetinker »

rch wrote: post #143

Something about Google's incentive structure is eating them alive. For instance, there's an alarm setting on Android (Pixel) for "Night Mode: Very dim display (for dark rooms)". Which I interpret as a Googler's way of saying: "my bonus is tied to minutes of display visibility while charging, so F users there's no way to turn the display off."

You’re not too far off with this example…

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#233

Post by clnq »

cogman10 wrote: post #119
largepeepee wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like it's not only products that get left behind once Google gets bored. Many of Google's software eventually get worse too. YouTube for example has killed most of their social features by removing dislikes, limited searchability of videos by channel, allowed bots to fill the comments. And Google search has so much malware in their ads that pop up first, that even govts are recommending ad blockers by default.…

Google is just shit. As my company briefly decided to look into using them for a cloud provider it quickly became apparent that they are just awful stewards of any software that isn’t related to advertisements. It’s beyond shocking how amateurish GCP is being operated. My assumption is it comes down to really awful leadership. They only care about making and selling new things. You simply can’t trust that any piece o…

Looking into Android Code Search, I've found the same issues. Google keeps saying C++ is a terrible language, but the way they use it is pretty bad too. "A bad workman blames his tools" springs to mind a lot reading that code.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#234

Post by ianburrell »

visarga wrote: post #52
Sosh101 wrote: post #15

I can't understand people that want to wire up every aspect of their home to big tech cloud companies. There are plenty of options for self-hosted smart home setups.

When I realized I need to register all my light bulbs and appliances and control them by janky wireless signals, with reconnect issues from time to time, I just gave up and use physical switches. They work all the time. Why would I want to open or close a light when I am 100 steps away from the button?

You can get smart switches, they require wiring but they work as switches without smart system. I have Zigbee and ZWave and both have been reliable.

I primarily use the remote to turn on light switches from across the room. It only saves a couple of steps but the seconds add up. The big one is turning on porch light at night while standing on porch. I have turned off left on lights on way to airport. I have also set up routine to turn on lights in evening while I’m away.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#235

Post by Silhouette »

michaelt wrote: post #57
Silhouette wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was amazed - in a bad way - when we were looking into getting solar for our home and almost all of the systems relied on some kind of mobile app for their UI, often via a cloud service. These are systems that should have a working life of decades ! What mobile or cloud platform today will even still be here and fully compatible in ten years? Want to bet tens of thousands on that?! (Plus of course all the usual "sma…

99% of solar/battery systems will work just fine with no internet connection. In fact often the internet connectivity is a separate plug-in module you can just not install. Loads of these devices get installed into garages and suchlike where the wifi is no good, so most installers will know that their systems can work without internet connectivity and will be used to installing them that way.

That all makes perfect sense and it's how we had always assumed these things worked. However we were told - by multiple installers - that they couldn't guarantee the products they were offering would continue to work for long without Internet access. Even if they didn't literally shut down with loss of power supply they wouldn't necessarily be configurable. That really matters with battery-backed systems where there are different strategies for charging them that might make sense depending on the conditions and expected usage.

It seems a particularly bad design because if the power is out in our area then probably so is the Internet. (Apparently our local ISPs haven't discovered putting a UPS in with their last-mile equipment yet.) And yet these were battery-backed systems that could take over supply for our own property during an outage so having access to their UI to change settings in the event of a longer outage could be important.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#236

Post by toast0 »

DangitBobby wrote: post #195
osigurdson wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is interesting, I thought GCP might be a good alternative - at least for managed Kubernetes.

GCP is excellent.

GCP is clearly good if your use cases match their services. However, there are a lot of things that are sub-optimal.

IPv6 doesn't have non-premium networking. Premium networking is nice, but non-premium networking is less expensive.

Instances sometimes take more than 5 minutes to shutdown. A lot of things seem very slow like this. Really frustrating to use for testing when it takes so long to bring an environment up and to clean it afterwards.

Load balancing is hard to use outside of http style short connection use cases. There's no load feedback mechanism, and at small request rates, requests are severely unbalanced anyway. Managed instance groups can auto scale downwards, but connection drain is implemented as take it out of rotation and wait a configurable time and destroy the instance. If the instance drains faster, it won't be destroyed faster. If you want to drain for more than 60 minutes, that's too bad (this isn't that unreasonable, but while I'm ranting...)

