This is a gen x complaint. Boomers would just ask their kids to set it up because they can’t get it to work. Gen x realizes what is going on and that it is bullshit to need an account for a fucking lightbulb.
I think it’s a complaint from everyone but Gen z, who are just used to it.
Somewhere between milennial and gen-z here. I can’t fucking stand making more accounts just because companies want to collect data. And neither can my gen-z younger siblings.
Used to it ≠ Not complaining about it
Ah. Resignation is NOT acceptance.
Withdrawal in disgust is not the same as apathy.
I think this is a common-sense complaint, mostly unrelated to generation.
Gen z to me is just the boomers mark II.
For what reason? That doesn’t make any sense.
I meet a lot of overentitled Gen z. They remind me of the boomers that I also meet a lot of. Of course neither group can see it.
This might surprise you, but people are people no matter what generation they were born in.
Boomers is a name for a specific reason.
My late 50s mum happily signs up with her Facebook to everything. Meanwhile it’s often the people in their late 20s to 30s who were introduced to computers during their youth before everything had super streamlined GUIs who know enough about software that they realize this is a privacy concern, what internet privacy means, and why it’s important. People who are older or younger than that have to go out of their way to learn how and why to look behind the easy interfaces. That’s my experience and explanation at least.
Remember when our parents were super nuts about keeping your info private online, not revealing too much info to strangers, and not signing up for stupid shit? My my, how the turntables.
My 70yo mom thinks I’m crazy paranoid because of my data privacy stances, while she’s dealing with constant spam and account hacks. Guess who hasn’t had damn near any info issues? :D
I was never allowed to be on Club penguin or the like. I also wasn’t allowed to be on Facebook when it became popular around me, until I was 14. Mum, what happened?
Tbf you weren’t missing much with Facebook. It was kinda cool in the early days when it replaced MySpace (like Reddit to Digg), but that went out the window pretty quick when all your extended family are calling your parents wondering why there are tagged pictures of you dancing around a fire half naked with a liquor bottle in your hand at 3am.
My young family members are the worst, they just click “yes” to everything, regardless of any effort I’ve made to explain how things work.
Any barrier to convenience is too frustrating to them. They don’t like even using full applications in their laptops, always say “wheres the app, this is too complex”. 🤦🏼♂️
that’s not just young people that’s 80~90% of users
You’re not wrong. Ffs.
I’d say you made the point better than any of us.
I know some network security folks, in their 40’s, who’ve literally said “I don’t want to be inconvenienced” when discussing why they tolerate this invasive shit.
Motherfucker, your job is securing networks. You know first hand the kind of shit going on out there.
I really wish more things just let me log in with Facebook, I don’t want to fill out and make passwords for every pointless site. At least I can be somewhat confident that Facebook will follow security standards.
Might I recommend a reasonably secure browser with an in-built password generator and manager? I use Firefox. You make up a username and it generates a safe password and saves it so you don’t have to remember it’d Just use a safe password for the browser itself that you can easily remember. I personally feel that’s a decent compromise between secure and convenient.
I love the basic instructions for someone debating security policy nuance. It’s like you don’t get that he’s way, way, way beyond “pick a password you can easily remember” despite the technical level of the discussion.
The person I’m replying to isn’t the only one reading the comment. Chances are someone who’s on the fence or hasn’t interacted with the issue yet will benefit from it a little. That’s what I like to think at least.
They still have a profile on everyone, established long before we could limit anything.
Hahahahahaha Facebook follow security standards? Your fucking kidding, right?
Facebook, probably the first greatest scourge of privacy invading companies (worse than Google), follows secjrity standards?
The motherfuckers have a profile on me, and I’ve never once been on any Facebook website or service, let alone logged into any Facebook crap.
Based on their long track record of privacy excellence?
Boomers would get the bulb set up by their kids, then something will happen, and you come over to find your parents sitting in a rave room because they need the light and can’t fix it.
And haven’t mentioned the issue even though it’s been like that for months.
Millennial here. We are in agreement.
Gen X here and can confirm.
Not wanting to be exploited by tech coorporations, technological literacy, is not a boomer thing.
