Amazon confirms it locked Microsoft engineer out of his Echo gear over false claim Brandon Jackson, a Microsoft site reliability engineer, says an errant report of racist abuse from an Amazon delivery driver led to the suspension of his Amazon account and the consequent inoperability of his Amazon Echo smart home hardware. Jackson earlier this month published an account of the incident, and yesterday shared …
He clearly understands how it happened, but didn't expect that a misheard phrase would lead to Amazon turning off everything. That's not a strange assumption to come to, because disabling purchased products for an unrelated event, whether it happened or not, is the kind of stupid thing that can lead to lawsuits and Amazon should know that.
He works for Microsoft so really he should have known and expected that the big tech company providing services to him would do its absolute best to shaft him as soon as it could.
Well-experienced engineers in IT tend to think of these scenarios and don't make assumptions expressly when it comes to availability and 3rd parties.
He is probably a younger engineer who's grown up with the interweb, and just did everything easy as the supplier made it. It's us long in the tooth engineers, that have a different attitude from growing up in different times, and learning the lesions of life. Which I guess he now has: Having a smart home is ok, but giving control to someone else isn't smart. relying on the law to protect you, takes an eternity and only make lawyers rich and you poor.
"expected that the big tech company providing services to him would do its absolute best to shaft him as soon as it could."
Never attribute malice to cases that can be explained by sheer indifference. They just don't care, have an agenda and losing your business affects their bottom line not at all.
Indeed. If I wasted money on smart home products and that happened, I'd box up the lot of Amazon interacting products and the video and drop the lot off at my attorney's office and contact the federal attorney for felony denial of service charges to be investigated.
Then, replace the crap with things that I control, not some megacorporation.
Might as well leverage some of my excess computing power I already have anyway, as I have more computing power than the Starship Enterprise. So much so, I was astonished when they shuttered Three Mile Island, given its proximity and output capability, now they're on natural gas fueled energy.
I'm considering getting some sterling engines, to recoup some of the heat losses...
That's what you get when you sell your soul to the likes of Amazon. The marketing droid who thought that people would PAY good money to have a SPY in their home recording their every move must be a mad genius.
Frankly, I pity the poor sods who have done this. The likes of Amazon and Google must be getting Terrabytes of data from millions of suckers like this guy.
Luckily, he also sold out to Apple which at least keeps most of the data local but even so...
Let this be a warning to everyone. Complain about a botched delivery from AMZN and get your account closed. The MAN (aka old baldy bezos) is in charge of the world (or so it seems)...
"didn't expect that a misheard phrase would lead to Amazon turning off everything" without proof.
That's the key bit: Someone claimed something was said, but did Amazon have any PROOF that it happened? No. They acted without PROOF and their actions were disproportional without that proof. Hence Amazon were in the wrong, but are they going to compensate the actual 'victim'?
Probably not. Hence this kind of stupid thing NEEDS to lead to a lawsuit.
To me, the worst bit it's that this about "someone said something." Short of a threat of violence, it should not matter. But being a Boomer, I grew up with "Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me."
Now it seems that everyone is a snowflake and a snide comment from a demented old uncle is enough to shut off your services.
I'll make sure to shout out "Hey Google, quit listening while I read my electric utility bill."
Times change, and we have known for at least 20 years that that simply isn't true. A lot of bullying is "just words" but leaves far deeper and longer lasting trauma than a punch in the face.
But none of this case comes anywhere close to that. Some ecotistical Amazon driver, seemingly with a massive chip on their shoulder, misheard an automated "Can I help you?" from a doorbell and went so overboard they were able to have someone's Amazon services cut off with zero prior investigation to establish if the claim was even vaguely true.
It's a situation that should simply never arise, and needs to be stamped hard with a very expensive lawsuit, so Amazon and the like are disincentivised from playing Judge Dredd with users' accounts and services following a single baseless allegation.
As someone who was bullied heavily in school and essentially ostracized, I appreciate that acknowledgement. Three decades later it continues to affect how I see myself in the world and how I react to people around me.
As someone who survived 2 suicide attempts as a teenager due to bullying, I concur. I’m glad it’s getting the attention and support it deserves. I dealt with it back in the mid 2000’s. You were on your own then.
As someone who was also bullied in school, all the way to the 8th grade (and even a little beyond), I couldn't care less about words. That would require me to actually care about the opinion of whoever said the "mean" thing.
I will admit it's different when you're an adult and dealing with someone you don't reasonably expect to ever see again. Living in a small town had decided disadvantages in that anyone who took a disliking to me and decided to make my life hell was going to be someone I had to interact with repeatedly for the forseeable future.
"A lot of bullying is "just words" but leaves far deeper and longer lasting trauma than a punch in the face."
Maybe one of the problems is that in the past once you left school for the day the bully would be left behind and there would be some respite. These days that bullying continues with kids being on social media from when they get home to when the parents finally confiscate the phone at night so the kids will get to sleep. Problem = poor parenting. Having good social skills is important, but so is having individual quiet time and time in an un-stressed environment. There were bullies at my school, but shortly after the final bell I could be shut of them. I'd go home, get my homework done and get together with some of my mates to do stuff together afterwards until dinner. Decompression achieved.
"They are not the courts it is not their job to punish the guilty."
I don't see it as an attempt to punish the guilty, but a way to push their agenda, foster their own take of the world and avoid getting named in lawsuits for facilitating hate speech. It's not that they'd get fined in court, but just the effort it takes to get separated from a suit is expensive. My mom was a nurse for years and got named in plenty of suits when attorneys compiled a list of everybody that was in that wing of the hospital in the same time frame and made the court strike the names of the uninvolved. She had insurance that would cover that, but at a gazillion bucks an hour, the time for an attorney to make a court appearance on a motion to dismiss could buy a car (used, a few years old). This is why I'd rather not see lawsuits over this sort of crappy customer service go to court. A M$ drone should have known going in what the pitfalls could be. Microsoft are no angels themselves.
The most surprising thing about this story is that Amazon appeared to have ANY interest in the well-being of their drivers. There are many horror stories about their drivers having to pee in bottles and suchlike, and I don't think most of those were fabricated.
As for the rest, the lesson is clear: Cloud-connected devices, like cloud storage and servers, are not under your control. They are controlled by avaricious, amoral corporations who fundamentally have no fucks to give about their obligations or your needs, interests, or the survival of your company. Trust them at your peril.
"Probably not. Hence this kind of stupid thing NEEDS to lead to a lawsuit."
Naw, the courts are busy enough dealing with the people that spill hot coffee in their laps and sue for it being TOO hot. Humans have already put sticks in the spokes of old fashioned natural selection. This sort of thing just needs to amass enough victims and appear not only in news articles, but in talks between people so people will learn. Hopefully they'll learn the broader lesson and not just do the exact same thing with another megacorp. That whole insanity definition sort of thing.