Google's container optimized OS has documentation that tells you how to configure docker log retention... But then their container runner (konlet) forces their own log settings for the main container, so your settings are ignored.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#237

Post by toast0 »

SomeHacker44 wrote: post #160
Corrado wrote: post #2

I feel like this is just one more thing that Google leadership is failing at. I have some similar examples to the ones in the article. I recommended that my brother-in-law get a Google wifi AP some years ago. Recently, I got an email from Google saying that they are no longer supporting it and after a certain date you will no longer be able to make changes to it. WTF?!? My Apple Airport Extreme is older than the Goog…

Recently I noticed I could not turn my Nest thermostat "off" anymore, on the device or on the app. Wait, what??? Any ideas?

I've never seen that? But pull it off the baseplate and it'll be off. ;p

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#238

Post by Silhouette »

jon-wood wrote: post #63
mattmanser wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And worse still these things get inflicted on the next home owner. I bought a house with a "smart" boiler and the UI and app are absolutely atrocious. Worse still it doesn't have basic functionality like my parent's manual system had 40 years ago like temporarily being able to turn it on without changing the schedule, doesn't have a weekend setting, requires me to send my email address and address to a third party wh…

I don’t disagree with you on shitty UI, but I’m going to question “a treasure trove for thieves”. I just don’t believe there’s some sort of house thieve’s Union running attacks on boiler infrastructure in order to work out who’s on holiday this week, especially given the low penetration on those things meaning you’re going to get visibility into one in a hundred homes. It just seems so low value compared to driving r…

This is an important principle. If essential systems in everyone's homes start depending on remote connections to work and/or including spyware that phones home with any kind of data about how the system is being used then that's a serious security and privacy concern. It's bad enough that we have metered supplies of various utilities and instead of the old "agent pops round to read the meter every few months" we now have smart meters phoning home with metrics every few minutes. At least the metering is there for a legitimate reason and the change to smart meters does have some real advantages including for the homeowner so the risk is more an unintended but unavoidable side effect in those cases. Almost everything else that goes under the "smart home" banner seems to be like smart TVs and connected vehicles: if it's phoning home then it's a good bet it's doing it for their benefit and not yours.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#239

Post by behnamoh »

__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #172
titzer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to replacing my furnace I had a mercury thermostat that was easily over 50 years old. The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I don't expect 50 years, but 20-30 seems reasonable. Somehow software people have forgotten that physical things last a long time, and people want them to keep working and stay the same as long as possible . My thermostat doesn't need "upgrades", and anyone who thinks they are going to…

I wonder if we could wield regulation to discourage products that phone home without also providing the ability to: - install a cert so we can MITM the traffic and see what they're phoning home about - turn off the phoning home without breaking local functionality - configure a different address for cloud I/O, such that I can run the "cloud" part on my own infra if I want those features

> - turn off the phoning home without breaking local functionality

Start with Windows, iOS (Siri), and pretty much any updateable software.

Re: I'm never investing in Google's smart home ecosystem again

#240

Post by biztos »

cabalamat wrote: post #208
titzer wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prior to replacing my furnace I had a mercury thermostat that was easily over 50 years old. The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I don't expect 50 years, but 20-30 seems reasonable. Somehow software people have forgotten that physical things last a long time, and people want them to keep working and stay the same as long as possible . My thermostat doesn't need "upgrades", and anyone who thinks they are going to…

> The new one is digital but isn't "smart". I do not, nor will I ever use, any "smart" device. "Smart" devices are - unnecessarily complicated - privacy destroying - overpriced - vendor lock-in - often infected with online ads you can't get rid of - likely to stop working if the vendor goes bust, their business model changes, or they just feel like it IMO, it is rarely or never a smart decision to get a "smart" devic…

I dipped my toe ever so cautiously into "smart home" territory last year, buying three "smart" lightbulbs at the Apple Store, but only talking to them over Bluetooth.

(At least, I think I'm only doing that: I suppose it's possible the software that talks to them via BT got them on my WiFi without my permission? Doubtful but hmmm...)

Anyway at some point there was a software update to the controller app and it couldn't find them. After much back and forth, I uninstalled that app, and the iPhone's iHome or whatever app then recognized two of them, but not the third. That one started freaking out and randomly turning itself on and off.

Now it's mostly off, but comes on for a bit about once a week. Yes, I'm lazy about changing lightbulbs.

All this drama for... freakin' lightbulbs that can change color. Doesn't make me want to further smartify my home.

I figure some simple fake LED candles are my future mood lighting. I'd spring for a Mathmos Lava Lamp[0] if they didn't look like sex toys.

[0]: https://mathmos.com/lava-lamps/lava-lamps-for-children-and-a...

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