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From: Lars Poulsen <lars@cleo.beagle-ears.com>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: smart plugs???
Date: Fri, 17 Jan 2025 02:53:38 -0000 (UTC)
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On 2025-01-16, rbowman <bowman@montana.com> wrote:
> On Thu, 16 Jan 2025 20:55:46 -0000 (UTC), Rich wrote:
>
>> Which is how all the other IoT stuff should be too.  Sadly, too many
>> companies don't even think to offer the "non-cloud" option.

In the trade press, I keep reading about how the new "matter" protocol
will unitfy IoT devices so thay all can run on any brand of "smart home"
gateway. But it may not be real yet, or we should have heard about it in
the OSS circles. But really, all of these devices should be using SNMP as
their control protocol.

> Some of the original decisions were made based on the edge devices not 
> having the compute power. A good example is Alexa. The edge device can 
> recognize the wake word but after that all the processing is done in the 
> cloud. That brings in many issues including bandwidth, security, and the 
> necessity to add processing power to handle thousands or millions of 
> concurrent requests.
>
> I chose Alexa as an example since that has been a money sink for Amazon. 
> The theory was people would use Alexa to order stuff; the practice is 
> people use Alexa to turn on the radio and so forth. 

I hate Alexa. We had an Echo in the house for a bit, and it was forever
listining in on our conversations and breaking in on them. That got her
banished.

> It may change as more companies realize the cloud is costing them a lot of 
> money particularly for AWS or other commercial providers. Some have went 
> back to running their own servers.

I never understood how any business - large or small - could be
comfortable having their financial information or their proprietary
technical data on a cloud server. Quickbooks online would seem to be a
tempting target for Intuit data mining. For that matter, I worry about
having my personal tax return submitted to IRS through Intuit's servers
(TurboTax) - or for that matter HR Block's. But I pray that there are
data protection laws surrounding this that they can't bypass with a
click-wrap user agreement. Imagine how lucrative it would be to sell
mortgages, life insurances or investment packages to people based on
reading their annual Form 1040.

> Meanwhile it is annoying. My Fitbit device won't synch with the 
> application on the phone without an internet connection. Leaving aside I 
> don't enjoy being radio-collared by Google I sometimes have to jockey the 
> phone around to get a connection.

I just discovered that in the last two weeks, as I replaced by Fitbit
Charge 5 with a new Charge 6. It somehow would not show me the time
when I had left my phone in the office while going out to get the mail
from the mailbox at the driveway. Recovered once I was in Blluetooth
range. Some datapoints can sync between the watch and the phone over
BlueTooth, but "deeper stuff" like sleep analysis does indeed require
connection to the Google servers.