Perhaps there needs to be lessons taught in school about secrecy and privacy in the real/virtual worlds. I recall one time when somebody I was chatting with online posted a photo of her home. I looked at the exif data, punched the GPS coordinates into Google Maps and asked her if that was her address. Hey, nice that many phones embed that information, but people need to realize that it's there. I scared the carp out of her, but it did make my point. You would think that one basic middle class home in California would look very similar to another middle class tract home in the same region and you'd be safe posting the image, but you aren't. I might have been able to search for a match using the photo and got one if the home had been listed for sale in the last 10 years or so. Given a couple of other innocuous data points and I could rapidly toss out false hits.
I suspect there's something in the EULA that fully indemnifies Amazon from any legal vulnerability. Something along the lines of "You give up any and all rights to any recompense for damages no matter how hard we abuse you. You can't sue us, you can't even contact us to complain. Nyah, Nyah, Nyah..."
"This wasn’t just a simple inconvenience, though," he wrote. "I have a smart home, and my primary means of interfacing with all the devices and automations is through Amazon Echo devices via Alexa. This incident left me with a house full of unresponsive devices, a silent Alexa, and a lot of questions."
Hopefully, the first question being: why did I tie my house so thoroughly into a third-party cloud, without considering what it would do to my lifestyle if it was interrupted in any way?
If he had the nous to do some of it locally, what was the gain supposed to be in outsourcing the rest?
Not his computer in control, means it wasn't really his home...
If he had the nous to do some of it locally, what was the gain supposed to be in outsourcing the rest?
Convenience.
Not his computer in control, means it wasn't really his home...
I... erm... what??
For 'wasn't really his home' you mean 'was slightly harder to turn the lights on and off' surely?
Dunno about you, but what makes somewhere "home" and not just "the place I'm living in" is, among other things, the feeling that "this is *my* space" (our *our* for the fortunate) and I have control over it (barring force majeure).
If the light stops working then it is frustrating when it is down to physical reality: the bulb is old - ah ha, I planned for this, quick swap, smugness (or didn't and grrr, self); the entire village has lost power, time for the good old Blitz Spirit, crank up the Victrola.
If the light stops working on the whim of someone else, that is an intrusion into the "home" - it may as well be a hotel for all the sense of "belonging there" that is left. And that "someone else" doesn't even know you! It isn't even personal, you are literally nothing to them other than an account on their screen.
Maybe one happy day you too will enjoy a home and not just a roof over your head.
If the light stops working on the whim of someone else, that is an intrusion into the "home" - it may as well be a hotel for all the sense of "belonging there" that is left. And that "someone else" doesn't even know you! It isn't even personal, you are literally nothing to them other than an account on their screen.
For the record, I do not, nor would I even consider, turning off someone's lights, whim or no!
Dunno about you,
[...]
Maybe one happy day you too will enjoy a home and not just a roof over your head.
In light of your opening statement, I may suggest that your closing one is a little presumptuous. ;)
I've never seen an Alexia controlled lighting system that doesn't have a physical control too, yes, I can see it would be annoying to have the reduced convenience. I have 'fancy lights' and it would irritate me no end if they stopped working as I've become very used to them.
But, for me, it would be an irritation, like if another aspect of my home develops a fault, say my central heating system. It wouldn't suddenly stop me feeling a sense of belonging or that it was no longer my home.
However, I also assume if you choose to have something like an Echo device in your home you've made that decision understanding the implications. (Perhaps ironically, I don't; for these very reasons).
If the light stops working on the whim of someone else, that is an intrusion into the "home" - it may as well be a hotel for all the sense of "belonging there" that is left. And that "someone else" doesn't even know you! It isn't even personal, you are literally nothing to them other than an account on their screen.
This is where we view it differently, once it becomes an impersonal action then, to me, it's the same as my boiler breaking early because someone in the factory didn't do their job one Friday afternoon as they were thinking of the weekend. The impersonality makes the fact there was maybe a human in the loop even less relevant, again, to me.
Oh, I don't know if it's important, but it's probably worth pointing out that I used Hue for my fancy lights for this very reason, they don't require internet access or even Wi-Fi to function, sure there's a single point of failure in the hub, but I couldn't be locked out of them by an external company.
It's not just convenience in terms of easy to use, it's also a cost thing.
Before things like Alexa, home automation systems were quite pricey, even if you did it yourself, but at least then it was offline and you were in control, power outages and bugs aside.
So by relying on someting you have no control over, whilst thinking you own the right to use Alexa forever, he's a fool.
For me, all critical systems are to be in house controlled, either manually or via automation here.
After all, internet outages are a thing. Power outages easily handled via UPS and a generator with an automatic transfer switch.
That said, my home entertainment system is fully automated, with servers in house. Lights, I get off my fat arse and operate them, just as I have to do to go to the toilet or prepare and eat my food.
Getting food, that's either a 3.5 mile round trip walk to one supermarket or a smaller market at 5 miles round trip with items the first market doesn't carry. Additional exercise item, the sidewalks are slightly below the quality of a well used tank trail.
Upside is, for the cost of a cheap pair of shoes, ethanol is available near the supermarket at 3.5 miles, so I can simply take my shoes off and float home.
Reliability, not magic when every subsystem works and havoc when one component, such as one authorization service gets capriciously disconnected.
And he continues "left me with a house full of unresponsive devices"
You seem to be assuming that "primary" meant he had a secondary means of controlling *all* of his devices? And yet they remained unresponsive.
Maybe "primary" here was more casually used, to refer to the most often used mechanism when interacting with his surrounds? And for that subset of his surrounds, the only?
"I have a smart home, and my primary means of interfacing with all the devices and automations is through Amazon Echo devices via Alexa. This incident left me with a house full of unresponsive devices, a silent Alexa, and a lot of questions."
Jackson's smart home wasn't entirely non-functional during this period. Most of his smart home gear, he said, is self-hosted locally, via Apple HomeKit, and not tied to an Amazon cloud service. He could still interact with some devices through Apple's Siri assistant software.
So let me get this straight:
You set up a "smart home" using devices dependent upon internet connectivity with a cloud provider (Amazon's Echo).
And then set up a "backup" plan...that ALSO depends upon internet connectivity with a cloud provider (Apple's Siri).
And, as a worker in the tech industry, you see / saw no problem with this implementation??
------------------------------------------
Never mind a cloud provider refusing service, have you never heard of the phrase "internet outage"??!
I think you should be fired from your day job. Apparently your idea of what a functional "backup plan" is, is completely incompetent. You shouldn't actually be allowed near any system as you show no ability to implement technology in a redundant manner, you show no understanding of the concept of BOTH "mission-critical" and "user-focused".
