By buying the device and then breaking the lock-in, one does more harm to the anti-consumer device manufacturer than had they done nothing at all.
I think this is bad for customers. If every vendor does this, and regulators don't set regulations that balance the interests of companies with the interests of customers, than the only option people have are things like this.
Vendors want to have their cake and eat it. They are no longer happy with a one-time sale, they want a continuous revenue stream. I have absolutely no qualms about buying "subsidized" devices and liberating them. I am not going to pay five times the price of a "smart TV" for a commercial display with worse specs when I can buy the consumer version and not connect it to the Internet or root it.
I don't see the difference. How would you reduce their influence without harming them?
What exactly is the subsidy here?
Is it that they plan to meet a bulk of their profit target after the sale, instead of frontloading the profit. The subsidy can be considered a 1000 dollars on a 200 dollar device if their target price is 1200 dollars.
It is only really subsidized if the device is actually sold below cost of BOM & essential software needed minus bloat. I'm skeptical that they are giving away hardware below cost based on potential profits.
There is no competition in the space anymore. Not on that. You either get crudded-up devices or a panel that doesn’t have the fundamental AV capabilities required of a living room TV.
Who pays for those ads/tracking/etc... companies that want to sell stuff to the consumer. Congratulations, subsidization just introduced more middlemen which extract more profit from the consumer.
The simpler things can be, the cheaper things can be.
The goal is to do harm to anti-consumer companies. Buying their (subsidized) hardware, and then breaking their lock-in so you and others aren't shown ads or forced to pay useless subscriptions, harms the company.
Only if you can guarantee that the vendor is going to remain in business forever, and provide service and support for the product forever.
Neither of those things happen. Ever.
If the manufacturer subsidizes the hardware purchase, that loss is realized at hardware purchase time.
Years ago, this was true. But today, selling your personal information isn't a loss leader. It's additional profit on top of the profit from the product.
In the meantime they continue to function as "dumb" devices just fine.
For any device that needs to connect to the internet, you want to be able to use dns and ip block lists at the very least.
These changes are on my todo list. Tvs especially need to be quarantined. They scan your network to datamine and try to report your conversations to the tv manufacturer.
The next step is root the tvs and clean off as much junk as possible.
Apple's HomeKit allows you to firewall your IoT devices, if you have a Wifi router that supports it.
Since that kind of privacy cuts into the profits of shady IoT companies, they don't support HomeKit.
I'm not interested in trading my privacy for the pithy convenience of moving the dishwasher start button from the machine to my phone.
[1]: Yes, I know. There exists Matter-upgradeable widgets that must be connected to the Internet before becoming usable as Matter devices; send those back. I'm also aware that there's Matter devices that require Internet in order to be useful[2], but every instance I've seen of that is just something that was designed by a moron, imbecile, or idiot; send those back, too. Returns cost these companies money.
[2]: https://www.reddit.com/r/TrySwitchBot/comments/1j8ogt8/matte...
Thread should not have allowed Internet connectivity by default.
> (..) the ability to commission a finished product into a Matter network in the field mandates certification and membership fees, entailing both one-time, recurring, and per-product costs. This is enforced using a public key infrastructure (PKI) and so-called device attestation certificates.
Matter is designed to necessitate phoning into the internet for certification, which allows all manufacturers to just easily add-in phoning into the internet for telemetry. Furthermore, it does not define exactly which functionality must remain if a device is disconnected from the internet for a long time (assuming the user is trying to avoid sending out telemetry, not even bypassing certification).
It’s the commissioners that check for the certification: your phone or an open source implementation.
And the commissioners can, explicitly by the specification, commission other devices while completely offline.
That's a little disingenuous... All Matter-over-WiFi devices inherently have Internet access unless you're blocking it through router policy, and most Matter-over-Thread border routers commercially available today give Thread devices Internet access by default if they want it (to avoid this you need to self-host your own OTBR instance).
The connected home was an idealistic dream that has been made perverse by the Zucks and Elons of the world. It is not accessible for normal people and it might never be - at least, not without the blood sacrifice of your privacy.
The other fun thing about them is because they talk Wi-Fi frequencies, if you break into them they can also be reprogrammed to act like a hotspot, or start commanding _other_ devices.
So if you send a drone up the side of an office building to the executives floor, and can break into one lightbulb wirelessly, you can then make that lightbulb break into all the other lightbulbs, until you reach the secluded inner rooms, and you can make that lightbulb listen for Wi-Fi traffic and can pretend to be a hotspot for the targetted executive's laptop. Like in the movies!
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322969640_IoT_Goes_...
I (with heavy LLM help) recently R.E. a golf cart motor controller which had a USB interface for programming, but only a crappy proprietary windows application, and it was super satisfying to see it hum attached to Linux.
