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What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

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Re: What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

#21

Post by murftown »

A little ironic: I tried to share this article on the #offbeat Slack channel at my work, but the automatic preview image Slack generated for it (from the top cover image of the article, which you can't really see most of, unless you view the image separately) is a (pretty NSFW) fake front-of-the-box for a "We-Vibe" IoT vibrator: "We can see how kinky you are". Not what I was planning to share with my coworkers. I'd recommend the author to change the cover image, or at least feature the whole image prominently front-and-center if that's really what they want to do, so people don't accidentally share it inappropriately like I did.

Good article though, and I definitely agree that these issues with IoT devices should be made more prominent.

Re: What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

#22

Post by tempodox »

DonHopkins wrote: post #2

WARNINGS: WARNING: This product warps space and time in its vicinity. WARNING: This product attracts every other piece of matter in the universe, including the products of other manufacturers, with a force proportional to the product of the masses and inversely proportional to the distance between them. CAUTION: The mass of this product contains the energy equivalent of 85 million tons of TNT per net ounce of weight.…

CORRIGENDUM: G·m1·m2 / r² isn't inversely proportional to r, but inversely proportional to r².

Re: What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

#23

Post by rootlocus »

NKosmatos wrote: post #8

Interesting idea. I wonder how this would look like on commercial software packages :-) Yeah I'm an oldschooler that remembers buying software and games in actual physical boxes!!!

I sometimes buy hard copies of games simply because I dreamed of having a PlayStation or a gaming PC as a kid, but my parents couldn't afford either, so I never got the chance of collecting anything related to PC games. Unfortunately, most of them only come with a small piece of paper inside with a steam activation code written on it. I remember when games contained entire manuals in the box.

Re: What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

#24

Post by c3534l »

seanmcdirmid wrote: post #13

In California, there is a law that basically everywhere (e.g. all apartment complexes) must have a sign that specifies that the compounds used on site can cause cancer or birth defects or whatever. But because the signs are pervasive, they are basically useless. This feels kind of like that.

Edit: I might be wrong and I have to go before I can get sources on it.

Re: What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

#25

Post by code_duck »

c3534l wrote: post #24
seanmcdirmid wrote: post #13

In California, there is a law that basically everywhere (e.g. all apartment complexes) must have a sign that specifies that the compounds used on site can cause cancer or birth defects or whatever. But because the signs are pervasive, they are basically useless. This feels kind of like that.

Edit: I might be wrong and I have to go before I can get sources on it.

They also miss a lot of things that do contain or emit chemicals that cause cancer, like dryer sheets.

Re: What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

#26

Post by julianwachholz »

npsimons wrote: post #18
michaelfeathers wrote: post #15

It would be interesting to have a word for devices that is sort of like 'organic' for food. It would indicate that the device is self-contained and has no connectivity.

> It would be interesting to have a word for devices that is sort of like 'organic' for food. > It would indicate that the device is self-contained and has no connectivity. "Well-designed"?

No "E.T.-Phone-Home".

Re: What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

#27

Post by krapp »

jacquesm wrote: post #10

Simple rule: I buy it, I own it and it should not need an external service to operate. If it does then I'm not buying it. None of those grafted on services for me, I really have yet to see anything that was so compelling that I would give up and consent to essentially renting a device and having an account with some service to make it useful. That way you also don't need to warn anybody about the lousy security, I'm…

> Simple rule: I buy it, I own it and it should not need an external service to operate. If it does then I'm not buying it.

That's a good rule, but good luck opting out once most manufacturers no longer give you an option.

Re: What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

#28

Post by jaclaz »

npsimons wrote: post #18
michaelfeathers wrote: post #15

It would be interesting to have a word for devices that is sort of like 'organic' for food. It would indicate that the device is self-contained and has no connectivity.

> It would be interesting to have a word for devices that is sort of like 'organic' for food. > It would indicate that the device is self-contained and has no connectivity. "Well-designed"?

>"Well-designed"?

Very good one.

A good candidate would have been "smart", but unfortunately it is already taken to mean the opposite.

Re: What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

#29

Post by oneweekwonder »

downer72 wrote: post #9
0xcde4c3db wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. A couple years ago I bought a network-attached hard drive with some kind of cloud backup service bundled (the current marketing-speak seems to be "personal cloud"); fortunately I did a little extra reading before opening it, because it wouldn't even let you set it up for local access without registering an account on the cloud service.

For sure, that’s what killed the Pebble watch for me. I got it home, opened the box, thinking I had a new watch! Nope. You have to connect it to the internet and let it phone home first. It would not tell time, permit you to manually set the time, or let you explore that watch at all, until it spoke with it’s mothership. I put it back in the box, and tossed it in the closet, and it’s still there, and now it’s complet…

If it is in a mint condition with boxing, hold on to it, in a decade or so I believe it would be worth a lot.

Re: What If We Put Warnings on IoT Devices?

#30

Post by jaclaz »

NKosmatos wrote: post #8

Interesting idea. I wonder how this would look like on commercial software packages :-) Yeah I'm an oldschooler that remembers buying software and games in actual physical boxes!!!

>Yeah I'm an oldschooler that remembers buying software and games in actual physical boxes!!!

Old enough to remember also printed, well written, exhaustive manuals coming with them? ;-)

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