Your fail is HUMILIATING and should follow you for the rest of your working life: you should spend the next few years considering the error of your ways and what you can do to redeem yourself in the eyes of Tech Geeks worldwide.
Do you have backups for everything you've ever bought for personal use, no matter how inconsequential the purchase was and how minor an inconvenience a failure would be? I seriously doubt it. This was not a person who set up this system to provide life-critical services to a client who required extreme fault tolerance; it was a person setting up some conveniences in his own house.
Answer this question: where is your email handled? All your accounts, every one of them. Is it all on your own mail server? Congratulations. Now that server, it's on hardware you control, right? Nobody else is running it? And that server is in a building you control, and by control I mean that you own it so nobody can lock you out, right? And that server has a backup which you also own, in a different building in case the first one burns down, and you control that building too? And the email address that owns the domain for those private servers is also controlled entirely by you in the same way, so you can't be locked out through that channel either? My guess is that your personal email does not have this level of backup, and it probably falls far short of that ideal. I have taken a couple steps in this direction, but I don't have that level of control or certainty. Yet, our email is far more important to our lives than smart lights, if we decide to buy them.
By the way, if you actually have this level of control over your email, consider other services that you also rely on. Can you honestly claim to have redundant backups for everything you rely on, not just the most important ones? If you do not, then your criticism of this guy applies to you as well. Fortunately, it's unwarranted, and I don't think there's anything wrong with you or that you should spend the next few years overcoming that humiliation.
Huge difference between email, which you don't need every day, and the lights and climate control which does require daily access. Your post implies you must even generate your own electricity or you'te wrong.
.
Personally, I control lights with wall switches and the HVAC with a mercury wall switch. These items work for a lifetime and have no idea an internet exists.
But the problem is people have been conditioned to believe that there is some essential value in an internet connection for both the strangest (toothbrush?) and most mundane (light switch?) of things.
I am seen as primitive because my house has no automation beyond mechanical thermostats on radiators; I have to turn on the lights myself using (eek!) mechanical switches on the walls or in the cables and if it's too warm I open a window (by grasping the handle, rotating it either 90 or 180 degrees depending how I want the window to open, and pulling). Physical access is provided by a small metal strip with dimples in it which I insert into a slot in the door... and the doorbell is a button which closes an electrical circuit, causing a solenoid to move a striker against a sounder.
Everything important is as simple as possible using old, well tried, mature and above all locally controlled technology. Attaching it to the internet seems both wasteful and pointless.
(and before anyone points it out: yes of course I have computers around the place. But while the house might lock me out of the computer, the computer can't lock me out of the house.)
@Neil Barnes
"the doorbell is a button which closes an electrical circuit, causing a solenoid to move a striker against a sounder."
We don't have none of that new fangled electrickery on our doorbell, You pull a handle which pulls a string round some pulleys, the string pulls a coiled spring and makes a bell wobble so that the clapper hits the side.
《Proper automation would involve your valet opening the door and offering tea to your guest.》
New horrors! The Amazon "Autovalet"(tm) - ChatGPT meets Talkie Toaster; a sociopathic misanthropic version of Jeeves.
If melting an Amazon snowflake delivery driver silences Alexa the calories (joules) were well spent.
The late Douglas Adams gave fair warning through his writing of the excesses of the Sirius Cybernetics Corporation but the last thirty years have demonstrated that this dystopian vision has been embraced by the polloi and their betters as something utopian.
Years ago I was truely irritated on discovering my CD/FM Radio microsystem wasn't fully functional without the remote. If pissing off one of Bezos' PFY drivers rendered my home dysfunctional - ballistic wouldn't decribe it.
We have a fully mechanical doorbell – actually just a bell mounted outside the door – but in practice I don't believe anyone's ever used it anyway. When it's cold and the door's closed they knock; if it's warm and the door's open, they just call out. (I generally suggest to friends and neighbors that they could just let themselves in, as folks used to do, but in this era of ridiculous dangerism people seem reluctant to do that.)
"(I generally suggest to friends and neighbors that they could just let themselves in, as folks used to do,"
If I'm expecting somebody, no problem if they let themselves in and give a shout that they're here just in case I didn't shut the cloak room door as I generally don't when there's nobody about. I can then shout back telling them where I am which will often be the kitchen making tea and putting out a plate of snacks since I'm expecting guests. I'm pretty old fashioned that way.
"the doorbell is a button which closes an electrical circuit, causing a solenoid to move a striker against a sounder."
I picked up a very old telephone ringer box that would mount high on the wall above the box with the earpiece and microphone with the intent of restoring it. I found a really great YouTube video of somebody restoring a very similar ringer box where it appears they repurposed it to be a doorbell as there is no phone system it will interface with and hasn't been for ages. That's got me thinking............Ring? FO.
《We don't have none of that new fangled electrickery on our doorbell, You pull a handle which pulls a string round some pulleys, the string pulls a coiled spring and makes a bell wobble so that the clapper hits the side.》
How's Gromit doing these days? :)
I assume you haven't bought an electric car recently. Every aspect we rail against is already part of the deal with a car.
And in the UK, the coming generation of 'green, super-efficient, smart' homes will have this stuff built-in too. Connected sensors in walls, controls built in to every part of the structure, etc. etc.
Every part of the house will have the same dependencies and vulnerabilities as any connected device. And of course, the favoured suppliers of all that stuff love it.
It's happening already. And the kids love it.
Live in a barge. Except for when the river dries.
My car is a 13 year-old petrol-driven on, I'm afraid. I might get an electric one, when that one eventually dies, but the main blocker there will probably be that I live in a rented second-floor flat, and my car is in a communal garage two floors below, so getting a charging point installed might not be easy.
As for barges, well, there's no canal going up the hill I live on, maybe you can send some navvies round to build a series of lock gates down to the nearest river, through a built-up city...
"I am seen as primitive because my house has no automation beyond mechanical thermostats on radiators; I have to turn on the lights myself using (eek!) mechanical switches on the walls or in the cables and if it's too warm I open a window "
After that I feel all New Age with my x10 controls. Mostly what I've done with that is make it so I can put wall switches where I find convenient and can turn on the outside lights if I hear something knocking about. Years ago I worked at a company that installed home automation stuff and while interesting, I didn't find any of it benefitting me at all. Maybe I just lack a home much larger than I have where walking to the wall switch would require a map. That's the sort of home we'd install this stuff in and also it was the sort of people trying to one up each other with tech things. It was so cool that they could watch a laser disc that was inserted in the player downstairs, in their bedroom. With the sorts of money these people had, it would have been cheaper to just replicated everything in the home theatre in the master bedroom and be done with it. They never could work out all of the remotes.
"Huge difference between email, which you don't need every day, and the lights and climate control which does require daily access."
