EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature ... "sweating through my sheets because the app's dead."

I suppose just unplugging the damn thing from the mains was too difficult? Probably scared of it rebooting properly when it was plugged back in.

The kind of person gullible or dumb enough to spent $200 a month on a gimmicky, data-harvesting electric blanket likely lacks the critical thinking skills to figure that out....toasty.

"Can I just ask one question... would anyone like any toast?"

But only if toaster is at least three million years old. Oh, you are? Golly good quality!

"I suppose just unplugging the damn thing from the mains was too difficult?"

Alexa was probably unresponsive &\or as was the associated SMART Plug.

It gets worse than that - a woman in New Zealand was silly enough to announce in the national news that a) she couldn't remember how to turn on her bedside light manually, and b), that she had to go to bed in a cold room because the smart plug her heater was plugged into didn't work. I've never looked at one of the Alexa controlled smart plugs, but I assume now that they must lock the appliance plug into themselves when connectivity is lost, thus preventing the obvious solution from being applied.

HOME ASSISTANT! HOME ASSISTANT! BESPOKE CONFIGURATION DOT YAML FILES!

...in a world where beds, bins, and bulbs need cloud access

These things don't *need* cloud access. They might have it for some reason but need?

Thinking back I don't recall beds and bins not working when there was no cloud.

Again a "solution" looking for a problem and a way to part money from a certain class of punters.

Call me an olf fossil, luddite or what you will, I see no reason to waste my money on this frippery.

" I see no reason to waste my money on this frippery."

I bought a house.

"I bought a house."

Luxury.

Obligatory response: "A house? You were lucky to have a house! We used to sleep in one room, 26 of us. "

Or should it be: "We used to hafta get 'out the lake, 3 am, clean the lake, eat a handful 'o hot gravel, work 20 hours a day at mill, for a penny a month"

for a penny a month

You got a whole penny ?

Y' spoiled southern pansy, yer don't know how good yer had it!

The world would be better off without most of the SmartShit described in this article!

Most?

Fair point- should have written 'all'!

Because all of these 'smart' things will be paperweights eventually.

Would not be surprised if they become paperweights due to their owners moving off AWS to some other cloud and the client contains cloud provider specific functionality…

I suspect that at least in the case of the "smart mattress" the company responsible will keep the product active for somewhat longer than the usual IoT tat. $200/month to "monitor sleep data"? That's a ridiculous revenue stream.

One of the standout casualties was EightSleep, the so-called smart mattress that learns your body, adjusts its temperature, tracks your sleep phases, and streams that data back to the cloud for a cool $200 a month.

Sounds ridiculous but (very much Devil's advocate and somewhat tongue in cheek) it would be nice occasionally if my bed could tell me if I was too warm or too cold. It seems to be something that's coming on with age - sometimes I feel cold when actually I'm too warm or vice versa.

> it would be nice occasionally if my bed could tell me if I was too warm or too cold.

You are supposed to be sleeping, the last thing you really want is the bed constantly woke you up to tell you “you are a little warm, do you want me to cool it down?” Then a few minutes later “you are little cold, do you want me to warm the bed up?”….

Who needs an app for that? "Just let me warm my feet for a moment..."

"Just let me warm my feet for a moment..."

Nice of your good lady to give you warning, that she's about to plant her ice cold feet on your person!

Jesting aside, my wife bought - on an impulse, on Prime Day - something called a BedJet a couple of years ago. It's basically a small under-bed fan heater / refrigerator, with a duct to direct the air under the bed's lower fitted sheet. Sounds like a gimmick, right? Well, that's what she thought & had immediate buyer's remorse, until one day out of curiousity she had me set it up on her bed.

Well, now she's hooked, and swears it's the best thing ever. When she gets cold - I'm choosing my words carefully, because I don't want to sound like a sexist pig, but she does seem to feel the cold a lot more at night, shivering even when I am passing out from heat - it'll blow carefully-temperature-monitored air straight up the bed from her feet onwards.

And no, it's not cloud- or subscription-based, we're not QUITE that daft, and it has both a physical remote control and a WiFi direct phone app.

Before that, the state-of-the-art in bed heating was a hot water bottle, or in extremis , me holding the covers up on the side and wafting a hair-dryer carefully up and down. This is apparently an unqualified improvement :)

Do you have one-mattress bed (maybe even shared sheets?) of a split double bed? I know it is a cultural thing, as for Germany a split double bed is the norm. Reason is what your situation describes: Women are (usually, only very few exceptions) more susceptible to cold, so the mattress, sheets and blankets can be tuned to her, which would give you a heatstroke even if the room would be at 10°C. She gets her [1]Lammfell , you get your satin, and you both feel great at night.

