MyQ garage doors shut on third-party tools for good

November 7, 2023 12:13 PM

Chamberlain, who makes the MyQ garage door remote control software, is locking out free tools.

The Chamberlain Group — owners of the MyQ smart garage door controller tech — has announced it’s shut off all “unauthorized access” to its APIs. The move breaks the smart home integrations of thousands of users who relied on platforms such as Homebridge and Home Assistant to do things like shut the garage door when they lock their front door or flash a light if they leave their door open for 10 minutes, or whatever other control or automation they wanted to do with the device they bought and paid for.

--from The Verge

As a user of the amazing and free Home Assistant software platform, I am able to integrate data & devices from hundreds of manufacturers, including individual LED elements, solar power systems, and software-defined radio data.

As the owner of a LiftMaster (part of Chamberlain) garage door opener, I have to go press the damn thing's button now, like a caveman.

Luckily, last week, Paul -- who makes the amazing ratgdo device for "smartening up" your Chamberlain/LiftMaster garage door -- released a new version of the device. Looks like I'll be sending Paul thirty bucks....

posted by wenestvedt (111 comments total)

The S in IoT Stands for Security

The L in IoT Stands for Longevity

The U in IoT Stands for Utility
posted by lalochezia at 12:17 PM on November 7, 2023 [92 favorites]

"The bait and switch here is another warning to consumers about the downsides of buying cloud-integrated products, which the manufacturer can change the functionality of at any moment."

A lot of folks warned about these things as soon as cloud-integrated products appeared on the market. The problem being nobody really wanted to hear that while these things are very cool and potentially useful, the long-term problems were obvious.

Software-controlled devices, and IoT devices are just going to continue disappointing people. Somebody will decide to pull the profit lever or anti-competitive lever when they feel they have enough market share to do so and/or when they need to boost their numbers. Vendors will stop supporting devices well sooner than the actual physical lifecycle of the devices because it's just not profitable to keep updating the old devices. Etc.
posted by jzb at 12:22 PM on November 7, 2023 [26 favorites]

The Internet of Other People's Property
posted by McBearclaw at 12:23 PM on November 7, 2023 [28 favorites]

I've limited my "smart home" to two ZWave light switches which I controlled with HA on an old Pi until the zwave integration auto-updated and started working. So I got a Hubitat Elevation which I thought would be like a real appliance, just set and forget. But NOOOO, I have to reboot it every 2 weeks because it just stops working.

I JUST WANT MY @%@# PORCH LIGHT TO TURN ON AND OFF WHEN THE SUN SETS AND RISES WHY IS THAT SO HARD.
posted by grumpybear69 at 12:28 PM on November 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

I have to reboot it every 2 weeks because it just stops working.

See, all you need now is a smart switch that is programmed to reset every 2 weeks.
posted by jzb at 12:31 PM on November 7, 2023 [39 favorites]

I think the problem is that that's what it's doing...
posted by HypotheticalWoman at 12:33 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I JUST WANT MY @%@# PORCH LIGHT TO TURN ON AND OFF WHEN THE SUN SETS AND RISES WHY IS THAT SO HARD.

It isn't hard. You can get LED bulbs with built-in photocells. They work great and automatically adjust for daylight saving time.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 12:33 PM on November 7, 2023 [22 favorites]

I JUST WANT MY @%@# PORCH LIGHT TO TURN ON AND OFF

You can buy a dusk-to-dawn fixture with a built in light sensor that will do that exact thing! No wifi or rebooting! This is a solved problem!
posted by echo target at 12:34 PM on November 7, 2023 [24 favorites]

The funny thing is that Home Assistant is hosted entirely on your home network, and requires zero cloud access....unless the manufacturer dictates it. So most HA integrations are ways to cut out the cloud "hooks" that manufacturers are desperately trying to force into users' homes.

It's amazing watching the community reverse-engineer protocols and write software to help consumers use the stuff they want -- and to use it in ways that the manufacturer never could have dreamed up.

Because I work from home, I built an automated presence lamp. It reads my laptop's Microsoft teams log file for a certain line, and then triggers a small RGB element (that I wired to an ESP8266 and hot-glued into a tiny box, which in turn is rubber-banded to a cell phone charger behind the couch) to turn red or green or off. It sounds like a Rube Goldberg machine, OK, but now my family can know when I am on the phone or not, and thus whether I need not to be disturbed for a bit.

And I did this with only information from the HA message boards and Reddit, and I am an idiot. HA is really accessible!
posted by wenestvedt at 12:37 PM on November 7, 2023 [56 favorites]

I feel like the end result is building remote control robot fingers to press buttons if there's no other way.
posted by emjaybee at 12:46 PM on November 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

Because I work from home, I built an automated presence lamp. It reads my laptop's Microsoft teams log file for a certain line, and then triggers a small RGB element (that I wired to an ESP8266 and hot-glued into a tiny box, which in turn is rubber-banded to a cell phone charger behind the couch) to turn red or green or off. It sounds like a Rube Goldberg machine, OK, but now my family can know when I am on the phone or not, and thus whether I need not to be disturbed for a bit.

I stand before you in awe. I need this.
posted by kimberussell at 12:48 PM on November 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

I have to go press the damn thing's button now

You may be interested in Switchbot; it literally sits on the wall waiting for a wifi command, then flips the switch for you. That's all. Just has a little finger it uses to hit a button on your behalf.

Alternatively, Wyze makes a garage door controller that more or less directly hijacks the hardwired terminals on your opener. It has some computer-vision stuff to check door status, but the main thing is it wires into your opener and then talks to your other stuff.

Dunno if either solution will work with your existing setup (yay IOT bs!) but might be worth looking into them.
posted by aramaic at 12:56 PM on November 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

Amazon dropped Alexa support for an API for IFTTT, which has broken all kinds of useful homebrew home automation, so sounds like HomeAssistant is going to be the only way forward for a lot of people.
posted by briank at 12:56 PM on November 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

I pretty much have some smart bulbs and some smart plugs running in my house becasue that's just convenient. No way is anything controlling access going on that stuff.