I disagree. If a smart light fails, then you have to use the wall switch. Most lights I'm aware of (I haven't purchased any, so my sample size may be limited), have a perfectly functional manual mode which means you'll have no automatic timers, color changes, or scripts to automatically set things when other events occur, but if you can move to the wall, you can still have light or darkness as you desire. If your smart light bulb is somehow missing this feature, then you can replace it with a simple light bulb and have that until you get your smart one working again, the same way you would deal with a normal light bulb that had burned out. Email, on the other hand, is quite important. It is a method of authenticating to a lot of services, a way to get important communications, and if you use one for business purposes, can be quite valuable. I'd much rather deal with a prolonged smart light bulb outage than a prolonged email outage, and therefore I would and do spend more effort having backups for email than for light bulbs.
"Your post implies you must even generate your own electricity or you'te wrong."
Sort of, since I'm trying to make the point that, at some point, the difficulty involved in doing everything yourself means it's not justified to do so. The post to which I replied was quite disparaging of this engineer for not having a third, local, backup system for something comparatively unimportant, but if you really need that level of backup, there are a lot of other things that would also need to be backed up. Some people actually go to that effort, often when they already have plenty of resources to make that possible (your own servers in your own buildings is much easier for people who own multiple buildings), but most of us do not. It would be hypocritical to attack the engineer for lacking a level of redundancy they didn't use themselves.
"Do you have backups for everything you've ever bought for personal use, no matter how inconsequential the purchase was and how minor an inconvenience a failure would be?"
For the most part, but I have to admit that the default in plenty of cases is "do without". I've done that before, I can do it again. The task of creating backups of things is an ongoing project. The chest freezer in the garage is now on solar/battery with mains as a back up. If I lose power, I don't lose a bunch of food. The next project like that is to be able to run the evaporative cooler via solar/battery with mains as the backup. Heating in the winter is with solar heating panels which are being added to. Again, the back up is electric heaters powered by the mains now and with the solar/battery system used for cooling a bit later. The backup to the mains is likely going to be a one of the Chinesium small diesel engines driving a generator run from processed used motor oil/chip fat. The list is endless, but after working in aerospace where one of my hats was Safety Officer, I think about backups and ponder loads of what-ifs. I also realize that there's no planning for the Golden BB, so after you've hit the seventh level of turtles, there's no point in creating plans for anything deeper down than that.
"Do you have backups for everything you've ever bought for personal use, no matter how inconsequential the purchase was and how minor an inconvenience a failure would be? "
Absurd absolute, thus irrelevant. But when you don't have a backup even for *getting in*, your position is FUBAR to start with.
Everyone and their cousin have a mechanical lock in some door and spare key at some relative. A lock which, you know, works without internet or electricity.
Having listened to his Youtube video it seems he did have a functional "backup plan" that would cover an internet outage. As his smart home is hosted locally he could access the devices through his server. He even has backup batteries for his devices to handle limited power outages.
His point was unlike him most people won't they will just have alexa and their smart lights etc will stop working if Amazon withdraw Alexa.
Hopefully, given his UPS capability, he'll consider a moderate generator with automagic transfer switch. They're only around $7k USD here. Around the size of an average central air conditioning compressor in size and can run on either stored fuel or natural gas.
If one has gone to the level of expense he already has, in for the penny, in for the pound.
But, for authentication services, I still prefer everything in house. And to be honest, I still get greeting cards from my utility company.
> that ALSO depends upon internet connectivity with a cloud provider (Apple's Siri).
The way Siri was talked about in the article confused me a bit (I don't have a setup like Jackson's; surprise!), so did a little digging. It appears that if you have a new enough shiny Siri can work locally doing the voice recognition on your iDoodad.
So let him have that point back.
Now start to ponder that Siri really is listening in all the time, even when you are disconnected, gathering all those useful little nuggets...
An identity thief drains your biggest bank account. What, no backup strategy? A carjacker jacks your work vehicle. What, no backup strategy? A rapist rapes you. What, no backup strategy? Eliminating all single points of failure depends on how big the point is.
Hey, if you don't have a backup strategy for global nuclear war or false vacuum collapse, there's really no point in having a backup strategy for your stupid "smart home" automation. Because all risks are equivalent and mitigating just one is completely pointless.
Honestly, GP here wins "Stupidest Argument in the Thread" award hands-down, and the bar was pretty high.
"I have a smart home, and my primary means of interfacing with all the devices and automations is through Amazon Echo devices via Alexa."
That's an odd way to spell "stupid home".
Oh, well. If this guy wants to make his living space an enormously overcomplicated, fragile engineering disaster with a huge attack surface, I suppose that's his prerogative. Personally I have better things to do with my time and money than go looking for trouble in the name of "convenience". (Particularly since "convenience" in this sense often primarily means less movement and thinking, in my experience, so you pay a price in health as well.)
I have to admit, it is a bit hard to muster empathy here.
A person gives, willingly, the keys to his home automation services to a third party with zero accountability and expects everything to go peachy? And the part where "Siri... could...", well that is just another third party with zero accountability.
What do you expect? Buy stuff controlled by others and it all just works all the time? And then all that electronics junk produced. A house is built for 50, 100 or more years. The installed electronics are not even properly owned but licensed and have life-spans ranging from 2...5 years, if you are lucky, and you must hope not to be proud owner of electronic bricks after yet another premature end-of-life notice.
Is this really worth the effort? Paying for the privilege and giving away the keys at the same time?
Not to mention the surveillance... That will not be disabled, of course...
"BMW are already doing it with their heated seats.."
And Alibaba already has heated seat pads you can purchase for $25. I didn't see if they provide the wiring to be able to tap power from the existing harness. Granted, the BMW implementation is likely much better, but the subscription thing is a kick in the teeth just on principle.
《And Alibaba already has heated seat pads you can purchase for $25》
Given the likely country of manufacture I can imagine this could be case of out of the pan and into the fire - more literally than might be imagined.
Worst case it won't be Ali Baba's arse in a sling. :)
Regrettably, I only recently saw an article that said your power supplier can switch your smart meter to pay in advance, remotely, and without even informing you.
British Gas have only just been banned by OffGem (or whoever) from breaking into properties and installing pre-pay meters when they feel like it.
> Just wait till the power company locks your out of your “smart” thermostat.
2021: https://news.yahoo.com/power-companies-taking-over-smart-185552524.html
"Have you ever seen your smart thermostat go rogue? Galveston, Texas, resident Shelby Rogers recently did, and discovered that her power company had manually changed her air conditioning unit to be set at 80 F."
https://www.theverge.com/2021/6/18/22540015/psa-energy-saver-program-smart-thermostat-adjust-temperature-heat
"Known as demand-response programs, some Texans were taken by surprise this week, as their thermostats were turned up without any action from them."