I mean, have you met zoomers? Technological literacy as we knew it is dead.
but also have you met boomers? Tech literacy as we knew never existed.
Born too late to be blissfully unaware about technology
Born too early to be blissfully unaware about technology
Born in just the right time to have the cursed knowledge on how all of the cobbled together tech stack out there barely works
How is this a boomer complaint? Why does everyone need my email and info?
So they can sell it to spam companies obviously.
Er I mean… For better customer exploitation!
Shit, I’m really not good at this but they’re going to send me to the
The Olympics required four apps. Five if you count Visa Go, which just outright didn’t work. All of them want you to make accounts and send you shit.
- Itinerary, account optional
- Tickets, account required even though the tickets were on the phone
- Transport, account required even though the tickets were in the
- Metro app, for which it told you to NOT DELETE THE DATA BECAUSE THE TICKETS ARE ONLY ON THE DEVICE
The real solution: Buy your own domain name, and make a catch-all email address. Every account gets a new address with that account’s company in the email. Target is target@[your domain].[tld]… The benefit is that you can see exactly who is selling your info to spammers, and easily burn those accounts. You start getting spam sent to that target address? Congrats, now you know Target has sold your info and you can set a rule to automatically send any target@ emails straight to your trash. Also, get a damned password manager so every account has a unique password.
Create a fake persona. This persona has a fake name, birthday, favorite food, first pet, etc… Memorize everything about this fake person, or even just make a note about them in your phone. And none of it is real. This fake person’s info is used for all of your signup info. So when shitty fucking companies get hacked and lose all of your info, the hackers never actually got any of your info. And if you ever see spam addressed to that fake persona, you know you can immediately discard it.
Between the catch-all email address and the fake persona, you’re basically immune to all of the typical ads, phishing, data breaches, etc…
That’s a massive ballache
Bitwarden can do both automatic email creation and also store the identity(s) and fill them in for you.
So it doesn’t need to be a ballache, can be one-click transparent.
Fyi, this can be done with Gmail as well. Just add a plus sign at the end of your email. I.e. your_email+target @ Gmail.com
Except most companies have wised up to this, and automatically scrub anything after the +. Because why wouldn’t they?
How do I make a spam email address using my own domain name?
If you set it up as a catch-all email, then anything going to the domain will hit the same inbox. From there, you can set filtering rules to send emails to whichever box you want.
How do I set up any email using my domain name?
That’s not even a boomer complaint. Zoomer here. I fucking hate how everything needs an account. I recently started cleaning up my mail box and this shit makes that nigh impossible. I especially hate it when it’s just a shitty novelty site, if it needs an account, you bet your ass I ain’t ever using it, piss off!
For me it’s that I don’t want short form video anywhere near my view.
I went to a bar for a drink the other day. They had TVs all over the place which I normally don’t care for but it looked like golf or something I could just ignore. After I ordered my drink I realized how wrong was.
It was actually some weird short form video TV channel. They croped the 16:9 screen into a 1:1 square with moving neon lines in the “empty space” where there was no video. Each video was about 5 seconds long and showed brainless content of people using a Rube Goldburg machine or doing card tricks and other such nonsense.
Once I realized what was happening it was too late as I got my drink and I felt compelled to finish it and pay. I tried to ignore the 5+ screens in my view but they were too big and eye-catching to really ignore. I kept catching myself looking at one of the screens after a minute or so. I felt like I was getting serotonin raped between ads.
Eventually I moved to sit by a window and stare at a tree. I’ll never go back to a bar like that again.
This reads like a cyberpunk vignette; I enjoyed it. Thank you. I’ve started to take note when something decidedly cyberpunk happens in day-to-day life. I make a lot of notes.
Extrapolating a bit, here are the next steps
- screens in places where people might look at an ad will all have built in image recognition and eye-tracking.
- an algorithm/model will calculate the number of people within view and an acceptable level of eyes on screen per minute (or some other time increment tbd by an industry leading marketing psychologist) depending on the task they are doing.
