Samsung’s consumer IoT vision – stupid, desperate, creepy

While the business side of the Internet of Things looks in good nick, and isn’t actually anything new, the consumer prospects look remote. Samsung is one of the few global companies that’s able to project a vision of consumer IoT: it does technology as well as consumer electronics and white goods. And it tried to give us a “ …

[AndyS]

The thing about turning something on before I get home is there is always something else that needs done first.

Turn the oven on? Great, so you've already taken the chicken out of the freezer last night, mixed a nice marinad, soaked it for a couple of hours, choped the veg, laid it on a tray and placed it in the oven?

No? All you can do is turn on the oven?

Because I can already achieve that, with a thing called a "timer."

Likewise, if I want a coffee brewed in the morning, I can, you know, brew a coffee in the morning. Or if I really don't want to, I can use that other thing again - a timer.

I'm with Andrew. I don't currently see any need for the sorts of things these companies are hawking.

Where I do enjoy more intelligent devices is music, TV, media storage etc (eg Chromecast, NAS drives etc). But those are all well developed products, already on the market, and aren't sold with the IoT.

[SImon Hobson]

> No? All you can do is turn on the oven?

Have an upvote from me.

And I'll add to that list of things to be done to something that needs cooking - and take out whatever was last left in the oven because we've a small kitchen and that was the easiest place to leave it ! So not only did it not get the chicken out of the freezer, defrost it, prepare it, and shove it in the oven - it fails to remove the frying pan and plastic spatula. The former item no longer has a usable handle; the latter item is now a burned, stinky mess on the bottom of the oven - and also set off the smoke alarms in the course of it's obliteration.

Remember that old mainstay of automation from years ago - the Teasmaid ? They were really common weren't they ? Oh no, they weren't. Perhaps people figured that by the time they'd made sure the water and tea were provided, and cleaned it afterwards, that it was just as easy to boil the kettle and make the tea yourself.

Now I'm not completely against all this technology. I rather fancy some intelligent radiator valves. But they'll talk only to an internal controller and be 100% firewalled off from the outside world. I can then experiment with different operating regimes. Got to be better than the current setup where, in a passing not to rules, the boiler installer put a thermostat next to a draughty back door in an unheated room with single glazing and somehow expects it to proxy for the temperature of the rest of the house ?

[Len Goddard]

Hey, the internet of things has been a stupid idea from the start. No one has yet come up with a significant use case for any of the devices which cannot be handled by a timer. However, the Teasmaid was a wonderful device. I'm still using one I bought second hand well over 30 years ago, although sad to say it doesn't look as if it will last much longer. The Teasmaid is a must-have device for people like me who cannot get out of bed before their first cuppa and the slowly increasing hiss as the kettle comes up to pressure is a much more relaxing way to wake up than some blaring alarm. Having said which, the Teasmaid is really only a sophisticated timer.

As for turning on the microwave, the discussions seem to forget that the people who would buy such a device probably have trouble mastering a toaster without a control app so cooking with real ingredients would be well beyond them. If you are just going to leave a ready meal on the platter it works, after a fashion. But so does pressing the button when you get home and letting the cooker nuke your sugar and starch packed reduced fat reduced flavour unidentifiable tofu mess while you shower and change.

[Diogenes]

When the microwave can get the "cook from frozen" meal out of the freezer and cook it I might be interested. Around our way in summer, leave a piece of uncooked chicken in the microwave during the day just awaiting your return so it can "ping" as you walk in the door is going to result in a very very messy mess in the loo or perhaps a relaxing ride in an ambulance and all expenses paid holiday to your nearest hospital.

Maybe the microwave will be replaced by an IoT fridge/freezer/microwave combo.

[Phil O'Sophical]

Maybe the microwave will be replaced by an IoT fridge/freezer/microwave combo.

Hmm, makes me think of one of those giant tape backup library things, with a robot arm scanning the barcodes to find the tape (food) you want, fetching it and plugging it into the drive (microwave).

Might be fun to have one in the garage, but stopping at the takeway on the way home would be cheaper, and probably tastier too. And you'd still have room in the garage for the car.

