There are a few steps you can take to improve this situation, but ultimately, the Ikettle is just a badly secured device that shouldn’t be on the same network as sensitive items like home burglar alarm cameras, networked thermostats, and the phones and laptops you use to access sensitive services.
You know what else shouldn’t be on that network? How about the “sensitive items like home burglar alarm cameras, networked thermostats, and …phones”? I have seen dozens of articles here dancing in glee over the Internet of Things, with no indication of why I would want this, and many many reasons to shun it like so much Black Death.
I work with a lot of B2B application programming interfaces and I have to say that internet security is a total clusterfuck which barely works at the best of times. The best way to be secure is to keep your head down and not be too important of valuable.
The reason is largely congestion management. Assume for a given band of frequencies you could handle up to 100 voice conversations, if your omnidirectional that’s 100 conversations for your whole foot print, if your directional with antennas facing in multiple directions each direction can support 100 conversations. I’m vastly over simplifying and using made up numbers, but the concept holds.
As an idea, the Internet of Things isn’t bad. But there are slight problems with the implementation.
Energy consumption is one. As a child, I was always told to use the mechanical button to switch off the TV, not just the remote. After all, if there’s no power, how will the TV know you it received a signal? We are currently living in a permanently consuming, stand-by world. Meanwhile, some people will tell you that solar panels aren’t enough to produce the electricity needed by a country, and we need nuclear power (the kind that goes boom, because Thorium is boring).
There, the temperature feature on that kettle is good. Depending on the beverage of choice, you don’t need to heat the water as much. That’s some power saved.
But if I want a cup of tea, it will only take five minutes. And the kettle wouldn’t be able to fill itself, or pour it.
I see “iWatch locks for your house”. In one case, advertised as “good when you come back from a camping trip and didn’t want to have to deal with your keys”. Err… You’re going to take a stupidly expensive smartwatch on a camping trip. And the associated expensive phone. Both of which go through batteries in no time at all. How do you get inside your house when you have no battery left? It’s entirely stupid. I know, keys are a novel idea, barely around since Roman times, and they’ll never catch on, but come on…
And then, there is the far too common problem of planned obsolescence. How long is that item going to last? There’s the “broken” option, and the “obsolete” option. That waste of resources is extremely worrying. Let’s buy the latest “revolution” because what you have been sold as the “latest revolution” the year before has been deemed an obsolete piece of junk by the very same people who sold it to you.
It appears that some people have never heard of ethics. (Though it’s probably a city in Greece.)
There are more important problems that networking household appliances. Making sure that they work for more than a year or two. Like they used to, and if they din’t waste resources on gimmicky features it would be even better.
I think the real question why aren’t we all using lasers… “Oh is this the way they say the future’s meant to feel/or just 20,000 people standing in a field”
Power is never “consumed”, it merely changes from one kind to another. What seems like consumption is merely a failure to manage the transition.
That would be a false dichotomy, since suns are nuclear power.
I agree with much of what you say, but I think that it is framed as being too much of a consumer issue. The old industrial revolution paradigm that a minority of producers devise goods which commerce delivers to a minority. There is no incentive for waste, obsolescence, frivolous features, nor half-assed security when people plan and build their own house and IoT. Saying that the products themselves are the problem and asking somebody else to change them I think misses the point. It might be more efficient from materials, manufacturing, and distribution perspectives to not mass-produce consumer electronics, and instead focus on custom implementations of things which your household actually wants or needs.
I know someone could swing by my house and hack my wifi password via my Interwebs kettle, but this seems like a lot of work for said hacker. Just go on the dark web and download a bunch of credit card data instead. Unless you are like, super rich, I don’t see the real problem this creates in the actual world.