What would be even more satisfying to see would be companies that were chill about this kind of work, instead of sending[1] legal threats[2] to people doing the work that they should be doing in the first place.
Basically a git repo with instructions that would maybe pull in rea and set all this up.
Hopefully, hopefully this new trend can break the cycle of using software to turn things into subscription services that should never be subscription services. I'm terrified that manufactures will respond with hardware encryption and legal maneuvering, but perhaps by then there will be an even larger and thriving ecosystem of open hardware as the ease of setting it up and integrating it with AI accelerates its adoption.
I used to have a small counter-top dishwasher that relied on proprietary soap cartridges. The dishwasher itself was fairly good and effective, and after hacking the cartridges to allow them to be refilled the overall price was quite acceptable!
It's easier to setup and maintain schedules, routines, or more complex functionality.
It's certainly not critical functionality, but it's nice. Same with my laundry machine and dryer sending a push notification when the cycle ends. Unnecessary, but nice.
Complex like wanting to hit the "Good night" button in Apple Home and have it turn the purifier to full blast for white noise, the workflow in TFA that wasn't possible with the app experience?
For an air purifier, I feel like I'd probably want to see outcome-level statistics convincing me it actually matters to lifespan, healthspan, quality of life, something, anything at all, to know and adjust minute-by-minute the exact air quality going through a purifier, or for that matter what the purifier is able to detect even reflects the quality of air elsewhere in a house with a whole lot of air volume not going through that purifier very regularly.
The most fascinating part of this wave of LLM reverse engineering is seeing how many weird and poor choices were lying in plain sight.
Any number of people could have discovered and exploited this, but it’s tedious work. Most people who can do this are busy with their job and other things. Now LLMs enable people who understand these things to quickly get through the tedious parts, so they can do a lot more of this work in their free time than they could before.
Would love to understand the decision-making behind this at Coway (or their firmware contractor). Anyone care to guess why someone would make this choice?
My guess: At some point in the past, a firmware was developed without plans to include firmware update functionality. The team that did this was later burned when the client tried to use a new certificate that the hardcoded, unchangeable system didn't recognize.
Angry meetings occurred, developers were chastised, and someone realized they could avoid that problem by fetching an updated root CA on demand. They did it over HTTP to avoid a chicken and egg problem.
In hardware manufacturing, everything is about crossing items off the list of problems. A problem was raised, someone came up with an idea to solve that problem, and it was implemented. The practice might have spread to other products because it became institutional knowledge about how to avoid a problem that made a customer angry once.
This is from my experience in the consumer hardware industry. If you're not watching the outsourced development closely, they will take the easiest route to solve the problem in front of them and nobody will consider any other consequences.
The air purifier market is full of garbage because consumers don't understand how these products work or what their tradeoffs are.
The root problem is that these products are designed the wrong way around. They almost all use custom-fit HEPA filters. That sounds great, HEPA is good, right? Except HEPA is really not good for household air filtering. HEPA is so fine that even air struggles to move through it. It's also far more fine than the common contaminants (dust and pollen) need. Because it's so fine, you need a VERY powerful fan to move any air through it, which means the purifier will be very loud.
Finer filters are not better. There are two things you want to optimize for:
1: CADR - clean air delivery rate. This is essentially how much air you can move through the filter per hour, multiplied by how much of the contaminant you can catch each time that air passes through the filter.
2: Volume - It doesn't matter how amazing your air purifier is if it sounds like a tornado. If you only run it for a few minutes before getting annoyed, the purifier is not doing its job. Every moment it is OFF it is not doing its job. Many purifiers try to use sensors to determine when to run the filter, but this fundamentally a flawed approach and just means you have low quality air 99% of the time.
The solution to these problem is a less-fine filter. For dust and pollen, something like MERV13/14 is absolutely fine. It will catch most of those on each pass, and because air moves through it so much easier - you can run the same air through it many times more in the same period of time. This results in an air purifier that is whisper quiet, keeps the air far cleaner, and can use off-the-shelf furnace air filters that are VERY cheap compared to custom-fit HEPAs which may stop being made the moment that purifier product line inevitably ceases to exist. (Note: This is mainly true in the US, said filters are harder to find elsewhere)
Combine MERV13/14 with off-the-shelf PC case fans (which have been optimized for decades to be as quiet and long-lasting as possible) and the result is an easily-maintainable, quiet, highly-effective purifier.
NOTE: People dealing with VOCs/odors need an entirely different approach that HEPA won't really solve either, for that you need activated charcoal which will run out almost instantly in the amounts common purifiers come with. You need a gigantic block of the stuff to last more than a month or two.
I'm confused by your dust and pollen comment. What about PM2.5, is this mostly dust or are you not that concerned about this vs dust?
1 20" box fan.
