36 Replies to “The Refrigerators Have Eyes”

  3. A house full of Internet connected light bulbs is a DDOS attack waiting to happen. Each light bulb contains a teensy Atmel system-on-a-chip that has more capability than an IBM 286. More memory, faster processor.
    There have been hacks described that allow light bulbs to transmit data by flashing at certain frequencies. People can hide malware in the light bulb’s memory. The BlueTooth itself is a pathway to your home network, just as much as if they plugged an ethernet cable into your router.
    But worse than all that, this stuff phones home. Samsung Smart TVs send data to Samsung all day, every day, recording every button push and all the shows you watch.
    Now, at the moment these concerns are very tinfoil hat. Nobody cares what you watch on TV. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say nobody -important- cares. Nobody who can do things to you for watching the wrong show on TV.
    As we’ve seen lately, there is a constituency of people out there who would like to be able to punish bad TV watching. That would be the Social Justice Warriors who rail and riot every time a skinny blonde chick wants to give a speech.
    Think about how it would be if thoser @ssh0les got hold of all that data. Because they might. One election is all it takes.

  4. The ability to phone your house and turn on/off almost anything electric has existed for a few decades already. I had a friend who built a few “smart-house” show-homes, starting in the 80’s. They also boasted such new features of the day as outdoor lights that adjusted to the changing seasons, automatic underground sprinklers and security systems with cameras and full, quality intercom/stereo systems inside and out. If memory serves, even more than just controlling on/off, he could also control music volume and light levels from his car-phone.
    Ha, of course back then, no one could conceive hackers taking over your home.

  5. I hate ignorant articles like this.
    manufacturing truly smart gadgets is harder than anyone lets on
    It’s ridiculously easy. Anyone can do it with a $30 Arduino or Raspberry Pi as a dev board.
    Until I can operate my Samsung TV, Blu-Ray player, Amazon Fire TV Stick, and Cisco cable box with a single remote control, the Internet of Things is a hoax.
    You can. It’s called your smartphone.
    The problem with smart gadget usability is the fact that there’s no economic incentive yet for making sure your smart gadget uses the same communications protocols as anyone else’s, and as yet there does not exist an open source protocol suite that’s useful for any arbitrary smart gadget. You can control six different smart gadgets with your smartphone, but you’ll need six different apps to do it.
    As for security, that’s a lost cause. I used to work for a company that designed smart consumer electronics. Absolutely nobody cares about security – not the designers, not the firmware programmers, not the project managers, not the consumers. Nobody.

  6. I think the author is referring to the difficulty in producing intelligently adaptive behavior in a machine. It is fabulously difficult. No one has done it yet.
    Consider that the self-driving car is less intelligent and less capable than an ant. All the car has to do is go from one place to the other without hitting anything. The ant accomplishes that, plus dozens of other tasks. Bees do that plus fly.
    Lately there have been guys going on and on about machine learning and how its going to put every man in America out of work. Machine learning is True AI and will create True Intelligence!
    Machine learning is a fancy search algorithm. There is nothing intelligent about it. It can -mimic- intelligence, but only because it is very fast. What it is actually doing is trying every combination, one after the other, like a ball rolling down a slope until it falls in a slot.
    That is not going to replace every worker in America. Two examples off the top of my head, show me a machine that can paint a house, and show me a machine that can un-stick a rusty bolt on a brake caliper. (Twisting off is not unsticking.) Two things that happen all day, every day.

  7. Stellar advice. I have a dumb fridge. No bells or whistles. Lasted me 15+ years thus far. Not a single issue ever. My washer came with the house and I’d say has to be at least 25 years old. Meanwhile friends and relatives have super expensive appliances that do everything. Something is always breaking. Then there is the issue of built in obsolescence. They just don’t make things like they used to. Or it cannot be fixed. I have a JBL PILL bluetooth speaker that all of a sudden starting cutting out after 10 minutes of use. You go on online forums to see if there’s a fix (there isn’t) and of course JBL couldn’t give a rat’s a**. Never again JBL.
    Dumb is good.