Just saw this in the homebrewing world as well. A company that started as a homebrew kickstarter for "smart airlocks" announced that they were going to focus on their professional brewing products and discontinue supporting their fairly expensive brewing monitoring gadgets in 2 years time. (The airlocks were originally ~$130 each)

They probably felt like that was plenty of runway, but the community responded with indignant howls and calls for open sourcing the protocols (which a number of other companies have done in the community.) Plaato responded "oh sorry, we'd love to, but our architecture decision don't allow it because we never thought we'd need to".

Several smart folks in the community quickly disabused them of this silliness - pointing out that their chips are all off the shelf parts that can be easily re-flashed, etc and so within 2 days they announced "we never anticipated this level of support and passion and are working with folks on a solution"

Don't get in the way of a hobbyist and their decently functioning tools. (Also, given the traditional pipeline between homebrewing and commercial brewing, it behooves them to keep both communities happy)
posted by drewbage1847 at 1:02 PM on November 7, 2023 [12 favorites]

It makes me wish I had never bought a Chamberlain garage door opener.

I had a 3rd party app, just so I could say “Hey Siri, check the garage” or “Hey Siri, open the garage”.

Chamberlain will only provide that functionality if you buy their hub.

The third party app used to break every 2 months. Then we got a notice that it was shutting down.

Please do not buy Chamberlain garage door openers.
posted by Mad_Carew at 1:04 PM on November 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

I stand before you in awe. I need this.

There are plenty of these on the market for $50-$80, but I am a cheapskate and also use a Mac -- so I had to go my own way.

If you ever want to get into this, I am happy to explain what I did. It really isn't for the faint of heart, but if you like to tinker, it's fun!
posted by wenestvedt at 1:07 PM on November 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

You can buy a dusk-to-dawn fixture with a built in light sensor that will do that exact thing! No wifi or rebooting! This is a solved problem!

It doesn't solve my problem. My porch light (it's really a stoop) is one of those fake flame things, and then I have a vestibule light which turns on and off with it. Neither of them are good candidates for replacement by an AutoBulb.

ZWave doesn't even require WiFi! It's a distinct mesh protocol that can be used to interface all sorts of devices with something like an HA hub. My problem was that HA itself got update-happy. Looking into it more, it seems like the zwave-ui-js integration that HA uses is actually just a standalone application for managing ZWave devices, which is, like what I need. So I may do away with HA altogether and just run that application and maybe a few cron jobs to send commands over to it. Something extremely simple with good logging and no self-updating features that will work, forever, like a clock.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:10 PM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

[I should have mentioned, incidentally, that the general descriptor for the button-pusher I linked above is "fingerbot". There are many other manufacturers with sliiiightly different approaches you may prefer.]
posted by aramaic at 1:10 PM on November 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

> Looking into it more, it seems like the zwave-ui-js integration that HA uses is actually just a standalone application for managing ZWave devices, which is, like what I need. So I may do away with HA altogether and just run that application and maybe a few cron jobs to send commands over to it.

This is not a dig at you, but as a certified Clueless Old Person I cannot believe this is a paragraph about technology used to turn porch lights on and off.
posted by The Card Cheat at 1:14 PM on November 7, 2023 [53 favorites]

I had a professor at work 3D-print me a small washing machine and dryer (free shape files from here), and I have a single LED inside each tiny appliance which illuminates when its cycle is done. My wife doesn't get it, but I find it useful and adorable.

This is done with a little ESP8266 microcontroller, which is wired (in series) right to the two LED elements, all of which I bought from Ali Express. I loaded the free WLED software onto the 8266, and created couple of Presets (one for each "segment" or LED element). The WLED presets were honestly the worst part of this entire project.

There's also a wireless button on the desk which turns both LEDs to black when I have emptied the machine. That thing cost like $15 at Amazon, and is the only real expenditure aside from the Ebay "thin client" retired corporate PC that I bought to run Home Assistant itself.

HA listens for the smart outlet [they were birthday gifts!] behind each appliance to notice the load drop sharply, which it takes as a signal that the machine is done. Then it calls for the appropriate WLED Preset to be executed, which turns on the corresponding LED. Viola!
posted by wenestvedt at 1:15 PM on November 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

You may be interested in Switchbot; it literally sits on the wall waiting for a wifi command, then flips the switch for you. That's all. Just has a little finger it uses to hit a button on your behalf.

Where do they get the fingers?

...actually, never mind, I don't want to know.
posted by The Tensor at 1:16 PM on November 7, 2023 [19 favorites]

This is not a dig at you, but as a certified Clueless Old Person I cannot believe this is a paragraph about technology used to turn porch lights on and off.

I mean, there's a switch, too! And I use it when the autobox stops working. But I think you'd be amazed at how super complex the underlying infrastructure is for many of the seemingly simple things you do with technology.
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:16 PM on November 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

It doesn't solve my problem. My porch light (it's really a stoop) is one of those fake flame things, and then I have a vestibule light which turns on and off with it. Neither of them are good candidates for replacement by an AutoBulb.

It's not as simple as replacing a bulb, but you can get "astronomical clock" timers which can infer from GPS coordinates the schedule for adjusting sunrise/sunset times throughout the year. These are used in places where a photocell isn't practical. Leviton makes one that can replace a standard lightswitch and it can even be programmed with custom on/off times. Guaranteed to be way more reliable than IoT home automation.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 1:18 PM on November 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

You may be interested in Switchbot; it literally sits on the wall waiting for a wifi command, then flips the switch for you. That's all. Just has a little finger it uses to hit a button on your behalf.

When I look at SwitchBot, what I see is a remote-controlled poking device. Just attach a rubber finger to that thing!
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:21 PM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

I have Home Assistant with 97 devices (I like to tinker) and only one is cloud connected - the MyQ garage door controller. I guess I'm down to zero cloud connected devices now which is good, but I do like to have the awareness (and control) of my garage door so I'll have to roll my own. The MyQ (mine isn't built into the opener but is connected to the existing opener) has been a really solid device, so it's a bummer that they're doing this. It's not surprising though. Luckily we live in a great time for building non-cloud connected devices cheaply. I have more fun building than using a lot of the stuff.

