AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists When Amazon's cloud face-planted on Monday, it didn't just take down some of the world's most popular apps – it took down dignity, comfort, and the occasional cat toilet. The AWS outage saw a long list of services go dark, from Snapchat to Signal, but the real victims were the gadgets that revealed how ludicrously cloud- …
EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature ... "sweating through my sheets because the app's dead."
I suppose just unplugging the damn thing from the mains was too difficult? Probably scared of it rebooting properly when it was plugged back in.
Adverts for Eightsleep started popping up in something I followed, so I remember taking a look at their website. From what I recall it's a bulky mattress covered with sensors and filled with pipes containing distilled water, with a box beside the bed that heats or cools said water and pumps it through the mattress. In addition to the monthly charges, there's also the cost and faff of replacing all the water at regular intervals to prevent it from becoming some sort of bacteriological hazard. I also recall hearing complaints that the pipework tended to spring leaks after a while. Somehow I just don't like the idea of sleeping on something that combines mains electricity and water, and is apparently known to leak - anecdotally, of course.
It gets worse than that - a woman in New Zealand was silly enough to announce in the national news that a) she couldn't remember how to turn on her bedside light manually, and b), that she had to go to bed in a cold room because the smart plug her heater was plugged into didn't work. I've never looked at one of the Alexa controlled smart plugs, but I assume now that they must lock the appliance plug into themselves when connectivity is lost, thus preventing the obvious solution from being applied.
EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature ... "sweating through my sheets because the app's dead."
I see this as the same thing as new parents teaching their babies to only be able to sleep in a completely quiet house. Babies sleep when they want to so if they get used to falling asleep with all sorts of activities going on around them, they will go to sleep anywhere.
I'm not going to advocate for sleeping on hard ground with rocks and sticks to get used to it. I like having a mattress under me for comfort. If it's hot, I'll sleep without covers. If it's too hot, I don't sleep well. If it's cold, I'll add a blanket. If it's really cold I'll put on the electric blanket, but I'm not going to train my body to only get good sleep in a 3deg window of temps.
...in a world where beds, bins, and bulbs need cloud access
These things don't *need* cloud access. They might have it for some reason but need?
Thinking back I don't recall beds and bins not working when there was no cloud.
Again a "solution" looking for a problem and a way to part money from a certain class of punters.
Call me an olf fossil, luddite or what you will, I see no reason to waste my money on this frippery.
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I have Hue lights in my house and they are connected to a closed circuit wifi network. I’ve never seen the need or had the desire to connect them to the internet/cloud, could not see the point of doing so. I don’t want Philips or any other data firm to know that I have a lighting setting in the bedroom that is called “Let’s get it on” and how often i use that. Someone recently tried to sell me a smart tv which I declined as I would rather use an aerial and dish. Same with a “smart” kettle although upon closer inspection it wasn’t what most on here would describe as smart. It was instead one where you could choose the temperature the water warms to, no internet or cloud needed.
Not if its American.
The 'merkin the waiters will bring you a mug of water at ~50 Celsius, with the tea bag next to the mug.
(It typically takes several attempts to get them to pour boiling water onto the tea. Then having to ask them for milk.... only for them to come back with cream. This in 4 and 5 star hotels FFS!)
One of the standout casualties was EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature, tracks your sleep phases, and streams that data back to the cloud for a cool $200 a month.
Sounds ridiculous but (very much Devil's advocate and somewhat tongue in cheek) it would be nice occasionally if my bed could tell me if I was too warm or too cold. It seems to be something that's coming on with age - sometimes I feel cold when actually I'm too warm or vice versa.
> it would be nice occasionally if my bed could tell me if I was too warm or too cold.
You are supposed to be sleeping, the last thing you really want is the bed constantly woke you up to tell you “you are a little warm, do you want me to cool it down?” Then a few minutes later “you are little cold, do you want me to warm the bed up?”….
Jesting aside, my wife bought - on an impulse, on Prime Day - something called a BedJet a couple of years ago. It's basically a small under-bed fan heater / refrigerator, with a duct to direct the air under the bed's lower fitted sheet. Sounds like a gimmick, right? Well, that's what she thought & had immediate buyer's remorse, until one day out of curiousity she had me set it up on her bed.
Well, now she's hooked, and swears it's the best thing ever. When she gets cold - I'm choosing my words carefully, because I don't want to sound like a sexist pig, but she does seem to feel the cold a lot more at night, shivering even when I am passing out from heat - it'll blow carefully-temperature-monitored air straight up the bed from her feet onwards.
