Damn!
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$20 per month? Why, one could hire a nanny for this!
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Things in our house we’ve bought in the past 3 years that have apps we don’t use and don’t want include:
- Washer and Dryer
- Water heater
- Garage door operators
- HVAC heat pump
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The only appliance we have with an app is the water softener, but we don’t have wifi, so it has nothing to conect to. So, all good.
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Another thing that I prefer dumb are TV sets and monitors. I can understand that for a CPU powerful enough to to decode h.265 HEVC having a tcp/ip stack it’s an easy task to do, but call me old fashioned, I’m ok to watch the programs broadcasted on UHF channels. On the other hand why there are a lot of TV that are called HD ready and have low resolutions, less than 1920x1080, horrendous speakers and a totally buggy and incomprehensible menu setup?
There are monitors, that are in theory designed to be used connected to a computer that have “smart” features. I’d rather prefer a monitor with an extra VGA/HDMI/Displayport/USB-C input than some smart feature I’m not going to use, because I’ve a computer connected to it.
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I once had a RokuTV that had an unobtrusive little glowing logo beneath the screen that served as the “power on” indicator light. I got sick of the TV sending telemetry back to Roku’s mothership, so I deleted the WiFi configuration.
The damn little light started to blink because the WiFi wasn’t connected. Do you know how distracting it is to have a little blinking light at the edge of your peripheral vision? They certainly do; that was a deliberate design decision to annoy the shit out of you if they aren’t getting their data.
DO NOT BUY ROKU.
They can be thrown in a volcano, and nothing of value will be lost. And toss their TVs in the volcano, too.
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A little while ago I saw Cory Doctorow as a guest at a live recording of a new NPR quiz show in Pasadena. There was a sign language interpreter there for the benefit of deaf audience members, and the hosts of the show were greatly amused in the interpreter’s translation of the term “enshittification” and kept bringing up the term again and again so that they could see it signed.
They quizzed him on a subject near and dear to his heart: Disneyland’s Haunted Mansion. Surprisingly he got one of the answers wrong, and he was deeply embarrassed because it was regarding one of the “stretching room” portraits which he has full-size copies of hanging up in his home.
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I’d love to give those appliances a wifi that pretended to connect to their mothership, then reverse-engineer the API so that all of the functionality was available though my local computers, but…
- That’s a serious project for each of those appliances.
- They probably used encryption to prevent that, rather than for real security purposes.
- They’d probably use old gaming cartridge copy-protection lawsuits to shutdown technical discussion forums, and cooperation between developers.
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The point is not that I had to fix it, the point is that they made a deliberate design choice that made it uncomfortable to not let them invade their users’ privacy.
And they camouflage it by hiding behind “you want your WiFi to work, so you can get all your shows, right? This light helps you know that your WiFi is broken.”
Roku subtly turned it into an attack on us. “Oh, you’re not getting our viewing habits? Let me fix that for you!”
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“I turned on the kitchen light. By the way, did you know I track all your purchases and can offer you slightly discounted prices on heavily marked up sponsored products that we mapped as relevant to your interests?”
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