I figured there must be an IoT graveyard webpage similar to Google Graveyard that tracks companies and devices that have lost support completely or gone to paid services but I can't find one. Likely the problem with creating such a site would be how often it would need to be updated.
posted by Clinging to the Wreckage at 1:22 PM on November 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

Chamberlain Group recently made the decision to prevent unauthorized usage of our myQ ecosystem through third-party apps. This decision was made so that we can continue to provide the best possible experience for our 10 million+ users, as well as our authorized partners who put their trust in us. We understand that this impacts a small percentage of users, but ultimately this will improve the performance and reliability of myQ, benefiting all of our users.

I bought a house and was excited about MyQ that it came with. I had two use cases - one, being able to open my garage door by speaking to my watch in the winter when my hands are covered, and two, getting notification that my garage door is still open if we all leave the house or before bed.

Neither of which are possible via the app, and now not even through third-party. The app is effectively a garage door opener for your phone that is slightly less reliable than a regular one as it occasionally times out or requires you to log in to the cloud periodically.

It’s remarkable to have them figure out how to provide a product that doesn’t even give me a trade off for the security risk it introduces. And to have a treasure trove of development ideas they could steal and incorporate and just…want to shut that all out in favour of doing nothing. Truly the worst of the tech world.
posted by openhearted at 1:31 PM on November 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

I JUST WANT MY @%@# PORCH LIGHT TO TURN ON AND OFF WHEN THE SUN SETS AND RISES WHY IS THAT SO HARD.

All my outside lights are hooked into a photocell. There are no inside switches for the lights. The theory is exactly as you state...Lights come on at dusk, go off at sunrise. However, the geniuses who installed this (when the house was built. I didn't have this installed) mounted the photocell on the north side of the house. You know, the side that is in shadow in the middle of the damned day. So, my lights tend to be on almost all day. Thank the gods for LED bulbs.
posted by Thorzdad at 1:31 PM on November 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

I've learned more about garage door openers in the last few years than I care to admit, but in general, even with (current) MyQ openers, open and close are handled by just two wires and whatever passes for a momentary switch. "ON" to open, "ON" again to reverse or close. I have to think there's an HA way of backporting the MyQ tasks to it.
posted by rhizome at 1:32 PM on November 7, 2023

So I may do away with HA altogether and just run that application and maybe a few cron jobs to send commands over to it. Something extremely simple with good logging and no self-updating features that will work, forever, like a clock.

All my outside lights are hooked into a photocell.

I'm going to be pretty sure that if you can find a way to just insert a photocell someplace into the lighting system set to be closed when dark and open when light you will find it so so so much easier than setting of anything that involves cron commands. Why involve a microprocessor and programming at all if your needs are "turn on the lights when it gets dark" when we've had technology to do this exact task available for literally decades?
posted by hippybear at 1:37 PM on November 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

I WANT TO DO THIS THROUGH CRON JOBS AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME
posted by grumpybear69 at 1:39 PM on November 7, 2023 [58 favorites]

In a relatively unrelated story, the garage door on my new place stopped working approx one month after I moved in. After about $500 for new cables, wheels and brackets, and the old door straightened out, it is working again (the single spring had been replaced at some point). No "smart"/cloud house things for me, nope nope. No Alexa thing for Amazon to eavesdrop on me, no Ring for the police or whoever to spy on my porch, no Nest for whatever nefarious thing they might do.

Get off my lawn and out of my electronic things. (Though yes I have an iPhone, so it's too late.)
posted by Glinn at 1:46 PM on November 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

I WANT TO DO THIS THROUGH CRON JOBS AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME

sudo kill advice -9 “I installed a simple Kasa switch and it has sunset/sunrise scheduling built in”

echo “favorite” > grumpybear69.user
posted by openhearted at 1:47 PM on November 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

We do several things with home assistant - most usefully is to keep our kid's room in a temperature range (switching on or off the heater, or opening/closing the aircon vent) so that they don't wake up too hot or too cold- probably pretty overkill but our oldest just wouldn't sleep when she was little and we got a bit desperate.

One of the important parts of our system is a firewall so the various things (such as our baby monitor cameras) can't phone home, and can't be accessed out side of our home network.
posted by freethefeet at 1:54 PM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

Somebody in this thread is living up to their user name.
posted by y2karl at 1:54 PM on November 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

The funny thing is that Home Assistant is hosted entirely on your home network, and requires zero cloud access....

but how else will Chamberlin obtain your leaving-home and coming-home times?

A paper log? That doesn't scale!

I always shake my head at those tut-tutting Metafilter comments where people smugly proclaim "well I would never get involved in $FOOLISH_OR_PROBLEMATIC_ENTERPRISE."

Today I will violate my values to say that I proudly subscribe to Battlestar Galactica rules: no critical home infrastructure gets networked, ever. I use a plain old thermostat, keyed locks, RF frequency garage-door openers, hardware toilets, etc, etc. data vultures will have to live without my pooping metrics.
posted by Sauce Trough at 1:55 PM on November 7, 2023 [22 favorites]

hardware toilets

I used a toilet built entirely out of software once. It was a very shitty experience.
posted by hippybear at 1:57 PM on November 7, 2023 [19 favorites]

A lot of people have brought this out implicitly, but I want to make it explicit: Home automation is not the same as the Internet of Things. There are many, many home automation solutions that never need to be connected to the internet, or that are only connected to the internet for setup.
posted by mr_roboto at 1:59 PM on November 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

Today I will violate my values to say that I proudly subscribe to Battlestar Galactica rules: no critical home infrastructure gets networked, ever.

We have a V-Tech Video Doorbell which is completely disconnected from the internet. Its proprietary, PXL-2000-ish video streaming protocol gets about 4 frames per second, but it is enough to be frightened by the vague shape of the person at the door! Mostly it gets used as an in-house intercom system for announcing lunch and dinner.
posted by grumpybear69 at 2:05 PM on November 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

Every aspect of IoT stuff is so awful. We've been in this mediocre stage where hackers could poke at devices and figure stuff out, temporarily at least. But LAN access is closing down and now the cloud services like MyQ are blocking people too. I'd be willing to accept it if any of the integrated products worked worth half a damn. They don't.

Today I am regretfully retiring my TankUtility propane tank monitor. Unlike the usual IoT stuff it has a really nice simple API for end users to get their data. Been graphing my propane usage for years now in Grafana, no fuss.