And no, it's not cloud- or subscription-based, we're not QUITE that daft, and it has both a physical remote control and a WiFi direct phone app.
Before that, the state-of-the-art in bed heating was a hot water bottle, or in extremis, me holding the covers up on the side and wafting a hair-dryer carefully up and down. This is apparently an unqualified improvement :)
Do you have one-mattress bed (maybe even shared sheets?) of a split double bed? I know it is a cultural thing, as for Germany a split double bed is the norm. Reason is what your situation describes: Women are (usually, only very few exceptions) more susceptible to cold, so the mattress, sheets and blankets can be tuned to her, which would give you a heatstroke even if the room would be at 10°C. She gets her Lammfell, you get your satin, and you both feel great at night.
Good question. It's a single mattress, king-size. We sleep separately; not because of marital discord, but simply because a) she tends to be very restless at night, and b) we have dogs, both of which sulk if they don't get to sleep on a people bed, and one of whom is extremely flatulent, necessitating an open window even in the depths of winter. I don't blame her for exiling herself to a separate room :)
For what it's worth (and I really don't want to sound like I'm shilling this product) the BedJet does offer a two-zone version, and if you want, special sheets with separate cavities sewn in for the airflow. We didn't bother with either. It's definitely the most energy-efficient way of giving her a warm bed without melting me, the dogs, or the whole house.
Yes, I saw the two zone version on their webpage (basically just a set of two of those). A surprisingly simple product when only looking at the components. But we never know how actual engineering went into it to make it work like advertised. Just like the simple 40 year old toaster example on technology connections, which does not expose how much brainpower actually went into it to make it work so well.
For years my parents used to argue about if and when to turn on the electric blanket. My Mum wanted it hot & early, my Dad often didn't want it at all. One Christmas I bought them one that had split settings, different on each side. My Dad accepted it politely, although I could see that he was thinking of that it was a strange gift.
A month later he phoned me - "That electric blanket? Best Christmas present ever!". No more arguments.
"You are supposed to be sleeping, the last thing you really want is the bed constantly woke you up to tell you “you are a little warm, do you want me to cool it down?” Then a few minutes later “you are little cold, do you want me to warm the bed up?”…."
I have a wife for that sort of thing :-)
I would assume the bed would adjust itself automatically. Only an idiot would expect it to keep interrupting someone to ask questions.
What I experience is a genuine problem and relates to when I'm trying to get to sleep not when I'm actually asleep. Overall my sleep health is good and I get plenty of sleep most nights. But sometimes it can take me over an hour to actually fall asleep after getting into bed and quite often recently that's because I appear unable to tell whether my body is too warm or too cold. I might feel too warm so get out of bed and open a window but then when I get back into bed I immediately feel cold and have to close the window and put an extra blanket on the bed. Some nights it can take quite a lot of experimentation until I feel comfortable.
I did make light of it and right now it's not a big deal but if it becomes more frequent I might end up trying to discuss it with my GP. Maybe it's something hormonal and I'm getting hot or cold flushes as I approach my 60s.
> $200/month to "monitor sleep data"?
Given that
>> EightSleep pumps out 16 GB of data a month
they clearly need to spend on their servers /s
(Although, to heck with "I wish I had the spare change to spaff $200 a month on this", I wish I could get an *uplink* capable of handling 16GB p/m! And still leave enough for El Reg to work. One day, Real Soon Now, after the cows have gone home because the last few of the neighbouring fields has been built on...)
in a world where beds, bins, and bulbs need cloud access, who's to say the the crapper isn't next?
As it happens, today is the day when pre-ordered cloud based crap monitoring devices are shipped.
Nothing to worry about as they assure purchasers that they use encryption at every step, and there is fingerprint authentication on the device. No mention of whether the fingerprint reader works if the finger is.... shall we say, unclean. Yuk.
who's to say the the crapper isn't next?
Ages ago I saw adverts for made·in·china, add·on automated bidet attachments for your existing throne that were controlled by a phone app.
Unless you enjoy the possibility of a jet of boiling hot water aimed squarely at the ring you'd be a braver man than I.
I never imagined that a species could become extinct through pure imbecility but that NZ woman for whom the principle of operation of the simple power switch eluded her inclines me to think we may well be the first inbecilecide species. Even Catweasle could grok electrickery.
Ah. Maybe Darwinian evolution in humans does still work in some cases!
Let all of the people relying on the Cloud expire when their cloud-thingys stop working.
(I've often thought that human society, medicine, and technology keep people alive when they would otherwise not have reached an age where they could pass their genetic morbidity on to any offspring, effectively side-lining the evolutionary sieve. We're doomed, I tell you).
and you in Europe don't notice a thing, since neither your work of private stuff depends on that region... Or on Amazon cloud in general.
