Cheapo LED lightbulbs the "single worst device I've ever bought"

boing
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fixed, thanks

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No problem. And yeaaah, i remember reading about this a while back. A+ for digging that back up

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So when can we expect a BoingBoing Store post advertising these?

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Maybe the FBI can use one of these to get into that iPhone.

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Like anything else, it is what you make of it. The main problem I see recurring is the bandwagon of people treating IoT like more lame consumerism. The technology is there for people to make things which are interoperable, customized to their needs, and secured for their own environment. OR people can simply shovel out lots of money to companies who they don’t trust, and then complain about the results.

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Are they pear-shaped? :smiley:

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California has the CEC Voluntary California Quality LED Lamp Specification, which requires a CRI of >90.

Daiso in my area sell 60 Watt equivalent, dimable to 10%, CRI >90 bulbs for $2 each - the price is subsidized.

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I have nothing against people connecting things to the internet when it suits their purposes, I do it myself from time to time; but I would contend that “If you don’t do it yourself, for yourself, it’s strikingly hard to find commercial offerings that aren’t utter crap, basically just surveillance devices for advertisers, or both.” is not a sign of robust health in the genre.

In some areas of electronics, ‘consumer’ and ‘enterprise’, you can actually pick something off the shelf and be reasonably sure that it won’t do anything atrociously stupid or hostile(indeed such hardware is mostly how people make their own IoT-things; among numerous other uses). In ‘IoT’ it’s more the rule than the exception. This doesn’t fundamentally discredit the idea of giving things IP-capable interfaces; but the current state of affairs is saved from being pitiful only by the fact that it is malicious and negligent enough not to deserve pity.

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Judging by the illumi bowl one, a matter of two weeks or so.

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Ok, this isn’t even a first world problem. It’s a zeroth world problem. The zeroth world is the future that hasn’t quite happened yet, probably shouldn’t, despite what capitalists desperately want us to want. Everything from TV phones to flooded New Orleans belong to the zeroth world.

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bonus feature!!!

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I’ve purchased similar lightbulbs; and some of them are a bit better. Often these will have an open SSID because you need to connect to them initially to configure them to work with your WiFi connection. You should always just huck anything with a hardcoded SSID into the garbage!

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Immanentize this!

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Could be worse. They could kill you.

… And this is a reason I never trust “too good to be true” pricing on things like this.

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