Japanese hotel chain sorry that hackers may have watched guests through bedside robots Japanese hotel chain HIS Group has apologised for ignoring warnings that its in-room robots were hackable to allow pervs to remotely view video footage from the devices. The Henn na Hotel is staffed by robots: guests can be checked in by humanoid or dinosaur reception bots before proceeding to their room. Facial recognition …
You really should consider going to Japan, it's great. Food is awesome, the people are polite and friendly, it has an awesomely wacky mix of ancient and futuristic technologies and buildings all mixed together to give a culture that is so completely different to anything you will experience anywhere else in the world. Oh and the toilets are... an experience.
But yeah you can definitely skip the robot hotels...
meh. That might be true for the major hotel chains near Tokyo but I found that many buildings had toilets which were a hole in the floor with a hose to wash up. Our tour guide was apparently a WW II vet who was still fighting the war, pointed off into the distance, "If you look this way you will see a building which looks just like the Twin Towers in NYC." (there was no such building)
France still has toilets that are a hole in the floor too ( well it did 15 years ago ).
I was there this summer - it totally still does. Although only experienced in public loos and even then only usually the rural ones. And even then not all of them.
Nope: I've experienced it in a bar in central Paris. My PUBLIC loo experience was to be ushered to a (nice clean) trough on the wall... in the hallway, with women and children walking right by me. Weirdest experience ever. No wonder they didn't think twice about installing outdoor urinals in the streets.
Funny, never had that myself and we stayed in everything from top hotels, to hostels, to itty bitty b&bs. Or are you just referring to squat toilets? You will find Squats everywhere in Asia and the Middle East. Along with the washing yourself rather then using toilet paper. Toilets are very much a western invention that hasnt penetrated that deeply into asia.
Still if the thoughts of a squat toilet are a bit much for you then travel outside of Europe or North America probably isnt recommended...
The bots are actually little more than what you'd expect to find at Disney Land or any other theme park. They move their heads and arms a little, but they brazenly ignore customers jumping around in front of them, waving at them, or otherwise making a fool of themselves.
To check in, you'd use the machines in front of the dinosaurs rather than the dinosaurs themselves. At this point it's only a gimmick to attract customers, but I see a lot of potential. Velociraptors screaming at and/or mauling customers with invalid credit cards or forgotten PINs, for instance.
Not to mention the Squid-o-matic Sexbot 2000 by the bed...
For Japan it should be an octopus.
I come here to be entertained and informed, and as usual, this is right up there, the hacking part not so much, we are made more aware each passing day of the vulnerability of practically any software available for use, so here it is the [ Hotel is staffed by robots ] bit that caught my eye,
novel idea, but is, I fear, yet one more step towards the jobless economy foretold in every bleak forward looking film I have ever watched, does no one in the design and implementation of these 'ideas' ever watch movies ffs ?
Japan has a small population problem - the employable population is getting smaller. Even their local mafia is a fraction its former size.
Hotels may legitimately have a hard time staffing. And they would rather try robots than suffer the indignity of letting non-Japanese workers into the economy.
Long-term, Japan may end up looking like Saudi Arabia, with a large fraction of the population being temporary foreign workers, Korean and Filipino, once Japan more completely expands its work permitting.
No human anywhere has ever done anything of this sort, oh wait, it required a human to trigger this issue. Still, it was shoddy programming to allow simple cracking and rotten acceptance testing to allow problems to roam free.
I wonder if the robots enjoyed their illicit viewing.
Some Japanese hotels have ruggedized Android phones that are always active with personal assistant software. They auto-reboot to the assistant if you turn them off or try to wipe them from the bootloader menu. I tried to hide them to run the battery dead but the staff found them and placed them back in the desk's charging cradle facing the bed.
No one forces you to use it?
It had cameras, it had microphones, it spoke suggestions, there was no means to turn it off, and staff would find it and recharge it for you if you attempted to kill the battery. It had a hardware deadman switch that made sure the software was always on.
"[...] long term vegans will be the most sought after meat
H G Wells made a prediction similar to that back in 1895.