- the algorithm/model can also calculate the local demographic
- the short format video content can be easily tweaked to improve engagement. If the racing crash clips aren’t generating enough engagement, then it can try indoor cat clips.
- when the eye to screen levels are at or above minimum advertising levels, display an ad that would best match the target demographic that the advertiser set. The ad contents will also match the actions of the local population.
Certainly. Having worked in advertising for 25 years, that’s probably just phase one. Those short videos will eventually be different for each person seeing the screen… and largely A.I. generated with few humans in the loop. In the flip side, people will probably be able to program their smart glasses to hide all that shit. It’s an arms race over our attention already. See: Trudell’s “mined mind.” Or Bo Burnham, for that matter.
Bro we need to track you in every way possible so we can sell you even more shit, what’s the big deal?
Fighting side by side with a boomer?
What about side by side with a friend?I don’t want my computer to treat me like an idiot, it’s my computer let me run whatever commands I want.
That’s not really a boomer complaint, that’s just a pro-privacy pro-internet security kind of complaint. Everyone of all ages hates having to have an account for everything and its mother
It’s also a lack of convenience complaint, and an anti e-waste complaint.
What happens when thier server has an outage or your internet is down…
What happens when the company goes out of business or just decides they don’t care about the product anymore or they’d prefer it if you have to buy a new one…
That’s not a boomer thing. Boomer will be like “sure, I’ll give you all the informations you want, even the name of my dog and my credit card number”.
No, lightbulb, I won’t give you my location
(actually happened)
I think it was requested on mine for the sunrise/sunset feature, but let me just put in a zip code after I declined location access
I kind of wonder whether it’d be worthwhile to have a certification agency that just certifies things for privacy and non-cloud-connectivity or the like. Trying to dig through spec sheets and reviews to figure out how a product functions is a pain. I’d rather pay slightly more to just look for some privacy certification on a product. I don’t really want to try to keep up with the latest privacy issues present in a given product category, would rather have a specialist do that.
Like, let me just look for a “PC-24-O” (Privacy Certification 2024 Offline) label or something on products. Saves me time. Also would let vendors like Amazon let me filter products for that certification.
I would love something like this. I have to dig through documentation all the time for security reviews for various applications as part of my job and it would be so much easier if all that crap was just standardized.
Like GDPR
I can see the point of needing an account for a smartbulb, if you are away from home and want to turn on the lights before you arrive, it is needed.
The problem is, unless you lock yourself into a single ecosystem, like hue, you need multiple apps to manage your fucking lights.
… Or you can get home assistant or something.
Sure, you have a very valid point.
Also, I can see a method of setting up remote access to the system without an account.
Simply have the hue bridge report a UUID and set a token in the app when you press the button to authorize the phone.
The Hue servers accepts and forwards the request to a specified UUID as long as it is signed with an approved token.
There is a local admin password to remove individual tokens, and a nice reset button on the bridge that will clear any config and let you start again.
Sure you can use VPNs, however I may be an IT guy but I don’t have the energy to deal with this stuff on my free time, I’d rather be out walking with my camera
I’m also an IT guy. I’m trying to make most of my stuff at home “smart” and had to go down the home assistant rabbit hole just to get everything managed under a single app. All so that my family doesn’t have to deal with it (I have to suffer so they don’t).
I started a long time ago with hue, when they were just about the only name in home automation. Luckily it integrates with home assistant, but I’m buying all generic zwave bulbs now, and I’m planning to replace them all as they die off, so I don’t have to overhaul the system and throw out a bunch of stuff that still works.
My only real problem is that, I picked zwave because it’s primarily 900mhz, and ZigBee is 2.4ghz, I’m trying to keep the home automation in a separate wireless band from my WiFi; but the majority of home automation stuff that’s coming out is ZigBee, or based on similar protocols that use the 2.4 GHz band (matter and thread seem to both be built on top of ZigBee, or at least 2.4ghz).
It’s frustrating because it’s very rare that some cool new home automation thing hits the market and it has a zwave variant available.
Anyways. I’m just saying, I’ve been on a journey, and it’s been frustrating. I understand why you wouldn’t want to screw around with this stuff in your off time. My advice: don’t change. Go for that walk with your camera. Enjoy.