[MrXavia]

"No one has yet come up with a significant use case for any of the devices which cannot be handled by a timer. "

I disagree, I think lighting, security and heating are the three things I would like fully automated, I just think the current offerings are pathetic. they are often proprietary or have terrible range (I tried Z-Wave and it barely worked in the same room!) or have poor features or are cloud based and stop working if your internet goes down (one of the reasons I don't want any nest devices)

[Dave 15]

THeromstats and radiator valves

Having rented a house with a 'smart' heating controller with remote operated valves et al I can inform you that you want that less than having your knee caps done good old IRA style with a hammer drill.

The software is awful, the stuff doesnt work and you end up paying a massive bill for the house to be too cold to use.

[JDC]

> Turn the oven on? Great, so you've already taken the chicken out of the freezer last night, mixed a nice marinad, soaked it for a couple of hours, choped the veg, laid it on a tray and placed it in the oven?

And all the while avoided food poisoning by having that raw chicken sitting in the oven all day while you're at work...

[Kevin Johnston]

Why....just why?

I understand the marketing speak behind the IoT and the desire to have lots of wonderful new interconnected toys but they all still fail in the same way that ideas such as 'Speech-to text-to-speech' and suchlike do.

Yes, they are great ideas and in limited circumstances they work well and can provide value but not globally or often not even outside of a lab. The problem comes when you try to explain to Joe Public what it is for and the words just fall into a black hole. OK, so the new Internet fridge can order things for you when you run out but maybe there is no guacamole left because you decided you hate the bloody stuff. As for providing auto-updates of what everyone else in the home group is doing, words fail and so again does any need.

This all seems to be driven by the idea that Facebook is popular so everyone knowing every last detail of everyone else must be good.

Lastly, where the hell is the money coming from for everyone to throw away perfectly good home contents to convert them all the IoT contents? If you don't do it all in one go then you can be damned sure that the interfacing will have changed and your microwave will no longer talk to your hairdryer.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: Why....just why?

You WILL buy IOT kitted out appliances.

You HAVE no choice.

The White Goods makers have built in planned breakage to everything they make.

Now it is cheaper to buy a new Washing Machine rather than change a drum bearing.

Soon IOT will be everywhere wether you like it or not.

Now if you connect it up to anything is another totally different story indeed.

Will I? Nope. Not in a gazillion month of sundays.

[Charles 9]

Re: Why....just why?

"Now if you connect it up to anything is another totally different story indeed.

Will I? Nope. Not in a gazillion month of sundays."

Does the phrase "Whispernet" ring a bell? Next thing you'll know they'll find a way to communicate via neutral wires, making even Faraday cages useless.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why....just why?

Now it is cheaper to buy a new Washing Machine rather than change a drum bearing.

But given the falling cost of appliances relative to wages, it is inevitable that a heavily automated production process and a slick supply chain can deliver you a really cheap and often rather good machine. The repair bloke on the other hand has to cover un-utilised time, "free" quotes, travel time, van and tools, time spent ordering one off spares, get the machine out, half dismantle it by hand without the benefit of manufacturer jigs and knowledge, and he then should be charging you VAT on the full repair cost, paying his accountant to sort out his tax and accounts, probably paying for training and trade registrations etc etc.

There's certainly corners cut to make the machine cheap, and some of those impact on both longevity and repairability, but for those who don't want a £350 Bosch machine that'll probably last seven to nine years, there's still the option of spending two or three times that on a Miele, which can be maintained for twenty years. Many people say they want the durability of the Miele, but when push comes to shove they choose to pay for the Bosch (or even cheaper machines from Beko, Hotpoint etc).

[DanceMan]

Re: Why....just why?

In this house I'm usually the repairman. So I prefer simple and durable.

[paulf]

Re: Why....just why?

"Many people say they want the durability of the Miele,"

Something I've never understood about Miele is the way they advertise their machines as having 20 year durability on normal usage, then offer a 2 year warranty with the option to pay for an extended warranty of up to 10 years:

http://www.miele.co.uk/domestic/warranty-479.htm#p3491

I'd spend £1000 on a washing machine if it came with 10-15 years warranty but 2 years makes me think they don't quite want to put their money where the marketing droid mouth is...

[Dave 15]

Re: Why....just why?

Of course not... it is a cheap machine with an expensive label, and no more reliable than the cheap one.

[Dave 15]

Re: Why....just why?

BTW when tempted by the highly expensive Miele have a check on the internet what other appliances the same company makes, look at the parts in both the cheap and expensive machines, conclude that the only substantial differences between the cheap and expensive are the logs and shape of the plastic buttons... and use that to realise that expensive is not always better... yup... Miele is a cheap machine with an expensive label.