Stayed at the Henn-Na Ginza last month and was the same. Also don't trust the Handy at all, it still had the email and details of the previous user on it even though it was supposed to have wiped itself at 1300hrs that day (before I checked in at 1600hrs) - Made sure that was unplugged in an attempt to make it die, and turned it away from the bed!
Perhaps I should have put it in the LG "Styler" and put it on a full 2hr steam cycle...
Heated toilet seats. True mark of civilisation.
No they aren't! Toilet seats should be cold. A warm toilet seat suggests that someone else has been there before you.
Having yourself washed and blow-dried afterwards though is a matter of taste.
"In the days of the Roman Empire you would have had your slave pre-warm the seat for you. "
Also a tradition at English public schools in the 20th century where a "fag" was a selected junior boy at the beck and call of a VIth Former. The latter was shown in the Lindsay Anderson film "IF...." (1968) NSFW. Their duties varied from making tea and toast - to warming toilet seats - and possibly sometimes more personal services.
I took two Australian lasses to the wonderfully named 'pop-up' Nairn film festival. One heartbroken, one lesbian. We saw one excellent film about child abuction [Crow/Wrona, Dorota Kedzierzawska] , and one crappy film about, I dunno. Tilda Swinton came on stage to talk about cinema about five metres in front of us, and the lesbian lass lost the plot. "Oh my god, oh my god, I'm just going to stare at her because I'll never have this opportunity again."
I whispered in her ear, "Go for it. She is a film star, she probably enjoys you ogling her. Try to stop salivating though."
I think Tilda had heard her because she was staring back at us.
My point is anyone who paid to stay in a hotel room with robots presumably wanted to be spied on, wouldn't care or are too stupid to worry about.
One of my jobs in the nineties was above a toy maker, and I found a computer chip on my shoe sole. It was like a tiny LED, but it was a camera. It scared me silly because it made me realise there was no way to detect them, AND they were already putting them in toys. I went through a brief period where I'd undress under bed sheets in hotel rooms, and then I thought, "Aw fuck it!" and would happily masturbate in police cells. There is so much free porn online today that there is no financial gain in covertly recording me.
The assumption that "pervy" hotel staff watch clients having sex or taking a shower is dubious. I stayed at one German hotel with drop dead gorgeous staff, and it had a pool that was open until midnight. The staff used the pool after midnight, and admitted, well, I won't fuel your imagination but you are correct. If the hotel owner was spying on anyone then it wasn't me.
"The rich have got their channels in the bedrooms of the poor" ~ Leonard Cohen, Tower of Song
It's called culture, bub, and I'll continue shoving it down your throats until you start liking it. I've posted two poems today, in context, and if the machines of loving grace permit then I'll post a fourth.
The trick is slick code to manage
all the if, for, and while statements
in a optimized number of lines.
Pass a list, fix the syntax, import all the variables.
Comment your lines and indent where necessary,
leaving line breaks and whitespace
for readability.
— Monica Sharman
"That really just raises more questions about you than it answers"
It's healthy to masturbate at least once a day, for your prostrate. I'll go down to lung cancer or bowel cancer or whatever, but my prostrate gland will remain pristine.
Have you ever spent the night in jail? Well, I have
Peace protestor and poor judgement of people are my major flaws. I do have tips if you are expecting gaol. Nicotine patches!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ballerina_Ballroom_Cinema_of_Dreams
[The big, cheap hotel in Aschaffenburg]
I stayed at one German hotel with drop dead gorgeous staff
Have you noticed that in Germany during checkin, the nice wimmen will be flirting with you. Whereas at the checkout it will a woman build like a barn-door, with Bundeswehr tats, and she is absolutely not flirting. Lord knows what happens if the card is rejected.
These wouldn't happen to be a chain of "Love Hotels" would it? In which case the robots are more likely to see something of interest than your typical overnight-stay establishment.
Yes, that's right, in the the apocryphal "No-Tell Motel" (the one that rents rooms by the hour) is an official, legitimate business in Japan. Even a company that started out manufacturing playing-cards in 1889 (I think they were called "Nintendo") was briefly in the Love Hotel business.
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