Technology

Despite the slurs, Mr Swenson was glad that the hackers had announced their presence so loudly. It would have been much worse, he said, if they had decided to quietly observe his family inside their home. They could've peered through his robot's camera, and listened through the microphone, without him having the slightest clue.

Who says they didn't???

Even if Mr Swenson had used the same username and password on other sites, and if those credentials had been leaked online, that still should not have been enough to access the video feed or to control the robot remotely. These features are supposed to be protected by a four-digit PIN. The PIN code was only checked by the app, rather than by the server or robot.

I don't even...

On May 24, the same day that Mr Swenson's device was hacked, a Deebot X2 went rogue, and chased its owner's dog around their Los Angeles home.

The robot was being steered from afar, with abusive comments coming through the speakers.

...

Late at night, an Ecovacs robot in El Paso started spewing racial slurs at its owner until he unplugged it.

The future is stupid.

Thank god for projects like Valetudo thar let you break your stuff away from the cloud.

Semi-related story time. I bought a Midea Cube dehumidifier for my laundry room. My dryer has been broken for years, and I've found that air drying clothes makes them last a lot longer. It's hard to air dry inside, hence the dehumidifier. My plan was to control the dehu automagically with Home Assistant along with some fans, so people could just click a button to turn all the shit on to dry their clothes.

After buying it, I realized that the dehumidifier could only be controlled via the cloud, and the cloud control was unreliable as fuck. With the exception of tech people, nobody is willing to deal with my flaky bullshit. If the button doesn't work consistently, my partner, her other partner, and my FIL aren't going to bother. Luckily, a very industrious person made this thing that let me rip out the hardware responsible for cloud connectivity and replace it with a cheap microcontroller. Now, my dehumidifier talks to my Home Assistant server directly via MQTT and it just fucking works.

Give me local-only control or fuck off, I'll take control myself. It's not much to demand, and shit like what this article describes absolutely deepens my conviction around local-only control.

It's a good thing none of them were armed...

"Why do they have to make everything about race? It's like they're obsessed. Nobody cares what color you are!"

Also these racists: "Hmm. You know what's a good use of my time? Going out of my way to hack a Roomba so I can call my neighbor the N-Word."

I thought the deal I got on my KuKluxKlean was too good to be true!

You know, vegans get a lot of hate for telling everyone they are vegan, yet I've never heard a vegan doing this and yelling about veganism. It's almost like racists are so much more violent and outspoken about it, including in kid's game lobbies and now with fucking vacuums. I have never seen vegans yell "VEGAN!" online repeatedly... and even if they did, that's substantially less harm anyway than racist bullshit. I never want to hear people complain about vegans talking about veganism ever again when this shit is part of everyday society and not surprising at all.

And ps I am not vegan.

Finally a feel-good story makes the news

Why does it have speakers? I mean maybe if it's really quiet otherwise it might be helpful for it to beep occasionally because tripping hazards and whatnot, but why does it need to be able to speak?

The first time I heard this story, I immediately thought of what this guy did. I think it would've been an awesome addon if it was just cursing, and not doing racial slurs or spying.

What did you expect from "The Internet of Things"?

Also, now I'm just imagining the vacuums gaining sentience and actually becoming racist.

We have a deebot but its a dumber model, no internet connection no app no cameras. Just a remote with some rudimentary pathfinding and it does the job.

I would only trust selfhosted and foss stuff for anything in my home.

The "smart"ification of stuff has got to stop. Nobody asked for wireless connected robots that don't let you connect to your own server even. Maybe if these worked with home assistant this wouldnt have happened, because home assistant devs are more competent that big corporations.

Thanks a lot for the inspiration. Now I wanna hack into all IOT devices that have a camera and microphone. Maybe even speakers, so I can blackmail the owners immediately after filming their intercourse. 👹

Last week: Insecure Deebot robot vacuums collect photos and audio to train AI

Somebody call Tom Selleck!