From those and other reports[1], it appears that the "affected" had voluntarily signed up to let the power company do this, to get a bit off their bill and those "surprised" were just the usual suspects who didn't read the T&C (or the instructions for their home units) but the point is, the ability is built into those things (think you'll still be able to override using the app? That they had written for them?).
In the US, at least.
The Texas grid is a poster child for grift, graft, greed, and corruption. We're deliberately cut off from the two larger grids east and west (There a 3 in the U.S.) because the powers that be want the freedom!!! to do whatever they want, which is basically allowing a "state regulated" utility to be free from outside (Federal) regulation or interference (and backup, when needed.)
Before the infamous Blue Norther that froze the entire state and caused "Fled" Cruz to flee to Cancun, we had a smaller storm a few years previous that pointed out the vulnerability of the plants to severe cold weather, and caused the utility regulatory body to recommend, but not require, the utility companies to weatherize their power plants. "No, we can't do that! That would cut into our profits!" And they did not.
And so, an unusually powerful but entire predictable climate change driven winter storm killed hundreds of my fellow Texans who couldn't afford the outrageous electric bills nor the expense to flee to warmer climes for the time the state was in the grip of one of the worst storms in recent history.
Sorry, I seem to have gone off on a wee rant, but the topic triggers and infuriates me to this day. If I killed as many people, I'd have been put to death by the state by now, but the utilities and pols responsible for this outrage laughed all the way to the bank.
My neighbor has a nice solar array on his roof, pays a miniscule bill, and sometimes even gets a refund. I intend to do the same as soon as I can afford to, because depending on the decisions of corporations and their enabling politicians can not only get you locked out of your smart devices, it can actually kill you.
And now, back to your regularly scheduled program.
/rant
That kind of load-shedding scheme has existed in parts of California for years; in less-connected times it was a physical relay connected to the A/C compressor. The thing is, it's opt-in; these people signed up for it in exchange for a bill reduction. They just want it both ways, to take the rebate but not have to follow through on their end.
"those "surprised" were just the usual suspects who didn't read the T&C (or the instructions for their home units) "
I'll point some of these pitfalls to people I know and often hear "They'd never do that". Facepalm. There's a reason it's in the contract.
I had a company I talked to about some independent contractor work send me their contract that stated payments would be remitted within 90 days after acceptance of the work when the person I talked with said they sent out payment in two weeks after the job is completed. They weren't entertaining any changes to the contract and it didn't say how long it might be for them to accept the work or even if they must. That wasn't the only major discrepancy.
Military planners go my capabilities, not intentions. The question is what the other side can do without worrying about whether they will or not. Next week after the coup/election/redistricting, intentions could be very different. We are seeing that sort of thing right now.
"the driver who had delivered my package reported receiving racist remarks from my 'Ring doorbell'"
Doesn't Amazon own Ring? I expect if they had checked their records, they would have realised they didn't have any and therefore it was not in fact a Ring doorbell. Ergo, they didn't check, and just switched off a customer on the say-so of a driver. Be nice to your driver. Be very, very nice.
Except as El Reg noted a few words later, it's actually an Eufy.
Still, same ruling applies given that Eufy was recently caught lying about their encryption and leaking videos captured by their security devices online. Anyone with a working brain would have returned the device and asked for a refund.
"Be nice to your driver. Be very, very nice."
F'em. Buy locally so those shops will be around next week when you need something and don't want to wait a week for a counterfeit item to show up in a huge box of missing matter pellets. I get it, sometimes you can't but too many people don't even try and another hobby shop, photo store, etc closes up forever. There was a thread on another article mentioning the old .049 engine model planes whose fuel would be darn near impossible to buy mail order. Big hobby rockets use black powder for the parachute ejection and shipping that is shed loads of cash in hazmat fees. Lucky for me I have a very good supply on hand since the last company in the US to make and sell black powder stopped/went out of business though there may be a successor. The store that used to carry it is gone, though. I'll need to put it on my list of things to buy when out of the state as it's likely I can't get it where I live now just like MEK, THF and some other solvents/adhesives that actually work as opposed to the water based stuff that last all of 5 seconds.
"Yes, but if you go out and willing purchase, with your own money, a Talkie Toaster instead, you can't really start complaining about it afterwards just because you didn't think the consequences of doing so properly."
Oh, don't do that. Buried in the T&C's is a clause that makes you liable for $1,200 if you dis the toaster and an agreement that they can put a lien on your home/car until the fine is paid.
> "It used to be that if you bought a toaster, you owned the toaster, he said,"
Fancy hearing that coming from the mouth of a Micro$oft employee, the same Micro$oft who thinks I don't own the computer I built with parts I bought myself with my hard-earned savings and is constantly pushing me obnoxious ads through Window$ and is seeking to take away my ownership of my PC further by forcing CPU makers to include their Pluton silicon and "secure boot" as well as obnoxious DRMs...
Odd, I've barely noticed any of that.
Oh, that's because I run Linux and *BSD, with one Windows machine under duress for interacting with medical equipment and the most repaired system that I own, despite it being the newest.
Software security patches and "improvements" necessitating ever so many repairs before the damned thing will properly function again.
I call it job security training.
I'm astonished at the constant claims on here that Windows (only children say Micro$oft, Window$ and so on) keeps feeding ads. I've never seen one - where do they appear?
If I looked at the Bing homepage I'm sure I'd see plenty of ads, and most sites I visit show ads that ultimately lead back to Google, Facebook and I dare say Microsoft, but where does Windows ever display an ad outside of a browser?
They've been repeatedly "trialling" adverts in the Start Menu and other parts of the Windows 11 shell.
To date, they have not been stupid enough to do that in the Domain-joined official "Pro" licenced versions, only beta test and lesser versions like "Home" and "severely limited".
There's a wave of complaints every time they trial it, so they roll it back for a while then try again a few weeks later.
I've not seen them myself, but my CPU apparently cannot run Windows 11, despite still being sold when it launched.
That's an advert now? How about the one mine shows:
"Install the latest PowerShell for new features and improvements! https://aka.ms/PSWindows"
If that's what we're responding to, I'd like to see the massive complaint you must have for Canonical, which has been printing something like this every time I log in just because I never even tried to change it:
Welcome to Ubuntu 18.04.6 LTS (GNU/Linux 4.15.0-200-generic x86_64)
* Documentation: https://help.ubuntu.com
* Management: https://landscape.canonical.com
* Support: https://ubuntu.com/advantage
[...]
Get cloud support with Ubuntu Advantage Cloud Guest:
http://www.ubuntu.com/business/services/cloud
Expanded Security Maintenance for Infrastructure is not enabled.
0 updates can be applied immediately.
24 additional security updates can be applied with ESM Infra.