[Alan Edwards]

Re: Why....just why?

> Now if you connect it up to anything is another totally different story indeed.

It'll get to the point where it will refuse to turn on if it hasn't got an internet connection.

It's for your own good. It has to check it's got the latest version of the gazillion built in recipes for stuff you'll never make, otherwise you could leave the scones in for 20 seconds too long.

[Dave 15]

Re: Why....just why?

Cheaper if you learn the skills to do the job yourself.... changed the pump the other day on mine... same pump in the very expensive appliance the wife was convinced was best as in the very cheap appliance that I told her was the same... still, told her she could pay the difference, she did, but I still had to fix it.

All that shite aside, its not just the cost of replacement but also the cost of the EU regulations... now new washing machines will only fill from cold ad use electricity to heat it up... no more filling from the hot water tank. (And for those environmentalists who think that is great... a summary of the old fashioned way.... cold water, gas boiler, hot water... washed clothes. And the new way... cold water, gas heater, steam, steam turbine, condenser to cool the boiling water that wasn't converted to energy, rotational energy (and hot bearings etc), electricity... lossy switches and cables... my house... cold water, electricity, hot water). The ONLY thing I see is more waste and a hell of a lot more cost.

[Teiwaz]

Re: Why....just why?

"microwave will no longer talk to your hairdryer."

'and the plate ran away with the spoon'

- just a small fragment from deep memory your phrase caused to rise to the surface like flotsam.

[Charles 9]

Re: Why....just why?

I'd always heard it "dish" rather than "plate", but that's a toMAYto/toMAHto matter at this point; it still meters right in the end.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why....just why?

"I'd always heard it "dish" rather than "plate","

Dish and spoon are a logical tableware pair in England - particularly in the past. That may not be true in other English speaking countries.

[Turtle]

Re: Why....just why?

"your microwave will no longer talk to your hairdryer"

Oh, the conversations they would have had!

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Why....just why?

MICROWAVE:

You know you don't have to act with me, Hairdryer.

You don't have to say anything and you don't have to do anything.

Not a thing.

Maybe just whistle.

You do know how to whistle, don't you, Hairdryer?

HAIRDRYER:

I'm not a bloody kettle, you know!

[Sir Runcible Spoon]

Re: Why....just why?

I was thinking more along the lines of

Microwave: I'm burning up for you!

Hairdryer: Oh, blow yourself!

[Phil O'Sophical]

Re: Why....just why?

Lastly, where the hell is the money coming from for everyone to throw away perfectly good home contents to convert them all the IoT contents?

And to do it again and again every 5 years as the latest IoT devices are churned out, and last years' models stop being supported and can no longer connect to the servers, which have also been upgraded to a new, better, and incompatible protocol.

You think that MS Windows support lifetime is a nuisance? Imagine when your whole house starts to nag you about upgrading to House 10...

[Triggerfish]

Re: Why....just why?

IoT fridge, why? Eyeballs + post it note, I spend enough time staring into it randomly anyway while I am tryng to remember what I came in the kitchen for.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Why....just why?

" I spend enough time staring into it randomly anyway while I am tryng to remember what I came in the kitchen for."

You need the IoT brain link so when you get into the kitchen the fridge shouts out "Over here. You came to get the milk."

[djstardust]

What a waste

Instead of wasting millions on this for "potential" business, dropping a couple of hundred quid from the price of their current phones would achieve a lot more ........

[Anonymous Coward]

The Internet of Landfill

When all your crappy plastic junk is connected - and broken and out of warranty

[Swarthy]

Where they've gone Wrong

The first problem of IoT is that they want to sell us an Internet of Things. I want (at most) an intranet of Things. I would like a deadbolt on my door that I can lock/unlock with a car-like key fob that would cause the porch lights to indicate activity(the chirp would be nice, but let's not get over-ambitious), but I don't want a door lock that some APT in China/Russia/Nigeria can use to lock me out of my house. Or a baby monitor that allows World+Dog to watch my kids.

A refrigerator that can send an SMS when the internal temp gets above a certain point could be nice, but I don't want one that sends my grocery list to Kazakhstan, or bleeds my google account settings over HTTP to anyone listening.