My propane company replaced it with an Otodata Nee-Vo. It's good, they can now bring me more propane when I need it. There's even a decent mobile app for me to access my data. But no API that I can find, not for end users, and maybe not even a website. I did find some HomeAssistant thread where it seems like the device is quite promiscuous with Bluetooth so if I can get a receiver close enough to the tank, maybe I can reverse engineer the data and get at it. At least until they patch the firmware.

SSL everywhere has made hacking these things a lot harder. In the old days I would have just sniffed the network traffic and figured out the secret URL they were using to get data to the app. One of these days I'm going to have to invest in some serious MITM infrastructure so I can circumvent the security on my own devices.
posted by Nelson at 2:19 PM on November 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

My education and the first 22 years of my working life were in electronic technology. The remainder of my career was in software and programming. I got into IoT early, including being an early fanboy of the esteemed ESP8266 when it first appeared around 2014.

So, is our house all automated to the nth degree? Um, no (blush)

I do have several IoT dev boards, including far too many ESP8266 and ESP32 boards, some "smart plugs" that can be DIY reflashed for custom cloudless control, a couple of Linux servers - one with MQTT...etc etc

So... why on earth haven't I automated everything? I can't be arsed to. I haven't yet come up with enough good reasons for us to do that. We're doing fine with simple programmable thermostats and motion-detecting porchlights. We haven't found a burning need that more home automation would solve for us. And I'm too cheap/paranoid to have a Nest, Ring, Alexa, Echo or any of other the cloud-connected talking annoyances in our home It's so funny listening to my friends try to talk to theirs. Like having a stubborn, somewhat hearing-impaired assistant in the house.

I am more receptive to some limited IoT applications for remote control and monitoring - eg cottage, RV, boat. Or house if you're away for an extended time.

btw - this guy has a lot of info on DIYing home automation, IoT etc.

There are many, many home automation solutions that never need to be connected to the internet

Seems to me that almost all of the modern home automation systems I've encountered actually do want to phone home regularly (aka "cloud-based"). Some level of connection is of course necessary for remote monitoring and control, especially by smartphone.
posted by Artful Codger at 2:21 PM on November 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

I WANT TO DO THIS THROUGH CRON JOBS AND NOBODY CAN STOP ME

sudo kill advice -9 “I installed a simple Kasa\
switch and it has sunset/sunrise scheduling built in”

echo “favorite” > grumpybear69.user

Ouch. You want to append, not overwrite.
posted by Nerd of the North at 2:26 PM on November 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

You may be interested in Switchbot

I was until I determined that it needs a cloud service to operate.
posted by joeyh at 2:34 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

It looks like the Switchbot can only press one side of the rocker switch, so I guess you'd have to get one for top and bottom, and $120 seems an awfully expensive way to turn the lights on and off.
posted by tavella at 2:49 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

I bet the real reason for this change is that they just noticed a huge security hole potentially allowing almost anyone to open any garage door and instead of fixing the problem, they are trying to paper over it by limiting access.
posted by Lanark at 2:49 PM on November 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

The trick is make sure whatever you buy is HomeKit enabled. I have a MyQ device that integrates into my smart home stuff perfectly. I couldn’t tell you what it is because I set it up in 2018 and I’ve once even looked at it. I only vaguely know what the box looks like at this point.
posted by Back At It Again At Krispy Kreme at 2:55 PM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

There's also a wireless button on the desk which turns both LEDs to black when I have emptied the machine.

Surely this button should be near the machines?

(Or monitoring a scale beneath them for a weight drop after the poweruse drop?)
posted by clew at 3:09 PM on November 7, 2023

Chamberlain are just a bunch of weird cats. I had a neighbor that worked for them and he got me an interview there a few years ago, the whole vibe of that place was odd. Mostly because it was privately owned by the Duchossois family, and if you are from the Chicago area you know them as the family that also owned Arlington Park racetrack. Pretty sure the garage door opener business paid for all the horsey stuff so Dick was heavily involved in the day-to-day business decisions there.

But Duchossois sold Chamberlain to Blackstone Private Equity two years ago, so this is the more likely explanation. It's a cash grab.
posted by JoeZydeco at 3:10 PM on November 7, 2023 [14 favorites]

This is why I only buy lowest cost commodity hardware from Chinese vendors.

They don't work and have no security, and are quite often malicious. So I don't ever give in to hope.
posted by blue_beetle at 3:20 PM on November 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

When I moved into my current place I wanted a smart(er) garage door. After a bunch of investigation I settled on a slightly fiddly but quite open source OpenGarage device. Setting it up involved soldering some wires to an existing garage door opener and it's been working pretty reliably ever since. I swear it has a "feature" where it notices I'm trying to demo it and doesn't open.
posted by caphector at 3:30 PM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

They don't work and have no security, and are quite often malicious. So I don't ever give in to hope.

You suffer for your art!
posted by rhizome at 3:54 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

On February 8th, 2027, every garage door in the country opened simultaneously. The event, which would later come to be called The Opening, was the first of many signs that something had gone horribly wrong.

—excerpt from my new science fiction novel about, I dunno, a massive state-sponsored cyberattack or something
posted by dephlogisticated at 4:01 PM on November 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

I've got local access to all of my smart devices, except one. Unfortunatly, it's one of the most essential ones (it's a set of flair smart vents, that I use with some custom code for doing per-room temperature). I do have plans to reverse engineer the protocol, at some point - I got as far as seeing that it actually uses the same JSON post API that's exposed to users for the cloud service, so in theory if I can solve a bunch of certificate type issues, I can MITM it and implement a server emulator as my final step, but... i shouldn't have to be reverse engineering something that lives entirely in my house
posted by jaymzjulian at 4:03 PM on November 7, 2023 [2 favorites]

i wonder how many simultaneous switchbots firing are needed to activate a clapper ?
posted by MonsieurPEB at 4:09 PM on November 7, 2023 [11 favorites]

There's also a wireless button on the desk which turns both LEDs to black when I have emptied the machine.

Surely this button should be near the machines?

Honestly, it's for when my wife notices that I haven't toggled the LEDs off, and thinks it will keep our lazy-ass dog awake at night. Which it won't because the brightness is dialed down, they aren't line-of-sight to his crate, and another automation shuts them off at 11:00pm.)
posted by wenestvedt at 4:10 PM on November 7, 2023

Philips Hue Will Soon Require Online Accounts to Control Lights

Dear Signify (who owns the Philips Hue brand): No. Never. I will hack the protocol and re-chip boards before I sign up for one more gods-be-damned account.
posted by SunSnork at 4:13 PM on November 7, 2023 [16 favorites]

I will hack the protocol and re-chip boards before I sign up for one more gods-be-damned account.