Learn more about enabling ESM Infra service for Ubuntu 18.04 at
https://ubuntu.com/18-04
When does providing information about updates when you start a program start becoming advertising? Is it advertising when I'm shown a license or copyright statement, more common in stuff with an open source license? This is not a good example of advertising in Windows. The ads in the start menu part is very different than this, and I could complain that someone even tried it for days, but a line in PS about a new version of PS doesn't qualify in my mind.
Recently bought a Win10 Lappie. To get it out of "S" mode (Stupid mode) I had to go to the Microsoft $tore (on Edge, because I couldn't install a better browser until I unlocked the thing) to get a code (and a ton of dire!!! warnings!!! about what might happen if I did) just to unlock my own computer.
Else, I'd not be able to install anything other than what's offered from the Store. And rest assured, most of the ITSec stuff I use would never show up there. I don't think they even offered Malwarebytes, because of course, there's Windows Defender pre-installed. Hmmm. You can't remove Edge, any more than you could Internet "Exploder." They've got their users by the short 'n' curlies, and they exploit that ruthlessly and have for decades.
I recently bought an Intel chipped Lenovo All-in-One. Intel has System Usage Report setup that constantly runs whenever the hell it likes, eats tons of my CPU resources and reappears soon after I delete the offending .exe, time and time again. God only knows what it's reporting back to Intel. Never had this happen on my AMD box. And, speak of the devil, there it is again.
Having been a contractor at M$, I'm surprised that engineer hasn't been flogged from the building and sent packing for admitting to using competitor's devices and services. The NERVE!!! ;)
I've been running some version of Windows since '95 on my PC's, and while even then, they locked down a lot of the system (for good reason, I dealt with way too many people who FAFO'd themselves into having to call support), but now it's gotten far more intrusive and annoying. But what can you do but buy an Mac (yikes!), or in my case, relearn the dreaded Linux, which I may well do. (I hear it's actually become a lot more user friendly in the last 20 years or so since I last looked at it.)
There are precisely three chances that I'd ever own or possess such a device, regardless of which Wizard of Oz controls it.
Slim, fat and none.
My video surveillance, my device and server. Period, end of story. Same with my door locks. The day I have to surrender control to my door lock is the day I mine my damned door and I am very well experienced in counterterrorism and explosive demolitions.
Yes, I used to terrorize actual terrorists for a living. I've also done redundant systems, with full fault tolerance and both fail safe and fail unsafe systems, doing a lot of defense work.
As for shit lists, got my own and am on quite a few. Oddly, I've managed to avoid getting on any FVEY shit lists thus far. But, I suspect that's a mutual thing ever since they tagged me REF.
Retired, Extremely Flatulent.
"This wasn’t just a simple inconvenience, though," he wrote. "I have a smart home, and my primary means of interfacing with all the devices and automations is through Amazon Echo devices via Alexa. This incident left me with a house full of unresponsive devices, a silent Alexa, and a lot of questions."
The root cause is that he handed his home over to a technology company under the delusion that it was benevolent.
Alexa and her mates are like vampires: they can't come into your house unless you invite them in and if you do....
"Clarification, I wrote this from the perspective of the average user. My entire system was fine but only due to me self hosting many services and that should not have to be the norm/expected of everyone"
https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-week-without-amazon-df1074e3818b
His boss will be of the same mindset.
As a M$ engineer he should have been more savvy. However most customers for all this cloud-based kit aren't. They have no hope of detaching themselves from what are useful services if they work right. The big downsides are connectivity loss, companies moving on leaving orphans, and now brain-dead tantrums like this by service drones.
Personally I eschew all this cloud stuff because I can DIY, but that's not an option for most.
"Clarification, I wrote this from the perspective of the average user. My entire system was fine but only due to me self hosting many services and that should not have to be the norm/expected of everyone"
https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-week-without-amazon-df1074e3818b
Having seen my wife's challenge with Amazon wrongly disabling her selling account (due to a customer complaint - some customers just complain a lot and take advantage of services like Amazon's tendency to favour complaints so as to get free orders), you might as well be talking to fruit flies. You can provide them with completely overwhelming provable evidence that shows the complaint is wrong and it will go through many eyes and still they can't see it. It is very worrying their lack of accountability, opaqueness and lack of communication skills. You read some real horror stories. d
"go through many eyes" - most likely, it doesn't. An AI system (more likely an automated set of if/else statements) will determine the outcome of whether you broke the vaguely worded rules or not, then your appeal will be reviewed by the same system with the same result. Getting a real human to look at any kind of complaint is pretty difficult in the big tech companies because people are expensive and there's profits to be made.
So many commentards think the story is abaut cloud control, smart homes, woke policies, tech dependence, etc. But the real issue is Amazon being negligent in the way they validate feedback. The driver could have entered the wrong customer. he could have butt dialed in the report. Amazon simply didn't build in a failure path tp their proess. Just like they do with all of their processes.
Exactly, and the other issue is Amazon responding incorrectly. Let's assume that an event like this actually involved a lot of intentional abuse directed at the driver. Amazon might want to do something about that, and they have the right to, but that shouldn't include deactivating the products they sold or they're likely to face legal risks, not to mention informing their customers that the products are as likely to fail as we know they are, but the general customer does not. Not only do they need to check whether incidents actually occur, they need to figure out what they'll actually do in response to them rather than going to the easiest automated switch.
"So many commentards think the story is abaut cloud control, smart homes, woke policies, tech dependence, etc"
It IS about that looked at from one angle. The details of why the account was disabled could be just about anything. The biggest take away is that for whatever reason, this person that works for a computer/tech company put their faith in automating their home with a system they don't control all aspects of. The story could have been that a digger drove a trench through a fiber optic cable up the road and shut down their internet leaving them locked out of their home, unable to control the lights, cooker, fridge, HVAC, entertainment system/TV and their alarm clock.
"The story could have been that a digger drove a trench through a fiber optic cable up the road and shut down their internet leaving them locked out of their home, unable to control the lights, cooker, fridge, HVAC, entertainment system/TV and their alarm clock."
Except the facts, even the subset we had from the article, are clear in indicating otherwise. The guy has indicated that he did have local backups for the stuff he had, but was commenting on this because most users of the hardware would not. Even ignoring this, most of the IoT stuff has some kind of local option. Smart light bulbs still have wall switches which don't go online. Smart locks, assuming he had some which I doubt because I've never seen one that was any good, tend to have some plan for being unlockable manually. I was recently looking at some WiFi-enabled cooking equipment in an attempt to figure out what the WiFi was for and who would want it, and while I still don't have a great idea of how that's useful, every model I saw has buttons on it which do not require remote control to use. The thing that is lost when the account is shut down or the internet interrupted are the convenience elements, in this case the ability to control all those things using voice commands. Someone who relied on that could build a local backup voice control system, but for many users, they can deal with a loss in voice control by walking over to the existing local controls and activating them.