[Teiwaz]

Re: Where they've gone Wrong

An Intranet of Things would be totally and utterly useless (from the manufacturersdata gatherers perspective there's no bonus feed of 'valuable customer user metrics' to analyse sell.

There's probably no convincing them of their idiot ways, and such companies are ell on their way to Sirius Cybernetics fame (and the wall they were eventually put against).

[Youngone]

Re: Where they've gone Wrong

@Swarthy:

All those things that you don't want are things that no-one wants, and so Samsung and other credulous idiots (looking at you Sony) will spend millions trying to sell us this IoT tat then give up when they have warehouses full of unsellable kit.

[Michael Wojcik]

Re: Where they've gone Wrong

I would like a deadbolt on my door that I can lock/unlock with a car-like key fob that would cause the porch lights to indicate activity(the chirp would be nice, but let's not get over-ambitious)

If I bought I house with such a lock, it'd be gone before nightfall. It's not that I think it's a significant vulnerability (none of the homes I've ever owned, or for that matter lived in, were difficult to break into); I just find the idea excruciatingly obnoxious.

And I think this is where the consumer-IoT vendors have really gone wrong. They advertise their products as if the purported advantages were interesting to everyone, and they simply had to convince consumers that they're interesting enough. But, in fact, some consumers aren't at all convinced that more automation doesn't make all of these things worse.

Of course clearly many people are interested in automating this or that, as you are, or Mr Xavia is in a post up thattaway. But I think the marketing departments need to find a footing other than "this is self-evidently wonderful!" if they ever want to get beyond niche. (And even then there will always be refuseniks. I'd gladly change my car transceiver fob for a good old cut key and mechanical switches.)

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Where they've gone Wrong

What was the old advertising mantra? "No one in this world, so far as I know— [...] —has ever lost money by underestimating the intelligence of the great masses of the plain people.".

H. L. Mencken

For more of his pithy observations

http://www.britannica.com/biography/H-L-Mencken/article-supplemental-information

[Anonymous Coward]

IOT

We can see and hear everything you do.

[Steve Davies 3]

Re: IOT

IOT == Idiots on Tap

As a source of data for slurping to the Ad Agencies

[Anonymous Coward]

Maturity

ERP systems will generate restocking orders, but you'd be crazy to allow them to go through without a review.

If we can't automate that then there's no hope in hell they can get my weekly grocery shop correct.

[Commswonk]

Just you wait...

Like other contributors I find the idea of an IoT horrifying; like others I want no part of it. But just wait...

"To register your <appliance of choice> guarantee it must be connected to the Internet. Please check why we cannot connect with your appliance and click Try Again to continue." (I cannot even download new software for my printer without it being connected to my computer and t'web.)

Followed later by:

"We are unable to detect your <appliance>. For your safety its power supply has been switched off; to restore normal operation please ensure that its connection to the Internet is working then click Reset."

And (when you know you are going for a decent curry, but your fridge doesn't) "Unexpected item in the Icebox Area"

Does anyone really imagine that ignoring new features will be allowed once these things hit the market?

[Innocent-Bystander*]

Re: Just you wait...

""To register your <appliance of choice> guarantee it must be connected to the Internet."

Back to the store with that PoS.

[Charles 9]

Re: Just you wait...

Only to find they're ALL like that, probably because they're mandated as a safety feature (to detect say a Halt and Catch Fire).

[Justthefacts]

Dumb ideas for IoT

But there are smart ones too.

Most of the stuff we use has a rubbish UI (crap buttons) that cost a moderate amount to design and make. like a microwave. Or a coffee machine. A bean coffee machine costing £500 has a bunch of buttons taking up real estate, rather pointlessly has a SCREEN to enable the UI, and still ends up being worse UI than a free app on a phone.

Or washing machine. Who knows what all the buttons do? Now, look at your calculator app - see Scientific, Programmer et al. Put that on your phone instead. Have a nice, clean UI customised to you, plus save £10 on the White goods front panel.

Or your car traction control already knows to micron level what your tyre grip is, minute by minute, and if your latest scuff pushed the tracking off causing uneven wear. So why, exactly, do you have a bloke peer into your wheel arch once a YEAR to "certify" for MoT that the car is somehow "safe". That's just Monty Python safety theatre. Why doesn't it just send you email with a link to appropriate tyres when you need it.