My only real problem is that, I picked zwave because it’s primarily 900mhz, and ZigBee is 2.4ghz, I’m trying to keep the home automation in a separate wireless band from my WiFi;
Yeah, I’m a little worried about where we’re going with all the stuff hitting 2.4 GHz. I mean, a lot of these devices are going to be spewing radio-frequency emissions for a long time to come, and if you saturate the airwaves too heavily in an area, nobody can use anything reliably.
Me too, I’m both IT with a specialization in networking (and further specialization in wireless), but I’m also a qualified amateur radio operator (ham radio).
To say I know wireless bands and constraints with available frequencies, contention, interference, scattering, attenuation and free space path loss, is an understatement.
Zwave and ZigBee, at the time I was making the decision to go one way or another, about two-ish years ago (maybe a bit more), were fairly comparable, and the set of what was available was fairly equivalent. This was before matter/thread were barely a concept, and long before anything thread/matter compliant was on the market. So I weighed the options based on a few factors and one of the more important factors that went into the decision was the 900mhz band that’s used. Zwave now has 2.4ghz, I don’t remember seeing any 2.4ghz support on zwave at the time… That was so important because of the interference that ZigBee would have created, and suffered from, with the WiFi in the house. We have 7 access points in the house and plans to add a couple more. Not all of them are broadcasting on 2.4ghz for the same reasons, but still, it’s a lot of activity getting crammed into a fairly small band.
Bluetooth is already on 2.4ghz, so we’re already going to hit some interference, plus all the problems we are likely going to experience from neighbors.
2.4 GHz is a really small band, around 72 mhz wide in total (from 2401 MHz to 2473 MHz). While 5ghz is more like 745 MHz (5150 - 5895 MHz), with some caveats due to regulations. It’s still nearly, if not more than, 10x the channel width, depending on regulations.
I have band steering on, but we have some older IoT stuff, mostly smart speakers, which are 2.4ghz only, so we still need it.
To say our houses 2.4 GHz is occupied, is an understatement. We need to keep that band as free as possible, and zwave had the right specs to make it happen. Then the entire home automation community seemed to pivot almost entirely to ZigBee, thread, and matter, running on 2.4ghz. sigh.
Not to mention that microwaves run at 1000W of power or more, at 2.45mhz with only a poorly built Faraday cage to protect the airspace. I try to make sure that the microwaves in the house have good isolation, for safety and communication integrity, but still, that doesn’t matter if the neighbor uses their microwave often and doesn’t care if the signals are properly isolated. Even 1/100th of the power leaking out (around 100W) is 100x more powerful than most wifi access points (which usually sit around 100mW or 0.1W of transmit power)…
2.4ghz is a mess. I don’t want to use it, but I can’t avoid it.
And everyone seems to be dogpiling stuff onto the band for no discernable reason. 900mhz is pretty “slow” in terms of bandwidth, but how much bandwidth do you need to tell a lightbulb to turn on, or have a device report that a button was pressed (for a light switch for example).
It doesn’t make sense. Everyone seems hellbent on making 2.4ghz their go-to, and not understanding why that’s a terrible idea. 900mhz has better penetration power, and more than enough bandwidth for the task. Use it, FFS.
Like, you can add frequency-hopping-spread-spectrum stuff, but that isn’t a magic wand; I means that yeah, maybe the FHSS device is more-resistant to interference on any one frequency, but it also means that it’s edging into more spectrum space.
And the problem is if the only way you can reliably get a signal through is by ramming the power up, that creates bad incentives.
I used to have a Logitech gamepad (an F710) that ran using a proprietary 2.4 GHz wireless protocol. Used it happily for years, I can’t comfortably use it now, because, over the past several years, some devices has shown up that eeevery now and then disrupts the connection briefly. And that’s with the receiver’s antenna and the transmitter’s antenna just a few feet away, with a clear line of sight. Bluetooth gamepads still work okay; I believe that the protocol has got more reliability built into it.