There are many here who appear to hate home automation hardware. I'm not just talking about not using it; I don't have any because I don't need it and I find the stuff I've seen to be of little use, and from the look of things, that applies to most authors of comments. However, that doesn't mean that I will look for reasons the equipment must be dangerous or stupid to the point that I'm inaccurate about its limitations or risks, nor that someone who chooses to have it is somehow less sympathetic. I'm seeing several comments that do one or both of these, and I find it a little confusing why there is so much hostility just because we may not use the same products.
"Amazon wrongly disabling her selling account"
That happens a lot and a good reason to never trust your livelihood to a megacorp. Amazon is also known for taking popular products, having knock-offs made in China, offering those products under their own brands and then deleting a seller's account that was making a good living from that product. Amazon winds up with very good insight into what sorts of things are selling on the backs and wallets of the people using their marketplace and taking risks.
The one thing I come away from this thinking is:
"Man, I wish I had this guy's PR agency"
Seriously, tech guy can't turn on his own lights has become an international news story. I get that this raises questions about blah, blah, blah, but nonsense like this goes on every day and we mainly shrug our shoulders and carry on buying into monthly subscriptions for someone else to remotely sell our own stuff back to us. Music, video, door bells, light switches, email and if the techbros have their way, our cars and everything else in our lives.
"An increasing amount of such incidents attracts state regulators like flies and it results in new laws being enacted to curb these bastards."
Sure, very poor laws written by the most techno-feeble portion of the population that will have a whole raft of unintended consequences which, if harnessed to generate electricity, could run all the crypto on the planet.
"You forgot about the law-makers being advised by the very industries they're trying to regulate."
Strike "Advised". Plenty of laws are written start to finish by those industries and handed to the "law-makers" to save them a bit of time. All the politician needs to do is have their staff double check that it's properly formatted and enough Latin has been sprinkled throughout.
"So is driving on bald tires but Amazon drivers do it all the time."
That happens when the driver or actual delivery company is 4 tiers down the contractor chain in the delivery network and making less than minimum wage. You shouldn't go by the livery on the side of the vehicle. In the US, those FedEx Ground vehicles look like they're from Federal Express, but they are contracted companies. Look for the name of the company and their address on the side in grey lettering. Amazon mainly does their own deliveries in very dense areas where the cost per drop is the lowest and farm out anything that starts costing real money.
And if you read all the fine print of the license agreements that you had to agree to in order to use your smart devices, you will find out that Amazon, Microsoft, Google can disable your accounts for essentially any reason. And of course you've given up the rights to sue them or join a class action suit along the way.
Sure, some of those clauses might not stand in court, but who's got the deep pockets to fight them about it?
This isn't quite this easy. Amazon, Micro$of, Google and all the rest of the bastards can even make you agree in license that they can sell your organs or sell you into slavery if you fail to pay their monthly fee but they still won't be able to enforce it (no matter how badly they want to anyway). If Amazon is found to be doing something illegal in any jurisdiction where they try to pull this kind of stunt off they still can be held liable and even a class-action lawsuit can proceed against them. Oh and believe me, some lawyers would be VERY happy to take on cases like this, because the awarded damages can be quite hefty.
"Sure, some of those clauses might not stand in court, but who's got the deep pockets to fight them about it?"
It won't go to court, but agreeing to the contract, you give up that right and promise to use their arbitration company instead where they will nearly always win. They have to screw up really bad for you to prevail. Since there isn't the same rights of evidence and discovery, you really don't have a chance.
My electron microscope is broken so it's hard to go over all of that fine print.
The part that surprises me is that there was an actual reason given, even if ridiculous, and the problem was resolved in just a week, as opposed to never.
My Facebook account was locked similarly. No reason, no explanation, no resolution. Giving control of your data or your device to large corporations is like handing your wallet to a stranger on the street. Perhaps they can be trusted, occasionally. Perhaps not, who can really tell?
Nah, antisemitism and murder are fine with Facebook, you probably inadvertently shared an image with one pixel of a nipple.
The number of times I have reported obviously far-right or deeply racist / sexist / homophobic / etc. hate speech to Facebook and got the "we found nothing wrong" response was quickly enough to make me stop bothering.
"and the problem was resolved in just a week, as opposed to never." - I think the fact that the story has gained international fame had a lot to do with this. As for the reason you almost always are given some vague, non-descript and unspecific reason for getting your account blocked, but then you get promptly ignored.
"Clarification, I wrote this from the perspective of the average user. My entire system was fine but only due to me self hosting many services and that should not have to be the norm/expected of everyone"
https://medium.com/@bjax_/a-tale-of-unwanted-disruption-my-week-without-amazon-df1074e3818b
You only ever rent stuff from Amazon.
I bought something of Amazon France and, after my Debit Card and Credit Card were both used to subscribe to Amazon Prime in France I decided to cancel my Amazon France account as I almost certainly will not be buying from them again.
Of course, I lost all the digital content I ever bought from them. Kindle didn’t want to know, but, big shout out to Audible who, even though they are owned by Amazon, gave me back all the Audible books I could prove I’d bought.
I still use Alexa for convenience so I’m guessing most people here will think I’m stupid for not setting up my own Linux based system and writing my own books and making my own films etc.
Very true. If I cancelled my Amazon account I can not see any reason at all to assume that I'd be able to, say, run the Amazon music app and expect it to still be allowed to connect to their servers.
Ditto any other online shop offering digital data: you close your account, they close your access to their storage. Would you really expect anything else?
The OP didn't say they'd cancelled their Amazon account, they said they'd cancelled Prime. I'd, quite reasonably, expect any Amazon-hosted media for which I had paid for a perpetual license, to be licensed in perpetuity regardless of whether I pay them a monthly fee for expedited delivery*.
*In reality, I've found it to be more like expedited estimated delivery, the number of times "Prime" items with "next day delivery" turn up two days later, and non-prime third party seller items with an estimated delivery time of 2 weeks turn up within two days...
Ah, afraid I have to disagree with you this time.
> The OP didn't say they'd cancelled their Amazon account, they said they'd cancelled Prime.
But he said:
>> I decided to cancel my Amazon France account
Not that he'd cancelled just Amazon France Prime (or Le Prime de Amazon Francais, as they like to do things backwards), but the whole account.
> for which I had paid for a perpetual license, to be licensed in perpetuity
The material would still be licensed to you - you can download and keep it, no problem - but I'd still not *expect* to go back and pull a fresh copy from their server if I didn't have an active account with them - just for starters, logging in would be tricky...
If it needs an app to work, you have a licence to use until the app stops being updated to the latest OS, or you keep an old phone and hope it doesn’t break.
