"The manufacturer had the power to remotely disable devices and used it against me for blocking their data collection."

https://codetiger.github.io/blog/the-day-my-smart-vacuum-turned-against-me/

...and people wonder why I resist having that kind of stuff in my home...

@corbet Wow. Surely a remote kill switch violates all kinds of consumer-protection rules? Or maybe not?

@corbet

Can't be boosted often enough.👆

The Future: premium devices will have the label "certified to work without Internet".

@corbet Home Assistant without internet access. If your IoT device won't work in this environment, return it.

@corbet I own only dumb stuff, even analog timers. Also my robots are dumb and they work fine.

@corbet Agree with the message, but the stupid AI slop message in the article make this unshareable for me.

Piss on carpet.

@corbet I don't just resist, but ban them entirely...

@corbet Not enough people take stuff back to the store. Story time. I replaced the "3 weeks of printing" printer cartridges that my HP printer shipped with, with third party cartridges, it worked fine until they updated it to not worth with third party cartridges. I knew the update was coming, it was all over tech news, but I hated the idea of it. I took it back to the store, feined innocence and they sent it away to HP. A few weeks later they sent it back with a new "3 week" printer cartridge..

@corbet

Talented fellow to pull it apart and then put it back together!

That morsel of advice, to never use the same WiFi for IoT devices and your actual computers is something most people ignore. It's a major effort to setup, and the priority slides down the list unless something out of the ordinary nudges them.

@ewen OpenWrt makes setting up an alternative SSID trivially easy; there is really no reason *not* to do it. (And little reason not to run OpenWrt, but that's a separate story...)

@corbet

No no no no no and no.

None of this is trivial to 99% of humanity. PLEEEEEEEASE see this from the perspective of regular humans!

@ewen @corbet setting up an extra SSID is mostly easy for people who know what an SSID is without looking it up. Which is a fairly small slice of humanity.

But it's worse than that -- I don't think putting IoT devices on their own SSID *but the same underlying network* makes much sense. You'd probably like IoT networks to look more like guest networks, with strictly controlled access to other devices. Which needs (at a minimum) VLANs and an extra set of firewall policies, all of which depend on so many things that there's no way to produce any sort of useful cookbook for people with moderate amounts of technical skill.

And then you'll discover that there's no good way to actually configure new IoT devices without moving a phone onto the IoT network. And some features will just silently fail to work if you don't have direct IP access to the IoT device from a phone. And useful things like mDNS won't work at all unless you go to heroic lengths.

I'm perfectly capable of setting up an IoT network at home. I even have most of the config for it rolled out. But I've never moved a single device into the IoT network, because it's just going to make everything extra-painful in practice.

@corbet ...and a note saying "Only use genuine HP printer cartridges". That rubbed me the wrong way. After that set of cartridges ran out I took the printer back and demanded a full refund from the store. Then I bought an Epson supertank printer. Say not to DRM.

@corbet Yet another example of #enshittification. @pluralistic writes about things like this quite often. Example:
https://pluralistic.net/2025/10/20/post-american-internet/#huawei-with-american-characteristics

@laird @corbet

Exquisite description of the drama required to isolate IoT from anything important. Right down to the "Oh crap I'm six steps into configuring a device over the Thread network but I forgot to change my phone to the IoT network first. Urgh. Start over."

I have actually implemented those firewall rules to restrict what IoT devices can see. And in the back of my mind I'm thinking "What if I missed something?"

And then there's the maintenance in case something stops working.

The average person will go to Office Depot and buy a box that says "Fast Internet". Even if there was a wifi/router that would setup your separate IoT network by default and manage all those firewall rules, people would still choose a product that is cheaper or has pretty flashing LEDs.

And governments let this go on. There is zero effort from my govt to regulate for products that protect consumers. The govt has a website telling us to "be alert for scammers" and other malarkey, with absolutely zero tools that might actually help avoid the average person from having their digital life stolen, let alone just being spied on by corporations.

@corbet I refuse to buy any robot I cannot take control over using Valetudo.

