• Quite (unregistered)

    "Take a peak"? !!!

    PEEK!

  • Basic Interpreter (unregistered) in reply to Quite

    Nice of you to poke fun at a peek.

  • Dave (unregistered)

    Buying a NEST thermostat before it was cool. In other words, buying it before it went bankrupt and still worked.

  • TheCPUWizard (unregistered)

    "You hook your toaster up to the WiFi and suddenly it’s part of a botnet swarm mining BitCoins." -- but it is so satisfying when warm BitCoins start popping out of the toaster <wink>

  • Quite (unregistered)

    Of course, the prudent man would either not get one of those stupid Alexa toys, or just not watch the TV. Both, for optimum lifestyle improvement.

  • Pudge601 (unregistered)

    I'm going to be that guy, and say that I've been a huge sceptic of IoT since I first heard about it.

    It's an entire industry built around the backwards principle of finding problems for their existing solution, rather than solutions to existing problems.

    "We can make a wine refrigerator which has a CPU and connects to the internet! What problems can we solve with this?!"

    None. Nobody has a problem where the solution is a smart wine fridge.

  • Wolf (unregistered)

    The 'S' in "IoT" stands for for Security. ;)

  • PJRZ (unregistered) in reply to Wolf

    But there is no 'S' in...Ooohhhh.

    (Someone had to say it).

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered)

    Because it is more usually known as the IoST ... Internet of Shit Things.

  • RichP (unregistered)

    So does the WiFi tea maker analyze your Google search history for food and drink queries, enabling it to construct a customized drink just for your palate that tastes almost, but not quite, entirely unlike tea?

  • Unhelpful (unregistered)

    internetofshit on twitter catalogues this sort of stuff.

  • Gubbo (unregistered)

    I don't get the problem with the door lock link. It looks like engineers just looking for something to play with, in the full knowledge that its a silly solution.

  • Calli Arcale (unregistered) in reply to Wolf

    OK, that's totally going into my quotelist.

  • Herby (unregistered)

    Now there is a plan. Harvest the energy from all those fidget spinners and sell it on the open market. Sure it is just a little, but think of the volume. Then you WiFi connect it for the Win-Win.

    What a business plan :-)

  • Ex-lurker (unregistered) in reply to Wolf

    And the "P" is for Privacy.

  • NotAnIOTBotHonest (unregistered) in reply to Pudge601

    The problem is having too much money

  • Bubba (unregistered)

    https://hackaday.io/project/25372-iot-pov-fidget-spinner

    Wi-Fi connected fidget spinner

  • Pickle (unregistered)

    If only Google had sent Hangouts to live on a nice farm upstate with Wave and the childhood dog; they just forced it as a replacement to Google Chat in Gmail browser windows, and my friend group is pissed.

  • Ulysses (unregistered)

    Inherently Overrated Technology.

  • Bob (unregistered)

    Another issue with IoT is that everybody is so greedy to scoop up all your personal information - what you buy, what you eat, where you go, what you do - that there's little to no inter-connectivity between devices. I just exercised up a sweat on my IoT stairmaster, but my thermostat doesn't know to crank up the AC and my fridge 'n' kettle aren't working together to make me some nice iced tea. Even in the rare instances there is some inter-connectivity, it's usually only between devices made by the same manufacturer. Nobody wants to work to a standard because then they'd have to share in the profits on all that valuable data-harvesting. Even the few instances when they do try to standardize, they don't get too far. This makes IoT devices even more useless than they already are. There arguably is potential for smart devices but the way companies are going at it completely sabotages their efforts.

  • löchlein deluxe (unregistered)

    The worrying thing is how much of this Bruce Bethke wrote into Headcrash more than 20 years ago. ("Everybody password-protects their startup, I password-protect my shutdowns, ever since the frat pledge of running through the library shouting "shut down"".)

    Probably still a fun-ish read today, if you're old enough to remember Doom and skip the last third or so of the book.

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered) in reply to löchlein deluxe

    Remembering Doom makes you old? Oh bollocks!

    Mind you, I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D

  • (nodebb)

    "It keeps a list of the wines you are storing"

    Open fridge, look in fridge, close fridge. Done.

  • MiserableOldGit (unregistered) in reply to bjolling

    if fridge.wines.count > 0 then call open_bottle() else call self.kick(hard) end if

  • ZoomST (unregistered)

    It should be called "Internet of Laziness" Iol. Most of these devices are offered to save you the damned execcise needed to go to your wine fridge and check what is inside. Who doesn't want to save this much amount of time and effort?

  • my name is missing (unregistered)

    I love the i(di)OT spam comments. We should Wifi enable spam commenting.

  • WasitNotOvbious (unregistered)

    I'm sad that Qualcomm didn't go with call it "SneakerNet"

  • Toby J (unregistered)

    "Burger King wants in on that action, with its commercial that tries to trick your Google Assistant into searching for burgers. That’s also not the first time that a commercial has trigged voice commands, and I can guarantee that it isn’t going to be the last."

    Far from the first either! Back in the 80s, when touch tone phones were all the rage, there were 1-900 numbers that targeted kids who could call and speak with Bozo the Clown or Hulk Hogan or whoever, and they'd play ads for them during morning cartoons. One such enterprising company told young kids, "hold your phone up to the TV to speak with Santa Claus!" and then they would play the touch tones to dial the number for them. Profit!

  • Lee Ryman (unregistered)

    "WiFi enabled fidget spinner"

    Don't even suggest such a thing.

    Next moment, the droids in HR in head office will be sending such devices out to operators, who will then phone helpdesk with inane out-of-the-blue requests about their fidget spinner app not being able to connect. Some poor desktop support guy will spend four hours fart-arsing around clicking random boxes only to find out they can't make it work. Then, because everything that comes out of head office immediately had higher priority than a manufacturing mill's computer systems continuing to run, the problem will be escalated to the IT business partner, who will then flow it downhill to the computer systems engineer, who will then waste a day finding out that the POS app isn't proxy aware, trying to explain this to mill management, who have taken an interest in said WiFi enabled fidget spinner for the supposed health benefits and demand that it is made to work. Next thing Forefront clients will be being installed, which will then be used by staff to install malware on their PCs. HR will then refuse to act on the breach of computing policy, whilst selling the next greatest app/IoT device to HO. And so the cycle continues.

    I'm not bitter, not at all...

  • Gene Wirchenko (unregistered)

    As I posted a while back on RISKS, IoT is Insecurely Designed Internet of Things.

  • Friendly_Reminder (unregistered)

    I recently met a person with the first name "Alexa". This might be the source of many future WTFs. "Oh hey Alexa, thanks for buying this awesome fidget spinner for me!"

  • Apathy (unregistered)

    "Mind you, I remember playing Wolfenstein 3D"

    That's an idea for the weekend, I'm sure there was one secret area I never found, now where did I put that floppy disk? and drive?

    Anyone know if it'll run on Win7? or will I have to dig out the Win95 disk as well?

  • Gandor (unregistered)

    Apathy - looks like someone does not know dosbox. And yes - you could play it even on android today ;)

  • Cyber (unregistered)

    People open up their homes and pass control of it to companies that themselves deliberately hide what they are using that power for by using closed source software to use the power that those people have given them.

    Why do people trust these untrustworthy companies so much?

  • Pixelated Executioner (unregistered)

    Internet of Shoes? Come on, totally missed opportunity.

    Should have called it the "Sprinternet." Duh.

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