  8. “Machine learning is a fancy search algorithm.”
    Incorrect.
    They have machines based on neural networks that can discriminate between male and female faces better than humans.
    Neural networks are trained, not programmed, per say. They still need thresholds to be set, etc, but they are definitely not “fancy search algorithms”

  9. I like to turn the heat on at the thermostat. I like to turn the lights on and off at the light itself or a simple switch on the wall. How darn lazy or stupid do you have to be to not do things on a timely basis without any computer crap.

  10. As long as we remain a free country we can vote with our wallets and maintain demand for cheaper simpler quality appliances. The socialist/fascist/globalist movement currently attacking our civilisation could gain the power to force all this technology into every home if it’s in their interest in their pursuit of absolute wealth and power.

  11. “I like to turn the heat on at the thermostat. I like to turn the lights on and off at the light itself or a simple switch on the wall. How darn lazy or stupid do you have to be to not do things on a timely basis without any computer crap.”
    Agreed.
    Folk that are too stupid or lazy to figure out what they need in the fridge, and want the fridge to send them a list on they &*&%* smart-phones are too stupid or lazy to survive.

  12. Folk that are too stupid or lazy to figure out what they need in the fridge
    I use my computer to create my grocery lists. I created a database with all of my household consumable items and their respective costs. Whenever I run now on something, I simply change the quantity box for the applicable item.
    By the end of the week, I know what I need to get and roughly how much I’ll have to spend. I don’t need a “smart” refrigerator or cupboard to tell me that.

  13. My shopping list is created in my head, using an old-fashioned thing called “memory.”
    It’s faster, cheaper and better than any gadget.

  14. My shopping list is created in my head, using an old-fashioned thing called “memory.”
    I used to do that, too, but I also needed to know how much it was going to cost. I created the database I mentioned when I had to watch every penny I spent and I had to make sure that I spent it wisely.

  15. Whomever invented the Ap which tracks every product I have ever seen or searched on the internet … then force-feeds these items back to me on my e-mail page … deserves the guillotine … in the public square … after being publicly violated by 100 AIDS patients. I don’t appreciate having to clear my entire cache after each and every web session. F_

  16. It absolutely astounds me with the amount of ‘smart’ people we have developing all these ‘smart’ devices that allow us all to lead ‘smart’ lives, that we live in a country of people “dumb” enough to vote in ‘smart’ people that are only interested in fleecing us.

  17. “They still need thresholds to be set, etc, but they are definitely not “fancy search algorithms”
    I’m well aware of the the way neural networks function, I’ve been following along since the 1980s. There is nothing intelligent about a neural network, it still works by the same serial Turing machine method as everything else.
    Sure, you can train a piece of software to a high level of functionality using evolutionary algos and all kinds of stuff, but it is never going to be intelligent. It is going to be fast, accurate and thorough. Like an ant.
    Ants are tough and successful. They are not intelligent. They work by search algorithms and by having large numbers of ants.

  18. That Woody Allen bit reminded me of the time my Mom bought a camera with voice commands and the voice was female with a strong Oriental accent. ‘Too dark, too dark’ became ‘too dauk, too dauk’
    It amused us to no end.

  19. It’s a slippery slope. You tell the fridge to send you a list of food and it gets edited down by the bathroom mirror. Next thing you know the toaster won’t toast your pop-tarts.

  20. One of the joys of old, dumb, appliances is that they do what they are supposed to. Our 20 year old oven actually self cleans, our 20 year old dishwasher brings the dishes to “gleaming”, the 20 year old dryer puts real heat into the clothes: all because they are not hobbled with dumb “energy efficiency” standards. Yes, you do pay a little more for hydro and use a bit more water. So what? Living in BC we have cheapish electricity and lots of water.
    Now, the eco-loons hate this. And they love the idea that a “smart appliance” can be remotely programmed to force you to do your laundry “off peak”. Has not happened yet but I have no doubt it is coming. And imagine the fun the centralizer will have when they can control your car.

