191–200 of 215 posts
Interesting, United recently added a pretty lucrative bug bounty program (a rarity among airlines) a couple of weeks ago. http://www.united.com/web/en-US/content/Contact/bugbounty.as... It would be ironic if the bug bounty program directly/indirectly lead to this.
Ironic? Maybe "fitting" instead?
Ironic: A state of affairs or an event that seems deliberately contrary to what one expects and is often wryly amusing as a result.
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This is the Achilles heel of the entire Internet of Things and smart appliance trend, and I think this will bite everyone bad. After 50+% of these vendors go out of business in the next decade, their products won't get updated, and people will wonder why their "smart" TV can't watch movies from whatever replaced Netflix/new whizbang video service. They won't be as likely to buy any "smart" thing again.
I bought an LG smart TV a while ago. It stopped receiving firmware updates after a couple years and is now way behind current models in terms of features--and, I can only imagine, security patches. I will go out of my way to buy a dumb TV next time.
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There is no reason to make this assumption (about smart TVs costing less) in the first place. You can retroactively justify anything by twisting and cherry picking facts. A product with more features may cost more if it costs more to produce or customers are willing to pay more for it because they see it as more valuable. Neither of those applies to smart TVs.
> There is no reason to make this assumption (about smart TVs costing less) in the first place. Sure there is. 99% of everything else I've ever experienced in my life have had a positive correlation between features and price. I'm actually struggling right now to think of another product where—in general—more features are cheaper than fewer. Other than television sets, I cannot think of one right now. (Maybe if I spe…
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I have a Mac 128k in my basement, does that count?
I only have a Mac 512KE. :( But it's featured prominently in one of my rooms if that gets me any bonus points.
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I don't think so. Cost is one side of the equation, but usability is another. And at the end of the day, I don't think there's enough consumer demand to push IoT where it could be. I think eventually we'll get there -- at some point in the future, it will just be cheaper to buy an Android SoC than a handful of cheap analog micro controllers -- but for the next 10+ years we're going to keep hearing about IoT as "the n…
I think we might agree entirely. I think mobile phones were a relatively fast cycle because people were pretty happy to replace their phones every few years. That's not true with, say, washing machines or furnaces. So it will definitely take a while. But if you look at devices with cycles in between, I already see it happening. 10 years ago when I bought a stereo receiver, I bought something entirely dumb. Last year…
I've always thought that the reason for keeping Android as open source was to enable this use case. Eventually, Android-capable SOCs will come down to a very low price point, and for these use cases they don't need to push much more than a few kb per second. But it retains the advantage of having a development ecosystem that is well understood and widely available (you can't throw a rock in China or India without hitting an Android developer).
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Yeah, but chances are you won't use the functionality often enough to configure it in the first place. That's the real problem with the Internet of Things: most of the things we own are not all that useful when we're not in close proximity to them. Thus, not only are users and manufacturers unlikely to update them in the future; users are just as unlikely to connect the thing in the first place. Home automation throu…
Agreed on all counts. The only ones I can see taking off in any sense are easy to retrofit things like light bulbs and the occasional wireless plug controller like a WeMo if you have a particular load that needs one, not as a standard on every outlet. But prices need to come down, light output needs to go up (wireless bulbs seem to top out around 60W equivalent), and switches need to not be a $60 optional accessory (…
But I'm personally not convinced by IoT. Every implementation I've seen adds complexity without really improving functionality. I have a few Insteon switches in my house, but only in a few places where I need them (e.g. on the lights in front of my house so they can be turned on with a timer when I'm out of town).
I actually have a "connected refrigerator" made by Samsung. I tried for 5 minutes to get it set up before I gave up. I really couldn't think of what I would need to use a connected refrigerator for. IMO this is the usage model for the vast majority of IoT devices: if I, a major geek about this stuff, am not willing to spend more than 5 minutes setting it up, who actually cares enough to bother with any of it?
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How can you prove that your TV doesn't have a WiFi antenna inside? There's plenty of space to hide something like that in.
... and what network will it be connecting to? Sure maybe a free hotspot here or there, but many of these TVs will not have access to even those. And hell yeah you can prove it's not in there, either with a quick wireless scan or even a simple physical tear down of the housing which can then be put back together. Show me a dumb TV that has been wired up to spy on people that has been in the wild before.
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There is no reason to make this assumption (about smart TVs costing less) in the first place. You can retroactively justify anything by twisting and cherry picking facts. A product with more features may cost more if it costs more to produce or customers are willing to pay more for it because they see it as more valuable. Neither of those applies to smart TVs.
Perhaps a more concrete definition of an analogous concept would make this clearer: Are you familiar with the concept of a prior distribution[1]? The point of a prior is that, before you get any of the evidence, you can still have some sense of how likely each event is. If you asked me whether a microwave with more features would be more expensive, I would feel pretty comfortable saying "yea probably". As mentioned d…
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There is no reason to make this assumption (about smart TVs costing less) in the first place. You can retroactively justify anything by twisting and cherry picking facts. A product with more features may cost more if it costs more to produce or customers are willing to pay more for it because they see it as more valuable. Neither of those applies to smart TVs.
> There is no reason to make this assumption (about smart TVs costing less) in the first place. Sure there is. 99% of everything else I've ever experienced in my life have had a positive correlation between features and price. I'm actually struggling right now to think of another product where—in general—more features are cheaper than fewer. Other than television sets, I cannot think of one right now. (Maybe if I spe…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
... and what network will it be connecting to? Sure maybe a free hotspot here or there, but many of these TVs will not have access to even those. And hell yeah you can prove it's not in there, either with a quick wireless scan or even a simple physical tear down of the housing which can then be put back together. Show me a dumb TV that has been wired up to spy on people that has been in the wild before.
You can do those things, but you're not going to.
This is a 100% trash point. I have yet to see an unknown device on my network from a dumb screen, let alone any additional microphones or cameras on said dumb screen. I have also not seen or heard of any reports of it becoming a spying type device. You mean to tell me the dumb panel I bought, which is from a major manufacture with known tear downs and a ton of buyers, managed to sneak this hardware in (even something like a cellular radio) and nobody noticed?
I'll repeat this for you so you perhaps it will impact you this time: Show me a dumb TV that has been wired up to spy on people that has been in the wild before.
Please come equipped with citations, references, and examples before commenting.