And will I’m on the subject a show we wanted to go to only provided tickets to a smart phone. No other option, print at home - no, email - no.
This mono-culture is so convenient, which is what the frog thought in that lovely warm water that slowly got warmer and warmer or so we are told.
> a show we wanted to go to only provided tickets to a smart phone
Ooooh, that is annoying when they do that. You get to the venue - oh look, bugger all connectivity (even if you aren't out in the middle of nowhere, guess what everyone there is trying to do) and the app won't show the QR to front of house until it has verified you (nope, no idea why it needs to do that, but in the meantime here is an ad for another show).
Screenshots, an absolute life saver.
As a 3rd party seller on Amazon, I can almost 100% guarantee that nothing that has happened here will change the way that Amazon works.
Every decision that is made on Amazon is made by 'AI' written by work experience guys (not even the intern). I'm convinced that the 'AI' here is basic pattern matching that doesn't even guard against the 'Scunthorpe' problem. Sellers can wake up in a morning and their whole business has been iced because of one of these flawed decisions.
I guess if it had have been a Ring doorbell, Amazon would've just gone in and checked the footage themselves, so that might have had a quicker resolution.
We're all hating on the SRE because he had no local backup method. Surely the key point is that something as easy as a deliivery driver lying can completely cripple all your paid for services and products?
And IF he was racist. again, what has that got to do with prior purchased products and services? Its very dystopian how much power they have to ruin your life.
It gets increasingly difficult to resist giving them power. Lloyds Bank came out with a system where you could photograph a cheque with your phone and they'd pay it in. Wonderful. Except I want to do it from my computer because I don't have that sort of phone. Just one example of the constant pressure to get a spy phone.
You can still do it the old-fashioned way, by queueing up in a branch and handing it over to the cashier. It's just your "local" branch might be a 50-mile drive away.
Also, the only time I ever have to deal with a cheque these days is when my 77-year-old father writes one, and even he has managed to work out internet banking now.
Most personal bank accounts don't even offer the ability to issue cheques any more.
I mean if I wouldn't have been VERY suspicious of sketchy cloud-based services up until now this definitely would've been my last straw. Either way this incident not only makes sure I'll never buy any Amacrap IoT/cloud/Internet-enabled device EVER, but I'll completely ditch the idea of having ANY of my devices connected to the cloud. This is simply unacceptable and an utter disgrace.
"I guess he now has realised, having a smart home is ok"
By most audits, smart homes cost the users more in energy than non-smart homes. The more things that are fitted the greater the costs over time. If it gets too involved, selling the home becomes an issue. As you could imagine, the buyer would also need to subscribe to all of the external services and know how to use them or turning on/off a light could turn into an insurmountable problem. A bog standard light switch on the wall next to the door is a concept we all understand at this point. When electric lighting first became a thing, the switches turned just like a gas valve would have so the muscle memory of turning the key to feed gas to the lamp was very similar to switching on an Edison bulb. Most of the smart home stuff doesn't follow a metaphor of traditional controls.
The Microsoft engineer is using Amazon Alexa to control his "smart" home, and not doing it via Cortana.
Here, let me Bing! that for you...
Pfffft.
It's not like Microsoft aren't one of the three major players in the cloud game, with Azure, and actually have some quite interesting edge computing stuff going on, maybe they have just reached the conclusion that voice-controlled devices are inherently insecure and fundamentally just a gimmick?
You basically can't do the same things with Cortana as you could with Alexa. For one problem, I don't think Microsoft makes Cortana boxes which you can put somewhere you want to have voice commands recognized. You'd have to have laptops sitting around to do that because Cortana only works from devices running Windows. I'm not sure if you can hook Cortana into any of the services that can control automated hardware either, but that's at least more likely (I've never enabled Cortana, so I don't know what it is capable of doing). I don't have any voice control except the one built into my phone, but some systems are clearly more functional than others.
"Anything 'cloudy' is temporary and unreliable."
A big problem is as soon as sales drop off for the physical devices, the service is shut down shortly thereafter. A month later there is a new incompatible system with new devices and ones that do all of the stuff your deprecated modules used to do. Shiny, Shiny.
So the delivery driver blatantly lied and caused the customer a great deal of harm and many billable hours.
So is Amazon going to do anything about it or are they so scared to be seen as the slightest bit not woke, that they will let their lying delivery driver go unpunished?
That engineer should haul them into court for all the time he had to spend on it and get his lawyer to legally compel the lying driver to show up and answer for his lies.
As much as folks love "free market" eventually big cloud providers and internet providers will need to be strictly regulated as public utilities to ensure justice and fair treatment for everyone and not just, hey let's ruin your life in an instant because we feel like it and who cares if you are right.
"That engineer should haul them into court for all the time he had to spend on it and get his lawyer to legally compel the lying driver to show up and answer for his lies."
Nope, that engineer should be forced to suck on the burned fingers he got from touching the hot cooktop when he should have known better. Painful lesson tend to be the ones remembered.
Sorry mate your an idiot for allowing a tech company to control your home.
The new world of EV where the company can disable your car
Or the automated re-enrolments these are so wrong they are off the scale.
I had my internet connection shut off by my provider
I merely relocated to a coffee shop that was bad enough, took nearly a week to get it sorted out.
I now have the coffee shop the home WiFi and my phone hotspot so they can never take me off mine again.
I'm delighted knowing that this Microsoft engineer was using Amazon and Apple products to automate his home in lieu of whatever incompetent also-ran flavor of it his employer offers. And the best part is he's not immediately drop-kicking all that fancy Amazon gear straight back out the front door and safely out of his house.
I was locked out of my Facebook account for a year (presumably disgruntled members of a particularly large group I admined had reported my profile enough times between them that it flagged up) as Facebook wanted me to prove my identity. I sent the photo of my driving license as requested and the automated system stated that they would have it checked but due to covid it may take longer than usual (this was from around May 2021 to 2022)
I confirmed with "Occulus" during that time, that had I owned or purchased an Occulus VR of any description, I would not be able to operate it due to my account being inaccessible.
So in this case, not even an accusation, just a prompt to prove my identity and a business model of removing as many human beings from the business as possible.
I only got my account back in the end by contacting the information commissioner's office to complain that Facebook weren't keeping my personal data up to date.
As companies like Facebook push more demands onto algorithms that are already not fit for purpose, the human element is more likely to be forgotten - after all, we are not the customer, we are the product. (An example of which, reporting content for clearly violating their own standards - the report is not upheld because they don't have the staff to check it and the robots are unable to decide either way - Facebook automated checkers are looking back on group content dating back 4+ years in some cases and sanctioning members for content they posted back then, yet they can't deal with recent content because it doesn't fit into their predefined peg-holes)
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