131–140 of 254 posts
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What fresh hell is that. Why does it need to reach out to the internet?
To ensure you've paid your monthly subscription fee (Not joking - the mattress cover has a subscription)
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Devil's advocate. As someone who has developed a Linux based appliance with over 100k live units across the globe, it seems insane to NOT have access to the thing you're selling and that you have to maintain. If your thing breaks or gets bricked by an update, you will call support and expect them to fix it. You don't want to send in your device or have a support technician come to your house to fix it. So yes, to the…
> As someone who has developed a Linux based appliance with over 100k live units across the globe, it seems insane to NOT have access to the thing you're selling and that you have to maintain. I’ve developed Linux devices selling that many units (and more) and I’m baffled that anyone would think this is a viable way to handle things at this scale. Units like this should have a firmly read-only Linux firmware that can…
At the time I inherited a system that had 30-50k units deployed and was updated via Debian/APT. Older units were running Ubuntu 10.04 (it was 2016) and were hopelessly outdated. We managed to pull every single device to Ubuntu 16.04 and designed a fully automated image based update mechanism for them (I've linked it in other posts). We tried for read only base systems, but it was too tricky, so images stayed read-write, with migration of configs across upgrades.
At the time, customers even had access via SSH (similar to NAS devices these days).
I think what you are describing works for well defined hardware with a medium complexity software stack, or at least something that is limited in terms of epipheral device usage.
The appliance I was managing was heavily using raided disk, ZFS, loops, dmsetup, and many other Linux tools that we have all seen fail in horrible ways.
Not having SSH access, and not being able to diagnose lockups or hanging progress (D state issues) in a live system would have severely crippled us in being able to fix these issues. Many of them I'm sure we would not have been able to. We had failing disks, slow disks, failing RAM, hanging loop devices, corrupt loop devices, hanging ZFS, hanging ZFS, hanging ZFS, many of its bugs we fixed upstream, and and and...
On top of that, we had a "bring your own device" product that literally allowed people to use whatever hardware they want. That makes the read only firmware thing ever trickier.
As said in the beginning, I agree with you in principle, but there are many cases in which it's not as black and white. And I can fully understand the rationale of providing remote access.
Side note: I would have never expected to be down voted on HN for expressing an opinion in a respectful manner about a subject that I have knowledge about, just because it is the "unpopular" opinion. On Reddit, I'd expect to be downvoted for something folks don't like, but on HN in thought the button is just for use against trolling and such.
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some of the newer WiFi setups have an IoT subnet that works like a guest network. Worth using if your gear has it.
you absolutely need to do this. we call it the "internet of shit VLAN".
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what would be a better way to design this that is cheap and updatable? Specialized hardware is riskier to build, b/c bugs would require a complete reprint.
Why would I want so much software in my bed that even makes sense to discuss updating it?
Kinda interested just to see what the parameters of this are like. Is it using PubkeyAuth or just password? Is it tunnelling home via ip or dns?
If everything is just right, I can imagine the setup for the most hilarious DNS hijack in human history.
In the immortal words of Homer Simpson. Bed goes up. Bed goes down.
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To ensure you've paid your monthly subscription fee (Not joking - the mattress cover has a subscription)
What sort of person is buying this? Do they give away the mattress for some really cheap price initially?
But yeah part of it is like, it's really weird. If you asked me how much consistently better sleep would be worth, the answer is how much do you want?
But phrase that as "Bed as a service" and my reflex is "you're kidding, righr?"
Anyone else getting cloudfare blocked on TFA?
Buried lede: “What I did find was a "convenient" backdoor that Sleep Number can use to SSH back into the hub (and my internal home network as a result).”
Devil's advocate. As someone who has developed a Linux based appliance with over 100k live units across the globe, it seems insane to NOT have access to the thing you're selling and that you have to maintain. If your thing breaks or gets bricked by an update, you will call support and expect them to fix it. You don't want to send in your device or have a support technician come to your house to fix it. So yes, to the…
Ideally you would have a backdoor on the device thats open only to the local network. User runs an app on their PC, provides willing consent for someone to complete a support task by providing an OTC to the engineer. App goes and discovers the device, and hosts the session for the engineer. If the user cant perform such a task they can probably buy a device with one button on it that will, or pay for a callout or return.
I'm interested if anyone has pulled the same thing with eight sleep. Not having access to control my bed's temperature because my internet is out bothers me deeply.
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> Python 2.7.18 I am not defending them for not keeping their stuff up-to-date, but it is very common practice for embedded systems to be hopelessly outdated. I've done what OP describes with IPMI/BMC systems for $mainboardmanufacturer1 and $mainboardmanufacturer2 (both really big name brands), and their BMC systems were equally outdated. It was almost comical, but really sad at the same time. Moral of the story is t…
I know I'm preaching to the choir, but I do prefer not having to treat my bed as a hostile device on my network
Er, I mean okay, well at least they're budget friendly....
Well at least they don't have an ssh server constantly running in the background or something