I read and saw a lot later on. Sounds like Active Directly, since year 2000, is a more stable DNS cluster :D :D... But hey, who knows how long, the dismantling is going on since Nadella.
This is getting tedious. DNS update borks $cloudMegaCo and takes authentication with it. World+dog+cat unable to do everyday stuff.
Surely the answer is to flog home hubs which cache credentials etc so Internet of Thingies can blissfully carry on while said borkage is resolved?
So ya missed where he said
>> Or on Amazon cloud in general
> You at least need to read some of the outage reporting a bit more closely.
So ya missed
>> Imagine
Yeah, it is hard to imagine a world where Europe won't be affected by something in the USA going titsup, but ya not even gonna try?
Or you should read Jou's comment a bit more closely. Yes, it could be taken as meaning that no one in Europe might be affected, but it can also be read as meaning that one (or you, if you must), in particular, is not affected in Europe. Unless you're just the sort of contrarian who wants to take things the worst way they can be interpreted, which I can appreciate… when there's some comedic value in it.
On a side note, I regret the losses in English of both a meaningful singular/plural second person distinction, and the regular use of 'one' rather than 'you' when one doesn't actually mean the person they're addressing.
I took it as meaning "I didn't notice anything as I don't use anything that was affected".
Guess what, "I" didn't know until I read about it. But then, I don't have any of this IoT crap - except for a few bits I lost the power of veto over (there's an Echo Dot in the other room) and don't generally use.
Terms for genitalia, of both genders, have been used as insults for many centuries. Would you be calling the language sexist if IGotOut had said "lazy pricks" instead?
Or are you the sexist one, perhaps, for assuming that this sort of language scares off the poor delicate ladies but it's fine for the gents?
i know women in IT & I can tell you they're a LOT swearier than some of the men in IT I know.
Always funny having a chat in the office that is definitely HR worthy & the usual self important style of knob who wants to report it being confused because the lady is the one being the sweatiest instead of me
You are completely right, some of these products can indeed represent a boon for the physically disabled. No one is criticizing that aspect.
It's the physically abled idiots that have more money than sense that garner our ire.
That and the fact that the companies hawking the tat are all using it as a means to monetize our private life under flimsy excuses.
All this technology is available and 99.999% is used for advertising, social media and general stupidity. I know how Robert Oppenheimer felt when he quoted "... destroyer of worlds. " Please use IT for the good of the world before we destroy it.
And the bedbound are amongst those who deserve better smart devices[1], ones that don't exist purely[2] to route data to AWS and become doorstops when they can't.
Of course, if any of these manufacturers were to make a cut-down version of the product, one that didn't even need the cost of the WiFi chip[3] and TCP/IP stack, then they'd slap on a "home medical care" label, which somehow costs four times the retail of the "old" unit just to print it.
[1] *everyone* deserves better devices, but the others can get by when it becomes obvious that the promises on the box don't match reality.
[2] the same way that McDonalds is in the building and rentals business, all that mucking about with food-substitute is an unfortunate distraction they have to put up with.
[3] did you know that we can do better than "clap to turn on the lights", all in one cheap little chip, *without* shipping the voice recording to an American data centre?
So various software houses have deprecated on prem and said they are or will be cloud only. SAP and Atlassian being two of note. So who’s paying when the underlying cloud goes feet up and businesses can’t do ERP or software development for a while. Even a few hours outage multiplied by all those customer companies must be in the billions of your currency of choice.
But then I guess what’s a few billion to Bezons and co?
With Threads there is no longer any reason there shouldn't be some options for this appearing. Maybe it is more expensive (because less opportunity for data collection) but if I could have it all talk to my Apple TV (if I upgraded it to a newer one that supports Threads) I might consider some smart home stuff. Dependence on the cloud, and the privacy implications of that, keeps me on the sidelines despite being the perfect demographic.
It amazes me how gullible the average consumers are, buying Ring cameras where you don't (truly) control whether the police has access to it, fridges that demand internet access to have features like icemakers work properly, light bulbs that have to talk to a server a thousand miles away to be commanded to turn on or off. We need a longer AWS outage, and hitting during the hours everyone in the US is awake, to possibly wake people up from this folly.
I guess that "smart mattress" company would argue that all the processing required for their 16 GB of monthly uploads can't be done locally, but that would be a lie. There's no way they are devoting more processing than a generic 'E core' running 24x7 to each user, so some sort of smart hub providing local cloud services would work fine. They just can't datamine information on people's sex positions and frequencies (if a "smart mattress can't tell the difference between sleep and sex either it isn't very good at its job or you aren't very good at yours :) ) which they probably sock away along with tons of other stuff because storage is so cheap, hoping it will someday have value.