[1] https://www.ecosia.org/images?q=lammfell%20bettdecke

"You are supposed to be sleeping, the last thing you really want is the bed constantly woke you up to tell you “you are a little warm, do you want me to cool it down?” Then a few minutes later “you are little cold, do you want me to warm the bed up?”…."

I have a wife for that sort of thing :-)

"I have a wife for that sort of thing :-)"

They do seem to work as a negative feedback system, they tend to be cold when you are hot or vice versa!

Icon - I'll get me dressing gown!

Ah, come on - surely there's a market for a new, improved version which collects even more telemetry, for only $400/month? Plus the cost of the new mattress required for all this magic to work, of course!

"Would not be surprised if they become paperweights due to their owners moving off AWS to some other cloud and the client contains cloud provider specific functionality…"

Or they return too many things back to Amazon and their account is cancelled.

So AWS spreads like cancer. They can do whatever they want now, because regulators can't just order them to close.

Next step, they'll be openly telling governments do this and that policy or I will switch you off.

I suspect some in the Whitehouse got a surprise and having had their eyes opened and for some light bulbs have gone off with respect to the opportunities for extortion this vulnerability presents.

I wonder if The Donald went dim and lost his colour

Most certainly didn't. Even AI isn't a stupid as King Donald I, his stupidity is a natural gift, or a creative art.

in a world where beds, bins, and bulbs need cloud access, who's to say the the crapper isn't next?

As it happens, today is the day when pre-ordered cloud based [1]crap monitoring devices are shipped.

Nothing to worry about as they assure purchasers that they use encryption at every step, and there is fingerprint authentication on the device. No mention of whether the fingerprint reader works if the finger is.... shall we say, unclean. Yuk.

[1] https://www.kohlerhealth.com/dekoda/

Nothing to worry about as they assure purchasers ~ That's a good one! I see what you did.

"As it happens, today is the day when pre-ordered cloud based crap monitoring devices are shipped."

Wasn't that going to be the next big product launch for Theranos?

Thuranus?

Anyone who pays $200/month for an electric blanket has minimal consciousness in the first place.

and you in Europe don't notice a thing, since neither your work of private stuff depends on that region... Or on Amazon cloud in general.

I read and saw a lot later on. Sounds like Active Directly, since year 2000, is a more stable DNS cluster :D :D... But hey, who knows how long, the dismantling is going on since Nadella.

Because my lights, heating, bed, toaster, oven, washing machine, fridge freezer, microwave, hot water, curtains, TV and HiFi just keep working.

Maybe I'm just not a lazy cunt that has the ability press a button, rather than get an app to do it for me.

Join me my friends, leave the smart world for the good old fashioned thinking world!

"Join me my friends, leave the smart world for the good old fashioned thinking world!"

We have cookies!

We[0] told you so!

In fact, we started warning you not to buy into the scam well over twenty years ago.

Colo(u)r me completely unsympathetic.

[0] TINW

They are a lifeline for my wife who is bedbound.

You are completely right, some of these products can indeed represent a boon for the physically disabled. No one is criticizing that aspect.

It's the physically abled idiots that have more money than sense that garner our ire.

That and the fact that the companies hawking the tat are all using it as a means to monetize our private life under flimsy excuses.

They get enamored with the idea of leaving it all to Amazon. Move to the cloud, fire your staff.

With Threads there is no longer any reason there shouldn't be some options for this appearing. Maybe it is more expensive (because less opportunity for data collection) but if I could have it all talk to my Apple TV (if I upgraded it to a newer one that supports Threads) I might consider some smart home stuff. Dependence on the cloud, and the privacy implications of that, keeps me on the sidelines despite being the perfect demographic.

It amazes me how gullible the average consumers are, buying Ring cameras where you don't (truly) control whether the police has access to it, fridges that demand internet access to have features like icemakers work properly, light bulbs that have to talk to a server a thousand miles away to be commanded to turn on or off. We need a longer AWS outage, and hitting during the hours everyone in the US is awake, to possibly wake people up from this folly.

I guess that "smart mattress" company would argue that all the processing required for their 16 GB of monthly uploads can't be done locally, but that would be a lie. There's no way they are devoting more processing than a generic 'E core' running 24x7 to each user, so some sort of smart hub providing local cloud services would work fine. They just can't datamine information on people's sex positions and frequencies (if a "smart mattress can't tell the difference between sleep and sex either it isn't very good at its job or you aren't very good at yours :) ) which they probably sock away along with tons of other stuff because storage is so cheap, hoping it will someday have value.

You don't need to wait for [1]"Threads" . There is enough local-only smart home stuff, and several helper tools like homeassistant, iobroker and so on to simplify it for less advanced users. There are also enough already existing norms for local-only smart home besides bluetooth and WLAN. Unless you get a big antenna to play tetris on the office building 100 meters away which uses unprotected lamps, then it is not local to your home any more.

[1] https://xkcd.com/927/