4 20" mirv 13 filters (cheapest is likely costco or lowes or home depot - buy in a 4 pack to save money).
More info Search "Corsi-Rosenthal Box" or click https://filterbuy.com/resources/air-filter-basics/how-to-bui...
Don't go hepa because it slows down the filtering too much. I use this technique in my house and it cuts down on pollen, smoke and mold. You'll feel a lot better than a tiny expensive hepa that has proprietary filters.
I'm seeing some 3d printed projects popping up that look to be filling this gap though.
And I can override or change it from Apple Home.
The smart plug lets it verify that the fan is actually running, (because it measures usage) and we worked out that after a power cycle the Vornado goes back to a known state, and we can find the speed by forcing it all the way to 4 and then stepping back.
Need to try to get Sonoff bridge rigged up next but have been busy messing with Hatch alarm
That said, the non-wifi model works perfectly with a simple HomeKit compatible on/off plug, so all this work — despite being very, very cool — seems a little pointless?
I am wondering how the big corporate will respond sooner or later. Because it is clear and they know that as well with the every rising capability of LLM more people will find ways to liberate their hardware from such unnecessary dependency and accept less the money drain.
Their ESP also uses Secure Boot... I don't know that there isn't a way to break in, but I wasn't able to find one short of hardware notification :/
While this is impressive: Why not just get a not-cloud one in the first place? Why does an air purifier need to be controlled via wi-fi?
I'm against a lot of smart home things because its actually more maintenance, not less, to have to think about an object connecting to wifi, to have to decide whether or not to control it (what are you even doing to it?) And I suppose to have to write your own drivers or app. Why allow it to occupy this much mental space for you?
Setting up almost never takes more than a few seconds for me. I have Apple home, it’s almost always scan a QR code, wait a few seconds for wifi and done.
Also it’s fun to mess with.
It is convenient to be able to monitor air quality from your phone, sourced from a device that is designed to improve it. Because then you can see how much of an impact it is actually making, move it to a different location with better airflow, etc.
I have the non-wifi version, and have to use a separate device for it.
One of the nice things about air purifiers, unlike owning a boat or leaving a stove on, is that its never going to surprise you in a bad way. You don't need to really monitor anything, it will just purify some air. Do you really want to be bringing that under the umbrella of the stuff you monitor? Maybe this is an irreconcilable difference and we cannot see it the other person's way.
Suddenly there are so many products to play with that would have previously been undesirable! This is one of the good things AI has enabled.
God forbid our fans, our fans of all things, might be broken of their dependencies on the internet. The plebians can't be allowed to do that. Every relay must be cloud-connected so it can be monetized and disabled for whatever dumb ass reasons someone might want to disable it.
I hear this a lot but I've never hit this.
For weeks now I've been working on a shared recompilation project of Switch 1 and 2 games, and Opus 5.5 has handled that with no issue.
Over 10 supported Switch 1 games, and 3 supported Switch 2 games, and never once has Opus 5.5 denied anything
Opus 5.5 will absolutely refuse to touch anti-cheat systems in video games, even when the end game isn't to cheat but to work on Linux compatibility or to bypass/spoof the checks to enable gameplay.
Mistral, QWEN, and other models (read non-American) tend to have little to no restrictions. There were some tasks where I was actively trying to sabotage my own local network and Mistral had no issue helping. Anthropic and OpenAI refused outright or had to be "convinced" but would often hit further barricades along the way.
So this only works on products that was developed before ~now.
The solution is to not buy crap regardless if you can make it work or not.
You're under the assumption that the companies producing these give a shit about security. It'll probably increase a bit but I doubt it will be by much. If they have shipped devices that leave the doors wide open for almost any intrusion, they won't invest engineering/AI time and money to make these better than before and certainly won't review the code that the model spit out beyond a quick check if the promised base functionality still works.
I'm going to guess that you will spend more money on this than just buying a light that has smart features compatible with your smart home ecosystem. You can't mix two smart systems on one cord - this has never worked. Where to put the smart is a tricky question as there are pros and cons to every answer, but in general the smarts need to be in exactly one place or things won't work.
It will unfortunately be a lot harder to free those devices
I am tired of having dust everywhere.
If you don't mind the hum of fans, it's hard to beat a Corsi-Rosenthal box... there are kits from cleanairkits.com or cybernightmarket.com to build quiet PC fan based boxes that in my experience work excellent and can use off-the shelf filters and parts
You can't install a true HEPA filter directly in a typical residential system, but you can have an HVAC tech install a bypass system in the air handler that would allow part of the air stream to be filtered via HEPA continuously. If you build the system (or house) from scratch and express your intentions to the HVAC contractor you could plausibly use direct HEPA filtration for 100% of airflow.
https://www.lennoxpros.com/healthy-climate-hepa-60-bypass-ai...