Yeah that's the same kind of bullshit. I guess I should be glad about past-me making a point of not getting one of their bridges and making sure their lamps were bluetooth-only (not wifi).

I now use the iOS app Hue Essentials to control my lights and I don't update the native Hue app.
posted by tclark at 4:33 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

While we're on a Hack All The Things kick, autopilot has done a bunch of work on hacking IKEA gear.
posted by phooky at 4:37 PM on November 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

This is why I only buy devices which directly support Apple HomeKit. I have multiple devices which have relied on a vendor’s cloud service which was discontinued, and everything which used HomeKit still works fine. The $20 plug I got off of Amazon whose manufacturer shutdown the cloud service years ago has outlasted multiple Google devices which they just couldn’t afford to keep supporting.
posted by adamsc at 4:40 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

"A Hue account lets us send important, security-related information straight to you."

Of course, w/o the bulbs needing to connect to the cloud there probably wouldn't be any need for sending important security-related information.
posted by Hairy Lobster at 4:42 PM on November 7, 2023 [12 favorites]

Philips Hue Will Soon Require Online Accounts to Control Lights

Yeah, I've been very happy with my hue system and do even have an account, but it's at a technical level utterly unnecessary to the functioning of the lights, so this is very worrying. I really hope this requirement isn't a sign of the same cycle of trashing the (large) 3rd party ecosystem as a cash grab that is happening in this chamberlain situation. I've recently gotten into programming everything with all4hue and it's amazing (at least if you like state machines), I'd definitely consider going to something else if I couldn't. Working with this app revealed how extremely limited hue's own software is (and what a joke Hue Labs is), I had no idea.

I guess I should be glad about past-me making a point of not getting one of their bridges and making sure their lamps were bluetooth-only

A bluetooth-only hue system is pale shadow of what can be done with the bridge + zigbee unfortunately, at least if you have more than a few lights or are doing sensor triggers or various other things.
posted by advil at 4:47 PM on November 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

The problem being nobody really wanted to hear that while these things are very cool and potentially useful, the long-term problems were obvious.

Software-controlled devices, and IoT devices are just going to continue disappointing people.

Remember, kids: Before you buy, define the problem you're trying to solve. If it doesn't solve a legit problem, then don't buy it.
posted by ZenMasterThis at 4:57 PM on November 7, 2023 [8 favorites]

Ron Amadeo writing for Ars Technica noticed that Chamberlain's first-party app, as of a month ago, has started displaying ads and upselling services when you use it to open or close your garage door and speculates that the shutdown of third-party apps is to protect Chamberlain's new hardware-app-as-ad-platform strategy.
posted by RichardP at 5:04 PM on November 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

Technology outpacing the law again. There should be consumer protections for this kind of thing. It will probably have to personally effect a politician. Or be something so absurdly egregious it's a viral talking point, like a surprise 200$ subscription fee to turn on the fucking lights that leaves millions of people in the dark.
posted by adept256 at 5:10 PM on November 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Facebook just broke compatability with the 3rd party Messenger app that was the only one that worked on my old Mac, now I have to get a new computer if i want to run Messenger now. It was my primary way of communicating with my family and caregivers. I am so tired of capitalism.
posted by GiantSlug at 5:13 PM on November 7, 2023 [9 favorites]

We recently replaced our garage door opener (after trying in vain to repair it for several months - apparently they no longer make parts for 30-year-old door openers) and chose the Chamberlain one because I could add the automation. Clearly, I should have saved the money and bought the Chinesium brand instead.
posted by dg at 5:14 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

new hardware-app-as-ad-platform strategy.

Exactly the type of horseshit that might put pressure on politicians to do something.

'Turn on the light'

Today's light is brought to you by Squarespace. Are you running a small business ...

This will probably happen and everyone will hate it enough to be a vote-winner.
posted by adept256 at 5:16 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Today I finished re-wiring the light in the garage so that I can turn it on with my watch via Home Assistant, because the original light switch is all the way on the far side of the room and that's not really possible to locate in the dark. Also I was able to make the light turn off when the door closes but for some reason HA doesn't like the reporting of the open garage door. I'll have to keep troubleshooting that.

OTOH my favorite "smart home" set up is the magnetic reed switch I wired into some battery-powered LEDs in a closet so that the light automatically turns on when the door opens. Sometimes the best automation is nothing at all!


(That GPS Leviton switch presents some hilarious failure modes to me. "What do you mean $enemy_state shot down a satellite and now our lights won't turn on automatically??" I'm probably gonna have to get one.)
posted by Nonsteroidal Anti-Inflammatory Drug at 5:25 PM on November 7, 2023 [3 favorites]

→ CRON JOBS

I already do that: cron fires up sunwait, which waits until twilight, then triggers my custom IKEA control system. None of it talks to the internet.

I do use my phone to turn on my office light, though. Not through an app. The switch is partially blocked by a bookcase and the phone is a handy way to reach the switch
posted by scruss at 5:30 PM on November 7, 2023 [10 favorites]

A bluetooth-only hue system is pale shadow of what can be done with the bridge + zigbee unfortunately, at least if you have more than a few lights or are doing sensor triggers or various other things.

My use case is that I was looking for the ability to set brightness/color scenes for a handful of lights in a single room, so the bluetooth implementation is perfect for my needs.
posted by tclark at 5:49 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

Speaking of cron; I have a sky camera (current sky views! star trails! Time lapses!) which has a couple tasks that run in relation to sunrise, sunset, and solar noon. There's a utility `heliocron` that will take a command and wait until the astral event before firing.
posted by caphector at 6:22 PM on November 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

I feel like the end result is building remote control robot fingers to press buttons if there's no other way.

Ah, I see you are a fellow connoisseur of the Internet of Things.