  21. And the funny thing is, who loves reliable old appliances which last forever, and who loves all the new fangled gadgets that are replaced every two years?
    I was reminiscing about the old TVs which you could almost completely maintain yourself. When something goes wrong, it was almost always a tube. You take the tubes out, and take them to a supermarket (!) which has a tube tester. You t.ested them to find out the one that was bad, buy a new one, go home, put all the tubes back in the TV, and voila! Rarely, it was something on the motherboard, a resistor or capacitor. With minimal ee knowledge you can test what is bad with a meter. Of course, my wife had no appreciation, to her the TV had always been a black box. Alas, it is almost that way to all of us now. I did replace the lamp on my 3LCD wide screen TV, but I think that is the limit of what I can do with it.
    The “Progressives” who call themselves “environmentalists” go all in for these planned obsolescence gadgets, then think they are saving the world because they demonstrate in the park and leave all their trash behind.

  22. A few years ago we were invited to a gathering at a friend’s place. We arrived to find her gas fireplace heating the house because her brand new furnace had packed it in. Something in the computer chips we guessed as she waited for the repairman to show up. I am sure her furnace is much more efficient than my 1950s model but my 1950s model has never failed me. I lube the fan bushings once a year and change the fan motor once every 5 years and my house is always nice and warm.

  23. Why you should buy the dumbest appliances you can find.
    The Federal Liberals went in whole hog on that one!

  24. I like having a thermostat that automatically turns up the heat before I crawl out of bed. That is about as smart as my house needs to get. Although it would be nice if the damn timer on the 5 year old drier still worked.

  27. Ha ha ha … cheap anonymous sex & junk food … are there any more powerful human drives ? You made me laugh, Satan. And, of course, lust after things that will kill me. Mmmmmmm pop Tarts …

  28. “And imagine the fun the centralizer will have when they can control your car.”
    Michael Hastings was unavailable for comment about Wikileaks Vault 7.

  29. Where is Henry Ford when we need him?
    Second, I am going to in invest in battery futures. Those suckers are expensive, especially the ones used in small devices.
    And battery recycling, too. Millions upon millions of batteries are being used for laptops, pads, smartphones, and eventually electric vehicles.

  30. Speaking of TV tube testing machines where the REDBOX kiosk now stands … and planned obsolescence … I moved into my current home 35 years ago (time DOES fly) … and still take the same hot showers every morning from the original 40gal tank water heater that came with my 1940’s era home. We consider our water heater to have been visited and blessed by Our Lady of Fatima. It’s a miracle !! Or … if you are more sciency about these things … I’ve been told that it has lasted so long (through 3-kids lives, which included 2 loads of wash every day for 25 years) … because … it is a glass-lined model. Well, that’s what a plumber-friend told me. More likely that I live in an area with very high quality water (at least before the recent drought). I DO wish that everything I owned was built for (essentially) a lifetimes use. Although, I suppose that would put too many people out of work – as in the economic theory of broken windows.

  31. I have a 300 watt light bulb in our laundry room used by the builder of the house in 1975. That light bulb gets turned on and off numerous times everyday. when we had a full nest it more often even. Still glowing brightly.

  32. I have a kegerator in my garage and a fridge in my house. The only smart thing I need them to do is:
    1) Keep my beer or food cold
    2) Turn on the light inside of them when I switch kegs or look for snacks
    I can pretty much figure out on my own if stuff isn’t cold, or the light doesn’t come on when I open the door.

  34. When we had the electronics fry on our not so old range, I asked the technician when they stopped making appliances that lasted 10 or 15 years. He responded “about fifteen years ago”.
    Not exactly an appliance, but I have a lawn mower that’s nearing 30 years old. Today was the first lawn cutting of the year. It started on the first pull. But then I do change the oil and sparkplug every five years or so.

  35. I think the author is referring to the difficulty in producing intelligently adaptive behavior in a machine.
    That is not what anyone means when they refer to smart devices. Including the article author.
    Also, your understanding of machine learning, neural networks and “fancy search algorithms” is…flawed.

  36. “understanding one’s own intellectual limitations is not a human strong point”
    A machine can’t understand it’s own limitations … and it appears you have a great deal of problems understanding your own.

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