- cross-posted to:
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- nottheonion
- [email protected]
- cross-posted to:
- [email protected]
- nottheonion
- [email protected]
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And nobody posted This yet!? The Roomba That Screams When it Bumps Into Stuff
“I suck!”
— robot vacuum (probably)Yet when I wanted to make my vacuum speak like Consuela from Family Guy I couldn’t do it.
You need to supply more lemon pledge.
Am I the only one confused by why a vacume needs a live video feed? Who’s sitting there thinking “I want to watch what my vacume sees!”
Ok so I used to work for iRobot, the OG robot vacuum maker. Robot vacuums used to vacuum randomly. To make them vacuum systematically, they need to map your house. One cheap way to do that is to use a camera roughly pointing at your ceiling and do Video SLAM. The camera identifies features on your ceiling and how they are changing to know where the robot is and map the room.
I guess ecovac thought they could add a camera feed feature for free since they already had a camera on the robot.
Probably to map the room and avoid obstacles like Chairs and pets. Low res cameras are probably the cheapest option for hardware.
A speaker too. So you can mess with your pets while away or spy on your spouse. What an amazing product idea /s
I mean, the speaker part makes sense. The vacuum has a speaker so it can make an alert sound of something’s wrong. The most common ones I hear are “please charge Roomba” and “error, please move Roomba” (that’ll happen if it rolls over a grate or something and the wheel gets stuck).
But a cheap speaker is a pretty sensible feature.
The problem isn’t the video feed per se, it’s that the business model of IoT companies, especially cheap IoT companies, include selling off customer data to advertising and other surveillance capital type entities.
So, cheap hardware, lax security at best, and a business model that requires all their devices to have an internet connection to function properly, or access its full feature set.
The unfortunate, actual reason is that people will pay more markup on the vacuum with useless shit added than it costs to add it. Explaining why humans are like this is unfortunately a less tidy and much more disappointing endeavour.
This is the reason I don’t get PS+.
I see the cheapest option, and think “oh…but I don’t go online much, and thats too little value for that high price.”
Then for a little more money you get a little more value.
Then for a little MORE value, you get the retro games from PS1 and PS2.
And then I realize that’s DOUBLE the cheapest option, to play games that are 20-30 years old.
So I put 2 and 2 together, and decide this whole thing is pissing me off. Fuck it, I’ll just emulate the damn things…
So I put 2 and 2 together, and decide this whole thing is pissing me off.
Still waters run deep.
People that have no opinions of their own and have personalities that are shaped entirely by the things they consoom.
Why won’t they say the brand? Which brand are they?
It’s in the first paragraph of the article.
Robot vacuums made by Ecovacs have been reported
although Ecovacs accounts are password-protected, and a further four-digit PIN code is required to access the video feed, that PIN code is not validated server-side—meaning anyone with the basic know-how of a tool like Chrome web inspector could bypass it
Wow, that PIN code is really on the honor system, isn’t it?
I guess he wasn’t naked at the time (camera was hijacked too, according to the article).
And people wonder why I go out of my way to obtain equipment that doesn’t have a bloody app or connect to anything.
I never thought I’d read about a vacuum being hacked one day.
Seems that blocking my robot vac’s Internet access when it’s not in use is not so paranoid after all.