Now all you have to do is host it on an Amazon server, and you'll have yourself a genuine poly-modality cloud-native smart-device.
posted by Mayor West at 7:10 PM on November 7, 2023 [1 favorite]

SSL everywhere has made hacking these things a lot harder. In the old days I would have just sniffed the network traffic and figured out the secret URL they were using to get data to the app. One of these days I'm going to have to invest in some serious MITM infrastructure so I can circumvent the security on my own devices.

Unless the device manufacturers are horribly incompetent, even the world's most serious MITM infrastructure will get you nowhere unless you can persuade the target device to install a certificate signed not by the device manufacturer but by you. Which, if you have that level of access already, I'm not sure why you'd need the MITM in the first place.

OTOH, device manufacturers routinely are horribly incompetent as well as malicious and capricious, so don't lose hope.

My entire professional career was in software, much of it in embedded, and as a direct consequence there are no proprietary "smart" devices in use in my home at. all. and never will be. Just, no. I'll get out of my chair and flip the switches myself, thanks all the same.
posted by flabdablet at 8:13 PM on November 7, 2023 [6 favorites]

Software-controlled devices, and IoT devices are just going to continue disappointing people. Somebody will decide to pull the profit lever or anti-competitive lever when they feel they have enough market share to do so and/or when they need to boost their numbers. Vendors will stop supporting devices well sooner than the actual physical lifecycle of the devices because it's just not profitable to keep updating the old devices. Etc.

It's not so much that vendors will do these things as that they already are doing them and have been for years. "Will" is long gone.

The current trend is to extend this model to ever more expensive and consequential devices. There will inevitably come a day when a car manufacturer kills people by turning off some obscure little server somewhere, thereby bricking its entire fleet while half of it is out on the road and driving at speed.
posted by flabdablet at 8:20 PM on November 7, 2023 [4 favorites]

Unless the device manufacturers are horribly incompetent..

Ummm, yeah.. bad news about that.. For example.

As you are aware, products ship with utterly horrifying design defects, omissions, or even deliberate choices. For reasons similar to yours (I spent ten years, among other things, managing security vulnerability disclosures for a widely-used open-source software product) I have a hard time trusting anything, especially anything whose communications are not openly documented and publicly vetted.
posted by Nerd of the North at 8:41 PM on November 7, 2023 [5 favorites]

I don't usually buy things that I think might require the internet to work. Even if I'm tempted by the convenience or whatever, it HAS TO have a dumb mode. Problem is, they don't always say if it does or doesn't. My automatic cat box, love it, but if it didn't work without the wifi password I would have returned it in a second. I'm not even worried about "hacking" I just want the shit to work. My heat pump installer wanted to put in a networked thermostat and controller so they wouldn't have to run a wire. Tempting, but nope, run the wire. I don't want some kind of network problem preventing me from controlling the heat in my house, and I SURE don't want the power company deciding I need to set my house temperature where they want me to and not where I want it.
posted by ctmf at 8:52 PM on November 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

(side note: read the fine print of the agreement if your power company wants to give you a rebate for a heat pump installation. You might be agreeing to let them remotely limit your thermostat settings if there's a power shortage.)
posted by ctmf at 8:56 PM on November 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

I have refused IoT stuff in my home and life as much as reasonably possible ever since some time around the late oughts when some of my nerd friends swung from hobbyist fans of the tech to working for some of the manufacturers of it and would complain about the absolute mess of it all. It feels like nearly every day I hear something about home automation and networks going horribly awry.

But I have a real hard time feeling smug about my dumb appliances and manual light switches and intentional lack of voice commands. Because so much of it, if it worked the way the companies claim it does, would be amazing for disabled people. It’s like infomercials all over again, with tech sold as neat gadgets but they are actually assistive devices. Except this time the assistive device breaks every two weeks, locks you out if you are not okay with a lifelong subscription service, stops getting security updates after a year, and interferes with your other assistive devices of similar complexity. Oh and sells all your medical and habitual minutiae to random opaque companies, something definitely totally safe for marginalized people, historically!

Like, if this kind of stuff is here to stay, and will only become more pervasive, but it stays a hot mess, it makes false promises to people who would otherwise love the assist with autonomy, productivity, and comfort. I see myself a few decades from now, fighting with my toaster oven’s app, in a wheelchair that needs its drivers updated before I can go in reverse again, while a neighbor flushes my toilet through the wall. Fingers crossed that some kind of standards and requirements become normalized before then, for the sake of my unburnt toast.
posted by Mizu at 10:30 PM on November 7, 2023 [13 favorites]

I see myself a few decades from now, fighting with my toaster oven’s app, in a wheelchair that needs its drivers updated before I can go in reverse again, while a neighbor flushes my toilet through the wall.

Unauthorized Bread
posted by flabdablet at 11:57 PM on November 7, 2023 [7 favorites]

I'm not surprised by this story, but I am surprised that anyone is surprised by this story.
posted by fairmettle at 12:21 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

In addition to the Ikea hacking stuff phooky mentioned above, I’ve also reversed engineered Homeconnect to enable cloudless dishwashers, in addition to other appliances. Unlike most IoT stuff, Bosch/Siemens did a good job on their security and key management while also having a “no cloud” mode.
posted by autopilot at 2:29 AM on November 8, 2023 [6 favorites]

You can buy a dusk-to-dawn fixture with a built in light sensor that will do that exact thing! No wifi or rebooting! This is a solved problem!

It's been a solved problem for street lighting for a long time as well. That didn't stop the idiots from the estate management company changing the bulb over and over again when the sensor failed.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 5:21 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I should point out that people in the UK who bought new build houses at the turn of the millennium don't have this problem. Because the minimum permissible garage size was actually too small to fit a car in.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 5:23 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

I see myself a few decades from now, fighting with my toaster oven’s app, in a wheelchair that needs its drivers updated before I can go in reverse again, while a neighbor flushes my toilet through the wall.

That isn't your neighbour. It's someone in Thailand trying to boil a kettle.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 5:25 AM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

autopilot: ...I’ve also reversed engineered Homeconnect to enable cloudless dishwashers, in addition to other appliances.

Wait, YOU started the Magic Lantern project? That shit is amazing!! You guys, this MeFite made their own firmware for Canon DSLR cameras, with tons of extra features. That's mind-blowing!

I released the source under the GPL, packaged up my firmware builds and offered it to interested and brave testers with the caveat that "if it breaks your camera, you get to keep both pieces".