You don't need to wait for "Threads". There is enough local-only smart home stuff, and several helper tools like homeassistant, iobroker and so on to simplify it for less advanced users. There are also enough already existing norms for local-only smart home besides bluetooth and WLAN. Unless you get a big antenna to play tetris on the office building 100 meters away which uses unprotected lamps, then it is not local to your home any more.
several helper tools like homeassistant, iobroker and so on to simplify it for less advanced users
LOL
You really think that setting up and configuring software like that is a task for "less advanced users"? Unless your idea of "advanced users" is "write your own home automation software from scratch", people who set up stuff like that ARE the advanced users! I am fully capable of doing stuff that like but am I absolutely not interested in wasting my personal time on such a project.
I would only consider smart home stuff if it is totally plug and play, but I would want to preserve my privacy and prevent leaving a pathway for hackers to get in if the "cloud" side gets compromised (as it inevitably is) I guess if you view home automation as a hobby you wouldn't mind messing with software like that but it doesn't appeal to me at all, and "less advanced users" will have the same reaction to that as if you recommend to them that they install DD-WRT or OpenWRT on their router. Which is to say, their eyes will glaze over and they will ignore everything you say following that.
It's not nearly as complex as people think and there are off-the-shelf options now albeit early arrivals, so there's risk of complexity, but the support has been pretty amazing. Check out home assistant green. They even have cloudy AI plugin but that's paid for and for me defeats the purpose of DIY automation.
Things only really get complicated if you try and run your own device installed from scratch on say a PI and start getting into customised things like your own wakewords.
I control my stuff directly with powershell, currently in a three second cycle. Three RS485 serial connections, my own Modbus-CRC-calculator since there was no pure powershell version (well I converted a C source so not really my own implementation), Growatt MIC, two Marstek Venus E, Shelly 3 EM pro, boiler controlled via adjustable PSU with Shelly dimmer, all in all about eight currently active shellies, doing my own calculations on how much I saved, painting the graphs on my own perfectly fitting to my situation etc blah blah blah. Gives me the true freedom to control the way I like, only needs powershell 5.1 WITHOUT any additional modules. Now HA an IOB are simplifying this, since you can feed them with already pre-made yaml others created, has modbus decoder/encoder/interpreter etc inside for a long time, and have their graphical display stuff pre-implemented.
So that's great, but do you really think the kind of stuff you're doing is anything a typical consumer could or would do?
That's my point, if it isn't prepackaged hardware/software combo you can buy off the shelf, it isn't going to be something 98% of people will give a look at.
I never implied "typical consumer", there is no point. But: Those solar groups, even in Fecesbook, are full of people using homeassistant and IOBroker. A lot more than you can imagine. And since even small solar+battery solution require a smart meter (Shelly 3 EM Pro or similar) or an IR-reader to attach to the existing meter of the power provider people start to dive in. I don't know about your region, but here in Germany the number or people doing both meters without an electrician, as they are supposed to, is surprisingly high.
But there are a lot of people who do this professional, and they are booked then. And larger solutions do it with RS485 anyway to talk to their batteries and the meter. The cloud is optional. And since Germans are quite aware that "Cloud = untrustworthy by design and sadly unreliable" those solutions are preferred.
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At the office we have electric toilets (not internet enabled fortunately) and these are bad enough
The sensors will "detect" a wave and flush while you are sitting on them, they will refuse to detect a wave and refuse to flush unless you back away from the sensor and re approach it *then* you can wave and flush.
The door will frequently swing open which causes the toilet to constantly flush.
If / When we have electrical works the toilets are out of operation. I'm happy to take a shit in the dark if required. Once seated I'm fine, but you can't flush them because of no power.
There have been instances where it has been necessary to reboot the toilet.. I don't want there to be a thing where I need to reboot a toilet.
Sometimes when trying to explain "the cloud" to my parents they spark to the idea that its just a faceless/unknown server somewhere unknown that someone else runs, and you put your data on it in hopes that you can trust them with it. They can "get" a mental picture of what a server room looks like.
Days like Monday are how you reinforce that idea.
Cloud computing offers scalability and cost benefits but also introduces significant security risks due to misconfigurations, improperly set access controls, and insecure APIs. Additionally, there is often a mistaken assumption that the cloud provider manages all aspects of security, while in reality, security responsibilities are shared between the provider and the business. This misunderstanding can create serious vulnerabilities and lead to security compromises.
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