[Doctor Syntax]

Re: Dumb ideas for IoT

"Or washing machine. Who knows what all the buttons do? Now, look at your calculator app - see Scientific, Programmer et al. Put that on your phone instead. Have a nice, clean UI customised to you, plus save £10 on the White goods front panel."

Or put that interface directly on the washing machine instead of the crap that's there. Who wants a washing machine that needs a phone to operate it? SWMBO would put it the other way round - why should she have to buy a smartphone she doesn't want to operate the washing machine? And then there's the problem that the app for last year's washing machine isn't compatible with this year's smartphone. So you have your new shiny, last year's shiny to work the washing machine and the year before that's to work the dishwasher...

[AndyS]

Re: Dumb ideas for IoT

I don't buy it. Buttons/dials on a microwave / washing machine / coffee maker? Cheap to make, work for the entire life of the machine, don't ever need upgraded, no compatibility problems, anyone (visitor, your gran, the new owner after you sell it on gumtree) can use it, no third party control device needed, etc etc. Replacing these with an (expensive) computer with all sorts of connection possibilities would lead to all sorts of headaches, all to solve a problem that doesn't really exist. If you find the buttons annoying, buy a slightly more expensive machine. Bingo, nice buttons.

As for "Who knows what the buttons do?" Try reading the manual? How would moving the buttons to a virtual app on another device solve this?

An intelligent car safety system certainly has benefits, but isn't really internet of things. These things already exist - TPMS that adjust torque based on tyre pressure, traction control that senses road surface etc. But you know what? Just because my car can tell me I need new tyres, doesn't mean I will actually go and get new tyres. And I certainly don't want my car deciding I'm not allowed to drive any more once it decides the tyres are too low, or the wrong brand, or too old. That sort of nonsense is already bad enough with printers.

Finally, try living in a country with no MOT (eg bits of Africa, some less developed Middle East countries, and large chunks of the good ol' USA) and then tell me it's just "Monty Python safety theatre". It most certainly is not. And no amount of intelligence in the car will change that.

[Dave 15]

Re: Dumb ideas for IoT

Oh come now, drifting off topic, but really, do you think having some bloke in a dirty overall tut tutting over your car and insisting you have several hundred quids worth of pointless repair that he benefits directly from actually helps safety?

Oh that rubber on the anti roll bar looks perished ... yes, the outer surface was no break, no dirt getting anywhere, no problem, no looseness, no safety issue.

Oh there is some oil on the bottom of the sump... yup, I was careless topping it up the other week, look its clean oil... oh no, even though it is clean and clearly never been through the engine you need to have all seals in the engine checked...

Balls to both, a wipe around with newspaper and a re test in another garage... no problems.

[toughluck]

Re: Dumb ideas for IoT

Yeah, 10 quid less for the front panel, 50 quid more for NFC, Bluetooth, Wi-Fi, a computer, and a hopelessly broken and insecure OS. You're going to have to be power cycling that washing machine more often than it does a spin cycle.

Suppose you want to turn it off quickly. You have to fiddle with your smartphone and play around with the settings. Suppose Wi-Fi goes down, you need to reconfigure for Bluetooth and then go through the setup to accept it as a trusted device.

That's assuming it will accept more than one device to control it. So instead of using your phone to control the washing machine, you end up buying an extra phone as a controller to have it handy. So, a double-win for Samsung.

And for what advantages? Suppose the water pipe breaks in your neighbourhood. An ordinary washing machine will stop and not resume until you're back home. The IoT washing machine will connect to the water company, look up incidents, find that the water pipe is fixed and happily continue with the washing cycle, only to clog its filter and spray your clothes with mud that's inevitably in the piping after the repairs.

As for car traction control. So, it knows to micron level what the tyre grip is, but for some reason, indirect TPMS (no TPMS sensor in each wheel) can never get it right, and will alert you when the tyre is still perfectly fine. Worse still, suppose the standard pressure is 2.2 bar front and rear, but the manufacturer suggests to overinflate the front to 2.4 and the rear to 2.8 when the car is fully loaded. If you go by these suggestions, the car will immediately signal that the front tyres are critically underinflated.

The car would more than likely e-mail you with a link to appropriate tyres every day, and only the recommended model will change depending on who spent the most on advertising. Oh, and it would probably e-mail the authorities at the same time to tell them that your tyres are unfit for use and to request being towed away.

[Anonymous Coward]

What I want from IoT..