You are legitimately inspiring: I have been tinkering very simply for a few years, teaching myself to crudely solder and the like --- and just knowing that Magic Lantern exists helps to remind me that wild things can be done with technology.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:58 AM on November 8, 2023 [11 favorites]

This makes me think of the fact that I wouldn't allow WiFi in my house until maybe 10 years ago when it became obvious it was rude not to have WiFi for one's guests.
posted by ob1quixote at 7:03 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

Yeah, I am an IT nerd, and I have only added smarts to my suite of very dumb appliances in the past year or so.

We got a tankless boiler/hot water heater two years ago, and NFW did I want the one with WiFi and Bluetooth and whatever: Lord save me from a wedged firmware upgrade in the winter that leave me shivering!

On the other hand, I am delighted to built smartness around my dumb things by putting a Kasa outlet in between the washer and dryer and their outlets, or by plugging my brainless TV into a Roku. But naaaah, I'll pass on the "smart" thermostat that the manufacturer cancels a year after I buy it, or light switches that all come back after a power outage in the "on" mode, waking up everyone in the house.
posted by wenestvedt at 7:16 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

I was able to use my Nest to allow an electrician to fix my A/C from 1000 miles away, which was pretty nice.

I'm not into the use cases of most IOT things, even though I downloaded Mr House in like 2002, but I don't really get the complaints either. Windows aren't hard to break, and IOT locks have real use cases, no matter how many outrageous security violations and failure modes you can come up with. Just because you can imagine some horrible thing happening it doesn't make it's exploit possibility real.

I actually have a MyQ garage door opener, because my wife wanted the most upgraded model with camera and nonsense because she's concerned about crime even though we live in one of the safest cities in the US, and she grew up in one of the safest cities in the US, and in 14 years, no one has ever stolen anything from our garage. The app is fine, if a bit annoying. Way better designed than a Ring IMO. Our last non-smart garage door opener only lasted 13 years, so if this one lasts that long, it's fine. Also, even at $1000, it cost less than therapy required to not believe NextDoor hysteria. Or that self-sabotaging thoughts of 'did I close the garage door?'
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:55 AM on November 8, 2023

This is a handy article on why, I personally do not do any "home automation" - I already have many other hobbies (3d printing, lasering things) and ALREADY have to support the families internet TV usage via Roku/FireTV boxes/sticks and a Synology NAS with Plex and periodic re-logins to Netflix/PrimeVideo/AppleTV+ because the authentication tokens expire every few months...

The absolute last thing I was are calls from my family on how to turn on and off the lights when I am out of the house... Life is too short, and I have been watching this IoT "Game of Clouds" since the begining...
posted by rozcakj at 8:18 AM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

my house came with Chamberlain MyQ openers and I thought I'd use the app to schedule the doors to close after leaving for work, or at bed time, in case they get forgotten. but i've found that functionality to be unreliable and therefore useless.

I don't know if it's because I rarely actually open the app to use it and my phone puts it into deep sleep or what. I thought I had it set to not do that. but several times in the last couple of months it has failed to work.
posted by ArgentCorvid at 8:41 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

You can buy a dusk-to-dawn fixture with a built in light sensor that will do that exact thing!

Ah, the light polluters friend, and starlight's enemy.
posted by pracowity at 9:04 AM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

From rozcakj's handy article:

In desperation you go to a smart home forum and make a post titled “smart lights no agony please help dear god”. The first response is:

Just get a Qetzl hub, a OTOROXv3.2 bridge, and any MongoChopper compatible bulbs. After matroid paring, you can connect xmpf12 beacons and trigger them with plain-old SkyDust switches. Are you trying to make this complicated?

Which sounds lovely. But then there’s many replies like this:

MongoChopper only works in reticulated mode, which newer Qetzl hubs don’t support. Easier to just make a custom Hellfire demarkation loop.

(Just. Always “just”.)

posted by Glinn at 10:01 AM on November 8, 2023 [21 favorites]

Partially responsible for this. (Sold Lockitron to Chamberlain in 2017 which became the basis for Amazon Key integrations.)

... is the beginning of a comment by a user paulgerhardt over on news.ycombinator.com. It might offer more scope that I am capable of understand.
posted by MonsieurPEB at 11:09 AM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

oh that is a delicious comment, nicely found! Key parts:

That solution is worth millions to retailers, naturally Chamberlain would like a cut but only if they can successfully defend that chokepoint. ...

Given the turnover in leadership there I’m not surprised the new guy needs to put their hand on the plate to see it’s hot, but there’s a reason this wasn’t implemented before and it wasn’t because of lack of discussion.

posted by Nelson at 11:40 AM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

I don't really get the complaints either. Windows aren't hard to break, and IOT locks have real use cases, no matter how many outrageous security violations and failure modes you can come up with. Just because you can imagine some horrible thing happening it doesn't make it's exploit possibility real.

For me, it's because the subset of people who will remotely fuck with your house from a distance is much higher than the subset of people who are willing to risk themselves by smashing your window with a brick.
posted by corb at 2:41 PM on November 8, 2023 [4 favorites]

I'm sitting in my dark living room reading this because my Wyze lightbulb in my floor lamp disconnected itself from the network and I can't be arsed to do the deep dive to figure out how to reconnect it. It's been 3 days.
posted by srboisvert at 3:24 PM on November 8, 2023 [8 favorites]

Yesterday, we had a major outage of one of the biggest telecoms companies here. Massive problems ensued with everything from government phone services to retail to 2FA for people working from home to various IoT devices - the linked article mentions a lady who found out about the outage from her cat. Her automated cat feeder stopped working and she was woken by an indignant feline looking for its breakfast.
posted by dg at 4:38 PM on November 8, 2023 [5 favorites]

One positive IoT use case: recently remodeled the kitchen and got new appliances, which of course can connect with the internet.