I converted our second robot just this Sunday, 5 years after buying and converting our first one. Now we have two working ones, and they free up so much time!

PS: the full conversion process took a bit less than 2h despite needing full disassembly (the Roborock S6 Pure isn't the easiest to root, but it was super cheap second hand at just 89€).

@corbet Yeah getting a second hand one and installing Valetudo on it one day.

@ewen
My vacuum ECOVACS Deebot N30 Pro Omni refused the special character "@" in my house Wifi SSID, so I run it on my phone access point, which I switch on and off at will. If off, the start button of my vacuum chooses at random to mop or to vacuum so it is useless.
@corbet

@mupuf @corbet very cool! wondering if someone could make a local business out of converting cheap vacuum cleaners etc. to offline devices? 🤔

@corbet
click link
see AI-generated header image
close tab

@ewen @corbet Urrg.. Even if the damm thing has it own private vlan, I still dont like a thinguie like that to drive around remote controlled in my home, with a camera capable of live streaming.

@benjaoming @mupuf @corbet Having to many project in my drawer already. I could definetly see myselv forking out some money to someone I trust, to buy a rooted vacum.

@dfs_comedy
These have been around for a long time. If not explicitly, then in critical features that stop working when the manufacturer changes their backend.

Wait until you hear about the tractors. Turning those off at the wrong time could kill more people than most munitions.
@corbet

@corbet Many sentences in this post sound like they're written by GenAI.

There are many instances of "It's not x, it's y", for example.

@corbet @lizmeyer Could be stupider. One of the headlines (Times or FT, can’t remember which) included the memorable ‘light switches not working’ line as part of the crisis…..

@corbet @Consumentenbond

@corbet @brucelawson Fascinating.

@ewen @laird @corbet
I worry it will take considerably less than ten years until appliances are non longer needing your Wifi, because they will (no user intervention possible) form their own mesh network with anything else around including your neighbours and random cars that are passing by

@corbet I've experienced this back when I had a lot of "smart" appliances. Got rid of them all after it became too much.

@Laberpferd @ewen @corbet I would really like this to be wrong. I'm not sure that I'd bet against it, though. This would be a PR disaster *today*, but a lot of the things that are relatively OK today would have been front page news a decade ago.

@Laberpferd @ewen @laird ...or they just have their own cellular interface...

https://lwn.net/Articles/850218/

@corbet

The Philipp K. Dick estate will sue for copyright infringement...

(note that someone suing reality for copyright infringement would actually be extremely Dickian)

@corbet
> To test the system, I built my own control system

You lost me way before that. 🎃

But building your own control system is just crazy.

@corbet
Agree, the #aislop causes me to not boost. Which is unfortunate 🎃

@corbet @laird @ewen @Laberpferd some people noticed that most solar panel inverters are sold with preinstalled mobile communications hardware.

https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/ghost-machine-rogue-communication-devices-found-chinese-inverters-2025-05-14/

@corbet @ewen
Alternative SSID is not the same as alternative VLAN, and setting up DHCP and routing for said VLAN as well as being able to set rules to firewall it save for certain ports and...

Even in any open WRT/related platform this isn't trivial. Multiple SSID names to the same network is trivial, multiple networks is not.

@SteffoSpieler @corbet .... genAI got its tendencies from somewhere.

@SteffoSpieler @corbet i think you're right, the whole thing has the tone and cadence of "please rewrite this for me" or "write a paragraph about this". the only thing it doesn't have is emoji headings.

@KayOhtie @corbet @ewen just did a VLAN this morning for my IoT! But yeah you need specialized hardware

@KayOhtie @corbet @ewen ough actually now it’s not working lol, was working this morning which is strange

@corbet there’s of course the horrible orwellian nightmare of putting these little robots in your house that answer to a mega corp

But for me it’s just like, what is actualy the utility of having a smart vacuum? seems to be not practical, more prone to error, idk how an operating system would help with the suction at all, rediculous realy that such a product exists