Now, okay, gamepads are maybe a worst-case scenario. They have hard real-time constrants; you really notice it in the middle of a fast-paced video game if your gamepad stops responding. Just delaying and retransmitting is problematic. Something like, say, a baby monitor briefly dropping out doesn’t matter so much.
But by the same token, they’re also the canary in the coal mine.
I have wondered if the end game is going to have to be taking the really high bandwidth things, stuff like WiFi, and shifting it to requiring line-of-sight and a mechanically-aimed laser or something like that.
I try to make sure that the microwaves in the house have good isolation, for safety and communication integrity,
Hmm. How do you do that? Like, go to a brick-and-mortar-store that has plugged-in microwaves with a some kind of spectrum analyzer? Just keep buying microwaves until you find one that you like?
I haven’t paid attention to microwaves, but I have been a little concerned about what LED bulb power supplies do; they’re apparently a rather significant and growing source of noise as everyone is replacing their (silent) incandescent bulbs with LED bulbs. I’ve actively tried to find low-RF-emission bulbs, and it’s a pain.
As I understand it, the basic problem is a combination of the facts that:
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They are using a hefty amount of juice.
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The power line is unshielded, and so can act as an antenna as a PWM power supply flips on and off.
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Lamps designed for incandescent A19 bulbs, were never designed with LEDs in mind, so the LED’s power supply isn’t built into the lamp; instead, you have to put a small, high-power power supply where users are very price-sensitive in a very small space: inside the bulb.
Even if there were a low-RF-emission rating, which there isn’t, it’s not as if someone can do something about other people using them.
I suppose that in the long term, this problem will probably slowly solve itself if people just wind up moving in the direction of lamps designed specifically for LEDs (usually with non-removable LEDs); maybe lamp-integrated power supplies will perform better. But even an LED bulb will hopefully last a long time, not to mention a lamp. So that’s not happening any time soon.
FHSS is not magic. In some ways it makes things worse for other protocols while avoiding problems for itself.
Which leads me into The next comments you made about interference sources. With microwaves and LED bulbs and such. While I do have an SDR, I don’t use it for wireless cleanliness. My access points, mainly Cisco aironet 2802i series, have a feature called “clean air” which isn’t new for Cisco, but other vendors are starting to add similar features to their access points. I believe it’s been included in most mid-range aironet access points since wireless N (around the 2600, maybe before)… Anyways, the built in radios will listen for and analyse interference and provide information related to it.
Clean Air will report pretty much everything that can be interference with decent accuracy. I’ve personally seen the following: radar, Bluetooth, microwave (oven), and “non-wifi” as interference sources. I believe “non-wifi” is the catch-all for something that can’t be identified.
Clean Air also reports on what channels are impacted by the inference, and I can also get reports on nearby wifi networks, and what channels they’re on, the frequency width that’s set on foreign access points… On top of that, it gives me a report on how busy the channels are for the configured channels on the access points, with classifications for my wifi traffic, others wifi traffic, noise, and inference.
With microwaves, I mainly watch the clean air report, if I see microwave (oven) interference, I try to reference the time of the interference, and figure out if the microwave was in use during that time. If it lines up consistently, time to replace the microwave.
In my experience, new microwaves rarely have an isolation problem. The mark quality in the manufacturing of the microwave, is how long before that happens. Some last a long time, others lose their isolation fairly quickly. Pre-testing isn’t very useful since the isolation is usually fine when It’s new.
To the same point it’ll pick up interference from other sources, like lightbulbs. So if that’s picked up at all, I’ll have to correlate what lights are on and when, to figure out which ones are the problem. To date, the interference is either off-band, or not significant enough to trigger clean air.
I know CFL’s put off way more RF interference than LED bulbs. The high frequency required for florescent lamps is far worse than the RF put out by most LED bulbs.
I’ve considered getting an ekahau sidekick to get a better wireless spectrum analysis, but there’s no way I could afford one right now. If I had more of a purpose for it, beyond my curiosity, then maybe. As it stands, no way. It’s in the neighborhood of $2000+. Unless I can use it to help pay the rent, I won’t be picking that up.
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