The advantage—and it’s a big one—when I walked into the kitchen this last Sunday morning I did not have to adjust the clocks on my ovens for Standard Time. Something very small, sure. But also something that’s bothered me deep in my bones for decades. I guess I don’t care if North Korea turns my microwave on?
posted by mr_roboto at 4:55 PM on November 8, 2023 [1 favorite]

the subset of people who will remotely fuck with your house from a distance is much higher than the subset of people who are willing to risk themselves by smashing your window with a brick

and when (a) the people remotely fucking with your house from a distance do not know, let alone care, whose house they're fucking with and (b) you paid them for the means to fuck with it? That just galls.
posted by flabdablet at 9:14 PM on November 8, 2023 [3 favorites]

IOT locks have real use cases, no matter how many outrageous security violations and failure modes you can come up with

I'm quite fond of the one where some of those will open straight up if you poke them just right with a bent paperclip.
posted by flabdablet at 9:35 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

Also looks like an outfit that can't get end-to-end encryption right shouldn't be trusted with designing a key lock either.

Their stuff sure looks pretty, though. For the prices they charge it would want to.
posted by flabdablet at 9:42 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

And wait a minute, were they... yes, indeed it was them behind the Racist Doorbell incident as well.
posted by flabdablet at 9:47 PM on November 8, 2023 [2 favorites]

> But Duchossois sold Chamberlain to Blackstone Private Equity two years ago, so this is the more likely explanation. It's a cash grab.

> Ron Amadeo writing for Ars Technica noticed that Chamberlain's first-party app, as of a month ago, has started displaying ads and upselling services when you use it to open or close your garage door and speculates that the shutdown of third-party apps is to protect Chamberlain's new hardware-app-as-ad-platform strategy.

The Secretive Industry Devouring the U.S. Economy [ungated] - "Private equity has made one-fifth of the market effectively invisible to investors, the media, and regulators."*
posted by kliuless at 12:12 AM on November 9, 2023 [1 favorite]

I have to go press the damn thing's button now, like a caveman.

Seriously, if someone sold a wifi-connected, Matter-enabled solenoid, I bet they could make a million bucks.
posted by 1970s Antihero at 11:17 AM on November 9, 2023

Pluralistic: The enshittification of garage-door openers reveals a vast and deadly rot (09 Nov 2023) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

As it happens, Chamberlain is a neat microcosm for all the bad policy choices that created the Era of Enshittification. Let's go through them:

Competition: Chamberlain doesn't have to worry about competition, because it is owned by a private equity fund that "rolled up" all of Chamberlain's major competitors into a single, giant firm. Most garage-door opener brands are actually Chamberlain, including "LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco":

posted by ChurchHatesTucker at 3:26 PM on November 9, 2023 [3 favorites]

"Grifco" being a brand owned by a PE firm is just one letter "t" short of perfect accuracy.
posted by wenestvedt at 6:09 PM on November 9, 2023 [2 favorites]

Or one letter "e".

runcibility, via Wil Wheaton, via Pluralistic link above:

I can’t tell you where the switchover was for me, but there is very much no longer a feeling of “How can this change/improve my life?” and a constant dread of “How will this complicate things as I try to maintain privacy and sanity in a world that demands I have this thing to operate”.

I can tell you exactly where that switchover was for me. It was that day in 2006 when I first received an invitation to join Facebook, ostensibly sent to me by a work colleague, and realized that no, they hadn't sent it, they'd uploaded their entire email address book to Facebook so that Facebook could joe-job everybody they knew.

I was furious. This was failure to use bcc: properly turned up to eleven. Having been communicating electronically since before spam was a thing, I'd come to view my own address book as a sacred trust extended to me by my correspondents, and made protecting its privacy a strong priority; for somebody else to crumple up and toss away my reciprocal trust in them felt like betrayal. And it was somebody I liked. I had trouble believing that they'd done such a thing.

And a day later, it happened again. Another day later I got four of the fucking things. And I thought to myself (a) fuck Facebook and (b) this is going to be bad.

It is undoubtedly the case that my subsequent principled refusal to have anything to do with Facebook and all its works has made my life more difficult in some ways, but I have never regretted that choice, not for a second. The writing on the wall was ten foot tall in day-glo orange, and whenever I hear a story of the Zuckerborg fucking over yet another poor unfortunate, all I can think is what the fuck did you expect?

I feel exactly the same visceral revulsion for "smart" homes and the IoT. Do Not Want. Not Having It. Not even when it's become normal in 99% of homes.

Were I ever to design a personal logo, it would feature the words CAN=MUST behind a slashed red circle.
posted by flabdablet at 10:00 PM on November 9, 2023 [4 favorites]

Chamberlain doesn't have to worry about competition, because it is owned by a private equity fund that "rolled up" all of Chamberlain's major competitors into a single, giant firm. Most garage-door opener brands are actually Chamberlain, including "LiftMaster, Chamberlain, Merlin, and Grifco":

I know it’s Doctorow’s shtick to take other people’s ideas and remarket simplified versions under his own branding but that’s not what happened here: Chamberlain was known for acquisitions before PE entered the story and they did that entirely on their own with LiftMaster in 1985, and Grifco and Merlin in 2006. I certainly don’t think Blackstone is anything other than a cancer but it’s not like they’re a unique deviation in the history of capitalism, either.
posted by adamsc at 5:53 AM on November 10, 2023 [1 favorite]

flabdablet, i hear you re Facebook. But I can't discount the benefits that many have received from it either. For many millions of people who aren't tech nerds, Facebook is the Internet. It has facilitated connections between friends and family members. My 89 yr old Mom can use it. If not Facebook, then what, for these people?

(All that being said, I never climbed aboard most things like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc either. I too sensed the potential for evil, but I was more influenced by the idea that these would become mostly empty timesucks for me. My wife is on FB, so we still get family news)

So, let's differentiate between great ideas, and the forces that ruthlessly exploit their first-mover/monopoly advantages. IoT is like that too. Some great low-cost hardware running on open bands, made shitty by 'cloud' chokeholds to extract rent.
posted by Artful Codger at 7:32 AM on November 10, 2023

For many millions of people who aren't tech nerds, Facebook is the Internet.

You're saying that like you think it's a good thing.

If not Facebook, then what, for these people?

Let a million Metafilters bloom.
posted by flabdablet at 11:38 PM on November 10, 2023

Oh God, please no.
posted by y2karl at 12:09 PM on November 11, 2023

You're saying that like you think it's a good thing.

I think it's a good thing that the Internet is to some extent usable by most everybody, including 89 yr old widows who like to know what's up with their grandkids and great grandkids.
posted by Artful Codger at 1:25 PM on November 11, 2023 [2 favorites]