> I don't feel the same way towards my garden hose or washing machine.
We just built and furnished a remote vacation home from the ground up and the shiny new appliances and even some fixtures (mostly ordered or approved by my wife) default to stubbornly demanding cloud access, often before they will even perform their most basic functions. At the moment, internet is only via 4G hotspot as we await Starlink's rollout next year.
This of course includes the Samsung TV but extends to the Denon amplifier, all the major appliances from washing machine, refrigerator etc all the way down to the light switches, thermostats and 'smart' toilets (which I view as 'input-only' devices). Fortunately, I intercepted the light switches before installation and hacked open source firmware on them but that required opening each one and temporarily soldering to reflash the firmware (I had to draw the line somewhere).
Most of the devices can be coaxed into functioning without permanent cloud access but it's a time-consuming escape-room adventure through dark UX patterns. The rest will require blocking at the router firewall level.
Well, when the story began I though this sounds like a pleasant getaway, and I was happy to read you've acquired such a place.
Then the rest of it was just a dour decline. Man, oh man. The worst of it is that all these devices could integrate genuine 'smart' functionality, but a user-respecting way would be locally run from a central box with open and interoperable protocols across devices. Exactly how a router and server works on a LAN. It isn't impossible to design this in a consumer-friendly way either. But the will and the demand just isn't there.
I wonder how these devices will be when the remote servers are inevitably switched off. I learnt this lesson very early on with online games (think GameSpy), the servers are not forever.
What has come over the population? It wasn't that long ago that they burnt identity cards in the UK (at the end of the second world war), the public were glad to see the back of them despite the touted 'benefits' by some politicians. My grandmother shuddered at the thought of giving any financial details online. In the early days, I never used my real name anywhere on the Internet. There is just so much passivity now.
It's still going to be a pleasant getaway, just one requiring much more effort during set up to configure it in a long-term sustainable way.
> There is just so much passivity now.
For anyone interested there is a large, active online community around the open-source Home Assistant platform. I'm using it and the community has been a terrific resource for finding those still too-rare devices which both work well and are willing to work sans-cloud. There are thousands of contributors and hundreds of thousands of HA users now and together we comprise a market large enough for even low-cost Asian manufacturers to notice and start targeting products toward.
> I don't feel the same way towards my garden hose or washing machine.
We just built and furnished a remote vacation home from the ground up and the shiny new appliances and even some fixtures (mostly ordered or approved by my wife) default to stubbornly demanding cloud access, often before they will even perform their most basic functions. At the moment, internet is only via 4G hotspot as we await Starlink's rollout next year.
This of course includes the Samsung TV but extends to the Denon amplifier, all the major appliances from washing machine, refrigerator etc all the way down to the light switches, thermostats and 'smart' toilets (which I view as 'input-only' devices). Fortunately, I intercepted the light switches before installation and hacked open source firmware on them but that required opening each one and temporarily soldering to reflash the firmware (I had to draw the line somewhere).
Most of the devices can be coaxed into functioning without permanent cloud access but it's a time-consuming escape-room adventure through dark UX patterns. The rest will require blocking at the router firewall level.