What I want from IoT is that the devices know who designed them so that when I find them having an interface that insists on beeping for an hour, is stupidly complex because their "userfriendly" approach only suits the logic of someone who is simultaneously drunk and out of his skull on drugs or is otherwise so "modern" that it renders a piece of kit unusable I can press a button that rearranges the controls of every IoT device in that designer's home, zap him every time he comes near the microwave or doorknob, changes his ringtone to Rick Ashley and hooks him up to the outgoing lines of a telesales setup with particularly aggressive double glazing sales people.

Personally, I think that ought to be written into the design standards.

[cantankerous swineherd]

"Soviet-style NHS, doctors still communicate vital referrals by postal mail"

nice ad institutionem there. you're happy for your HIV+ status to get spaffed? on the the super new email?

it so happens that blood tests ordered by a consultant in darkest Barnsley can be taken in an even more god forsaken neck of the woods and get reported to the mother ship online. I wholeheartedly disapprove of this but it is fucking handy if, like me, you haven't got anything to hide, like your HIV status.

short story, you can fuck off with slagging a relatively secure means of communication.

[Ian Joyner]

What you have described is the old view of computing that computers are in control of people. The revolution of Silicon Valley, Doug Englebart and others was that people are in control of computers - computers are made to help the intellect of people by magnifying it. But the ideas come from people in the first place - computers can't have them.

There is a third view that comes out of John McCarthy and the AI crowd - that computers will replace human intellect. But that is a fraud as well.

Seems Samsung is very much copying the look of 'people in charge of computers' paradigm while throwing out the core of it and going with the 'computers control people' paradigm. I like Samsung less and less, if you have reported accurately on their view of IoT.

[Anonymous Coward]

"People in charge of computers?"

You haven't passed many borders recently then, or never had an error in a tax return. "The computer says so" is still the first argument you get thrown at you when things go wrong.

And don't get me started on the mistaken trust US citizens have in computerised elections. Man of the Year wasn't comedy, it was a documentary.

[Doctor Syntax]

"What you have described is the old view of computing that computers are in control of people. The revolution of Silicon Valley, Doug Englebart and others was that people are in control of computers"

That's old hat. The new view is that the people who make the computers are in charge of the people who have them.

[Michael Wojcik]

Yes, there's nothing like a black-box GUI to give the user "control".

[Henry Wertz 1]

Yeah, but...

"Now it is cheaper to buy a new Washing Machine rather than change a drum bearing."

Yeah, but... when my fridge broke (compressor failure), I bought a new fridge. It's got a temperature knob in the freezer, and a blend door kind of thing to adjust the fridge temp. Given it just has a themostat and a bit of electronics to cycle the compressor and fan on and off as appropriate, I doubt there's a bit of digital electronics in there. The washer and dryer are a normal washer and dryer, with knobs on it that clunk various relays or solenoids or whatever as they're turned. Are these not available any more in the UK, because they are here in the states. I don't see it being likely at all for IoT to be forced onto an unwilling public because non-IoT models are unavailable.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Yeah, but...

The washer and dryer are a normal washer and dryer, with knobs on it that clunk various relays or solenoids or whatever as they're turned. Are these not available any more in the UK, because they are here in the states. I don't see it being likely at all for IoT to be forced onto an unwilling public because non-IoT models are unavailable.

The main argument is cost, and a second argument is profit. Cost: it is cheaper to make a little electronic device for timing that it is to make the clunky mechanics, because it requires more materials to make it all work. Profit: it also helps with built-in obsolescence as it is in theory possible to simply program a lifespan - you won't be able to tell why the thing no longer works, but it will need a new piece in (X years or operating cycles + random number, to avoid people finding out it's programmed failure).

I'd hold on to mechanical replacement equipment and parts because I can't see that availability last.

[Charles 9]

Re: Yeah, but...

One possible angle would be for it to be able to send alarms that it's about to Halt and Catch Fire. A few house fires due to catastrophic dryer failures and the like could see a push for this as a safety tech. This would also handily remove all the dumb devices from the market as unsafe.

[Dave 15]

Re: Yeah, but...

Dont be too sure... the politicians are all happy to take a back hander to introduce legislation to force manufacturers to only make the things the person giving the back hander profits from.

And yes it IS the case, just look at the number of MPs and Lords in the UK caught by regular sting operations by the press doing JUST what is described... but who get elected time and again (or in the case of the lords just left in place)

[rainjay]

Skynet!

