• TrackinDaKraken@lemmy.world
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    23 hours ago

    Soon, every fuckin’ thing you buy that plugs in will have an app, and demand to connect to the internet, and do it’s damnedest to make that happen, whether you let it or not. There’s probably a generic, dedicated chipset or board that does just this available for OEM purchase that they just wire into whatever they’re building. Fans, speakers, TVs and monitors, every appliance, lights, clocks, push vacuums, pet feeders, smoke alarms, anything you can think of. They’ll add some feature that no one wants to justify the camera, mic and internet connection. Or, they’ll just hide it, because whatever law might be used against them for doing that would not be strong enough to outweigh the profits, if it’s enforced at all.

    If you have old appliances without these “features”, do your best to keep them working.

    This won’t stop until we kick the capitalist out of our governments.

    • SirEDCaLot@lemmy.today
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      7 hours ago

      There’s probably a generic, dedicated chipset or board that does just this available for OEM purchase that they just wire into whatever they’re building.

      Yup. It’s called an Espressif ESP8266, and it’s spawned a bunch of variants including the more powerful ESP32. It’s a little microcontroller on a circuit board with an antenna on the board, cost about $1-$2 in quantity, out of the box it speaks WiFi and most variants now have Bluetooth also. It’s got enough intelligence on board to run a simple IoT gadget, and if you want more it’ll act as the communication module for your larger system board. And since it’s got all the RF approvals (FCC, CE, etc) already done, it means you can add RF communication to your product without expensive RF certification.
      In fact, use an external low voltage power supply (which comes with its own certification), and pretty much the only regulatory testing you need to do is to prove it won’t spontaneously catch fire.

      Anyway there’s over a dozen variants of ESP-family chips and boards with various capabilities. Here’s an example. Or that same example mounted on a breakout development board. See the pinout here- this little module is a proverbial tub of Legos with TONS of capability to unlock.

      Then throw in some cloud platforms like Tuya that will handle most of the cloudiness so all the developer needs to do is write an app and sell products.

    • Dæmon S.@catodon.rocks
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      20 hours ago

      There’s also a social factor in play: yes, I could refrain from having “smart” apparata (and face the crushing social ostracism stemmed from this choice), but if one of my neighbors have a “smart” apparatus, depending on which one it is, it could technically be used to spy on me. I mean, the whole polemic involving Meta’s Creep-Glass has to do exactly with how those things can be used and are being used to spy on others, unbeknownst to said others who never ever purchased a Creep-Glass.

      !technology@lemmy.world

      • willington@lemmy.dbzer0.com
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        7 hours ago

        Exactly. Even if you do everything right as an individual, if the society you live in is shit, your personal discipline will not protect you.

        And then some ahole will tell you not to take any of it personally. Because if the bad thing is only happening to you, it’s horrible and you deserve to be angry. But if the same thing is happening to everyone, then you get to smile and carry on like it’s normal, and like it is supposed to be like that.