We really do live in a boring dystopia
I work in IT and I keep a baseball bat handy in case I suspect a device has gone online.
However what a ridiculous situation on Amazon’s part and it raises a bigger question. Even if this guy was 100% a racist shitbag, should he have had his Amazon account suspended unilaterally in the first place? Should someone have their bank account closed too then? How about utilities? I obviously am not agreeing with someone being racist but think that allowing corporations to impulsively take punitive actions is a slippery slope. Next thing we know, Amazon will be offering capital punishment as a service.
I’m of the opinion the “smart” home thing was just unintentional secondary, I can’t imagine them being smart enough to do so on purpose.
This sounds like it leads to the capitalist version of social credit scores.
Aggree, that’s not being an excuse to be a racist shitbag, but why does Amazon cares about this? This sets a dangerous precedent now, anyone who criticize something that the Amazon overlord like might get banned.
I mean if that man was doing something bad for the business side of Amazon (stealing, annoying customer support and whatnot) yeah sure but what he does outside of Amazon does not impact them?
No better reason to ditch the internet of things.
“The cloud is just somone else’s computer”
This is one of the many reasons why you don’t buy devices that require cloud services to function.
Pretty much like a car these days
Reason 89327458934795 I will never have any smart home shit in my house that I can’t host myself.
I’m on the bandwagon of no “smart home” devices that connect to the cloud. I build a lot my own little controllers with the ESP8266/ESP32 using MQTT to communicate with OpenHAB.
OpenHAB has served me well, but I started using it so long ago that I have not tried out some of the newer options like HomeAssistant.
Here is one of the devices I developed a long tome ago. It used an old chimera of a board, the Arduino Yùn. https://www.instructables.com/Introducing-Climaduino-The-Arduino-Based-Thermosta/
The code referenced in the Instructable is much older code. I don’t think I have my current and much simpler code on Github for the ESP8266. If there is any interest, I can push it.
My new code just turns things on or off and monitors temperature and humidity.
HomeAssistant has been around almost as long as OpenHAB (2013 vs. 2010), so it’s not exactly “newer”. It’s good that there are several open source options, but I don’t see anything wrong with sticking with what works for you (OpenHAB for me as well, btw).
Even if the accusation had been true, Amazon shouldn’t have this ability.
This is dystopian. Amazon should be crushed and split into hundreds smaller companies.
It’s mind boggling that the victim writing all of this is still delusional about Amazon making a change based on this incident. From listening to what Louise read it doesn’t even seem like the victim is fully set on removing echo/Amazon, just “strongly considering it”. At this point they deserve every bit of headache and misfortune that comes from continuing to deal with Amazon.
I work in IT, and I don’t have any ‘smart’ things at home. I don’t want to come home and troubleshoot more dumb junk.
I don’t even have a smart watch. My watch tells the time, has a timer, etc and that’s all I need.
I try to have the best of both worlds - my home is primarily run on a Zigbee network from a Raspberry Pi with a Conbee, which is then linked up to Homebridge which talks to HomeKit (being in the Apple ecosystem).
This means I get the creature comforts of a consumer home cloud service like Apple Home, but I get to call all the shots - controls are all local, and if I wanted to get my home off the cloud, I can without any reprocussions.
It’s surprisingly very reliable as well - I haven’t had a single minor hiccup for more than 12 months, and even then, the last one just required a reboot of the Pi.
Are there any voice assistant solutions that run locally? Don’t really care about conversational stuff. Just the basic ‘lights on’ type commands.
There are open source options. The main limitation is hardware. I would love to be able to reuse the half a dozen Google speakers I have for something local that works with Home Assistant!
The pieces are all there (STT, TTS, and the wyoming protocol), and hassio has made voice the number one priority this year, so I would assume hardware voice support is high on the priority list. Fingers crossed!