So the IoT means parts of Skynet living in my fridge and microwave, and Judgement Day comes when most of humanity dies of food poisoning from improperly refrigerated food that's been inadequately zapped...

[Anonymous Coward]

"Samsung demonstrated how a father could spy on his student daughter"

Creepy... while I can understand having a single account where anyone can check on the location of a family member in an emergency (I have all my families android phones on the same account for the 'find my phone functionality), the spying is just creepy...

Personally I want my own server, not accessible by some big corporation, that run open source software talking to all the nice little commercial devices I can buy...

Open Standards is what we need! they don't even have a single open standard for whole house audio!

[Anonymous Coward]

Brainstorming here....

Lights come on when I go into a room and it's dark enough, go out via an app or when I leave the room - saves energy.

Adaptive lights change brightness at different times of day and based on ambient conditions - better living conditions.

Lights that come on when I'm not in so that it looks like I am - security.

Fridge/freezer knows what I have bought, can warn me when something goes out of date - safety - and can suggest menu choices based on what I have and how long I want to cook for, also generates shopping list (or arranges a delivery automatically) - convenience.

Thermostat in every room along with occupancy detector to heat that room - convenience and energy saving.

Washing machine that reads clothes and performs appropriate wash/dry cycle - convenience and energy saving, especially if coupled with sensors that can detect how dirty they are.

Appliances that "'phone home" to allow wide-scale co-ordination of cycles - energy saving.

Appliances that monitor usage and can arrange for repair/service - convenience, reduced downtime.

[Dave 15]

Re: Brainstorming here....

Get a life... things out of date!!!!! Food goes off but most food that is out of date is very very far from being even slightly dodgy. I prefer to check the food by smell, texture and so on and decide if it is fit for eating or fit for the bin.

And as for everything else.. I have light switches which I can use when I want to put a light on because it is dark (or if I want to turn them off when I have finished reading), I can judge when I need light for a particular task or if I am watching TV and don't care. I can also judge when the room will be used so that when the person walks in they don't have to wait freezing their brass monkeys off for the heating to warm it up! I also know what washing needs to be done and if I need to put on a half load because I need a particular item, or if the jeans are dirty because I have been fixing the car... I have a perfectly acceptable mk1 eyeball and use it!

[Charles 9]

Re: Brainstorming here....

What about people with FAULTY eyeballs? Or bad memories? AND no help? Just because YOU have a fully-functioning human system doesn't mean everyone else does. Or are you saying we should take the Spartan route with them?

[ShortLegs]

Turn ON the microwave???

Why would one need to turn on the microwave before one gets home? Every microwave I've owned is 'instant on' - unlike an oven, it doesn't need to warm up.... is this to save the half second it takes to push the "start" button? Because unless the IoT connect device can move the meal from the fridge to the microwave, removing packaging en-route, work out what it is and how long it takes and set the appropriate power level (presumably using an embedded RFID chip in the packaging), there isn't a lot else to do to cook using a microwave, other than "wait 45 seconds for it to go zing".

Such a device will then presumably "wash the plates, put them away, and then make me a nice cup of tea" (appropros to a Jasper Carrot sketch from many years ago satiring washing powder commercials)

Back in the early 90's a colleague and I had an 'joke' idea for a modem connection to a VCR that would monitor when you left the office, and 'intelligently' record/cancel recording programs depending on when you left the office. A decade later I regretted not patenting it. >Two decades later its becoming reality (doubtless there is an app for it already).

I can see some uses, perhaps; your house monitors when you awake, boils kettle in anticipation, turns lights on/off as you walk from room to room (ditto music), but I can't see a need for an internet connection for that.

Voice interaction? I got fed up fighting with Android voice commands, Siri almost caused me to kill my ipad... and in any case, if anyone ever considers investing in voice-controlled devices, I'd refer them to this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sAz_UvnUeuU

[Charles 9]

Re: Turn ON the microwave???

"Why would one need to turn on the microwave before one gets home? Every microwave I've owned is 'instant on' - unlike an oven, it doesn't need to warm up.... is this to save the half second it takes to push the "start" button?"

Or it could, you know, push the button BEFORE you arrive so that, by the time you walk in, the microwave does its DONE sound so that it's hot and ready for you the moment you arrive (or perhaps 30 seconds after in case you want a bit to get your shoes off).